Sarah Angleton's Blog

At Least it Didn’t Take Eighty Years

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.

I’m Not Quite Sure How to Say This…

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?

Staring at the Wall

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.

Down the Creek Without a Paddle

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.

Gardeners in a Pickle

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.

A Big, Big Man

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.

Murder Free Since 1952

Last week I had the opportunity to squeeze in a quick girls’ trip with my sister and our aunt and cousin to spend a few days exploring Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Our home base was an adorable rental cottage on Independence Lake near the tiny unincorporated community of Big Bay, MI, about thirty miles northwest of Marquette and a long, cold swim from Canada.

Sock Monkey Steve and I noticed this curious sign on the Lumberjack Tavern before we discovered why it was there. To the right of this sign, you can see part of the image from the movie poster as well.

Though it does have a post office, Big Bay is not large enough to sport a traffic light. It contains around a thousand people during the summer when stunning views of Lake Superior, lots of great hiking trails, waterfalls, and even a good stretch of sandy Great Lake beach attract visitors like us. 

In the winter it may host some hardcore snowmobilers and skiers, but most area locals we met said winter in the UP was best spent either hiding inside or living somewhere else. After experiencing a thirty degree temperature shift from one day to the next, I tend to believe them.

But for all the things Big Bay doesn’t have, it features two excellent places to eat, The Lumberjack Tavern, which includes a sign proclaiming it has been “murder free since 1952,” and The Thunder Bay Inn, which was featured in the Academy Award nominated film Anatomy of a Murder, directed by Otto Preminger and starring Jimmy Stewart. 

The Thunder Bay Inn still looks more or less the same as it does in the movie. At least enough to recognize it, both inside and out.

The film, released in 1959, was based on a novel of the same title by Robert Traver. That was the pen name of former Michigan Supreme Court Justice John D. Voelker, who in addition to being an avid fly fisherman, served as defense attorney in the case of a murder that occurred at a tavern in the tiny community of Big Bay in 1952.

What made the case such an interesting subject for fiction was the unlikely victory of the defense. An Army lieutenant stood accused of shooting and killing his wife’s alleged rapist. The jury found him not guilty based on a decades old precedent that used a fairly obscure diagnosis of a type of temporary insanity.

It was a good bit of legal acrobatics that translated nicely to the screen under the capable talents of a strong cast and set to a truly excellent Duke Ellington sound track. Since its release, the film has garnered praise from the legal profession as well as accumulated plenty of accolades from the film industry, including a 2012 selection to the National Film Registry for its cultural, historical, and aesthetic significance.

But the UP really does have a lot more to offer than murder.

Not being a classic film aficionado, I had never seen it, but you don’t vacation on a movie set and not watch the movie. Shortly after arriving back home, I got hold of a copy and I have to say, in my humble opinion, it’s good. 

If you want to visit it, just be forewarned that part of its cultural significance is its unflinching use of descriptive words referencing sexual violence that were atypical for a film in its era, words that got it briefly banned in the highly Catholic city of Chicago. 

Well, maybe not entirely unflinching. There is an amusing interaction in which the judge calls the counselors to the bench to discuss the possible use of alternative words for panties. After some debate in which one suggests perhaps a French word, they determine there are no better alternatives, and decide to just plow ahead, panties and all.

And while it has nothing to do with why we decided to take our little family girls’ trip to the incredibly beautiful UP, it is why unincorporated Big Bay, Michigan, with a year-round population 256, is evidently kind of famous. 

The Summer of Flying Whatsists

We are approaching the anniversary of a very big week for the United States and for the world because between July 19th and July 27th of 1952 was the peak of intense UFO sightings in a year that had been filled with them. Over the course of the previous four years the US Air Force had recorded observations of 615 UFOs. In 1952 alone, that number jumped to 717.

USA National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, via Wimikedia Commons.

