THE GIANT KILLER Part Two of Five

I think the greatest insight into the black heart and soul of George Hull, a “confirmed scoundrel”, in the words of a one critic, came when he put his giant plan into action. In the summer of 1867, several months before George's alleged epiphany with the Reverend Turk in Ackley, a blacksmith from 35 miles south of Ackley,  in Marshalltown,   named H.B.. Martin, signed into room 11 at the St Charles Hotel in the tiny outpost of Fort Dodge, Iowa. The village had only 700 souls or so, so Martin's behavior stood out.

Martin closely examined buildings clad in the local gypsum, and was seen walking outside of town, pausing to visit those places where the Des Moines River and its tributaries had sliced open the glacial loess and revealed the beds of gypsum (above)  below. Seventy million years earlier a tongue of an inland sea had invaded this land, advancing again and again, leaving behind after each evaporate retreat a dry chalky precipitate, layered beds of gypsum, up to 300 feet thick. Martin asked few questions, and avoided sharing his own concerns with the locals. And after a few days, Mr. Martin checked out of the St. Charles Hotel, and disappeared

One year later, on Saturday, 6 June, 1868, Mr Martin returned to the St. Charles Hotel, this time registering as a resident of Boston, Massachusetts. And he was accompanied by a tall, broad shouldered, fellow dressed well but all in black,  named George Hull, who gave his address as Birminham, New York. On Monday, 8 June, the two visited Mr. C.B. Cummings, who owned an outcrop along Soldier Creek, north of town. The pair explained they were looking for a sample of the geologic wonders of Fort Dodge, to be displayed in New York City. How much, they asked, would the old man charge to supply a single block of his gypsum, 12 feet long, 3 or 4 feet wide and 2 or 3 feet thick.

Cummings assumed he was dealing with idiots. He explained that besides being expensive, such a block would weigh three tons. There were no wagons in Iowa that could carry that weight to a rail head on the abysmal Iowa roads. Hull and Martin assured Mr. Cummings that price was no object. Cummings smelled trouble and told the pair to buy their giant block from somebody else.

Hull and Martin doggedly shifted their activities to the south of Fort Dodge, where they leased a small “improved” one acre lot and hired a man to cut a 12 foot block by 4 feet by 3 feet off the a gypsum ledge hanging over Gypsum Creek. The quarry man, Mike Foley, took their money and offered no suggestions on the practicality of their scheme. He split $15 with his friend, George Webber, and two other men to help him load the three ton block onto a heavy duty wagon. It took four horses to pull the block, and on Sunday, 14 June, 1868 they started toward the nearest rail head, 40 miles to the south, at Boone, Iowa, then called Montana, Iowa.

It would take them 43 days to get there, at an average speed of of less than a mile a day. First the wagon broke down, just as Mr. Cummings had warned it would. Hull and Martin, with the assistance of Foley, managed to fashion repairs and strengthen the wagon. But the first bridge they came to collapsed under the load, damaging the wagon again. It took a few days to make those repairs, after which the three men struggled to muscle the wagon and its three ton block across the stream, and up the opposite bank. Once on solid ground, Hull allowed Foley to shorten the block, shaving its weight by over a ton. I'm willing to bet the poor horses, if they could have spoken, would have thanked Mr. Hull.

The entire journey was a test of endurance,   a “Fitzcarraldo” trial of sweat and blood and determination, a journey  to Hull and back, and no less admirable because it was not being suffered in an humanitarian effort. Perhaps never in human history was so much been suffered by so few for so long,  just to cheat so many out of so much. But on Monday, 27 July 1868, the exhausted horses staggered into Boone/Montana, Iowa and dragged the wagon and block and the exhausted pair of would-be crooks up to the Northwestern Railroad station. Freight charges were paid, and the block was loaded into box car number 447. The next day it started its journey east.

