Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 12

 

As I read and watch things, I come across references to people, places, and things that pique my interest or renew my curiosity, and I go to the internet to look up more information. You're welcome to follow me down the rabbit hole....

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 11

 

Join me on my trips down the rabbit hole, looking just a little deeper into interesting things I come across as I read and watch stuff that pique my interest or rekindle my curiosity.

Hans Massaquoi

Have you ever seen this photo before?  Definitely one of those pictures that's worth thousands of words. The boy in the center of the picture was Hans Massaquoi, and it was taken in 1933 in Hamburg, Germany.  Hans was a mixed-race child of a German woman and a Liberian diplomat living in Germany.  Like many boys in Germany, Hans was enamored by the pageantry and bluster of Nazism, and he was devastated to learn that he was not allowed to join the Hitler Youth, the only excluded boy in her class, because he was a "non-Aryan."  He encountered racism as a child but still considered himself German.  The 1935 Nuremberg laws blocked the pathway to higher education because of his status, and he was placed into a blacksmith apprentice program.  A sympathetic vocational counselor and SS officer told him not to worry, there will be a chance to serve the Reich in the future for people like him once Germany conquers Africa.  As he aged, he grew to hate Nazism, and he and his mother went into hiding in Hamburg, aided by friendly families.  (His father had been recalled to Liberia years before, and his mother had chosen to keep Hans in Germany.)  After the war, his father arranged for Hans to move to Liberia, but he grew disenchanted with Liberia and had a falling out with his father.  He then immigrated to the US in 1950.  There he studied journalism, and he forged a successful career, eventually becoming the managing editor of Ebony magazine.  He published his autobiography in 1999, called Destined to Witness in English.  He died in 2013.

William the Conqueror and the Witch of Ely

Every student of history knows the story of William the Conqueror invading England and instituting Norman rule in 1066, but resistance didn't end there.  William spent at least the next five years putting down various Saxon revolts.  One of the most interesting of these revolts was led by Hereward the Wake.  Hereward had been abroad, in Flanders, during the initial invasion and first Saxon revolts, but he returned to family land to find his home and family in ruins.  After exacting revenge on the perpetrators of the outrage, he emerged as a leader and amassed an army around him.  He established a base of operations at the Isle of Ely, not really an island, but a region in eastern England surrounded by marshes and bogs, making it nearly impenetrable and relatively secure from Norman aggression.  It became a Saxon enclave.  In 1069 and 1070, William vowed to destroy Saxon resistance and launched the "Harrowing of the North," a full-scale military assault against the rebels.  Soon, the last hold out was Hereward.  In 1071, William and his Norman army surrounded Ely.  A siege would prove fruitless because Ely was actual on high, fertile ground, and it would have been impossible to starve the defenders into submission.  The only option was to cross the bogs in a full assault.  William first built a pontoon bridge which sunk as soldiers crossed it, leading to a major loss of lives.  Finally, William turned to witchcraft.  He ordered a witch to climb to the top of a tower and to cast spells on the enemy.  She did this, yelling, screaming, and casting every spell, using every incantation and gesticulation that she knew, including repeatedly mooning them.  It seemed to have little effect. Hereward's army successfully pushed forward, setting fire to the towers that William had built, including the witch's.  She was forced to jump off the burning structure to her death.  Eventually, the Norman army prevailed, and Ely was captured.  It is not known what happened to Hereward.

 Carrot Propaganda

Maybe you heard as a child that eating carrots was good for your eyesight.  Did you know that was all a myth created by British propagandists during WWII?  Yes, the whole story was concocted by military intelligence.  When Royal Air Force Pilots successfully shot down German Luftwaffe planes on their nightly bombing missions against Britain, the British intelligence didn't want to reveal the real reason for their surprising defense, radar.  Radar was a new invention and a huge advantage; the British didn't want the Germans to know that it existed, so they had to come up with another explanation.  They settled on carrots.  The government began a campaign touting the health benefits of carrots, claiming that carrots increased one's night vision.  The stories claimed that British pilots ate lots and lots of carrots and urged everyone else to follow the suit so that they could see better during blackout conditions.  Propaganda posters, radio jingles, and carrot recipes were created.  Dr. Carrot became a ubiquitous character.  The propaganda reached the German military, but it's hard to say with certainty how much of the propaganda, if any, the Germans believed.  There were stories that German pilots started getting more carrots in their meals, but it's hard to prove their validity.  Nevertheless, the connection between carrots and improved vision became entrenched in popular culture for decades despite the fact that there is little evidence to support it.

