Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (69 page)

…if both parties are registered blood donors.

A SHOW OF FORCE

On the morning of September 22, 1842, the two men and their respective parties showed up on the island. The “seconds,” friends of the fighters charged with securing the location and weapons and so forth, immediately began negotiating to try to bring about a peaceful solution. When Shields refused, Lincoln started hacking branches off a nearby willow tree with his sword—high above his head. The sight apparently took some of the stubbornness out of Shields. The two sides soon came to an agreement, with Lincoln agreeing to admit in writing that he had written the letters, and saying he “had no intention of injuring your personal or private character or standing as a man or gentleman.” The ordeal was over.

AFTERMATH

Lincoln and Shields never became friends, but their near-duel didn’t ruin their relationship as politicians—or soldiers. When the American Civil War began 19 years later, Lincoln was president and commander-in-chief. Shields, a onetime Army officer, joined the Union Army, and Lincoln made him a brigadier general. And after Shields was wounded in 1862 while his troops gave Confederate General “Stonewall” Jackson his only defeat of the entire war, Lincoln approved his promotion to major general (it was blocked by Congress). Shields served with distinction and went on to serve in Congress after the war, becoming the only man in history to be elected U.S. Senator in three different states (Illinois, Minnesota, and Missouri). He died, still in office, on June 1, 1879.

Historians say that Lincoln was terribly embarrassed about the duel and the events leading up to it, and refused to speak about it afterward. In an 1865 letter, Mary Todd Lincoln wrote that an army officer once visited the White House and asked President Lincoln, “Is it true…that you once went out to fight a duel and all for the sake of the lady by your side?” Lincoln answered, “I do not deny it, but if you desire my friendship, you will never mention it again.”

*        *        *

“The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

—
Henry Kissinger

America’s first public park: Boston Common, established in 1634.

THE BRISTOL SESSIONS

Or, how one man with a microphone changed the face of American music.

M
AKING MUSIC HISTORY
For two weeks in the summer of 1927, a vacant store in the Appalachian town of Bristol, Tennessee, became the scene of one of the pivotal moments in music history. Johnny Cash later called it, “the single most important event in the history of country music.” Scores of “hillbilly” musicians came out of the mountains and hollows, and performed their songs in an improvised recording studio run by a 35-year-old producer named Ralph Peer. With each acetate master Peer made, American roots music left its rural isolation farther behind and began down the path to worldwide acclaim. Two of the artists Peer recorded—Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family—became so influential that they defined the style of country for generations to come.

THE HITMAKER

In the early days of the recording industry, most records were made for urban markets. Peer noticed that many new record players were being sold in rural areas, but relatively few records were being sold in those same regions. He figured that there was probably an untapped market of rural people hungry for their own kind of music. When Peer became recording director for Okeh Records in 1920, he seized his chance to go out and find that music.

Ralph Peer knew a good thing when he heard it. His first success was getting Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” on wax—the first blues recording targeted specifically for a black audience. He also gets the credit for making what experts agree is the first country music record: a medley of fiddle tunes called “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane/That Old Hen Cackled” by Fiddlin’ John Carson. Peer wanted to make more country records, but he was limited by the small number of artists he could convince to come from their Appalachian homes to his New York recording studio. His solution: Take the studio to the mountains.

Oh, be-have! State dance of South Carolina: the Shag.

SETTING UP SHOP

By 1925 Peer had left the Okeh label and moved to the Victor Talking Machine Company, because, as he said later, they “wanted to get into the hillbilly business and I knew how to do it.” After a long talent search through the South, Peer decided to set up shop in Bristol, Tennessee. The town of 32,000 was the largest in the area, and, more important, it lay right where the borders of Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia come close together. Peer was convinced that true “mountaineer melodies” still survived in these states. He rented the second floor of the Taylor-Christian Hat Company at 410 State Street, put an ad in the local paper announcing that the Victor Recording Company would be recording local talent, and went back to New York to alert his bosses.

On June 23, 1927, Peer drove back to Bristol with his wife, two engineers, and a carload of recording equipment. After hauling their gear up the stairs into the vacant office, the team hung blankets on the walls to deaden the sound and prepared to receive an onslaught of hopeful musicians and singers. The only problem: Almost no one showed up.

ALERT THE MEDIA

A desperate Peer ran down to the local paper and talked the editor into running a front-page feature about his makeshift studio. The article appeared the next day, touting the great opportunity available to the locals. One paragraph mentioned that session musicians often made as much as $100 a day in New York, and that Peer was prepared to do the same for the musicians he recorded. By noon the makeshift studio on State Street was full of hungry musicians looking to make some easy money.

Peer was ecstatic. The recording sessions ran day and night to accommodate the rush. By August 5, Peer had 76 masters by 19 different acts to take back to New York. Some of the groups he recorded: the West Virginia Coonhunters, Dad Blackard and the Shelors, Red Snodgrass, Ernest Phillips and His Holiness Quartet, Blind Alfred Reed, the Alcoa Quartet, and the Bluff City Church Choir. Nearly all of these singers and musicians went on to have solid careers in the infant country music industry. But two of the acts that walked in the door at 410 State Street ended up doing much more than that.

First person to be born in Antarctica: Emelio Palma, in 1978.

BRISTOL BOYS

Down in North Carolina, word of the sessions in Bristol reached a local band that was working the Asheville music scene. Three of the band members—brothers Claude and Jack Grant, and Jack Pierce—were from Bristol, so they talked their lead singer, a skinny railroad worker from Mississippi named Jimmie Rodgers, to come along with them. The night before their session, they got into a disagreement over how to bill themselves. The argument grew heated until finally the singer said in disgust, “All right, I’ll just sing one by myself.”

