Uncle John’s Briefs (45 page)

A NEW BEGINNING
Gorham was devastated by the loss of his children. He wanted to do anything he could to see to it that no other families in his neighborhood or the surrounding communities ever had to suffer the same fate. So he and a group of his friends decided to found the Chapel Oaks Volunteer Fire Department, the first all-black volunteer fire company in the state of Maryland.

Tennis balls are mentioned in Shakespeare’s
Henry V
.

Less than a year after the fire, the department opened its doors. It wasn’t easy—the organizers didn’t receive any funding from Prince George’s County, so they took up a collection in the surrounding black community and used these funds to buy an old pumper, which they kept in an old garage that served as the fire station. There wasn’t enough money for proper firefighting gear, so the Chapel Oaks firefighters made do with surplus helmets, coats, and boots they got from the U.S. military. They had no breathing equipment, either—if the men had to enter burning buildings, they simply held their breath or tied wet handkerchiefs over their mouths. Since they didn’t have access to professional training, the volunteers trained themselves by setting fires in abandoned buildings and putting them out.

“We weren’t in the county fire association, because they had a white male–only clause,” remembers Crutchfield, who joined the department in 1949. And the discrimination continued even when firefighters battled a blaze. “The white firefighters would take our lines out and put theirs in,” Crutchfield says. “They wouldn’t recognize the authority of our chief on the scene. But we wouldn’t play those games. We were professional men who were there to save lives, and that’s what we did.”

HEALING
Change came slowly in the decades that followed. When a fire destroyed the garage that served as Chapel Oak’s first fire station, the volunteers raised enough money from the community to build their first proper fire station nearby and laid the bricks themselves. The county fire association eventually dropped its whites-only clause and Chapel Oaks joined in 1960; then, in 1979, the county built them a new fire station.

Gorham and his wife had three more children. He was a volunteer with the department for 54 years, serving as chief for 17 of those. And when he wasn’t at the station, he was listening to his radio scanner. “The only time his scanner wasn’t on was when he was at church,” his daughter Tanya said.

Even when he became too old to fight fires, Gorham continued to visit the fire station every day, and did so until the day before he died in July 2000. “LeRoy wanted to be sure,” his friend and fellow firefighter Roy Lee Jordan remembers, “that no other children died like his did.”

A fresh lemon left at room temperature will lose 20% of its Vitamin C in 8 hours.

TEARING DOWN
THE WHITE HOUSE

The White House wasn’t always a national treasure. A number of
presidents once seriously considered demolishing it or turning it
into a museum and building a new residence somewhere else.
But today, that’s unthinkable. Here’s why
.

N
OT ENOUGH SPACE
At first, most Americans didn’t think there was anything particularly special about the White House. Few had ever seen it or had any idea what it looked like, and even the families who lived there found it completely inadequate.

When it was built, the White House was the largest house in the country (and it remained so until after the Civil War). But it served so many different purposes that little of it was available for First Families to actually live in. The first floor, or “State Floor,” was made up entirely of public rooms; and half of the second floor was taken up by the president’s offices, which where staffed by as many as 30 employees. The First Family had to get by with the eight—or fewer—second-floor rooms that were left.

By Lincoln’s time, the situation was intolerable. Kenneth Leish writes in
The White House
, “The lack of privacy was appalling. The White House was open to visitors daily, and office seekers, cranks, and the merely curious had no difficulty making their way upstairs from the official rooms on the first floor.”

THE LINCOLN WHITE HOUSE
Lincoln was so uncomfortable with the situation that he had a private corridor (since removed) constructed. This at least allowed him to get from the family quarters to his office without having to pass through the reception room, where throngs of strangers were usually waiting to see him.

He also received a $20,000 appropriation to improve the furnishings of the White House, which had become, as one visitor put it, “bare, worn
and spoiled,” like “a deserted farmstead,” with holes in the carpets and paint peeling off of the walls in the state rooms.

The barbiturate sodium thiopental is also known as truth serum.

Lincoln was busy with the Civil War, so he turned the matter over to his wife, who spent every penny and went $6,700 over budget. Lincoln was furious, and refused to ask Congress to cover the balance. “It would stink in the nostrils of the American people,” he fumed, “to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriate [amount] for
flub dubs
for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets.”

The new furnishings didn’t last for more than a few years. When Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, the White House fell into disarray. “Apparently,” writes The White House Historical Society, “no one really supervised the White House during the five weeks Mrs. Lincoln lay mourning in her room, and vandals helped themselves.”