The media noticed, particularly in that one week in July when many of the reported UFOs were spotted in the air over Washington DC. Headlines across the nation proclaimed the news. The Cedar Rapids Gazette announced: “SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL.” The front page of the Standard-Sentinal out of Hazelton, Pennsylvania declared: “RADAR SPOTS MORE ‘FLYING WHATSITS’ OVER WASHINGTON, and in Monroe, Louisiana, the front page of the Monroe News-Star featured the headline: “RADAR SPOTS ‘FLYING SAUCERS’ IN BACKYARD OF NATIONAL CAPITAL.”

Of course most of the articles do acknowledge various versions of the official government response, provided in the largest Pentagon press conference since World War II, that there was no national security concern at all, and that the sightings could be attributed to natural phenomenon like air temperature inversions and meteorite activity.

The UFO media frenzy seems to have been touched off by an April article in Look magazine that asked the question, “HAVE WE VISITORS FROM SPACE?” Then it steadily built because the eyewitnesses to UFOs weren’t just the usual crazies, but also included more credible people like both military and civilian pilots as well as air traffic controllers, some of whom were insistent that their observations didn’t perfectly fit the explanations.

I did see a series of UFOs earlier this spring over my house. That is until my husband identified them as a Space X satellite launch. Still a pretty cool thing to get to see.

Of course the most likely truth rarely gets in the way of a good sensational headline, or even a slanted story, of the variety that will sell a lot of news to the hysterical people who most want to consume it. That was certainly true in 1952, just as it was during the Summer of the Shark in 2001, when everyone became so afraid to go into the water that the number of shark attacks was down a little bit, and just as it has been every single year, before or since, that there has been nationwide media coverage. 

Yes, that includes now. But before you get mad at me, it also includes every year the other political flavor held more power, too. Because media is a business designed, like all businesses, to make a grab for our attention and resources. It’s most successful when we’re scared and angry and maybe a little irrational, which is why it works very hard to keep us that way. 

Am I suggesting that there isn’t any truth to the sensational, terrible, nation-ending, world altering stories we are consuming in the media every day? Well, not exactly, but often with a little distance and the slight change in perspective it might offer, we can start to see things a bit more clearly.

I suppose I can’t really say for certain that DC wasn’t visited by flying saucers in July of 1952, but I have read that when digital filters were added to radar equipment in the 1970s, there was a sharp reduction in reported UFO sightings. And that really can only mean one thing. Clearly, flying saucer cloaking technology also saw vast improvement at that time.

Furry Little Demons

It was in 1924 that the Bureau of Biological Survey, precursor to the US Fish and Wildlife Agency, responded to a request from local sheep farmers in Kern County, California and set out to eliminate coyotes and other predators from the area. The campaign, which sounded like a much better idea in 1924 than it does a century later, was a success, but it came at a cost.

According to the West Kern Oil Museum, the cost was the most epic house mouse infestation in US history. To be fair to the Bureau, Harvard mouse researchers have since drawn the conclusion that it might not have been entirely their fault. It turns out that a few dry years plus a dry lake bed planted with wheat, barley, corn, and cotton plus one of the most wildly successful invasive pest species in the world plus a torrential rain equals 100 million mice. 

Such a ridiculously cute furry little demon. Image by Alexa from Pixabay

Admittedly the number might have been a little smaller if there’d still been a few coyotes skulking about, but once you reach a million or so mice, I’m not sure it’s worth quibbling over the thousands a healthy coyote population might consume.

Oil companies close to the source of the outbreak did attempt to control the problem, digging long trenches filled with poison-laced grain, but it wasn’t long before the horde, fleeing their now flooded lake bed home, made their way to the nearby town of Taft, where residents set as many traps as they could and the house cats ate to bursting. But it was no good. They were at war. And they were losing.

I can sympathize, because as I mentioned in my last post, we recently bought some land in the country with a house that needs a little work. The house sat on the market for about a year before we found it, and the previous owners had long since moved out. We weren’t ready to move in just yet, as our son was finishing his senior year in high school and I was working in our current town. That was fine for us, because we had quite a few renovation ideas anyway and that gave us time to work on them. 

