Category: History

Writers Have All the Ideas

On By Sarah AngletonIn History, literature5 Comments

In May of 1903, a man by the name of William West, recently convicted of some crime or other, arrived at the Federal Correctional Institute in Leavenworth, Kansas for processing. As the records clerk took the new inmate’s precise measurements, he asked him about the man’s prior murder conviction, at point which a genuinely surprised West insisted he had committed no such heinous crime. The records clerk remained unconvinced, presenting West with a file of a convicted murderer named William West that included his precise measurements and a picture identical to himself.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

That a convict might lie about his past crimes didn’t surprise the clerk, but what did surprise him was that the William West in the file was still serving his sentence, and so couldn’t be the William West standing in front of him.

It turned out that the two men, later presumed to be identical twins separated at birth, possessed identical characteristics when processed with the Bertillon measurement of physical characteristics in common use in the US prison system. Fortunately, the clerk was delighted to discover that the two men did have one distinguishing characteristic: their fingerprints.

And that is the excellent story of how fingerprinting became an important tool of forensic science in the United States. Of course as with most excellent stories in history, this bears the telltale too perfectly symmetrical marks of being not precisely true. It makes for good fiction.

In reality, there are oily smudges looping, arching, and whorling all over the smooth surfaces of history, dating back at least 4,000 years when Hammurabi sealed contracts with a fingertip. Not much more recently, the Chinese used inked prints as unique signatures on contracts, and as early as 200 BC may have been using hand prints left at crime scenes to help crack burglary cases.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

It was in the 17th century that European scholars started describing the unique combinations of patterns on the ends of our fingers. Then in 1892, Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, and originator of the unsavory study of eugenics, published a helpful classification of the patterns of fingerprints. That led to Sir Edward Henry’s development of a practical system of identification that could be used in law enforcement, which he presented to Scotland Yard.

Of course as impressive as this sounds, Mark Twain solved a crime using fingerprinting in his somewhat embellished memoir Life on the Mississippi in 1883, indicating, I think, that it would behoove scientists to pay closer attention to writers because they have all the ideas.

Scotland Yard adopted Henry’s system in 1901, brought it to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, and presented it to St. Louis police detectives and the general public, including both the fictional amateur sleuth in my novel set at the World’s Fair, as well as the historical M.W. McClaughry, records clerk at the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. In September of 1904, fresh from his trip to the fair McClaughry requested that a fingerprinting system be implemented at the prison. It was another one hundred and twenty years before my sleuth put the science to work in my book, Paradise on the Pike.

But even though the story of the two William Wests is somewhat fictional, too, there’s a ring of some truth to it. There were two William Wests at Leavenworth at the same time and they were identical, distinguishable only by their unique fingerprints. They did become a good illustration of the usefulness of the relatively newfangled science of fingerprinting. Still, in reality, the timeline of the story doesn’t quite work out.

When a second William West showed up to be processed, it doesn’t seem that it caused much of a stir at all. It was, however, convenient to have them both there when clerk M.W. McClaughry got excited about this newfangled science that had already been in use in some way for thousands of years. And it sure did make for a good story.

Not Quite History Yet

On By Sarah AngletonIn History, literature7 Comments

I’ve been at this Thursday blogging thing for more than a decade now, which makes me feel terribly old. I’ve never figured out how to make money off it, though apparently some people do. I probably couldn’t anyway because I rarely share recipes or include bullet points that offer succinct strategies to improve your health or achieve your financial goals. This blog will rarely  promise you better sleep, space-saving hacks, or hot vacation tips. And I assure you, you will never ever read technology advice in this particular corner of the blogosphere.  

While I do harbor a vague hope that readers who stumble across my blog might be curious enough to buy one of my historical novels, I’m in this space primarily because I enjoy it. I enjoy playing with history and interacting with readers and being kind of silly and occasionally toying with an idea that might just turn out to be a little bit profound and spur some good thinking.

One such book. Excellent historical fiction for a middle schooler. Emotionally tough read for those who remember.

But once in a while, Thursday falls on a day when I’m not sure I have any words to offer. This is one of those Thursdays, because of course, twenty-four years ago today, a moment of national tragedy occurred here in the US and altered the way I think about the world. 