Pythagoreanism

Everyone knows his name, and everyone learned his namesake equation, even if they've ever really used it outside of the math classroom.  Pythagoras is considered a giant in science, mathematics, logic, and philosophy.  He was recognized as a genius during his lifetime (570 - c. 495 BC), and his ideas went on to influence Plato, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein, among many others.  Some sources assert that he was the first to identify himself as a "philosopher," a "lover of wisdom."

His teachings formed the basis of a religious movement that lasted a couple of centuries.  Pythagoras believed in sacred mathematics and thought that the universe could be understood through numbers. Pythagoreanism was more than a cult of numero-philes. Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, embraced an egalitarian communal lifestyle, and practiced a rigid set of daily rituals and dietary restrictions.  They sought to imitate Pythagoras' own austere lifestyle, often practicing silence and vegetarianism, believing that a healthy body and soul worked in tandem.  The cult also believed in universal music or harmony of the spheres, wherein it was believed that the movements of celestial bodies were a form of music. Pythagoreans even broke cultural norms by admitting women into their ranks equally.  They spent their lives in a quest to use mathematics and music to uncover the secrets of the universe and to achieve harmony with the universe, thereby ending the chain of reincarnation.   Pythagoreanism began to decline in the 4th century BC, but there was a revival in the 1st century BC, and the philosophy continued to influence many religious communities, including some early Christians,  for centuries.

Arthur John Priest is not somebody to cruise with

Arthur John Priest (1887-1937) was a fireman and stoker on board several British steam-powered ocean liners, one of the crewmen charged with fueling the furnace.  It was a hard life for the crewmen, spending long hours in the deep, dark holds of the ships, stripped to the waist in the incredible heat, constantly covered in soot and inhaling heat and ash.  The work took its toll, and Priest actually retired from the sea at age 30, dying of pneumonia at age 49 in his Southampton England home.

According to him, health wasn't the only factor in his decision to retire; he said he was forced to retire because no one would sail with him on board.  Why?  Priest actually survived the sinkings of four ships and two other ship collisions, earning the nickname "the unsinkable stoker."   The ships in question were RMS Asturias (collision on her maiden voyage, 1908), RMS Olympic (collision with HMS Hawke, 1911), RMS Titanic (sunk by an iceberg, 1912), HMS Alcantara (sunk in combat with SMS Greif, 1916), HMHS Britannic (sunk by a mine, 1916) and SS Donegal (torpedoed by SM UC-27, 1917). 

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

My last rabbit hole post was about a lucky survivor of the Titanic sinking, but Arthur John Priest's fortune was nothing compared to today's subject, Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the man lucky - or unlucky - enough to survive both atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Although it is estimated that 160 people were somehow affected by both, Yamaguchi is the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government as a survivor of both.  

Yamaguchi (1916-2010) was a marine engineer who worked for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Nagasaki in 1945.  On August 6, he happened to be in Hiroshima on a business trip when the atomic bomb exploded.  The explosion ruptured his eardrums, temporarily blinded him, and left him with radiation burns on the left side of the top half of his body.  He returned to Nagasaki the following day and received medical treatment.  Still bandaged, he reported for work on August 9.  As he was explaining his experience to his supervisor, the bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" exploded over Nagasaki.  This time he wasn't injured, but he suffered from a high fever and vomiting for over a week.  He and his wife, a Nagasaki survivor, had radiation-linked medical issues throughout their lives, as did their three children, all born after the war,  He continued to work, however, and he became a nuclear disarmament activist.  His wife died in 2008 of liver and kidney cancer at age 88, and Yamaguchi died of stomach cancer at age 93.  