SAVING THE HOUSE
Ironically, at the same time the White House was being ransacked, it was gaining a new respect with Americans, attaining an almost shrine-like status.

National tragedy turned the presidential residence into a national monument. It wasn’t just the White House anymore—it was the place where the great fallen hero, Lincoln, had lived. Photography had only been invented about 30 years earlier. Now for the first time, photos of the White House circulated around the country. It became a symbol of the presidency…and America.

The Founding Fathers had assumed that future presidents would add to, or even demolish and rebuild the official residence as they saw fit. But after 1865, no president would have dared to suggest tearing it down.

HOME, BLEAK HOME

“I’ll be glad to be going—this is the loneliest place in the world.”

—
President William Howard Taft,
on leaving the White House

Actress Geena Davis reached the semi-finals in the 1999 U.S. Olympic Archery tryouts.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

If English is your first language, thank your lucky stars
that you didn’t have to learn it as a second language
.

“Any language where the unassuming word ‘fly’ signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.”

—
Bill Bryson

“It’s a strange language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.”

—
Franklin P. Jones

“English has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.”

—
Paul Tillich

“Not only does the English language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.”

—
Eddy Peters

“Introducing ‘Lite’—the new way to spell ‘Light’, but with twenty percent fewer letters.”

—
Jerry Seinfeld

“When I read some of the rules for writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.”

—
Henry David Thoreau

“If the English language made any sense, ‘lackadaisical’ would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.”

—
Doug Larson

“The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.”

—
Cyril Connolly

“Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?”

—
Clarence Darrow

“Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.”

—
William Jennings Bryan

The metal loop that a lampshade sits on is technically known as a “harp.”

OOPS!

It’s comforting to know that other people are screwing
up even worse than we are. So go ahead and
feel superior for a few minutes
.

L
IGHT MY FIRE
JERUSALEM—“It was, to say the least, a very unfortunate mistake. German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder accidentally extinguished Israel’s eternal memorial flame for the six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust.

“At a somber ceremony in Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, Schroeder turned a handle that was supposed to make the flame rise. It went out instead. Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak stepped forward to try to help, but was unsuccessful. Finally, a technician used a gas lighter to bring the flame to life again, but by then the damage had been done.”

—
Reuters

REAL-LIFE LESSON
“A Grand Rapids, Minnesota, SWAT team, scheduled a drill at a local high school with actors and actresses playing the part of terrorists. But they mistakenly stormed another school next door. One of the teachers terrorized in the ‘raid’ said she was sure she was about to be killed as she was led from the building at gunpoint by the officers, who never identified themselves.”

—
Bonehead of the Day

SANTA CROOK
PHILADELPHIA—“Construction workers recently did a ‘chimney sweep’ of a vacant building and found the remains of a serial burglar who had tried to rob the place several years ago. According to Detective Romonita King, workers were knocking down the chimney Saturday when they smelled a foul odor. On closer inspection, they noticed a pair of sneakers, jeans, a Phillies cap, and what appeared to be human remains. The medical examiner’s office tentatively listed the cause of death as accidental compression asphyxia. It was reported that the remains could be at least
five years old and it was not known how long the business—ironically, a theft-prevention business—was closed.”

—
Bizarre News

Only musical instrument that’s played without being touched: the theremin.

THREE STRIKES, YOU’RE OUT
“Lorenzo Trippi, a lifeguard in Ravenna, Italy, lost his job when three people drowned after he hit them with life preservers. Police said his aim was too accurate.”

—
Strange World #2

HOE NO!
“Leonard Fountain, 68, got so fed up with having his gardening tools stolen from his shed that he rigged a homemade shotgun booby trap by the door. A year later, he was in a hurry to get some pruning done and opened the door, forgetting about the modification. He received severe flesh wounds to his right knee and thigh from the ensuing blast, and was charged with illegal possession of firearms.”

—
Stuff

THE YOUNG AND THE WRESTLESS
TACOMA, Wash.—“A seven-year-old boy practicing wrestling moves he had seen on TV bounced off his bed and tumbled out a second-story window. The boy sustained minor cuts and bruises after smashing through the bedroom window and tumbling two stories onto a cushion of grass. ‘He was jumping from the dresser and doing a back-flip to the bed and went straight out the window,’ said his mother.

“The boy was treated for minor internal injuries and hospitalized in satisfactory condition Friday. ‘It hurts to wrestle,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing any more wrestling moves.’”

—
CNN Fringe