And I still don’t want to write about it. I don’t know if someday I will want to. In the past twenty-four years, several authors have ventured to do so, many in nonfiction formats, but also several now who have chosen to let the sad events of September 11, 2001 be the backdrop for fictional stories.

I’ve read a few such novels, and have appreciated them. Last year when I took some time off of writing and worked in a middle school library, I sometimes recommended them, discussed them, and shelved them—in the historical fiction section of the library.

Yes, we debated whether that was appropriate or not. After all, the Historical Novel Society, which seems as though it should be the authority on the genre, defines historical fiction as a story written at least fifty years after the events described or that has been written by someone who was not alive during the events, and so has approached them only via outside research. Their website does, however, also acknowledge that it’s complicated.

Most of the writers of the stories that bump up against the events of the September 11th terrorist attack in New York were alive when it occurred, and are certainly not fifty years removed from the event. Like me, they probably remember where they were when the news of the planes hitting the twin towers broke, and they shared in the shock of a nation that had been generally pretty lucky throughout its relatively short history not to have experienced too much terror on its own soil.

My adult children have no living memory of this event, but for me it’s still pretty raw. National Park Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But the readers in the middle school library have no living memory of that awful day. Their older siblings likely have no living memory of it, either. And so they have no direct emotional connection with which to approach the subject matter. To them, it is just another historical event they learn about in school, like the Kennedy assassination, or the Apollo moon landing, or the attack on Pear Harbor were to me. 

I’m pretty sure I have written in this space, at least tangentially, about all three of those historical events, because even such huge moments in history are fairly easy to plumb for material that’s only vaguely worth writing about—my specialty in this space.

Today, however, is different. It’s a day when ridiculous historical tidbits that might be fun to write about are obscured by this other monstrous moment. And that one moment, at least for me, isn’t quite history yet.

I’m Not Quite Sure How to Say This…

On By Sarah AngletonIn Food, History9 Comments

In 1837, chemists and business partners John Wheeley Lea and William Perrins decided to clean out the piles of forgotten treasures and banished mistakes from the basement of their pharmacy in Worcester, England. In doing so, they rediscovered one particularly awful batch of a failed sauce they’d attempted to produce two years earlier.

The pair had been commissioned to make the sauce by the third Baron Sandys, Lord Marcus Hill, who’d returned to England after serving as the Governor of Bengal, with a terrible hankering for a particular sauce he had grown fond of in India. 

Tangy, sweet, sour, salty, smoky, and hard to pronounce.

He described a tangy, sweet, sour, salty, smoky sauce that would be great in a beef stew or as part of a marinade or thrown together with some tomato juice, vodka, and maybe even celery, if for some reason you crave a refreshing glass of cold alcoholic brunch soup. Also maybe there was some fish in it?

Like a couple of kids let loose in the backyard with a bucket, a hose, and all the leaves, twigs, and mud they can pull together, Lea and Perrins got to work. What they ended up with was every bit as edible as a bucket of garden muck. 

The awful experimental sauce was banished to the basement, leaving Baron Sandys to dream of tastier days in India, the muck not to be thought of again until two years later when it was rediscovered during the great cleanup. 

I do like to use Worcestershire Sauce for a lot of things, but this I could do without. Trilbeee, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s not clear why the two pharmacists decided to give their previous failure another taste, but that’s what they did. To their amazement, they discovered a mellowed and flavorful fermented sauce that made them think it might just be the missing ingredient in, according to this practical historian’s opinion, the worst thing to ever happen to brunch. Though their sauce is excellent in a beef stew or as part of a marinade.

The two decided they should market their new discovery, but it needed a name that would roll off the tongue. After mulling it over for not nearly long enough, they decided to name the sauce after the town in which they lived. Worcestershire Sauce was born. 

Personally I think it could have used a bit more workshopping. I’m sure the great citizens of Worcester have no trouble with it, but for the rest of us, the name probably leaves us a little tongue tied. In a recent informal Facebook poll of the people I know, in which I asked what words in English do you think are hardest to pronounce, buried between some excellent answers like brewery, espresso, cinnamon, mischievous, and etcetera, were several mentions of Worcestershire Sauce. 

On second thought, maybe a small brand refresh can hurt a little bit.

