"Why does he want to kill me?" ...

During the Vietnam War, Americans often suffered from enemy ambushes without sighting a single enemy soldier. The enemy was familiar with the terrain and undergrowth and simply faded away after an intense, quick attack. Excitement –sometimes too much excitement – reigned when an enemy soldier was finally sighted.

Philip Caputo, a young Marine officer when he served in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966, shared such an experience in his critically acclaimed 1977 book A Rumor of War:  “I saw a (enemy soldier). … Actually, I saw a twitching beige cloud at the end of the trees; it was the dust kicked up by the recoil of his rifle. I might have seen the guerrilla himself, but I could not be sure. He was too far away to hit any of us, except by accident …”

“I figured this presented an opportunity to redeem [an] earlier foul-up, [and] with Hollywood heroics. Standing up in front of a stunted tree – it was the only tree in the paddy and a stupid place to expose myself – I crooked my arm and pumped it up and down,” a signal for his unit to move quickly.

“Something slapped into the branches not six inches above my head … A severed twig fell against my helmet and shredded leaves fluttered past my face. Belatedly, I hit the deck.”

“Well, there was nothing random about that. That one had been addressed to me; and so, for the first time in my life, I had the experience of being shot at by someone who was trying to kill me specifically.”

“It was not horrifying or terrifying or any of the things it is supposed to be. Rather, it was perplexing. My first reaction … was:  Why does he want to kill me? What did I ever do to him?”

Teddy Roosevelt's bear ...

Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, president of the U.S. from 1901 to 1909, was known for his abundant enthusiasm and wide range of “manly” interests -- the outdoors and hunting among them.  But on a hunting trip to Mississippi in 1904, the game he sought avoided him and his party for five days, even though a veteran game catcher named Holt Collier tried to lure animals toward the presidential party. To make matters worse, Roosevelt had allowed members of the press to visit his camp once a day, and their stories about the president’s lack of hunting success had become an embarrassment to him.

But on the next morning, as told by Edmund Morris is his 2001 book Theodore Rex, Collier’s hunting dogs scented a bear and gave chase. Roosevelt and others followed quickly, but thick brush forced them to give up. Collier suggested that they wait in a clearing for any further sightings, while he disappeared into the woods to try to drive the bear back toward the presidential party. Hours later, with Roosevelt bored and hungry, he and the men began the trip back to camp. But soon after they left, a young bear, with dogs in chase, burst through the brush and splashed, exhausted, into a pond, where it roped and captured by Collier, who tied it to a tree.

Roosevelt, notified of another bear sighting, rode back quickly, but was so disappointed to seeing the small, injured bear tied to a tree that he refused to shoot it. Instead, he called for someone else to “put it out of its misery.”  The hunting trip continued for another three days without success.

But according to Morris’ book, “[Roosevelt] did not know … that the outside world was already applauding his ‘sportsmanlike’ refusal to kill for killing’s sake.” The bear as drawn by a Washington Post cartoonist was so liked by readers that they asked for more “bear cartoons,” and the cartoonist obliged with many more. “With repetition,” writes Morris, “his original lean bear became smaller, rounder, and cuter,” and was soon part of almost all cartoons involving Roosevelt.

That winter, by some weird circumstance, a toy factory in Germany began producing “stuffed, plush bear cubs with button eyes and movable joints,” and 3,000 were ordered by a New York store. At the same time, a small New York toymaker came out with a similar small bear. The rest is history, as they say.

Notes Morris:  “The competing bears soon fused, along with [the cartoonist’s] cub, into a single cuddly entity that attached to itself the nickname of the President of the United States.” The Teddy Bear was born, although few people today link it to its namesake.

Abigail Adams gets tough with John ...

As the American Revolution waged on, the U.S. Congress in late 1777 appointed John Adams to join Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee in Paris to negotiate an alliance with the French. Adams’ wife, Abigail, remained behind in Massachusetts, tending to their children (except for their 10-year-old son John Quincy, who accompanied his father to Europe) and their farm through the hard New England winter.

