January 2011

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.”

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.

GIT ALONG, LITTLE GOATHE, GIT ALONG WILL THE MYSTERY GUEST SIGN IN, PLEASE THE TVA: CHEAP, CHEAPER, CHEAPEST FIND A TREE AND CUT IT ISRAEL’S DEBT TO ANDREW JACKSON THEY WEREN’T NO DUMB CLUCKS

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.

Only a man who has undergone famine can properly value food; only sailors and desert-dwellers know the meaning of fresh water. And only a child, with a child’s imagination, can come to know the meaning of things it has been long denied. I early discovered that the only things I could have were those I got for myself.

—John Barleycorn, 1913

Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean … where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn. … The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment.…

—The Road, 1905

On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died, and soon afterward Vyascheslav M. Molotov, the Russian foreign minister, stopped by in Washington to pay his respects to Harry Truman, the new President. Truman received Molotov in the Oval Office and, as Truman recalled it, chewed him out “bluntly” for the way the Russians were behaving in Poland. Molotov was stunned. He had never, he told Truman, “been talked to like that in my life.”

“Carry out your agreements,” Truman responded, “and you won’t get talked to like that.”

That’s a good way to talk, if you want to start an argument…

We don’t suppose there has ever been such a thing as a “Best Chicken Photograph” contest—although in a country as dedicatedly contest-minded as these United States it would not come as much of a surprise. In any case, there is little doubt in our minds that the picture above would win such a competition with little or no difficulty. Ulrich Bourgeois was the photographer, obviously a master of his craft, a man to make all other chicken photographers cringe with envy.

 

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In the late 1820’s and 1830’s American physicians found themselves with a major rebellion on their hands. The rebels were their own patients, or ex-patients, and the rebel leader was a onetime New Hampshire farmer and itinerant herb-and-root doctor named Samuel Thomson, who had published, in 1822, a book called Thomson’s New Guide to Health; or, Botanic Family Physician.

On Thomson’s recommendation, hundreds of thousands of Americans were no longer calling in conventionally trained and licensed physicians when they were sick. Instead, they were either doctoring themselves according to the instructions contained in the New Guide to Health , or were consulting disciples of Thomson who had set themselves up in business as botanic healers.