Despite the difficult name, the sauce took off, first throughout England, and then across the pond and around the world. In case you want to use the name for a similar sauce of your own, a court ruling in 1876 declared it not copyrighted. Of course if you’d rather, you could take a page from TikTok cowboy cook sensation Pepper Belly Pete who markets his Worcestershire-inspired sauce (say that five times fast) as Worshyoursister Sauce.

I suppose a small brand refresh never hurts, but Lee & Perrins has remained the same since the beginning. I did recently learn that it uses a slightly different recipe in the US market than in Worcester, but it still comes in a brown glass bottle, often wrapped in paper for safer shipping. I never found out whether Baron Sandys liked the sauce, or whether it really did resemble what he’d enjoyed in India, but there’s little doubt brunch just wouldn’t be the same without Worstesheresher Woostesher Warchestershyre that tangy, sweet, sour, salty, smoky sauce that goes in a Bloody Mary. And maybe there’s fish in it?

Staring at the Wall

On By Sarah AngletonIn Art, History, parenthood7 Comments

On August 22, 1911, artist Louis Béroud intended to spend his day at the Louvre, working his way through mimicking the paintings in one of its many galleries. He’d chosen Salon Carré, the room in which a small 16th century painting by Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci smirked from behind glass between Antonio da Correggio’s Mystical Marriage and Titian’s Allegory of Alfonso d’Avalos.

Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

When he found an empty spot where the Mona Lisa had been on display for more than a century, he didn’t initially think much of it. At the time, there was an ongoing project to photograph many of the paintings in the Louvre, and several had been removed from their display locations temporarily to capture better lighting on the roof. 

The portrait had been the focus of critical attention in the art world for about fifty years at that point, as an excellent representative of Renaissance oil paintings, but outside that circle, the world hadn’t really given the Mona Lisa much thought.

That changed the moment Louis Béroud thought to ask one of the security guards when the painting might be returned, and the guard discovered that the painting hadn’t been taken for photographing at all. It was missing.

I love listening to his list because he finds all kinds of bands I’d never heard of, but that I absolutely love.

A thorough search of the museum didn’t turn up the painting, nor did nearly two years of investigation. The story became a fascinating true crime mystery and made the Mona Lisa, with its curious half smile and uncertainly identified subject, one of the most famous paintings in the world. It also made the empty spot where it had hung the most highly visited blank gallery wall in the world.

It’s that part of the story that I find most interesting, that people came in droves to stare at a vacant bit of wall. Of course, I don’t know why they all came. Maybe they were hoping to find clues or at least understand the circumstances of the crime a little better by putting themselves in the space. Maybe like the Instagrammers of today, people just wanted to seem interesting at parties because they’d taken time to be there, and obviously they’d always known that the Mona Lisa was an important work of art.

But lately, as I see the social media posts of so many grieving friends sending their newly grown up kids out into the world to college, or the military, or apparently in one lucky young man’s case, a gap year European tour, I tend to imagine that the crowds came to the Louvre as an expression of grief that they couldn’t quite make sense of and couldn’t quite shake off.

I imagine all those parents are catching glimpses of, and maybe even intentionally visiting, bedrooms once occupied by the children they never fully understood until now just how much they would miss. For me, it’s not the room so much, though it is sad and empty, but the Spotify list that I can’t stop listening to because it makes it sound like my youngest son is still at home.

And then there are just some fun surprises because he’s kind of an old soul.

I realize this is not a perfect analogy of course, because at least I hope every parent who’s watching a son or daughter leave the nest, already knows their kid is a work of art that fills an important space in the history of the world.  

Thankfully for most, even though their grief is very real, their young adult children will eventually return home, at least to visit. Mona Lisa did finally turn up again and wound its way back to the Louvre. It had been stolen on August 21st, the day before Louis Béroud noticed it was gone, and a day when the museum was closed. 

Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian man who had been employed at the museum, and helped install the glass that protected the painting, had walked out the door with it. The Mona Lisa’s almost immediate burst of fame had made it impossible for him to do anything with it and only when he attempted to fence the work two years later was he finally found out and arrested. 

Today, Da Vinci’s kind of cheeky portrait is the most visited piece of art in the entire world. Because when you get the chance to miss something, that’s when you truly understand how special the time you spend with it really is.