Bat Bombs

Those who are very familiar with World War II's more bizarre stories have certainly heard of the secret weaponization of bats tested by the US, but some of you may not have.  A dental surgeon and acquaintance of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt named Lytle S. Adams had a brainstorm and shared it in a letter.  He knew bats roosted at night, often on the eaves of buildings, and he knew that most homes in Japan were constructed of wood.  He proposed attaching timed incendiary devices to the bodies of live Mexican free-tailed bats and dropping them over Japanese cities at night.  The bats would instinctively roost under the eaves of the buildings, the incendiary device would explode, and huge swaths of Japanese cities would burn down.  President Roosevelt gave his approval, the US assembled a research team, and thousands of bats were captured.  The researchers decided on napalm as the active incendiary agreement.  The devices would be glued to the bats' bodies, the bats would be chilled to force hibernation for transport and packing into 4-5 feet long bomb tubes, and then dropped from above.  The tubes would open and the bats would disperse and roost.  Researchers estimated that the bat bombs would create 10 to 15 times more fires than standard incendiary bombs.

There were a couple of testing setbacks.  In one incident, some escaped bats roosted under a fuel tank and caused great damage to a base near Carlsbad, New Mexico.  The Air Force passed the project on to the Navy who then passed it on to the Marines.  Eventually, high officials realized the project would probably not be ready until mid-1945, and they killed the project.  Atomic bomb research soon overtook bat bomb development.

Claude Duval

Claude Duval (1643-1670) was a French-born highwayman active in Restoration England who became the inspiration for the "gallant rogue" archetype in folklore, literature, and song over the next couple of centuries.  According to the stories, Duval was born to a once noble family in Normandy that had lost its land and prestige, and he was forced to become a domestic in Paris at age 14.  He was employed by an exiled family of English royalists who returned to England following the Restoration of King Charles II, and they took Duval with them.  Soon he became a highwayman, stopping travelers and stagecoaches on the roads to London.  He was noted for his fancy, dandyish clothes and for his impeccable manners and for his charm, especially toward women.  He was never accused of violence, supposedly only stole valuables from men, and once he interrupted his robbery for a dance with the lady of the carriage.  Authorities offered a large reward, and Duval was arrested in a Covent Garden tavern, convicted of six robberies (There were several more for which he was not tried.), and hanged in 1670.  Poets, authors, and playwrights, told, and embellished his story, romanticizing the English highwayman in popular culture into the Victorian period.

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 10

The Liverbirds

The Liverbirds were an all-female rock band from Liverpool, UK, active from 1963 to 1968.  They released two albums, and they were mostly a cover band, recording only three original songs.  However, they followed their fellow Liverpudlians, the Beatles, to Hamburg, Germany, and they performed in many of the same clubs that the Beatles performed in, billed as "the female Beatles."  They developed quite a fan base in Germany, more so than in the UK, and three of the four band members settled permanently in Germany.  Apparently, the relationship between the Liverbirds and the Beatles wasn't very warm, as John Lennon was quoted in an interview saying that the Liverbirds couldn't play their own instruments.  The group disbanded in 1968 following a tour of Japan and briefly reunited in 1998.  A stage musical about the band called "Girls Don't Play Guitars" debuted in Liverpool in 2019, and the two surviving band members, Sylvia Saunders and Mary McGlory,  published an autobiography of the band this year.

The band's name comes from the fictional liverbird, the symbol of Liverpool.  No one is quite sure what kind of bird it's supposed to be, but it dates back to city seal first designed around the middle of the 1300s.  The seal shows a bird with a plant sprig in its beak.  Some sources say that it was a poorly executed eagle, but other sources say that it is likely a cormorant, native to the area.

Catgut

All of my life, I've heard the word catgut used to refer to the strings on tennis rackets and musical instruments, and I just decided to actually look it up.  No worries:  catgut has nothing to do with cats, but it is gut.

Catgut has historically been used as the most common material for strings of harps, lutes, violins, violas, cellos, double basses, and acoustic guitars and for snare drum heads for centuries.  It was used surgically as suture material (and still is in developing countries), and it was used in the earliest watches and continues to be used hold to hang weights in some grandfather clocks.  It is still used to make high-end, high-performance tennis rackets. What is it? Catgut is actually made from the walls of animal intestines, usually cattle, sheep, and goats, but sometimes also horses, mules, donkeys, and hogs.  The word "catgut" may be a shortening of "cattlegut," or it may have derived from the Old English "kitgut,"  with "kit" meaning "fiddle."  After WWII, synthetic materials started replacing catgut in some uses.  Acoustic guitarists started switching to steel strings around 1900, and classical and flamenco guitarists switched to nylon after WWII.