The next day Rodgers recorded two songs: a World War I tune, “The Soldier’s Sweetheart,” and a lullaby called “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” that featured his distinctive yodel. The session lasted just over two hours, and Peer paid Rodgers $100. When the record was released in October 1927, it proved enough of a success to convince Peer to record more of Rodgers’s songs. This time Rodgers went to the Victor studios in Camden, New Jersey, and one of the tunes he recorded there, “T for Texas (Blue Yodel)” sold half a million copies. Rodgers became the first superstar of country music until his career was cut short by tuberculosis in 1933.

FAMILY BUSINESS

At the time of the Bristol sessions, Alvin Pleasant Carter, known as A. P., was managing a general store in nearby Maces Springs, West Virginia. He and his wife, Sara, sang together and were popular with the locals. After he heard about the sessions, A. P. packed Sara into their jalopy and headed for Bristol. At the last minute he asked Sara’s sister, Maybelle, to come along to play guitar and add a little harmony.

When he first met the Carters at the studio, Peer was unimpressed. As they climbed out of their broken-down car in their overalls and homemade dresses, Peer suspected that they were “too hillbilly” to be any good. A. P. had such a thick mountain accent that he was almost unintelligible. Then they set up and began to play. For Peer it was like striking gold. Although she was only 18, Maybelle was already a virtuoso guitar player, picking in a unique style that Peer had never heard before (it came to be known as the “Carter scratch”). But it was Sara’s voice that sold the deal for him: a clear, thin alto, it seemed the essence of pure mountain singing. On August 1 and 2, the Carter Family, as they decided to call themselves, recorded six tunes, including “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow” and “The Poor Orphan Child.” Within months, they were nationally known recording stars and went on to be the bestselling country artists of the 1920s and 1930s.

Monkey business: Mother orangutans breastfeed their young for as long as 7 years.

THE UNBROKEN CIRCLE

It’s hard to overstate the influence that the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers had on the development of country music as a result of the Bristol sessions. The recordings Ralph Peer made, not only of the Carters and Rodgers but also of the other mountain artists, were the first to be widely heard in rural America. For many Americans, this was their first exposure to records at all, and they took to the music and new technology with gusto. By the 1940s, an entire generation had grown up listening to Rodgers’s “blue yodel” and the tight harmonies of the Carter Family.

Country music continued to evolve, from the bluegrass innovations of Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs to the honky-tonk of Hank Williams to the intricate harmonies of the Louvin and Everly Brothers. And out of that grew the crossover blend of country and R&B that, in the hands of Elvis Presley and other early rockabilly artists, morphed into rock ’n’ roll—another direct descendant of those crude acetate masters recorded in a makeshift studio in Bristol, Tennessee.

*        *        *

WORLD CUP MADNESS

“A Beijing soccer fan refused to let the small matter of his house burning down disturb his enjoyment of the 2006 World Cup match between France and Spain. A fire broke out in a
hutong
in the center of the Chinese capital at kick-off time and gutted the traditional courtyard dwelling, the
Beijing Daily Messenger
reported. ‘When the neighbors shouted “fire!” I took my little baby and ran out in my nightclothes,’ the man’s wife said. ‘My husband paid no attention to the danger, just grabbed the television and put it under his arm. After getting out of the house, he then set about finding an electric socket to plug in and continue watching his game.’”

—
Reuters

The word
calzone
literally translates to “pant leg” in Italian.

THE
GLOMAR EXPLORER

Shh! This story details one of the most incredible examples of nutty spy technology. Ever. (But don’t tell anyone.)

L
OST AT SEA
On March 8, 1968, the submarine USS
Barb
was on a mission, secretly monitoring shipping activity near Vladivostok, home of the Soviet Union’s largest naval base on the Pacific Ocean. Suddenly five Soviet submarines came racing out of the port at full speed. Subs are supposed to be stealthy and silent—these were anything but. They were noisily “pinging” the ocean floor with active sonar, and repeatedly diving and surfacing. It was clear they were looking for something, and a dozen surface warships soon joined in the hunt. Radio communication between the ships was frantic and unencrypted, another indication of the urgency of the search. What were they looking for?

CHECKING THE RECORDS

The U.S. Navy’s Office of Undersea Warfare, responsible for intercepting the radio traffic of enemy submarines, quickly started poring over the logs of recent radio traffic, looking for clues to what was going on. Sure enough,
K-129
, a diesel submarine carrying nuclear torpedoes and ballistic missiles with four-megaton nuclear warheads, had failed to report in, as scheduled, the day before. More than 24 hours had passed since then and there was still no word from the sub. It was missing and now presumed sunk. And judging from the haphazard nature of the search, the Soviets didn’t have a clue where it had gone down.

Did the Americans? The Navy operates a large network of “hydrophones”—underwater microphones—in strategic locations all over the Pacific. This Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) can distinguish between sounds made by military ships and submarines, and those given off by ordinary maritime traffic. It also records background noise. Analysts went over the recordings, looking for any sound that might have been
K-129
exploding or being crushed by tremendous pressure as it sank to the ocean floor.

60% of Americans can name the Three Stooges. 17% can name three Supreme Court justices.

TAKING PICTURES

They found what they were looking for: a single unexplained loud popping sound that they traced to the same area of the Pacific where they believed the
K-129
was likely to have gone down. The USS
Halibut
, a submarine capable of dropping a camera to the ocean floor at the end of a long cable, was dispatched to the area to search for the missing sub.

Analysts narrowed the search to a five-square-mile section of ocean floor about 1,700 miles northwest of the Hawaiian Islands. That’s still a lot of ocean—it took two trips to the site and more than 13 weeks of methodically inching across the ocean floor before
Halibut
finally found the wreck of the
K-12
9, three miles below the surface.