Gardeners in a Pickle

On By Sarah AngletonIn Food, History4 Comments

We’ve reached that part of the summer, when the heat and humidity have soared to almost unbearable levels, bins of school supplies have taken over all of the stores, and it seems like everyone I know wants to give me cucumbers.

We spent a beautiful afternoon recently with friends enjoying live music at a wine and beer garden, and of course, someone brought along homegrown cucumbers.

I should say, I like cucumbers. I enjoy them in salads, on sandwiches, on their own as a crunchy snack, and I usually won’t turn down a nice dill pickle. Most years I grow them in my garden and then when this part of the season rolls around, I try to give them away to everyone I know. 

But our garden is a little smaller this year than it has been in the past. It’s been a busy summer of travel and transition and we’ve been managing two properties as we work on renovations in our new country house and on prepping the city house for the market. I did drop some tomato and pepper plants in the ground, but that’s all I managed. 

It turns out that has not diminished our supply of homegrown cucumbers, because the average plant yields ten to twenty fruits. Now of course this varies quite a bit, but if we assume the average garden cucumber weighs a conservative half pound, the average American eats about eight and a half pounds of cucumber per year, and the average gardener plops eight cucumber plants in their garden plot, that leaves an excess of, well, quite a bit of cucumber.

We’re not talking quite the numbers Newfoundland was dealing with in the late 1980s of course. That’s when the provincial government decided to enter into the cucumber business with innovator Philip Sprung, the man who claimed his hydroponic greenhouses would revolutionize the produce industry and usher Newfoundland into previously undreamt economic prosperity. With mostly cucumbers.

This is not the Sprung Greenhouse, dubbed by the press as the “Pickle Palace.” This appears to be a less massive and more successful greenhouse full of cucumbers. Amnsalem, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The idea was that with the combination of eight interconnected greenhouses, large grow lights to extend the naturally short growing season of Newfoundland, and Sprung’s unique hydroponic solution, the project would yield fully grown, market ready cucumbers in as little as six days.

The enormous project, which employed 330 temporary and 150 permanent staff and ended up costing the taxpayers about $22.2 million, was projected to produce 6.7 million pounds of produce in its first year and expand to 9 million in its second year. It promised to quickly turn Newfoundland into a cucumber powerhouse unlike the world had ever seen.

Instead the greenhouse took much longer to produce about 800,000 cucumbers, many of them misshapen because of moisture control issues. It turned out also that there was very little market for them as the average Newfoundlander was responsible for the consumption of only about half a cucumber per year, and the Sprung cucumbers were almost twice as expensive to produce as they were to purchase. 

Everyone who is currently trying to give me cucumbers has a seriously large number of apples in their future.

In the US, a cucumber could be purchased for about a quarter of the cost of production for a Sprung cucumber, probably because every home gardener had more than enough to share. It’s probably not surprising that the project also brought down several political careers. In the end, each Sprung cucumber wound up costing the Newfoundland taxpayers about $27.50 and a good number of them were fed to livestock.

I don’t think the cucumber growers in my life have gotten that desperate yet, though there have been seasons I might have started offering my overabundance of cucumbers to any cows or pigs I happened to meet. For now, I’m grateful I have friends who are offering me the crisp, cool taste of summer without charging me a dime, much less $27.50.

Since I don’t have to try to figure out what to do with an overabundance, I’m free to live life as cool as a cucumber. At least for a few weeks until the apple harvest comes in.

Furry Little Demons

On By Sarah AngletonIn Animals, History, Nature8 Comments

It was in 1924 that the Bureau of Biological Survey, precursor to the US Fish and Wildlife Agency, responded to a request from local sheep farmers in Kern County, California and set out to eliminate coyotes and other predators from the area. The campaign, which sounded like a much better idea in 1924 than it does a century later, was a success, but it came at a cost.

According to the West Kern Oil Museum, the cost was the most epic house mouse infestation in US history. To be fair to the Bureau, Harvard mouse researchers have since drawn the conclusion that it might not have been entirely their fault. It turns out that a few dry years plus a dry lake bed planted with wheat, barley, corn, and cotton plus one of the most wildly successful invasive pest species in the world plus a torrential rain equals 100 million mice. 

Such a ridiculously cute furry little demon. Image by Alexa from Pixabay

Admittedly the number might have been a little smaller if there’d still been a few coyotes skulking about, but once you reach a million or so mice, I’m not sure it’s worth quibbling over the thousands a healthy coyote population might consume.

