Sarah Angleton's Blog

On September 25, 1878 readers of The Times in London could have read a letter written by physician Charles R. Drysdale, proclaiming tobacco use to be “one of the most evident of all the retrograde influences of our time.” To support his claim, he highlighted symptoms experienced by those who are exposed to the poisons contained within cigarettes, including nausea, vertigo, heart palpitations, tooth staining, gum swelling, weakness, miscarriage, and in some cases even blindness.

To readers in 2025 of course this list doesn’t sound all that surprising. We’d even add to it without much thought. But in 1878, it would still be another eighty-six years until the Surgeon General of the United States released a report that came to a similar conclusion, and a shift in smoking habits began. At the time, forty-one percent of American adults smoked, tobacco companies were still using misleading ads that claimed the enthusiastic support of the medical community for their products, and people were dropping dead of lung cancer at alarming rates.

Image by Alexa from Pixabay

The percentage of American tobacco smokers dropped to somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty percent by the time I was a kid growing up with the pervasive odor of cigarette smoke in public spaces, much the way my children now experience second-hand marijuana smoke every time they’re in the parking lot of the grocery store. A sharp decline finally began to occur in the 2000s, and currently about eleven percent of American adults smoke (or vape) tobacco products.

Europe trended downward as well, though not nearly so quickly or dramatically, and they’ve settled out at about twenty-six percent, now 147 years after Dr. Drysdale told them all it was bad for them. He wasn’t the first person, or even physician, to express doubts about the wisdom of smoking tobacco, but like those speaking into the void ahead of him, Drysdale’s words didn’t have much impact.

Perhaps he’d have had better luck if he’d had the ability to launch a targeted social media campaign. Then he could have really grabbed people’s attention with a catchy headline, a disturbing picture, and an oh-so-clickable link offering the secrets to good health after ten minutes of scrolling through bullet-pointed promises to share the information that big pharma doesn’t want you to know, a lengthy self-promoting video, and a chance to order some supplements and sign up for a costly personalized health program.

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

At least I assume that must work, because I am bombarded with these kinds of pitches. All. The. Time.

The reason for this, I think, is that I have pretty thoroughly entered into a clear advertising demographic. I recently celebrated a birthday in which I went from being a forty-something-year-old woman to a slightly older forty-something-year-old woman, and as such, I am apparently exclusively interested in losing weight, sleeping better, getting rid of stubborn belly fat, reducing stress, improving posture, eliminating joint pain, increasing energy, overcoming mental fatigue, balancing gut bacteria, and abolishing foot pain. That’s the list from just one quick scroll through.

I don’t tend to click on such gimmicks, but of course, though not exclusively, I am kind of interested in those things. Because I’m a forty-something-year-old woman.

Just reading the headlines, I have come to understand that I’m supposed to walk more unless I’ve been told to walk more and if that’s the case, it’s the worse advice ever. There are certainly lists of supplements that I should be taking that all overlap with the lists of supplements I should be sure to avoid. Obviously I should not be eating sugar or flour, but also I shouldn’t be counting calories or following an elimination diet.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

There are three foods every woman my age should be eating, though I don’t know what they are. There are also three foods every woman my age should never eat. I don’t know what they are, either. A few minutes a day of certain exercises will return me to the fitness levels of a much younger me. But not those exercises. Those exercises are super harmful and will definitely work against me. Also I should drink red wine and black coffee, but consume no alcohol and avoid caffeine.

It’s a confusing world out there in the sea of health information. It makes me almost understand how Dr. Drysdale’s good medical advice, at least a century before most people were ready to hear it, might not have received much notice among the noise.

There could be some social media campaigns out there right now that are pushing out sound medical advice. Maybe eighty-six years from now, someone with more medical prowess will embrace it, and the population as a whole will start to be healthier for it. Until then, I’m pretty convinced that as a forty-something-year-old woman, I probably shouldn’t smoke tobacco.

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.

In 1924, while working at his family’s roadside sandwich stand, The Rite Spot, in Pasadena on a part of the famous Route 66, 16-year-old Lionel Sternberger made history when he placed the first slice of cheese ever to grace the top of a hamburger patty. Probably.

The Rite Spot, Pasadena, CA. Unknown (Provided by Don Sternberger), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

How exactly it happened is a little unclear. One story suggests that Lionel burned the patty and so he threw on the slice of cheese to cover up his mistake. A slightly less dramatic theory is that a clever, uncredited, customer asked for cheese on their burger and Lionel simply obliged.