Mike Foley left the party in Boone. He used his payment to invest in a livery stable in Fort Dodge, which he ran for several years. H.B. Martin disembarked as the train passed through his hometown of Marshalltown. That little berg had wanted to call itself Marshall, but Henry County beat Marshall county to the municipal moniker, and the 1862 fix of Marshalltown was the best the town fathers could conceive. In that same spirit, the exhausted Martin paused to recover, while the black hearted George Hull accompanied their precocious cargo on to Chicago.

Literally on the shore of Lake Michigan, George Hull had found a sculpture who was willing to create his giant. German immigrant Eduard Gustave Burkhardt had made a good living cutting headstones and carving angels and figureheads, working in a barn in the center of the Old City Cemetery, between North Clark Street and the lake, in what is today Lincoln Park. 

But in 1866, with cholera killing 5% of the population of Chicago every year because bodies were decomposing in soggy ground adjacent to the source of the city's drinking water, (Lake Michigan) Cook County banned any new burials in the old cemetery, and Eduard found his business moving out to the private suburban cemeteries. He was glad to get the assignment from Hull, grateful he and his two apprentices , Henry Salle and Fred Mohrman, had paying work for another month. None of them ask many questions.

Hull stayed at the “Garden City”, a “third rate hotel” in downtown Chicago, but spent most of his time in Burkhardt's studio, where, legend has it, he served as the model for the face of his giant (above)  - sans mustache, of course. Like a child playing with a new chemistry set, as the sculptors chipped away and then smoothed the shaped gypsum with sandpaper, Hull experimented with stains to give the emerging giant an aged appearance, and applied sulfuric acid to the back of the head to suggest immersion in water. Darning needles were even used to simulate pours in the giant's skin. The carving took seven weeks, and when finished was 10 feet, 4 ½ inches tall, 3 feet 1 ½ inches broad at the shoulders, and was down to a fighting weight of just under 1 ½ tons. On 22 September, 1868, the giant was boxed and labeled as “finished marble”, and shipped by rail to a Mr. George Olds,  in Union City, New York.

To his credit - if that is the correct term - Eduard Burkhardt never claimed his work on the fraud. But because Eduard died a few years later, and his business went bankrupt and was sold off in 1875, the shame of a failed business got mixed up with his participation in the fraud, and the Burkgardts never publicly recognized Eduad's willingness to feed his family and workers by whatever means necessary. Blaming the immigrant sculptor for the success of George Hull's fraud is no less absurd than blaming the Reverend Turk for inspiring the fraud.

On Tuesday, 13 October, 1868 the eleven foot long wooden crate arrived on the New York and Erie railroad at the tiny station of Union (now Endicott) New York, just ten miles west of Bimingham. It sat there for three weeks, until Wednesday, 4 November, when a tall man with a round face, sharp blue eyes and a black mustache, identifying himself as George Olds, arrived to claim the huge package. He and another man supervised the loading of the box into a heavy duty wagon, pulled by a team of four horses. And they immediately set off on the road north, toward Syracuse.

Experience had better prepared George Hull and H.B. Martin for this journey - the burden was half the weight and the roads of upstate New York were in far better condition than those on the Iowa frontier. The pair stopped overnight at an inn run by a Mr. Luce, and the next day continued 30 miles up the Tioughnioga River valley, passing through the village of Homer. Here, George Hull happened to run into an acquaintance, who greeted him by name and asked what he was transporting. George told him castings and cut the conversation off. 

The encounter spooked Hull, and 15 miles further north up the road, at the village of Tully, Hull checked into the hotel on the shores of Green Lake. Martin continued on alone. On the rainy Monday evening of 9 November, 1868, the giant approached its destination, ½ mile west of the tiny village of Cardiff, across Kennedy Creek, on the farm of William C. "Stub" Newell.

Mr. Newell had prepared the ground, digging a five foot deep, 12 foot long trench in a low spot behind his barn, hidden from any prying eyes. The wagon was left in a stand of woods until after nightfall, when it was backed up to the trench. Hull had arrived to help, having walked all the way from Tully. The crate protecting the giant was broken down, and the statute allowed to slide off the wagon and into the earth. Some quick work in the mud, and in the morning Martin returned the hired wagon and horses to Union, and caught the next train for Chicago. The morning of 10 November, George Hull reappeared at his hotel in Tully, soaking wet and covered in mud. He checked out and returned to his home in Birmington, New York. 