Oil companies close to the source of the outbreak did attempt to control the problem, digging long trenches filled with poison-laced grain, but it wasn’t long before the horde, fleeing their now flooded lake bed home, made their way to the nearby town of Taft, where residents set as many traps as they could and the house cats ate to bursting. But it was no good. They were at war. And they were losing.

I can sympathize, because as I mentioned in my last post, we recently bought some land in the country with a house that needs a little work. The house sat on the market for about a year before we found it, and the previous owners had long since moved out. We weren’t ready to move in just yet, as our son was finishing his senior year in high school and I was working in our current town. That was fine for us, because we had quite a few renovation ideas anyway and that gave us time to work on them. 

But what that means is that now for at least a year-and a-half, the house has been unoccupied except for the occasional night between shifts when my husband might sleep there or when we might stay a night or two working on projects. 

The mice have moved in. We are at war. And at the moment, it feels like we’re losing. 

Each time I’m at the house now, I set traps and catch a few. Yes, we do have a contract with a pest control company that has treated the home for insect infestations, eliminating our previously significant wasp problem, set up a termite monitoring system, and provided us with a rodent-fighting defense system, but I think we must have had a pretty good population of the little critters living, and unfortunately also dying and stinking, in our walls already. 

It seems so simple. I’m not sure what we’re doing wrong.

At this point, I’m ready to call in the Pied Piper.

That is what the people of Kern County did. Once again they appealed to the Bureau of Biological Survey, which in January of 1927, sent in an agent named Stanley Piper, because if you happen to have a Piper on staff in that situation, I don’t think you really have any choice. 

Piper pulled out the big guns and got to work poisoning the mice, though he also just kind of got lucky, because environmental conditions shifted, as they do, predatory birds moved back into the area, probably drawn by the horrendous smell of a great deal of prey, and the house mouse population soon fell to tolerable levels.

I’m hoping that will be our experience, too. I’m hoping that once we are in the house on a more regular basis, setting traps and making noise with our scary predator-smelling dog in tow, maybe we’ll win a few battles, and eventually the war.

I’m fairly certain we do at least have plenty of coyotes.

We Don’t Need No Hatchetations

On By Sarah AngletonIn Current Events, History, Politics9 Comments

On June 7, 1900 the clientele of Dobson’s Saloon in Kiowa, Kansas got something of a shock when a tall, possibly slightly unhinged woman entered the establishment with a hymn on her lips and bricks in her hands. Following a vision she believed to be from God, Caroline Amelia Nation greeted the bartender with a “Good morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls,” and proceeded to smash up the place. She claimed she was perfectly within her rights to do so because the business should have been illegal anyway.

Carry A. Nation with a Bible in one hand and a hatchet in the other. N.N., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A decade earlier, Kansas had become the first state in the union to outlaw non-medicinal alcohol. Almost immediately, and to the disappointment of the temperance movement, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed for the interstate importation of alcohol in its original packaging. That weakened the law significantly and created a loophole for places like Dobson’s Saloon.

Political passion is important, and persuasive and open dialog is essential to a thriving democracy and to just generally being good humans. However, smashing up a lawful business, even if you don’t believe it should be such, is probably going a little too far.

Caroline, more often Carrie, had survived a bad first marriage to an alcoholic husband and became a fervent speaker against drink, founding a local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. There’s a lot to admire about a person who crusades for a strongly held political belief, even one that turned out a few years later when the US enacted prohibition, to be kind of a bad idea.

Carry A. Nation, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Carrie Nation, who eventually changed her name to Carry A. Nation soon traded her bricks for a hatchet. Despite more than thirty arrests and a lifetime banishment from Kansas City, she kept on spreading her message through a series of unlawful saloon “hatchetations,” while also marching and speaking for women’s suffrage, establishing a women and children’s shelter, and feeding and clothing the poor.

I think it’s safe to say that in many ways, she was a pretty good lady, with a heart full of fire for the things most important to her. She certainly seemed to think so, and boldly titled her 1908 autobiography The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation.

In some ways, she’s right. A nation needs passionate people to carry it forward. Of course we in the United States are feeling keenly this week the reality that passionate, pretty good people don’t always agree on which way the nation needs to be carried.