Between April and September of 1778, Abigail received only two letters from her husband, for whom she had proven over many years previously to be a valued, no-nonsense confidant for his activities as a patriot and political leader. She wasn’t happy about the lack of communication, as noted in David McCullough’s 2001 book John Adams, and she let her husband know about it:  “‘All things look gloomy and melancholy around me,’ she wrote. ‘You could not have suffered more upon your voyage than I have felt cut off from all communication from you.’ … ‘Let me entreat you to write me more letters at a time, surely you cannot want subjects.’” McCullough adds:  “What he wrote, she said, was always too brief, cold, and impersonal. It was as if he had [in Abigail’s words] ‘changed hearts with some frozen Laplander.’”

In Adams’ defense, the passage of mail between Europe and America was not tremendously reliable, and it was common for letters to become lost, stolen, or delayed by many months. He claimed to have written nearly 50 letters during that April-to-September period, although McCullough writes that “was almost certainly an exaggeration.”

Adams’ response to Abigail’s concern was to express a concern of his own about writing tender letters to his wife:  “I have no security that every letter I write will not be broken open and copied and transmitted to Congress and the English newspapers. They would find no treason or deceit in them, it is true, but they would find weakness and indiscretion, which they would make ill use of.”

Abigail’s response, as transmitted in McCullough’s book:  “The affection I feel for my friend is of the tenderest kind, matured by years, sanctified by choice and approved by Heaven. Angels can witness its purity, what care I then for the ridicule of Britain should this testimony of it fall into their hands?”

She has a point ... a good one.

Lindbergh's first choice ...

Before Charles Lindbergh in 1927 became the first person to fly an airplane nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean, he sought, with funds offered by a group of St. Louis businessmen, an appropriate airplane. He approached several companies, but focused on a new, highly efficient model designed by Giuseppe Bellanca. At first, Lindbergh found that Bellanca’s design was tied up with a company that didn’t seem to think highly of Lindbergh’s endeavor. But that changed when Bellanca went into business with a different company, Columbia Aircraft.

“Willing to make attractive proposition on the Bellanca airplane for Paris flight,” Bellanca telegraphed Lindbergh after the change, writes A. Scott Berg in his 1998 biography Lindbergh. So the soon-to-be-famous pilot met with Columbia officials to close the deal in February 1927.  His enthusiasm was in for a rough welcome, though.

Berg writes of Lindbergh’s reception:  “‘We will sell our plane,’ [Columbia President Chairman Charles Levine] said, ‘but of course we reserve the right to select the crew that flies it.’ For a moment Lindbergh was dumbstruck. When he finally found the words, he suggested there must have been some misunderstanding, that this point was non-negotiable. Levine countered that his company could not possibly release its plane without selecting its crew but that he was willing to let the St. Louis group paint the name of their city on the fuselage. …. Before Lindbergh could leave the office, Levine asked him to call the next day,” however, so Lindbergh reluctantly spent another $3 for a night in a hotel.

Berg continues:  “At the appointed hour [the next day] Lindbergh telephoned. ‘Well,’ Levine said, ‘have you changed your mind?’ Too angered by the question to speak, Lindbergh simply hung up the phone.”

Lindbergh then turned his attention to tiny Ryan Aeronautical Company in California, which over recent months had responded favorably to his questions about the possibility of building a special plan for a non-steop transatlantic flight. And that's the company that build the plane widely known today as Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis.

 

Germany's first female doctor ...

Dorothea Erxleben became Germany’s first licensed female doctor in the mid-1700s, but it wasn’t without a long struggle against societal norms. As a teen, she displayed an aptitude for intellectual pursuits, although there were few opportunities outside of the house and home for women. Her father, a doctor in the German city of Quedlinburg, encouraged and supported her academic study, however. She studied medicine under his watchful eye, and was admitted, even as a woman in that day, to the University of Halle, which she attended for a time with her brother. But when her brother was drafted into the military, societal norms prevented her -- a young, single woman -- from continuing her education at the university. She returned to her home town and later married a widower with several children, and subsequently the couple had several children of their own. Her husband became ill, and to support him and the children, she began treating patients. Her activities brought charges of "quackery" from three local physicians (including Henricus Grasshoff, one of my direct ancestors!) after one of her patients died.