But as Sherlock Holmes would have said – “The Game was afoot.”

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THE GIANT KILLER Part One of Five

I find it odd that such a minor player as the Methodist minister, the Reverend Henry Benjamin Turk is always the villein of the Cardiff Giant story. His pompous ignorance is what motivates and justifies the heroic sins of George Hull. But in Christian theology, ignorance is not one of the seven deadly sins. Greed, yes, lies, yes, lust and envy, surely, gluttony, and wrath: these are all the forgiven the sins of George Hull. Meanwhile, a fervent evangelical blind faith in a dyslexic translation was the Reverend Turk's chosen path to divinity And for obtusely following that path ad nauseam, the Reverend generally gets all the blame. Now, why do you suppose that is?

George Hull came close to being a giant himself. At six feet three inches tall, he towered half a foot above the average man of his day, and intimidated them with his broad muscular shoulders, and round face behind a slick black mustache and beneath his black, slicked back hair. But other than his size and villainous appearance, what most people remembered were George's small sharp intelligent blue eyes always darting about. His chief delight, recalled the post master in the Wisconsin Dells town of Baraboo, was expounding on the advantages of infidelity and betting on everything from pool games to local elections. In August of 1867 the tobacco warehouse George had opened four months earlier, and which he had insured to the amount of $12,000, burned to the ground, under circumstances which the insurance company thought highly suspicious. Despite George's declarations of innocence and threats of legal action, he accepted a $1,000 settlement and moved on.

According to George, he moved on to the tiny hamlet of Ackley, Iowa, because his brother-in-law who lived there had taken a consignment of 10,000 cigars, and was having trouble moving them. This could not have been surprising since Ackley had barely 300 residents. Even if every man woman and child smoked a dozen cheap cigars a day, it is difficult to envision how they could ever smoke 10,000 cigars before hacking up a lung and dropping dead.

George Hull had gotten into the business through his uncle, the front half of the Hull and Grummand Company, which had recently opened a cigar factory at Water and Henry streets in Bimginham, New York, on the Pennsylvania border.  The young George needed work after a short stint in jail for selling marked cards, and the cut throat cigar business seemed a natural for him.

The 8,000 citizens of Bimingham had strict anti-union laws, encouraging  local sweat shops to employ unskilled workers at starvation wages - 40 cents for a day spent rolling stale tobacco scraps and assorted agricultural detritus, dust and rodent droppings into 100 cigars that sold from three to fives cents each. It inspired a business model long on salesmanship, and short on morality.

But it was while residing with his sister and brother-in-law that George Hull briefly crossed paths with the fulcrum of his giant morality tale. According to George, “At that time a Methodist revivalist was in Ackley, and prayed all over the settlement....One night he was at my sister’s house, and after supper we had a long discussion and a hot one.” Specifically, according to George, the hot discussion centered around a quote from the King James Biblical book of Genesis, chapter six, verse four,“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”.

Besides sounding like a “Christianized” version of ancient Greek theology, the King James edition of the bible which the Reverend Turk quoted, was an English translation of a compilation written in Latin, of stories originally composed in Aramaic and Greek And as any skilled translator will tell you, and any reader of a Google translation will confirm, conveying the meaning from one language to another is as much social art as lexicography. Translating a translation only increases the inevitable misunderstandings. And in this particular text, the scholars compromised on the word “giants”, when a more precise word was “Nephilim”. But that word requires an uncomfortable explanation.

The mysterious Nephilim are mentioned only twice in the bible, this once in Genesis, and once in Numbers, chapter 13, verses 32 and 33 . “And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.'” But they also appear in the Book of Enoch, which is not part of the conical bible, but a conservative Judaic variation. The Nephilim were the products of male angles mating with human woman. This was far too close to the pagan religions Yawah was so critical of. Later Christian scholars chose to mention them only twice, hoping to avoid the theological torture required to explain them, by using the word “giants” instead. And it was on the foundation of this compromised pebble that the Reverend Turk built his temple of biblical literalism.

