It will he recalled that our “Readers’ Album” in June of this year featured a photograph of an outsized rooster hitched up to a small wagon. Now we offer a period photograph of a billygoat hitched to a miniature sulky. The picture was taken in 1907 on the long-gone Casino grounds at Newport News, Virginia, and was sent to us by James A. Lcftwich of La Jolla, California. The happy five-year-old decked out in his R’fcster Brown suit is Mr. Leftwich himself.
This whole business may start a trend in unearthing similar photos of unusual hitches that delighted youngsters long ago. Who knows the hounds of parents’ imaginations? We can scarcely wait for a pictureof atiny buckboard beingtowcd by a team of snails.
WILL THE MYSTERY GUEST SIGN IN, PLEASE
We invite our readers to guess how the father of our country signed his name. Was “George Washington” or “G. Washington” the form he customarily used? If you thought it was the first version, you were dead wrong. So were we.
In February, 1977, we ran a story about Nellie Custis, G. Washington’s stepgranddaughter. With it, we included a letter of advice from Washington embellished with a copy of what we assumed was his signature.
Not so, as Donald Jackson, former editor of the Washington papers and author of the article, pointed out to us:
“It’s a One issue.… But note that the facsimile signature on page 84 of my story is not that of George Washington. It is a crude imitation, probably done by some clerk in making a contemporary copy of a Washington letter.”
THE TVA: CHEAP, CHEAPER, CHEAPEST
James Branscome’s “The TVA: It Ain’t What It Used to Be,” which appeared in our February, 1977, issue, brought us the following communication from John Kane of Rancho Palos Verdes, California:
“Twice comments were made to the effect that TVA sells power at a much lower cost than commercial utilities. The impression made was that this was because of superior management or lesser greed. Neither explanation is true. TVA can sell power for less because it does not have any of the financial expenses that any competing utility would have. Here is a partial list:
“Taxes. Taxes amount to as much as twenty per cent of the revenues of some utilities.
“Dividends. Public companies must pay a return to the people who put up the money. Unless, of course, they are a government agency.
“Interest costs. TVA bonds, as obligations backed by the American taxpayer, are rated AAA. This means that on a typical $100,000,000, 30-year bond, TVA will pay about $60,000,000 less interest than a public utility.
“The money value of other federal subsidies, direct and indirect, would be difficult or impossible to measure. The wonder is not that the T VA’s cost of power is so low; the wonder is that it is so high.”
On this long-familiar question concerning public vs. private power, Mr. Branscome replies:
“Mr. Kane’s letter makes several points about TVA’s finances and power that have long been favorites of agency critics. The facts are, however, that TVA in many instances is at a disadvantage relative to private utilities when it comes to tax breaks. For example, TVA gets no tax credits for installing pollution control equipment, as private utilities do.
“Tax breaks for private utilities have become so lucrative that the last study of the TVA system in 1974 by the CPA firm of Coopers and Lybrand concluded that had the agency been a private utility it would have paid no federal income taxes in the previous ten years. As the study notes, private utility income taxes have been declining over the last decade. TVA does, however, pay back to the government each year what amounts to a ‘tax’ based on the government’s previous investment. It also pays in lieu of taxes (five per cent of revenue) to counties impacted by its facilities.
“So far as bond ratings are concerned, New York City’s financial disaster should teach us that government entities have no sacred bond rating just because they are government related.
“TVA sells power more cheaply, as the article made clear, because it is close to the coalfields, buys coal more cheaply, and has more dams than most utilities with which to generate power. Additionally, no TVA official gets those $100,000-plus salaries so common in the utility industry.
“Seventy-five per cent of TVA’s costs are for fuel. If the agency deserves criticism, it is for buying that too cheaply, and not for some imagined tax breaks.”
FIND A TREE AND CUT IT
Sooner or later, the last report of a bicenO ten niai aberration will reach us. Until then, we continue to feel it a moral obligation to keep our readersin touch with some of the stranger things that went on out there during the country’s two hundredth birthday.
Take, for example, the triumph over one of nature’s wonders that occurred in Pioneer. Ohio, a town of some one thousand souls. Pioneer, it seems, has been noted over the years for the unusually fine black walnut trees in its vicinity—especially one tree! It was estimated to be somewhere between 180 and two hundred years old and, inevitably, was dubbed the “Bicentennial Tree.” Described as the most perfect black walnut tree in the nation, it stood more than 130 feet high, and its first 57 feet rose as straight and true as a Grecian column. “It was majestic.” Ohio state forest officer Roger Herrett rhapsodized to a New York Times reporter. “I’ve seen perfect logs 20 feet long, but to have this perfectness spread over 57 feet, well, as old George Gobel said. ‘They don’t make them kind anymore.’”
The “Bicentennial Tree” was regarded with such enthusiasm that in December, 19TU. its owners put it up for sale. The lucky purchaser, the Atlantic Veneer Corporation of Beaufort. North Carolina, placed its value at $30,000. a company spokesman exclaiming, “I’ve known about this tree for fifteen years… it is very unlikely that there would be another one like this, very unlikely.” The tree was forthwith cut down, its perfect trunk bedecked with a suitably patriotic ribbon, and then shipped off to the company’s plant, where it was scheduled to be sliced into two thousand board feet of walnut veneer, almost enough, the Times remarked, to cover three acres of land. Precisely which three acres was not noted.