The Night Ella Fitzgerald Was Arrested

In the 1950s, Ella Fitzgerald was the undisputed Queen of Jazz and is still regarded as a musical legend.  That didn't keep her from being subject to racism, however.  She wasn't allowed to tour and perform in  much of the South where it was illegal to perform in front of integrated audiences.  Even on her European tours, she and her band members were sometimes subjected to unwarranted searches, delays, and hassles by airport security because they were black and because the were jazz musicians.  Fitzgerald became a dedicated spokesperson for civil rights, as was her manager Norman Granz.  Granz saw jazz as a force for social change, and he stipulated that venues where Fitzgerald performed had integrated audiences.  He saw Houston Texas as an opportunity and planned the first integrated show there.  He rented Houston's Music Hall for October 7, 1955 for a show featuring Fitzgerald and her frequent touring partner Dizzy Gillespie.  He demanded that all segregationist signage be removed, that there was no pre-sale of tickets (so that white buyers couldn't arrange to buy blocks of whites-only seating), and he hired extra security, including a number of off-duty Houston police officers.

Houston, like the rest of the South, was still burning over the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision, and someone in the police department and/or city government decided to take action.  Five undercover policemen got backstage passes and burst into the dressing room with guns drawn.  Fearing that they were going to plant drugs, Granz confronted an officer who jammed a gun into his stomach and threatened to kill him.  They "found" no drugs, but they did find Gillespie and a band member playing dice.  Fitzgerald, her cousin and personal assistant Georgiana Henry, Gillespie, Granz, and musician Illinois Jacquet (ironically a Houston native) were all arrested for illegal gambling, taken to jail and booked . During the whole process, officers besieged Fitzgerald and Gillespie for autographs. Reporters and photographers awaited their arrival at the station, an indication that it was all pre-planned.  After paying a fine, the group returned to Music Hall and performed the second set, the audience none the wiser.  A year later, Fitzgerald and Gillespie returned, and the integrated-audience show went on without a hitch.

L-R:  Fitzgerald, Henry, Jacquet, Gillespie

 Alfred E. Neuman

People of, ahem, a certain generation - my generation - almost certainly recognize Alfred E. Neuman as the unfortunate-looking cartoon logo of MAD magazine, the naughty parody and humor magazine that satirized television, movies, and popular culture and was marketed to teenaged boys, first published in 1952.  Adults generally frowned on the adolescent silliness found on every page, but celebrities and creators knew that they had made it or had a hit when MAD illustrators and writers parodied them.  Almost from the beginning, Alfred E. Neuman graced the covers and pages of the magazine, usually accompanied by his trademark line "What, me worry?"

As it turns out, Alfred was not created by MAD's founders Howard Kurtzman and William Gaines.  In fact, the image goes back to at least the 1890s, possibly as far back as 1877.  The origins aren't clear, but a very similar image appears in advertisements for canned mince meat and plum pudding about 1894, and it appears in an ad for a Broadway comedy from that year called "The New Boy."  After that, the big-eared, gap-toothed, freckly or pimply boy's face is used in advertising for numerous different products, everything from dentists to sodas, and the image is often paired with some variation of  "What, me worry?"  Versions were also used politically, on anti-Franklin Roosevelt postcards in 1940, for example.  Kurtzman first saw the image on a bulletin board and said that he immediately saw mischief and a care-free attitude. The name was inspired by the name of a prominent film score composer, Alfred Newman, and by the name of a minor character on comedian Henry Morgan's radio program.  The image first appeared on the cover of a MAD reprint collection in November 1954, and it started appearing regularly on the magazine cover in March of 1955.