Londa Schiebinder, in her book The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science, writes that “Erxleben considered her enemies accusations ‘gross insults to truth’ and concluded her letter by offering to take a qualifying exam – but only on the condition that her accusers also take the exam. The doctors, of course, refused to take such an exam, and claimed that ‘the dear lady considers herself a doctor, only by virtue of the fact that she can toss around some broken Latin and French. Such is her feminine understanding.’”

After Erxleben passed her exam in 1754, the university rector announced that she "proved herself a man." She practiced medicine without further trouble until her death in 1762.

George Washington's Christmas Day decision ...

In December 1776, George Washington’s Continental Army was in bad shape, but that changed a bit for the better on Christmas Day, thanks in large measure to a quick decision he made in the face of an extreme challenge on that very day.

As 1776 neared its end, Washington and his men had been driven out of New York and westward across much of New Jersey by British forces. The American fighting force faced mounting problems as soldiers’ enlistment periods expired, food and supplies were in short supply, and desertions increased. But these desperate times gave birth to one of the key American victories in the war – the crossing of the Delaware and subsequent defeat of British-hired Hessian mercenaries at the Battle of Trenton on December 25, 1776.

As the river-crossing plan was put into play, almost everything went wrong. Preparations for the crossing, to be carried out by American forces at three points along the Delaware, ran hours behind schedule. The weather turned worse, with an strong wind accompanied by sleet and snow. Floating chunks of ice and ice jams threatened the boats, and several inches of water in most of them made the soldiers they carried even colder and wetter. Some men fell overboard, into the icy water.

Under those conditions, only one of the three American crossings – the one that happened to carry Washington – was successful. In despair, Washington came close to calling off the entire operation, and probably would have done so had going back been even more dangerous for his men than pushing on. In his 2006 book Washington's Crossing, historian David Hackett Fischer described the scene:

“On the Jersey shore Washington wrapped himself in his cloak, sat on a wooden box that had once been a beehive, and brooded over the demise of his plan. The operation was now three hours behind schedule. Later he wrote that the delay ‘made me despair of surprising the Town, as I well knew we could not reach it before the day was fairly broke.’ … But desperate as the mission had become, he decided that it might become more difficult to abandon it. Washington wrote, ‘As I was certain there was no making a Retreat without being discovered, and harassed upon repassing the River, I determined to push on at all Events.’”

So in a single moment, one man's simple, on-the-spot decision -- to go or not to go --gave American patriots a badly needed victory, one without which the American Revolution might have fizzled.

When European-Americans Didn't Celebrate Christmas ...

Were America’s early English settlements home to widespread mirth and joy during the Christmas season? Did many of America’s English settlers – especially the most pious groups, such as the Puritans -- have a strong affinity to Christmas celebrations and what they represent?  The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. In fact, some of those first people to successfully settle in the New England had a strong aversion to Christmas celebrations, notes historian Stephen Nissenbaum in his book The Battle for Christmas.

“In New England, for the first two centuries of white settlement most people did not celebrate Christmas,” writes Nissenbaum. “In fact, the holiday was systematically suppressed by Puritans during the colonial period and largely ignored by their descendants.  … It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five shillings) … Puritans were fond of saying that if God had intended for the anniversary of the Nativity to be observed, He would surely have  given some indication as to when that anniversary occurred.” Indeed, many scholars report that there is no biblical reference to December 25 as the date of Jesus Christ’s birth.

Nissenbaum also notes, among other interesting details, that Puritans had other reasons for opposing Christmas celebrations, too, based largely on what they had witnessed of those events – “… rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging (often involving the threat of doing harm), and even the invasion of wealthy homes.”