But another entirely different tale of the invention of the cheeseburger comes from Kansas City, where a man named Charles Kaelin claimed in 1934 to have had the first genius idea to add tang to a hamburger by adding cheese, just a year before the owner of Denver’s Humpty Dumpty Drive-In first trademarked the word cheeseburger.

There are probably other origin stories as well, and we could certainly debate about them, and produce all kinds of memes and reels and righteously angry and potentially insensitive social media tirades, though somehow I doubt we’d get anywhere productive. I’d rather take today, National Cheesburger Day here in the US, to appreciate and celebrate what we have in common: this fine sandwich we all know and love.

Even veggies love their cheeseburgers.

Well, most of us probably love at least some version of it. What precisely goes on a cheeseburger is not always the same from burger stand to burger stand or from backyard grill to backyard grill.

We can all pretty much agree that it needs to include some sort of beef patty. Unless of course you don’t eat beef and prefer something like bison or venison or even turkey. Or I suppose you could be vegetarian and stick to a plant-based patty or replace it all together with a big beefy portibello mushroom, which I guess still counts.

A bun, too, is standard, either with sesame seeds or without, smeared with a little butter and toasted, or not. Maybe a gluten free bun is your jam or no bun at all. Some people, though surely not anyone I’d want to know, replace the bun with a couple large pieces of lettuce.

There’s also the question of what kind of cheese you use. The traditionalist might go with a cheddar or a melty American, but Pepper Jack can pack a nice punch or blue cheese, an odd funk, in case you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re a little pretentious, a Swiss or smoky Gouda could work, and then there are the vegans among us that I guess have to settle for some sort of not-a-cheese product.

And then we hit the question of toppings. Ketchup is pretty standard, unless you’re dead set against it. Mayonnaise is a contender, too, for those with no taste buds. Steak sauce might work, again, for the unapologetically pretentious. The indulgent might like to add bacon to theirs, and the vegetable obsessed will insist on lettuce, tomato, and pickles, while people who completely hate themselves might even consider raw onion a defensible choice.

Image by leonardovieira260998 from Pixabay

With all of these certainly not exhaustive options, maybe the best thing to do would be to avoid confusion and standardize the cheeseburger. And if we do that, then we could make sure we are providing the ultimate cheeseburger experience to all people, regardless of their individual backgrounds and ill-informed biases.

We could use only the very best ingredients, too, and perhaps limit the consumption of cheeseburgers so that people don’t stress the healthcare system with their poor choices or shape the supply chain in a way that we suspect might overburden either the environment or the market.

Yes, it’s true that at first we could get some push back. Some cheeseburger stands and backyard cookouts may initially fail to comply, and will likely use hateful rhetoric to insist that they have a right to prepare and eat cheeseburgers the way they want. If these deplorable enemies of culinary taste get a chance they might even spew their venom in public debates in which they claim it could even be a good and useful thing to consider alternative ways of preparing cheeseburgers.

I believe, however, that if the truly good and hungry people of this nation fight hard enough and take to the streets to protest the non-compliant businesses and backyards, maybe squish up a few buns, torch a couple of grills, and throw a few ketchup bottles, we can silence the opposition. I bet. You know, for the good of all.

But of course, I jest.

In truth, I feel that if you want to ruin your otherwise perfectly delicious cheeseburger with a hunk of raw onion, you should be free to do so. We can even still be friends, provided you brush your teeth before standing close enough to, say, engage with me in a heated political debate. If, however, you try to put a hunk of raw onion on my cheeseburger, be forewarned that I just may say something hurtful on social media that I’ll probably regret and have to try to apologize for later.

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.

In 1872, Dr. François Merry Delebost was serving as the chief physician for the Bonne Nouvelle prison in Rouen, France when he had a pretty great idea. Every day about nine hundred prisoners engaged in hard, often messy, labor that left them each in desperate need of a bath. Unfortunately, the prison didn’t have very many tubs and the water was changed infrequently, so most prisoners came out just as dirty as they went in. 

I forgot to take a before picture, but trust me, it didn’t look much better than this.

Concerned about the risk for the spread of disease in these conditions, Delebost devised a series of individual cubicles in which a prisoner would have warm, clean water to be pumped and sprinkled over his head to wash away the grime of the day.