But to return to the theology of George Hull, “At midnight we went to bed, and I lay wide awake wondering why people would believe those remarkable stories in the Bible about giants, when suddenly I thought of making a stone giant and passing it off as a petrified man.” But, of course, there is nothing in George Hull's past which would have give any reason to believe that is what George thought. As one recent biographer put it, “ "Once Hull had an idea, he had no qualms about breaking partnerships, or laws, to get what he wanted.” And George Hull's obsession was not logic, or heaven, but money.

Five years earlier, Mark Twain had written his first humorous article for the Virginia City, Nevada “Territorial Enterprise”, which began, “A petrified man was found some time ago in the mountains south of Gravelly Ford. Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which has evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner...”  In Twain's story the locals want to bury the defunct stone man, but cannot separate him from the rock which has engulfed him. So, “Everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.”

Twain (above) later explained his inspiration. “One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding...one or two glorified discoveries of this kind....and I felt called upon to destroy this growing...petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire.” Except the joke did not kill the idea of a petrified man. Twain was “stunned to see the creature I had begotten to pull down the wonder-business with, and bring derision upon it, calmly exalted to the grand chief place in the list of the genuine marvels our Nevada had produced.” Over the next year, Twain's joke was reprinted as fact in newspapers across America, and even England, where it was published in “The Lancet”, the premiere scientific medical journal of the day.

It seems unlikely that George Hull realized that Twain's story, if he ever read it, was intended as a joke. In the history we have of him, George Hull does not display a sense of humor about anything that does not entail some degree of humiliation for somebody other than George Hull.  In fact, a witness said George had considered “salting” an “Indian burial mound” outside of Barboo, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1867, before he ever met the Reverend Turk. 

 It did not even matter to Hull that there were no dead Indians in most of  the Wisconsin mounds. They were drummlins,  formed by moving rivers of ice more than 10,000 years earlier, proving again that the truth is more complex and fascinating than the theology of angels dancing on the head of a pin, or mating with human women.

I don't know if the native peoples got the idea for their burial mounds from the moraines, but I do know that George Hull did not get the idea for the Cardiff Giant from the maligned Reverend Turk. And we should stop blaming him for it

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THE POTTY MOUTH CONSPIRACY

I believe Matt Welsh when he insisted years later he thought the "whole thing was a tempest in a teapot..." But honestly, that might be just the way he remembered January of 1964, not the way he lived it.  Because when the letter from the small town of Frankfurt, promoting a conspiracy theory, landed on the desk of the 41st Governor of Indiana, Matt Welsh wasted no time in spreading it as far and as fast as possible. That's what most politicians do. They spread panic.  It's almost their job description.

Frankfurt (above), a town of 15,000 exclusively white citizens, 45 miles due north of Indianapolis, was very much in the news that January because of the Hoosier obsession with high school basketball. 

 On Saturday, 28 December, 1963, Frankfort High School (above) had hosted a holiday invitational tournament in their new $4.5 million building and basketball arena (above right). The Frankfort "Hot Dogs" were eliminated in the afternoon game. That evening the team from Anderson, Indiana, met the reigning state champs, the Muncie Central High School Bearcats in what Indianapolis News sports writer, Corwin "Corky" Lamm,  described as "A Basketbrawl".

During the final seconds of Anderson's upset win, a frustrated Muncie player slammed the ball into his opponent's face. The sight of blood emptied the bleachers. Players and fans went at each other with their fists. Somebody even punched an Anderson cheerleader into the bleachers. Frankfort police quickly got things under control, but according to Lamm, the principle causality was  "... one black eye for basketball". At the core of the hysteria which followed, but which was barely mentioned in the press, was that while the entire Anderson team was white, 3 of the 5 starters for Muncie Central (below) were African-Americans.