ISRAEL’S DEBT TO ANDREW JACKSON
During the behind-the-scenes infighting and debate that preceded President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the new state of Israel in 1948, as recounted by Clark M. Clifford in our April, 1977, issue, so much pressure was put on Truman that for a time he refused to see any Zionists, including the ailing Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who was soon to become Israel’s first president and had journeyed to America to plead with Truman for recognition. But on March 12, Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s old friend and former business partner in Kansas City, Missouri, called on the President in the White House to intercede for Weizmann. Four years later, Jacobson described the meeting in a letter he wrote to Dr. Josef Cohn of the Industrial Institute of Israel. A copy of that heretofore unpublished letter was recently sent to us by Loeb H. Granof, whose father. A. J. Granof, was a friend of both Cohn and Jacobson. as well as of Truman.
In his account, Jacobson noted that during the first part of the meeting Truman was extremely bitter over the attacks made on him by American Zionist leaders, and he steadfastly refused to see Weizmann. “I suddenly found myself thinking,” Jacobson wrote, “that my dear friend, the President of the United States, was at that moment as close to being an anti-sémite as a man could possibly be. …” And then: “I happened to rest my eyes on a beautiful model of a statue of Andrew Jackson … which I had noted passingly many previous times I had been to the White House. I then found myself saying this to the President: ‘Harry, all your life you have had a hero. You are probably the best read man in America on the life of Andrew Jackson.… Well, Harry, I too have a hero.… I am talking about Chaim Weizmann. He is a very sick man, almost broken in health, but he traveled thousands and thousands of miles just to see you and plead the cause of my People. Now you refuse to see him because you were insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders. … It doesn’t sound like you, Harry, because I thought that you could take this stuff they have been handing out to you.…’
“Just as I finished, I noticed that the President began drumming on his desk with his lingers and as I stopped talking, he abruptly turned around while still sitting in his swivel chair and started looking out the window. … I knew the sign. I knew that he was changing his mind. I don’t know how many seconds passed in silence, but it seemed like centuries. All of a sudden he swiveled himself around again, facing his desk, looked me straight in the eyes and then said the most endearing words I had ever heard from his lips: ‘You win, you baldheaded son-of-abitch. I will see him.’”
THEY WEREN’T NO DUMB CLUCKS
Why on earth would a band of seafaring Vikings have traveled all the way to Minnesota in the heart of North America in 1362? The notion that they did may seem absurd, but ever since the turn of the century many people have argued learnedly that it happened. They have based their claim largely on the Kensington Rune Stone, a flat rock incised with medieval Norse symbols that was allegedly discovered in 1898on the Kensington, Minnesota, farm of a Swedish-American settler named Olaf Ohman.
Despite inconclusive studies and tests of the stone and its inscription, most serious scholars long ago decided that it was almost certainly a hoax, and they identified the likely culprits as Ohman himself, who had a resentment against bettereducated people, and Sven Fogelblad, a hard-drinking local schoolteacher and cynic. Now, a series of tape recordings made in 1967 and recently released by the Minnesota State Historical Society not only corroborate that belief, but expose a third participant in the hoax—John P. Gran, one of Ohman’s Scandinavian-born neighbors, who apparently also loved a good joke as much as he, too, despised educated folk.
The following selections from the tapes, published in the winter, 1976, issue of Minnesota History, illuminate the shenanigans of the trio. Describing the hoax were Walter Gran and Anna Josephine, the son and daughter of John P. Gran; the interviewer was Walter’s nephew:
NEPHEW: Did you ever know him [Fogelblad]?
WALTER: No, I didn’t get to know him, but Fogelblad, you see, was an outcasted minister from Sweden.… A regular drunkard. … But he was educated … well, he spoke seven languages, so you see he wasn’t no dumb cluck. … And then you know when hard times come … that’s when he used to come up here and stay with Ohman … he was the head man to lay out this inscription.…
ANNA: Wasn’t Papa and Ohman working together on the Larson place and while they were resting and having lunch, Mr. Ohman … carved out some script letters and he asked Papa if he knew what it meant?
WALTER: Oh yeah, he took out his jackknife and he was setting there and he carved some runic letters … and says now wouldn’t it be fun … to make some scripts that would bewilder the whole community and the people, he said, and especially them that was educated. He was mad at people who were really educated.
ANNA: Why, he had no use for them.
WALTER: … Well, anyway, you know for a good hoax like that, Dad’ was in for them tricks.…
NEPHEW: Well now, did Ohman ever admit that he did this?
WALTER: No, Ohman didn’t. Well, you see, then as time went on, Papa was getting older and older.… He brought up about the rune stone.… He says, you know it is false, he says.…
ANNA: You see, Papa was lefthanded … and Ohman was right-handed.
WALTER: You know I seen that sculpture had been examined and it said it had been two men working on that stone and because one was a left-handed and one a right-handed man. Well, that fitted in for Dad and Ohman, but then I thought, byGod it is something isn’t it?