Bum Farto

Organized crime has always given us some truly unforgettable names over the years, but I just recently learned about the all time best-name winner in the history of organized crime:  Bum Farto.  Joseph "Bum" Farto was born in 1919, and his Spanish-born father arrived in Key West Florida via Cuba in 1902 and became a restaurateur.   From an early age, Joseph constantly hung around the fire station, and the firemen started calling him "Bum."   It stuck.  He grew up, became a fireman and worked his way up in the department, becoming Key West fire chief in 1964.  He was known for being loud and flashy.  He drove a bright lime-yellow Galaxy 500 with mirrored tint and chrome wheels and "El Jeffe" ("The Boss") painted on the sides, constantly smoked big cigars, and wore red suits and rose-tinted glasses.  In 1968, he was suspended from his position for illegal check cashing, but retained his job.  That was just the beginning.  Key West was the wild, wild west of drug smuggling in those days, and Farto became a major a major cocaine and pot dealer, even dealing out of his City Hall offices, packing drugs and money in Burger King bags.  The US Drug Enforcement Administration conducted a sting operation  along with state authorities, arresting Farto and 28 others in Operation Conch.  Farto was convicted of drug smuggling in 1976.  While awaiting sentencing, he left Key West and drove to Miami.  From there, he was never seen or heard from again.  T-shirts popped up in south Florida saying "Where's Bum Farto?" and "The Answer is Bum's Away," and he became a bit of a south Florida legend.  A podcast called "The Bum Farto Story" dropped in 2020, and "Bum Farto-The Musical" premiered in 2021.

 

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 9

 

As I watch and read things, something may come up that piques my curiosity or stimulates a memory, so I pick up my phone and go down a short research rabbit hole.  Join me if you'd like.

William Adams

William Adams (1564-1620) was a ship's pilot and navigator considered to be the first Englishman to reach Japan.  Sound familiar?  Yes, he was the inspiration for John Blackthorne, the lead character in James Clavell's novel Shogun, recently adapted again as a limited television series.  Apprenticed at 12 to a shipyard master, Adams learned shipbuilding, astronomy, and navigation before joining the Royal Navy.  In 1600, he arrived in Japan on board a Dutch merchant ship, the only surviving ship of a five-ship expedition.  While the captain and other survivors were allowed to leave Japan, Adams and the ship's second mate were not permitted to leave the country.  They became advisors to the Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu  and became two of the first foreign-born samurai in Japan.  Adams was given the special title of hatamoto, a direct vassal of the shogun and awarded a fief, 80-90 serfs, and a handsome annual stipend. He was renamed Anjin Miura.  The Dutch second mate was rewarded similarly, but he drowned in a shipwreck a few years later.

Adams directed the construction of the first western-style ship in Japan. He also acted as an agent for English merchant interests interested in establishing trade.  Like Blackthorne in Shogun, Adams had an antagonistic relationship with the Jesuit Spanish and Portuguese priests in Japan who saw improving relations with the Protestant English and Dutch as threats to their spiritual and economic monopoly.  Adams died in Hirado, just north of Nagasaki, and left his estate to be divided equally between his English family and his Japanese family.

The Underground City of Derinkuyu

I've always been fascinated when I come across references to Turkey's underground city of Derinkuyu, just one of several underground settlements discovered in the central region of Cappadocia.  It consists of as many as 18 levels carved into the soft volcanic rock to a depth of 280 feet below the ground.  The city could hold as many as 20,000 residents and their livestock, and it was complete with wine and oil presses, cellars, apartments, school rooms, stables, and chapels.  It is believed that there are more than 600 entrances, and each one can be sealed by rolling stones from the inside.  That fact has led to speculation by archaeologists that the chief reason for building underground was defense.  Cappadocia has been crossed by invading armies repeatedly throughout its history, and the theory is that the first underground chambers were used for storage by the Phrygians in the 8th-7th centuries BC before people moved in to escape invading armies.  Over the centuries, the city was greatly expanded and reached its greatest population from from 780 -1180 during the Arab-Byzantine Wars.  The Christian natives of the region continued to seek refuge there from later Mongol invasions and Ottoman persecution in the early 20th century.  By 1923, the Ottoman Turks had expelled all Christians from the region, and the city was largely forgotten.  In 1963, a man discovered a hidden room while renovating his home, discovering an entrance into the underground city, and excavations began.  Today, about half of the city is open to tourists.  