It’s okay to disagree. It’s probably even a good thing because none of us is right all the time, and we do need to engage in purposeful, respectful conversations about the things that matter most to each of us. We just also need to leave our hatchets at home.

The Dark Days Ahead

On By Sarah AngletonIn Current Events, History, Politics17 Comments

It’s election season once again here in the United States, with early voting already in full swing, and most people convinced that the nation will fall if their pick for president doesn’t win. I’d say something reassuring, but alas, I’m not totally immune to the hysteria. One thing I can say for sure is that no matter what happens, next Tuesday will be a dark day for all Americans.

That’s because in the early hours of Sunday morning time itself will suffer a stroke when our clocks fall back an hour. The early evening will suddenly become the blackest depths of nighttime, my dog will fail to sleep a second past 4:00 in the morning, traffic accidents will see a slight uptick, and everyone will be universally miserable for a good week or two.

The US first observed Daylight Saving Time in 1918. In 1919 Congress scrapped it because of the universal misery, and because apparently at that time Congress cared. It wasn’t implemented again until World War II when it once again proved temporary on a federal level, though some states and cities embraced the misery and adopted some version of it. Then in 1966, the Uniform Time Act signed by Lyndon Johnson, standardized the practice across the country, except in a couple of states that didn’t feel like it and decided to stay on standard time.

The awful tradition has been tweaked several times since, with the dates of clock changing moving around a little, but the most exciting development came in 2022 when the US Senate passed, by unanimous consent, a bill to eliminate standard time. Everyone cheered and looked forward to the first Sunday of November, 2024 when Daylight Saving Time would become the standard across the land.

Everyone, that is, except the House of Representatives where the bill has still not been voted on because it has proven weirdly controversial despite not dividing along party lines. 71% of US citizens want to stop the biannual insanity, which is pretty much a slam dunk for politicians who claim to want a less divided nation. Granted, 40% favor keeping to Daylight Saving Time while 31% are incorrect. I guess maybe 29% just didn’t understand the question?

20% of the members of my household, and NOT a fan of time changes.

I don’t know, but it is true one has to be careful with polling results because they can be pretty heavily manipulated based on how a question is worded or a sample taken.

For example, I recently conducted a highly scientific poll of a fair cross-section of the American population, consisting of the members of my household and found that 80% of participants were entirely unpersuaded by political gripes on social media. I know that can’t be right because pretty much everyone I know is still spouting their opinions from their keyboards.

20% of the members of my household don’t use social media, were just happy to be a part of the conversation, and thought they deserved a treat. And he’s right, because he’s a very good boy, even though starting this Sunday, he is not going to let me sleep a second past 4:00 in the morning.

One thing I can confidently state is that 100% of the residents of my household do pretty much despise the biannual time change. I was shocked to discover that we don’t all agree on whether we prefer Daylight Saving or Standard Time, but when it comes down to it, I suspect we’d be willing to set our differences aside and agree that we’d just like to stick to one or the other.

Alas, as with all things political, not all of us can get exactly what we want, which can feel a little dark and frightening. But when it comes down to it, at some point, we’re going to have to at least try to set our differences aside if we don’t want to be universally miserable.

One Wicked Omission

On By Sarah AngletonIn History, Writing15 Comments

A few weeks ago in this space, I posted a piece about Taylor Swift and the history of public education in the United States. Except that apparently I didn’t. A few hours after the post went live, I received a text from one of my aunts saying, “Am I the first to point out a spelling error?…”

She was the first, and the error was unfortunate because instead of typing public education, I had accidentally left out a very important letter l. Fortunately, I was able to fix it quickly and if any of the rest of you noticed, you were gracious enough to cut me some slack.

Whales. Image by M W from Pixabay

I try to be a meticulous editor, but anyone who has followed this blog for very long has probably spotted the occasional error that gets through. Often either the hubs or my eagle-eyed mother will discover them and point out the mistakes spell check won’t catch. One time a reader I don’t know personally was kind enough to politely point out that the country of Wales is spelled differently than the marine mammal with a similar name.

You’ve all been very kind over the years, and as far as I know none of my silly typos have led to any controversy. Royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas were not so fortunate. In 1632, they stood trial in the court of King Charles I for a mistake that made its way into their 1631 re-printing of the King James Bible. The mistake occurred in Exodus 20:14, which should read: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” The problem was that this printing omitted the word not.

