Way This Side of Paradise

Finally in print. The title of the story (above) is not included in the article. Click to enlarge to a readable size.

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Fez

In my last post, I mentioned the fez which I received in the 1962 Shrine Circus Essay Contest. I did find it in a box in the basement, still stuffed with the pages from the Goshen News and covered in the plastic bag my mother used to preserve it. The fez has weathered the last 46 years very well--the face below it, not so much.

First, At Last

Forty-six years ago I placed second in an essay contest in Kosciusko County, Indiana:
Somewhere I have another newspaper clipping with a picture of me sporting an even toothier (impossible, you say?) smile than this, wearing the Shriner's fez I won, and receiving my cash award, the amount of which escapes me now. Squirreled away in another box is the fez itself. My mother never threw anything away. Eventually I'll find it, but for now, here's a picture of Mr. Magoo to remind you what a fez looks like.
Now, after a quest of almost five decades, I have achieved my goal of being A-number-one, top of the list, king of the hill--not in New York, New York, but in Kosciusko County, Indiana. Last month, the Kosciusko County Literacy Society sponsored The Big Read, a project where the entire county was encouraged to read F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Part of the project was a contest to write an essay using the descriptive style of Fitzgerald. I entered, and lo and behold, I have won with my entry entitled, "Way This Side of Paradise," which uses way too many adjectives and adverbs to describe the experience of raising ducks in Milford, Indiana. The prize package includes publication in the KLS Newsletter, and two $25 Visa gift cards, which, allowing for inflation, is probably pretty close to what the Shriners forked over in 1962. But as most writers know, it's not about the money, or the fezzes.

The Tao of Foo

The internet is an overflowing font of serendipity. It's Easter, I'm on call, and I'm surfing the web between phone calls. A Google blog search for etymology led me to a post about the word foo at Goldblog, written by Corey Goldberg. Sorry, Corey, my knowledge of computer programming hasn't progressed beyond the class I took in BASIC computer language in college, so I don't understand most of your blog, but I was interested to find out that foo is your favorite word.

Apparently, foo is used a lot in writing computer code. Corey provides a link to a lengthy document entitled "Etymology of 'Foo'" by D. Eastlake 3rd, C. Manros, and E. Raymond. As I read through it, I was struck by the following:

The earliest documented uses were in the surrealist "Smokey Stover" comic strip by Bill Holman about a fireman.

This brought back memories of weekly trips to my grandparents' house a mile down the road on Sunday afternoons. We would come home with the Sunday paper. The Millers would drive into the drug store in Syracuse Sunday mornings to buy the paper, because I don't believe it was even possible to get home delivery where we lived. For me, one of the highlights of the funnies was Smokey Stover, with his two-wheeled fire engine and various crazy gadgets. At the time, I didn't appreciate the surreal quality of the comic strip, but that was part of its appeal. As you might expect, there is an official Smokey Stover web site, and it is quite interesting. I had to go there to refresh my memory about Smokey. One thing I had forgotten was that Smokey's creator, Bill Holman, had grown up in Nappanee, Indiana, just a few miles from my hometown of Milford. I had also forgotten that the word foo appeared frequently in the comic strip, and Smokey's vehicle was the foomobile. Holman claimed he had seen the word on the base of a Chinese figurine. According to Eastlake, Manros, and Raymond, the Chinese word fu (transliterated as foo), can mean "happiness," and might have appeared on a Chinese statuette.

Foo, or rather foo-foo, is a popular term around our house. Early in my relationship with our annoying apricot poodle, Sid Vicious, I started to call him Foo-Foo. I'm not sure where I got the term. Maybe from the Muppets, because I have just learned from my web surfing that Miss Piggy had a dog named Foo-Foo. It just seems appropriate for a small poodle. We have also converted it into a verb, as in "The puppies are going to the groomer to be foo-fooed," meaning they will return in a state that no self-respecting coon hound would find himself in. Foo-foo can also be an adjective, as in "She is going to Starbucks to get a foo-foo coffee." I have also learned today that the closely related word frou-frou comes from the French and means "fussy or showy dress or ornamentation." It can also mean "a rustling sound, as of silk."

Finally, as we complete our serendipitous sojourn through the world wide web, let us note that a character named Le Comte de Frou Frou appeared in Episode 3, "Nob and Nobility," of the BBC comedy Blackadder III, starring Rowan Atkinson.

Arthur the Egg Man

Perhaps now, we have some indication why Arthur Griffith, Milford's famed calculating prodigy, died of a stroke at an early age. Here's an excerpt from an article about Arthur from the New York Times Sunday Magazine, February 27, 1910:

Eggs are his staple article of diet. Recently he sat down to dinner in a New York cafe. His manager ordered a steak, &c. handing the menu card to the calculator. Griffith, scanning it over, raised his head, and in a loud voice asked for "six fried eggs, straight up." He himself does not know what that "straight up" means.

The whole article is available at the New York Times online archives.

Another Episode in the Strange Case of Arthur Griffith

I just received a parcel of old photographs my sister Diane had stored in the crawl space of her house. Alas, many of the old pictures, which include a number of tintypes, have no identification on them, and I have no idea who the subjects are. The most fascinating picture in the lot is the one shown above--a small picture pasted on cardboard which bears the holes of being tacked up somewhere at some time. The photo is undated, but on the back, in my grandfather Lee Cory's handwriting, is written, "Mrs. Harvey (Etta) Griffith." I know from my research of Arthur F. Griffith, the calculating prodigy discussed in earlier posts, that his parents were Harvey and Etta. Apparently, my grandfather knew the family well enough to have a picture of one of them in his possession. Oh, if only he would have written about them in his journals, instead of endless descriptions of cutting wood and how many times he chewed each mouthful of food (at least for a time he was a devotee of "Fletcherizing", a practice promoted by Horace Fletcher, who believed chewing each mouthful of food 45 times was the pathway to good health)! But he didn't, and so I can only regret that he is no longer around to ask.