Interestingly, this seismic headline and editorial producing event was not mentioned in the perfidy letter to Governor Welsh, even though the letter was written less than 3 weeks later, and the author attended Frankfort High School, infamous scene of the "basketbrawl". Rather the writer of the letter postmarked 17 January, 1964 professed to be concerned only with an immoral musical machination which began 8 months earlier, and 1,500 miles away.

At about 10:00 a.m., on Saturday, 6 April, 1963, the 5 members of the rock and roll group The Kingsmen gathered in a recording studio at 411 Southwest 13th Street in Portland, Oregon. 

The local group had been playing together for about 2 years, with 18 year old Jack Ely  (above left) singing through his new dental braces and playing rhythm guitar. Mike Mitchel (above right front) played lead guitar, Dan Gallucci was on the organ, Bob Norby (above right rear) was on bass guitar and the group's founder, Lynn Easton, reluctantly played the drums. They had pooled their funds to pay the $36 fee for a 1 hour use of the equipment and a recording technician, because they were proud of their rock-and-roll rendition of a calypso song written by a Los Angles musician named Richard Barry - who no longer owned the song, having sold all rights 3 years earlier for $750.

Backstage during a show in 1957, Barry had quickly scribbled the lyrics to a easy going R&B love ballad he called "Louie Louie" - no comma between the names - on a roll of toilet paper. The song told the story in Jamaican English of a young man forced to leave home to find work. "A fine little girl, she waits for me, catch a ship across the sea, Sail that ship about, all alone, Never know if I make it home...3 nights and days I sail the sea, Think of girl, all constantly....See, see Jamaica, the moon above, It won't be long, me see me love, Take her in my arms again, I'll tell her I'll never leave again"

The Portland studio mostly recorded voice-overs for commercials and documentaries. and had never recorded a rock band before. The Kingsmen formed a circle around Jack Ely, one microphone for each instrument's amplifier and a single mic suspended from the ceiling for the vocal - this was before multi-track recording. 

After playing "10 or 12 bars" to set sound levels the technician and studio owner Robert Lindahl (above), moved Jack "about 10 feet back" and then they "laid down" a single 2 minute 40 second version of the song. The band thought they were still rehearsing. Ely was yelling to be heard above the amplifiers and drums, and he started the last verse too early. Half way through the song, Easton dropped a stick. But at the end Lindahl announced, "Great! Wonderful! What do you want to put on the B side?"

According to Ely, "We pressed 1,000 copies. The five of us got 20 each to pass out at school...The rest went into distribution, and nothing happened for months." But the slowly growing sales so impressed New York based "Wand Records" they signed on to distribute it. But Wand, as part of the racist division in American music, handled almost exclusively African-American artists. And as guitarist Mike Mitchel explained, "They had no idea we were white. By the time they found out...the song was climbing up the Billboard chart." In fact the Kingsmen's one take version of "Louie Louie" sold 12 million copies. When they later released it as part of an album, the cover did not include a photo of the band.

What the recording had was energy and spontaneity. What it did not have was enunciation. Teenage musicians across the country listened to the popular record over and over, copying the music, but the more they listened, the more versions of the lyrics they came up with. According to Mitchel, "Some students at Tulane University called Lynn's house one afternoon and said, 'We've heard the record and these are the words we hear. Is it true?' And then they sang some dirty lyrics. That was the first time we learned that some people thought the lyrics were obscene because, in the northwest, it was a well-known song that had been played by many groups."

But nobody in Frankfort, Indiana (above) had ever heard the song before, lest of all the student who signed the letter to Governor Welsh. But he or she was certain what they were hearing was "so filthy that I cannot enclose them in this letter. ” However, students at Miami University in Athens, Ohio produced an obscene version of the lyrics, which compelled Jack New, Governor Welsh's executive secretary, to obtain a copy of the record - thus increasing sales by one more. According to Welsh "We slowed it down and we thought we could hear the words." At the time Welsh had no doubts, saying the supposed lyrics made his ears tingle. The Governor's Press Secretary, James McManus, assured the Indianapolis Star, the obscenities were "indistinct, but plain if you listen carefully."