Barker and Lucas had to answer for the slip-up to the tune of £300. That’s roughly £56,000 today, or about 75,000 US Dollars, which is a pretty steep price to pay for three little letters. To make matters worse, the gentlemen lost their publishing license.

But think about how many words they got right! Image by Pexels from Pixabay

While nearly all of the one thousand misprinted Bibles were confiscated and destroyed before they had a chance to tear apart too many families, at least fifteen copies still exist today—seven in England, seven in the United States, and one in New Zealand.

A British rare book dealer named Henry Stevens obtained one of the copies in 1855 and called it the Wicked Bible, a name that has pretty much stuck since then. In the last decade, copies have changed hands for somewhere around $50,000, which means that if the descendants of Robert Barker and Martin Lucas still had a copy, they’d need to wait a few years yet to come out ahead.

I doubt any of my typos would fetch that kind of bling, and so my promise to you, dear reader is that I will continue to do my best to catch all the irritating little typos on this blog. I can assure you that if I ever suggest adultery as a good life choice, then you can assume it’s a terrible mistake.

I do feel for Barker and Lucas, though. It may be true that none of the errors that have occasionally popped up in my little corner of the blogosphere have been so grievous or costly. Still, I’m certainly aware that no matter how cautious an editor one may be, it can be a big risk to put your words out there in a pubic space.

It’s Out There

On By Sarah AngletonIn Architecture, History7 Comments

Lately the hubs and I have been on something of a quest. For the last dozen years or so we’ve lived happily in a rapidly growing suburb of St. Louis. It’s been a great community for us with excellent schools for our sons, easy access to the city and its amenities, by which I mean baseball, and some of the best neighbors ever.

I’m really not in that much of a hurry. There are definitely some parts of moving that I’m not excited about. Image by jacqueline macou from Pixabay

But our youngest son is a senior in high school and almost a year ago, the hubs took a job that requires an hour long commute, so not too distantly in the future, it might be time for us to settle on a new home base.

We’ve been casually searching. Fortunately, we don’t have to be in a hurry, but I admit we’ve looked at quite a few properties and I’m starting to get a little frustrated. We’d like a bit more elbow room—space for a larger garden, a few fruit trees, and some chickens.

If we find a great plot of land and have to build a house, that would be okay, but ideally there’s a pretty little old farmhouse out there somewhere with a wood-burning fireplace and a good settin’ porch. Most importantly, though, it just has to feel right. Around every corner of windy country road, I hope that we’re going to spot this as-yet-unidentified perfect future home for us.

You just never know what might be waiting for you around the next bend in the road.

And it could happen, because you never know what a windy road will reveal. Last spring, on a family trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee, we rounded the corner of a windy road on Signal Mountain and discovered a UFO.

Actually, as much as it surprised me, I did have a pretty good idea what it was, because I had read about Futuro Houses, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968. These structures were prefabricated plastic homes constructed to resemble the Hollywood version of a flying saucer. Designed to be easily portable and to fit seamlessly into any terrain, the small houses contained a fireplace, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom, all behind a hatch door.

About one hundred of the UFO houses landed around the earth by the time the oil crisis of 1973 made the plastic structures cost-prohibitive to build. It also seems unlikely to me that there were ever more than a hundred people on Earth that might want to live in one.

A Futuro House just fitting in seamlessly with its surroundings. Henning Schlottmann (User:H-stt), CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About sixty or so of the Futuros still exist around the world today, but I was surprised to discover that the flying saucer house on Signal Mountain just outside of Chattanooga isn’t one of them. Constructed in 1972, the Signal Mountain spaceship house certainly comes from the same cultural era as the Futuros, but with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a full bar, plenty of custom curved furniture, and around 2,000 square feet worth of floor plan, there’s a lot more space in this spaceship. And as it’s constructed of bizarre building materials like steel and concrete, it’s probably less likely to actually take flight.

Much like its plastic Finnish cousin, to say that the flying saucer house of Signal Mountain fits seamlessly into its environment might be a stretch. Perhaps it would be better if it had a nice settin’ porch, and were located on a pretty piece of land in Missouri. I’m convinced it’s out there.