Karen Horney

I took the required Intro to Psych courses in college and the educational psychology courses, but in those courses, I never once heard the name Karen Horney.  Turns out she's a fairly important figure in the development of psychology and psychiatric medicine.  Born Karen Danielsen in Hamburg Germany in 1885, she decided at an early age to become a physician, but college, let alone medical school, was closed to women in Germany.  That changed in 1900, however, and she entered medical school in 1906.  After marrying, starting a family, and losing her parents in rapid succession, she began the new field of psychoanalysis - as a patient -  as a means of coping, and she began studying the field herself.  In 1920, she became a founding member and instructor at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, and she started a private practice of her own as well.  Concerned over the rise of Nazism and divorced from her husband, she left Germany in the 1930s with her children and moved to Chicago.  As her career developed, she began to diverge more and more from Sigmund Freud's theories, particularly when it came to Freud's ideas that men and women were inherently different in their psychology.  She vehemently disagreed with his assertion that women suffered from "penis envy."  She believed that any differences were due to culture and society and not biology.  Her theories made her a founder of feminist psychology.  She also published important theories in the areas of neuroses, narcissism, and self-actualization.  After a few years in Chicago, she moved to Brooklyn where she set up a private practice and taught in medical schools until her death in 1952.

Novocherkassk Massacre

From June 1 through 3 1962, a large group of  peaceful and unarmed Soviet citizens rallied in the Soviet city of Novocherkassk in order to demand relief from crippling economic policies.  Wages at the city's largest employer, a locomotive factory, were slashed 35% while production quotas and work hours were increased.  Meanwhile, the state raised prices of milk, dairy, and other staples by as much as 35%.  Unrest started in May with strikes within the plant and spread quickly. On June 2, some 4,000 men, women, and children gathered and marched in the city square carrying Soviet flags and pictures of Lenin.  Thirty worker leaders were arrested, and tensions grew.  Infantry units were called in to restore order.  When the crowd ignored orders to disperse, the infantry fired into the air, but KGB (Soviet state police) sharpshooters and machine-gunners stationed on rooftops fired directly into the the crowd, operating under orders that were later traced back all the way to Premier Nikita Khrushchev.  At least 26 people died on the scene.  They were buried in unmarked graves, and they're families were never told what happened to them.  In the aftermath, a couple of hundred other people were arrested, several were executed, and dozens were imprisoned.  The incident was never reported in the press, and it was never publicly recognized until 1992, a year after the collapse of the USSR. In 1992, remains of the victims were disinterred and reburied, a monument was erected, an official apology was issued, and a token payment was made to surviving victims.  

St. Martin's Le Grand

In Karen Brooks' novel, The Good Wife of Bath, the title character lives for a time in the St. Martin's Le Grand section of London, just north of St. Paul's Cathedral.  During the 19th and 20th centuries, the area was dominated by the General Post Office headquarters, and "St. Martin's Le Grand" became a synonym for the national postal authority much like "Scotland Yard" has for the police.  It was in the General Post Office headquarters that Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated his wireless telegraphy invention, earning support for the development of what became radio, but the history of the area goes back several hundred years before.  Some traditions maintain that the site was home to a church and monastery as far back as the 7th or 8th century, but confirmed history has a church and college built ( or rebuilt) there around 1056.  Shortly after,  St. Martin's Le Grand, and other churches, began asserting sanctuary rights in England, and this concept became part of English common law by the late 12th and early 13th centuries.  There was a tradition, sometimes called abjuration, that a felon could seek temporary asylum by living in a church or churchyard for up to forty days while he made plans to leave the kingdom.  Eventually, in St. Martin's the time limit was lifted, and the area became known as a "liberty," and felons, debtors, and other wrongdoers were free from arrest and harassment from sheriffs, constables, and creditors.  The City of London did not accept this idea without a fight, and the idea of sanctuary was contested in courts into the 15th century, with St. Martin's Le Grand seemingly winning a in the early 1400s.  However, King Henry VIII's seizure and dissolution of churches and monasteries during the English Reformation caused a sharp decline in sanctuary's legal standing.  The St. Martin's church, monastery, and college were demolished about 1450, but the area retained some "liberty" status until it was annexed into the Aldersgate Ward of the City of London in 1815.

Battle of Hayes Pond

On the night of January 18, 1958, about fifty members of the Ku Klux Klan attempted to stage a rally near Maxton, North Carolina. Several hundred armed Lumbee Indians, many veterans of WWII and the Korean War,  showed up, a fight ensued, and the Klansman dispersed and fled.  The event was covered widely by the national news media, and the media coverage overwhelmingly condemned the Klan and praised the Lumbees.  The event became known as the Battle of Hayes Pond or the Maxton Riot.