This wasn’t the first time anyone had taken a shower of course. Presumably clever people have pretty much always stood under waterfalls to get clean, Egyptians used jugs to pour water over their heads, Greeks and Romans may have even had rudimentary showers as a part of some public baths. 

In 1767, an English stovemanker by the name of William Feetham invented contraption that pumped water up from a basin to dump it on a bather’s head over and over again as the water got dirtier and dirtier. An anonymous invention, known simply as the English Regency Shower improved on this somewhat in the early 1800s, and even Charles Dickens got in the action in 1849 when he commissioned an outdoor shower making use of a waterfall on his family’s vacation home on the Isle of Wight. 

But the true hero in bringing the modern shower to the masses was most likely Dr. Delebost, whose prison shower system caught on, finding its way into gymnasiums, army barracks, and insane asylums. It did, however, take a while for the shower to make a splash in private homes.

As nice as the new shower is, my favorite part of the renovation is the hand towel fixture securely attached to the non-poop-colored wall.

Having recently almost completed a bathroom renovation, I kind of understand that. As I’ve previously mentioned, we are in the process of moving from the suburbs into the country, to a house that will make a much easier commute for my husband. The new old house that we bought needs a lot of work, but we also needed to do a project in our other house, because nearly thirteen years ago now, we moved in saying that while the house is extremely nice, something had to be done about the lackluster master bathroom.

I mean the cramped and stained shower was usable and I think we may have soaked in the over-sized Jacuzzi tub once or twice. I definitely didn’t love the dark brown walls, convenient, I suppose, for hiding any additional bathroom staining that might come up, and the screw that held the peacock themed hand towel fixture was literally pulling from a gaping hole in the poop-colored wall. For twelve years. 

Of course, as one does when they are about to sell a house, we decided we finally ought to take on the project of making it nice—for someone else, who very well could appreciate our design choices as much as we have enjoyed the gold-trimmed shower door that’s almost impossible to clean.

Just ignore the plastic wrap on the bathtub. The project is almost finished.

Still, in the hopes that a prospective buyer who might otherwise say, “Well, this has to be completely redone,” and offers us ten grand less than our asking price, will instead say, “Ooh, this is nice. We should probably offer above asking just to be safe,” we decided to take on the renovation. Oh, also because we’ve got some skills and a professional bid came in at about thirty grand more than we were willing to spend, we decided to do it ourselves.

In early February, we figured out a way to cram all of our bathroom belongings into the much smaller bathroom we would have to learn to share with our son, and destruction began. This week, at the beginning of September, I finally got to take a shower in the almost complete, newly renovated bathroom. 

I admit it was a longer process than I had hoped, but we’re busy, and juggling two houses, and I can be awfully patient when it comes to saving thirty thousand dollars. Also, it’s worth the wait because whether a new homeowner loves it or not, we will get to enjoy it for a few more months. At least it didn’t take quite the seventy or eighty years it did for Dr. Delebost’s genius innovation to arrive in most homes.

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?

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.

It’s been a big couple of weeks in the house of practical history. If you’ve followed this blog for long you’re probably aware that I have two sons. When I started this thing way back once upon a time they were pretty small, just starting school, giving me, their mommy, bits of time to devote to something like blogging about history and nonsense.

As children do, they’ve gone and grown up now. My youngest graduated from high school last spring, turned eighteen this summer, and left this week on a great adventure. I won’t go into the specifics because he is an adult with sole possession of his own stories. I will say that I’m really proud of him and I miss him already.

It was a beautiful trip.

My oldest son spent the summer away on an adventure of his own, returning about a week and half before his brother’s planned departure, and so as a family we decided to spend a little fun time together. We chose to take a quick getaway in the middle of the week to canoe down part of the North Fork of the White River in Southern Missouri. It’s a beautiful little river and the state has experienced plenty of rain this spring and summer. The occasional low spots one might sometimes experience were nicely covered over and the the current was swift.

My husband and I used to be pretty experienced canoeists; my sons, not so much, but after spending the summer apart, they wanted to catch up and canoe together. No mother could say no to that. Of course, we as the the more experienced, took the cooler and strapped the dry bag to our boat.

They worked together really well, communicating through the tougher spots where rocks and debris made the steering (and staying dry) a little more challenging. Despite more experience and twenty-five years of marriage, we didn’t do quite as well. The problem wasn’t our lack of communication exactly. It was more our admittedly slower reflexes and slightly poorer eyesight that got us. And also a fallen tree that we didn’t manage to skirt on an outside bend the way we needed to.