But Governor Welsh did not bother to contact anyone at Wand Records, or even the band members in Portland, Oregon - whose families were available by dialing directory assistance. Instead Governor Welsh sent a letter off to his "friend", President of the Indiana Broadcasters Association, Ried Chapman (below).

Later Welsh insisted, "At no time did I ever pressure anybody to take the song off the air. I suggested...it might be simpler all around if it wasn't played." Eager to help his friend, Chapman dispatched telegrams to stations statewide "asking" them to not play the record. 

Overnight "Louie Louie" by The Kingsmen (above)went from the 4th most played song on Indianapolis radio, to zero. A few days later the Indianapolis Star called Portland and reported, "Young Singers Dismiss As Hooey Obscenity Charge in 'Louie Louie.'" Lynn Easton was quoted as saying, "We took the words from the original version by Richard Berry and recorded them faithfully. There was no clowning around. " 

But the editorial board of The Star refused to let go of the conspiracy, denouncing "...some stations" which have "decided to fill their programs with a cacophony of noise, and a collection of musical garbage. Call it what you like--folk music, rock 'n' roll, bop, hip or what-not." The paper offered no suggestion as to who should decide what was music and what was garbage, but the implication was clear.

Two Marion County prosecutors were assigned to investigate the dirty record. They played it at the standard 45 revolutions per minute, sped it up to 78 and slowed it down to 33 and a third. Their assessment was "the record is an abomination of out-of-tune guitars, an overbearing jungle rhythm and clanging cymbals." But it was not obscene. Surprisingly the 1 February edition of "Billboard, The International Music - Record Newsweekly", endorsed their own cabal - "...some shrewd press agent may also be playing an important role in this teapot tempest. Exactly whose agent is hard to pin down at this point."

That January the United States Attorney General, Robert Kennedy got an almost identical letter, originating from the parent of a student attending Sarasota High School in Florida. "...My daughter brought home a record of "LOUIE LOUIE"... The lyrics are so filthy that I cannot enclose them in this letter." Fifty years later it is reasonable to suspect an organized movement to suppress the "jungle rhythm". 

But in January of 1964, Kennedy did what Governor Welsh should have done first. RFK ordered the F.B.I to investigate. At the same time the U.S. Post Office and the Federal Communications Commission also launched investigations. 

As the Associated Press reported, "All three agencies dropped their investigations because they were unable to determine what the lyrics were even after listening to the recordings played at speeds of 16 rpm to 78 rpm."

The foolishness of the entire matter was made plain when on 1 February -  the same day as the Billboard article about the supposed "Louie Louis" conspiracy - announced that the  song "I Want To Hold Your Hand" by The Beatles hit number one on the charts. It would stay there  for 7 weeks. 

The "45 "single record sold 10,000 copies an hour in New York city alone. Nationwide it sold 5 million copies that spring. And it was replaced for another 2 weeks at the top of the Billboard chart by "She Loves You", also by the Beatles. It was the beginning of the British invasion, and the reign of the "Fab Four".  The Kingsman's "Louie Louie" was the last American record to top the charts for months.

Frankfort, Indiana saw no advantage in being the source de main for the "Louie Louie" conspiracy theory.  Nor did it gain any advantage from the press coverage of the "Basketbrawl"  These events, which seemed so important to community leaders in 1964,  gained the town nothing. In the forty plus years since the 15,000 residents of "Gem City" -  so called because of its early investment in electrical lighting, - grew to a town of about 16,000 people. 

There are still almost no African-Americans in Frankfort. But the population is now only 72% white, with Hispanics making up 27%.  And 11% of all of them live in poverty. Winning the Culture Wars in Frankfort may not be the cause of its failure to grow, but clearly racism and fear has not helped the town. As the clearly enunciated clearly not obscene lyrics to the Frankfort High School fight song say, "All hail to dear old Frankfort, to the blue and the white that floats upon the breeze....may her glory never, never die."  But there are times when it looks like the town just might.

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