William Howard Taft once found himself stranded at a country railroad station and was told that the express train would not stop for a lone passenger.
He wired the conductor: STOP AT HICKSVILLE. LARGE PARTY WAITING TO CATCH TRAIN.
When the train stopped, Taft got aboard and told the conductor, “You can go ahead. I am the large party.”
What is this? Well, it’s a dodecahedron, but what was its purpose? More than 100 of these objects have been found between England and Hungary; this one was discovered among Roman ruins near Frankfurt. Typically they’re made of bronze or stone, with a hollow center and a round hole in the middle of each face, and they range in size from 4 to 11 centimeters.
The Romans likely made them in the second or third century, but strangely they appear in no pictures from that period and they’re not mentioned in Roman literature.
Best guesses so far: survey instruments, candlesticks, or dice.
History’s shortest-reigning king served for 20 minutes. When Charles X abdicated the French crown after the July Revolution of 1830, rule passed to his son, Louis XIX, who immediately resigned as well, over his wife’s entreaties.
The longest-reigning king is the pharaoh Pepi II, who ascended the Egyptian throne in 2278 B.C. at age 6. He ruled for 94 years.
Wilmer McLean used to say that the Civil War started in his backyard and ended in his parlor. The Virginia grocer was living in Manassas in 1861 when the First Battle of Bull Run broke out and dropped a cannonball into his fireplace. He moved to Appomattox and four years later Lee surrendered to Grant in his parlor.
He got a good story out of it but lost most of his furniture, which spectators carried off as souvenirs.
In 1882, when Texas governor Big Jim Hogg had a daughter, he decided to name her after an epic Civil War poem that her uncle had written.
Unfortunately, the heroine was called Ima.
“My grandfather Stinson lived 15 miles from Mineola and news traveled slowly,” she wrote later. “When he learned of his granddaughter’s name he came trotting to town as fast as he could to protest but it was too late. The christening had taken place, and Ima I was to remain.”
Contrary to local legends, she did not have a sister named Ura.
Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert seemed to carry an odd curse — he was present or nearby at three successive presidential assassinations:
In 1863, a stranger saved his life in a Jersey City train station. The stranger was Edwin Booth — the brother of John Wilkes Booth, his father’s future assassin.
The Confederate navy had a working submarine during the Civil War. Powered by a hand crank, the 40-foot H.L. Hunley managed to sink an 1,800-ton sloop-of-war in Charleston harbor in 1864, a historic first, but then herself sank.
Little is known about the sub’s crew, but one story held that the commander, Lt. George E. Dixon, had survived the Battle of Shiloh because a Union bullet struck a coin in his pocket. His sweetheart, it was said, had given him the coin “for protection.” This was considered a family legend until 2002, when a forensic anthropologist investigating the Hunley‘s remains discovered a healed injury to Dixon’s hip bone.
Near Dixon’s station another researcher found a misshapen $20 gold piece, minted in 1860, with this inscription:
Shiloh
April 6 1862
My life Preserver
G. E. D.
One may see in the shop-windows of a Fourth avenue confectioner, ‘Pies Open All Night.’ An undertaker in the same thoroughfare advertises, ‘Everything Requisite for a First-class Funeral.’ A Bowery placard reads, ‘Home-made Dining Rooms, Family Oysters.’ A West Broadway restaurateur sells ‘Home-made Pies, Pastry and Oysters.’ A Third avenue ‘dive’ offers for sale ‘Coffee and Cakes off the Griddle,’ and an East Broadway caterer retails ‘Fresh Salt Oysters’ and ‘Larger Beer.’ A Fulton street tobacconist calls himself a ‘Speculator in Smoke,’ and a purveyor of summer drinks has invented a new draught, which he calls by the colicky name of ‘Aeolian Spray.’ A Sixth avenue barber hangs out a sign reading ‘Boots Polished Inside,’ and on Varick street, near Carmine, there are ‘Lessons Given on the Piano, with use for Practice.’ ‘Cloth Cutt and Bastd’ is the cabalistic legend on the front of a millinery shop on Spring street; on another street the following catches the eye: ‘Washin Ironin and Goin Out by the Day Done Here.’
— Frank H. Stauffer, The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical, 1882
The oldest U.S. Civil War widow is still alive. Maudie Hopkins was 19 when she married 86-year-old veteran William Cantrell in 1934. She’s 92 today.
In May 1944, as the Allies prepared to invade Europe, the word UTAH appeared in a crossword puzzle in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Security officers found that a bit worrisome: Utah was the code name for one of the landing beaches.
Their worry turned to alarm when OMAHA and MULBERRY, two further code names, appeared in subsequent puzzles. And alarm turned to panic when NEPTUNE and OVERLORD appeared four days before the planned invasion. In Allied code, Neptune referred to the landing operation, Overlord to the entire invasion of Normandy. The government immediately arrested Leonard Dawe, the schoolteacher who had composed the puzzles.
A long interrogation ensued, but in the end they decided Dawe was innocent. Apparently his students had overheard troops using these words and then repeated them in his hearing. If that’s true, the published words were in fact code names — but no one involved had recognized them as such.