The current was fast where it happened. When the canoe dumped, my husband managed to hold onto it and ride with it several bends downstream, while I grabbed onto the first thing that came to hand, which was the cooler. I clutched it tightly and rode the current, feet first, until I got to a place I could safely stop myself, very near where my husband had finally managed to bring the canoe to shore.

A couple of kind strangers helped him empty the water while our sons chased down all of the wayward objects that had once been in our boat. They found everything except for one paddle. The dry bag was still fairly dry, the cooler that had so beautifully kept me afloat, was no worse for wear, and they even managed to grab my favorite baseball cap that had been swept off my head.

I’m pretty sure this happened yesterday.

Other than a couple scrapes and bruises, we were unhurt, although the strap of one of my husband’s sandals broke during the ordeal leaving him with only one functioning shoe, and of course, there was the beating we took to our egos. That only got worse when shortly after the incident, our just grown sons decided that for our safety, they should each take one of us. And we agreed. Ouch.

Though I don’t think we were at any serious risk of injury in this shallow river, the reality was that for a few minutes there, we were up a creek without a paddle, a phrase that though surely older in conversation, began showing up commonly in American print in the mid to late nineteenth century.

So there we were, divided up between our children, my husband with only one shoe and me without a paddle, each being steered down the river by one of the boys whose lives used to more or less take the direction we chose for them. I suppose now we get to watch them navigate the currents of their own lives.

They were good boys. They are good men. I guess that’s just how life flows.

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.

If you drive along the western portion of US Rt. 2 into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan you will, as you approach the Village of Vulcan in the Norway Township, come across a big, big, man. This man carries a pickaxe, wears a yellow raincoat, and stands forty feet tall as he advertises tours of the Iron Mountain Iron Mine. 

At forty feet tall, this Big John is slightly bigger than the 6’6″ described in Jimmy Dean’s famous song. I mean that’s tall, but it doesn’t really strike me as legendary.

On my recent visit to the UP, I had the opportunity to experience this tour, which is a pretty cool one that takes visitors 2600 feet through an exploratory tunnel into a large man-made cavity from which much of the mine’s nearly twenty-two million tons of retrieved iron ore were taken.

Along the way, an expert guide, who in our case was an extremely knowledgeable retired high school history teacher, tells the harrowing tale of the many miners who risked, and often lost, their lives during the operation of the mine between its opening in 1877 and its final closure in 1945. The tour includes demonstrations of some of the ingenious but terribly dangerous equipment used in different eras of mining and plenty of stories about the awful conditions in which of men worked over the years to supply the iron needed to build a burgeoning industrial world power. 

That’s an awfully big wheel barrow.

What the tour does not include is anything about Big John who stands so prominently in the parking lot, is featured on the tee shirts for sale in the gift shop, and about whom the 1961 hit song by Jimmy Dean was written. The song plays on a loop in the visitor’s center, which made me suspect that it might somehow be related to the iron mining industry in the area.

It occurred to me too late that I should have asked our knowledgeable tour guide, so instead I posed the question to the young lady selling tickets for the next tour. Her face grew a little red as she sheepishly admitted that there was absolutely no connection between Iron Mountain, or any iron mine as far as she knew, to Jimmy Dean and his song, or to the legendary figure of Big Bad John. “It just attracts attention,” she said. 

It was a disappointing answer, as I thought maybe I had stumbled onto a hidden gem of a story. Still curious, I looked into the background of the song, and discovered that the co-opted folk legend hero of miners everywhere was inspired by a real life man who, as far as I know, may never have set foot in the UP, or in an iron mine, or in any mine at all. 

Dean’s Big Bad John sprang instead from the musician’s acquaintance with an obscure, but tall, actor by the name of John Minto. Dean started jokingly calling the man, who was six feet five inches tall, “Big John,” and as the name rolled around in his head a hit song emerged, and a new American folk hero was born. 

While Vulcan’s Big Bad John holds the world record as the tallest, you can also find Big Johns in Whitwell, Tennessee and Helper, Utah. The song, and the legendary tale it tells, has no connection to those locations either, but each statue serves to honor the early miners who worked in incredibly dangerous conditions to obtain the materials necessary to build the industrialized world we live in.

In my book that makes this big, big man a gem of a story.