I also find it a little spooky that this picture found its way to me, perhaps the one living human being with the greatest interest in and knowledge of Arthur Griffith.

This picture of Arthur appeared in the book by Lindley and Bryan. I assume it was a publicity still that was preautographed and handed out as he toured the country. Sort of reminds me of the often-reproduced photo of Blind Lemon Jefferson with the inscription "Cordially yours, Blind Lemon Jefferson" very neatly written across the bottom. If he was blind, how did Lemon Jefferson write so legibly?

Pooze the Prodigy

On a farm southwest of my hometown, Milford, Indiana, on July 30, 1880, Arthur F. Griffith was born. Somewhere along the line, for unknown reasons, he acquired the nickname of Pooze. I tried to find a definition of this word, and all I could find was in an online urban dictionary, which defined pooze as either the anus or the female genitalia. I doubt that those meanings applied in the late 19th century. Like most of us from Milford, Arthur might have lived in relative obscurity except for one inexplicable trait. He was a mathematical prodigy. He was able to count to 25,000 at age five, and memorized the multiplication tables through 130. He developed 47 methods of multiplication, 6 methods each for division and addition, and one for subtraction. He could tell you the date of Easter Sunday for any year in the 20th century. He was able to extract cube roots from numbers of 6 figures in seconds. He could watch a train of 100 cars go by on the Big Four tracks in Milford, and memorize the numbers painted on the sides. Arthur had no talent for nonmathematical subjects and didn't go to school beyond the eighth grade. So amazing were his abilities that he was studied by scientists at universities including Indiana University and Yale. His case was presented to the International Psychological Congress in Paris in 1900.

His head was so large, he had to have his hats custom made.

At one point, he said he would publish a book of this methods, but never did. He toured as a vaudeville act, and in 1902 was sentenced to 30 days in the Osceola County, Michigan jail, for failure to pay a boarding house bill. In 1907, he was working as a blacksmith's helper in St. Louis. He became so upset when he wasn't paid for the work he did, he was declared insane and put in the city hospital. He recovered, and was released after a period of observation. He never married, and when he wasn't touring or being studied at a university, he lived with his parents on the same farm where he was born.

Arthur had a history of epilepsy. Were some of his strange behaviors due to a brain lesion? For that matter, was there some structural "defect" of his brain that gave him his incredible mathematical abilities? We'll never know. He died in 1911, at age 31, in Springfield, Massachusetts, presumably on tour. The cause of death was apoplexy, which nowadays would be called a stroke. Perhaps he had a vascular malformation of the brain which ruptured. Again, I can only speculate. Thirty-one was pretty young to have a stroke, even in 1911.

One reason I'm posting this is that there is virtually nothing about dear old Pooze online, and I don't want to see such an amazing character forgotten. So now my vast audience knows his story.

ADDENDUM - 9/11/06:

I have found some more source material and need to correct a couple things in the original post: First, Arthur did publish a book of his methods, entitled The Easy and Speedy Reckoner in 1901. Copies still exist in the Library of Congress and in the Math Library at the University of Illinois. BTW, http://www.worldcat.orgis a great web site that tells you where books are located beginning with libraries closest to your zip code. Second, although Arthur had epilepsy, his seizures started after an unspecified illness at age 7, after he had started to display his calculating abilities, so the two weren't related. Third, he should be called a mental calculator rather than a math prodigy, as he didn't understand or have an interest in learning algebra. He was blessed with a fantastic memory and developed many calculating shortcuts.

The Chieftains

The Chieftains

The two Chieftains rest,
surrounded by trees
along a creek,
Eyeless,
headlights gone,
wheels gone,
bellies on the ground,
they face northeast, toward Detroit,
like blind pilgrims facing Mecca in prayer.

They are relics
of the twentieth century, named
for Native Americans
who were extinguished
to make way
for industry and agriculture,
for Henry Ford and Cyrus McCormick.

The vehicles’ rusting chrome trim
once reflected
postwar American optimism.
Their substantial steel skins,
now pierced by hunter’s bullets,
are dulled and corroded by the elements,
the once glossy brown of the older sedan
rendered into a palette
of umber, burnt sienna, and russet.

The white top of the newer two-tone two-door,
which gleamed in the fifties,
is now a dirty eggshell.
The lower surfaces
show only muted traces
of the original copper red
amidst the rust.

Helpless against
destructive human impulse,
the windows of both are shattered,
like all abandoned fenestrated artifacts
of civilization.

Exposed to man and nature,
only vestiges of the interiors remain--
tatters of upholstery, rusted springs.
There is no trace
of the cardboard shelves
behind the back seats
which, baked by sun
through the rear windows,
had emanated a peculiar dry aroma.

Gone are the hood ornaments
from these namesakes of Chief Pontiac--
in 1949
an amber translucent likeness of the chief
which morphed into a sleek faceless airplane
in 1955.

The enormous engines,
stripped of some components,
lifeless under skewed hoods—
the straight-eight Silver Streak
and the V-8 Strato Streak--
are monuments to
America’s addiction
to fossil fuels.

One car carried me,
newly born,
home from the hospital,
the other to Little League games.
The Chieftains, like their drivers,
my parents,
roll no more
down life’s highway,
but rest,
forever rest.

Originally published in Children, Churches and Daddies, Vol. 158, March 22, 2006