Who are the Lumbees and why Maxton?  Maxton is located in Robeson County which has a significant Lumbee population.  The Lumbee people are like the Seminole tribe in Florida, a relatively new tribe comprising survivors of several other tribes decimated by European violence and disease.  These survivors coalesced to form a new community, officially recognized as a tribe by Congress in 1956.  The Lumbee assimilated quite quickly into the majority culture and intermarried with white and black North Carolinians, making them fairly indistinguishable from the rest of the community.; they were agrarian, English-speaking, and Protestant, bound together by kinship and their shared history.  While they were not subjected to removal like like other southeastern tribes, North Carolina law designated them "colored" in spite of the fact of the fact that many were physically indistinguishable from white North Carolinians, and subjected them to segregation, discrimination, and Jim Crow laws from the antebellum period into the 1950s.  After official tribal designation occurred, and many Lumbees started protesting segregation, James "Catfish" Cole began organizing Klan activities in Robeson County including cross burnings and the Hayes Pond rally.  He ignored local law enforcement requests to cancel the rally, and he and another Klansman were arrested and convicted for inciting a riot as a result of the event.  Following the incident, the North Carolina Klan shrank and splintered even further, and Americans learned about the existence of the Lumbees from the media attention.  

Josh Gibson

A few days ago, Major League Baseball announced the integration of Negro League and Major League statistics.  This integration really shook things up, with many new names popping up on leaderboards and as record holders.  I must admit that I'm a little surprised by how little talk this generated, but I must admit that I may be the least interested person in the world when it comes to baseball - in fact, I loathe it.  I'm a bit confused because one of the things that baseball fans constantly rave about it is statistics, and Negro League statistics are questionable.  They weren't kept as closely as Major League statistics, and teams played only a few dozen games a year (60 or fewer) against other professional teams, compared to the seemingly hundreds and hundreds of games played today.  For most of the year, Negro League teams, played semi-professional, school, and local amateur teams in "barnstorming" tours across the country.

Nevertheless, some really fantastic athletes played in the Negro League and were denied their due for too long.  One of the most famous was Josh Gibson, who now holds several Major League Baseball records.  When Gibson played, he was called the "black Babe Ruth,"  but many called Ruth the "white Josh Gibson."

Gibson was born in the small southwest Georgia town of Buena Vista in 1911.  The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1923, and his father went to work in a steel mill. Gibson entered training to become an electrician.  At age 16, he first played organized baseball on a Gimbel's Department Store team; he worked there as an elevator operator.  He was recruited by the Pittsburgh semi-pro black team, the top semi-pro black team in the country.  By 1931, he had made the major Negro League, playing for most of his professional career with the Homestead Grays.  His career was tragically cut short, however.  In 1943, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.  He refused surgical treatment and died of a stroke four years later at age 35.  In 1972, he became the second Negro League player inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, after Satchel Paige.  

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 8

 

As I read or watch things, I see come across intriguing references to things that stir memories or otherwise pique my interest, and I look it up.  Join me as I go down the rabbit hole....

Shin-Kicking

Yes, believe it or not, it is actually a real, erm, "sport":  shin-kicking.  It originated in the Cotswold region of the UK in the 17th century and also became popular among Cornish miners both as entertainment and to settle disputes.  It  was a major event in the Cotswold Olimpick Games from 1612 until the games ended in the 1850s, revived in 1951.  The event draws thousands of spectators. Two competitors, sometimes wearing white coats representing shepherds' smocks, lock arms and kick each other in the shins until one has had enough and cries "Sufficient!"  Modern rules require the wearing of soft shoes and padding their trousers legs with straw, but paramedics and ambulances are on standby.

Dwile Flonking

OK, here's another uniquely English game/sport(?) that I learned about recently from an episode of the "Father Brown" TV series.  Unsurprisingly, it has origins in pubs, but the true origins are hard to pin down.  There are claims that it originated in the Middle Ages, but others only trace it back to the early 1960s.  ("Father Brown" is set in the late 1950s, so that connection doesn't help much.  In any case, there are two teams of 12 players each. Each team takes a turn dancing a circle around a member of the opposing team.  The encircled opposing team member uses a stick to fling (or "flonk') a soaking wet cloth or mop (a "dwile") at the dancers' feet, earning points for hitting them.  

Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte

Napoleon "Bony" Bonaparte is the leading character in a series of some 29 detective novels published by Australian author Arthur Upfield between 1929 and 1966.  Bonaparte is the son of an Aborigine mother and a white father, born at a time when interracial relationships were illegal.  Orphaned as an infant, he was raised in a Catholic orphanage where he acquired his name and developed his crime-solving intellect which, when combined with his superior tracking skills, made him a formidable detective inspector with the Queensland Police after earning a university degree.  The Bony books continue to be popular in Australia and abroad, and American author Tony Hillerman cited them as influences on his popular Leaphorn and Chee series.  The books have been adapted for Australian radio and television numerous times, although they are sometimes criticized for being politically incorrect and reflective of the time in which they were written, and, so far, Bony has not been portrayed by an actor of Aboriginal descent.

Upfield was born in England in 1890, migrated to Australia and served in the Australian military during World War I.  After the war, he traveled extensively in Australia and became very familiar with Aboriginal culture and participated in numerous scientific expeditions.  During his travels, Upfield claimed that he met a mixed race man known as "Tracker Leon" who worked for the Queensland police and became the inspiration for Bonaparte, but there is apparently no evidence that such a man existed.  Upfield wrote other novels, but they were overshadowed by Bony's popularity. Upfield died in New South Wales in 1964.

Carson Gulley

One of our must-watch tv shows is "Top Chef."  This season is set is in Wisconsin, and a recent episode honored Chef Carson Gulley (1897-1962).  Gulley was one of ten children born into an Arkansas family of sharecroppers.  He made his way to Wisconsin, where he became the head chef of the University of Wisconsin, serving in that position from 1926 to 1954.  In 1949, George Washington Carver encouraged him to publish his first cookbook. In 1953, he began hosting a radio cooking program, and he and his wife co-hosted a TV cooking program from 1953 to 1962, becoming the first black couple in the country to host a TV show.  Their recipes were published in booklets that listeners and viewers could request by mail. Gulley was an also a leader of the Madison chapter chapter of the NAACP, and he led the fight against discriminatory housing practices.  The campus building in which he worked is now named for him,  Carson Gulley Commons, and the university still serves many of his recipes regularly, including his famous fudge-bottom pie.

Clutch Cargo

Were you, like me, simultaneously traumatized and mesmerized as a child by the animated - using the term loosely - cartoon series "Clutch Cargo"?  "Clutch Cargo" was a syndicated series of only 52 episodes that ran originally from 1959-1960 and ever after in cartoon shows and kids' shows.  Created by Clark Haas, the series follows the adventures of pilot Clutch cargo, his young "ward" Spinner and their pet dachshund named Paddlefoot.  The cartoons were each 5 minutes and created in 5- cartoon arcs, with each of the first four cartoons ending in a cliffhanger and the fifth acting as the conclusion to the adventure.  Haas' idea was that kids' shows could show a segment each weekday and then show the full arc on Saturday mornings.  The driving force behind the show was cheapness.  The animation was extremely limited, and the show was the first to use a new technology called Syncro-Vox.  Syncro-Vox involved superimposing moving human mouths over barely-animated or even still animation cells, so that the lips moving were the major movement.  This process made it super cheap and fast to produce, at one-thirteenth the cost of real animation.  Haas also save money on music, with the soundtrack created by one man using only bongos, a vibraphone, and a flute.  A few other Syncro-Vox shows followed like "Space Angel,"  and I would venture to guess that Hanna-Barbera used Clutch as partial inspiration for "Jonny Quest" that debuted in 1964.

Paraceratherium

Paraceratherium, also known as Indricotherium, is an extinct genus of hornless rhinoceros that lived during the Oligocene epoch, approximately 34 to 23 million years ago. It is the largest land mammal known to have existed, with an estimated shoulder height of up to 16 feet (4.8 meters) and a weight of around 15 tons. Paraceratherium had a long neck and a relatively small head compared to its massive body. It likely fed on leaves and twigs from trees, browsing in forests across Eurasia. Fossil evidence suggests that it had a wide geographic range, from present-day China to the Balkans. Paraceratherium is a significant species in paleontology, offering insights into the evolutionary history of large mammals and the environmental conditions of the Oligocene period. A paraceratherium appears in Douglas Preston's new novel, Extinction.