But what that means is that now for at least a year-and a-half, the house has been unoccupied except for the occasional night between shifts when my husband might sleep there or when we might stay a night or two working on projects. 

The mice have moved in. We are at war. And at the moment, it feels like we’re losing. 

Each time I’m at the house now, I set traps and catch a few. Yes, we do have a contract with a pest control company that has treated the home for insect infestations, eliminating our previously significant wasp problem, set up a termite monitoring system, and provided us with a rodent-fighting defense system, but I think we must have had a pretty good population of the little critters living, and unfortunately also dying and stinking, in our walls already. 

It seems so simple. I’m not sure what we’re doing wrong.

At this point, I’m ready to call in the Pied Piper.

That is what the people of Kern County did. Once again they appealed to the Bureau of Biological Survey, which in January of 1927, sent in an agent named Stanley Piper, because if you happen to have a Piper on staff in that situation, I don’t think you really have any choice. 

Piper pulled out the big guns and got to work poisoning the mice, though he also just kind of got lucky, because environmental conditions shifted, as they do, predatory birds moved back into the area, probably drawn by the horrendous smell of a great deal of prey, and the house mouse population soon fell to tolerable levels.

I’m hoping that will be our experience, too. I’m hoping that once we are in the house on a more regular basis, setting traps and making noise with our scary predator-smelling dog in tow, maybe we’ll win a few battles, and eventually the war.

I’m fairly certain we do at least have plenty of coyotes.

Don’t Call it a Comeback

Hello blogosphere! I know it’s been a hot minute since I appeared in this space. It turned out I needed the break. I also have had less time to write as I spent the last school year working full-time at a middle school where I learned to use phrases like “it’s been a hot minute.” I had a great year and would happily return for another, but life is shifting again, as it does. 

For well over a year now, my husband has been dealing with a long commute for a job that he loves. With our youngest son’s graduation from high school this spring, we’ve been looking to escape the bustling suburb that has been our home for more than a decade, searching for more land, a smaller house, and a shorter drive.

I’m pleased to report that we found all three, but as his route to work is shortening, mine is lengthening too much for my position to be practical. And that’s okay, because now, in between renovation projects on our new kind of weird house that sits on the pretty much perfect land, I can spend more time writing again.

Because when I see a majestic creature like this, the first thing I think is that it sure would look good in a hat. Minette Layne from Seattle, Washington, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m excited to be back. I’ve missed this sharing of vaguely historical and occasionally hysterical tidbits, kind of like one misses the hottest trends of their childhood. I’m seriously at least as excited as I would be if celebrities suddenly started wearing acid wash jeans again, we all decided to walk like an Egyptian, or whales donned dead salmon hats. 

Okay, so you may not have been entirely hip to Orca culture of the late 1980s like I have recently pretended to be, but yes, apparently, there was a brief window of time in 1987 when trendy killer whales, particularly those who frequented the Puget Sound, placed jaunty dead fish on their enormous heads.

Why they did this researchers aren’t sure, but then acid wash jeans didn’t make a lot of sense either. Some suggest it was a clever way to save some food for later during times of abundance. Orcas have been known to swim with large chunks of food tucked under a fin, a mode of transportation that isn’t terribly practical for a relatively small fish like a salmon. That fits much better as a hat. 

Or it could just be a playful fashion statement that this year has seen a little bit of a comeback. It’s definitely not as wide-spread as it was in 1987, but then I suppose the retro look isn’t for everyone. 

In case you want to dress like a fashionable Orca, Amazon has you covered.

Still, there have been a few instances over the past several months of Orcas once again sporting dead fish hats, enough to get some in the whale fashion industry to declare it a hot trend of the season, similar to the boat rudder disabling challenge that cropped up a couple years ago or the orca kelp massage fad surging right now, that is surely the result of a whale lifestyle influencer.

And why not bring back a little bit of fun, like a silly hat in a great big briny sea, or one more hopefully amusing, poorly researched, sort-of history blog written by a real human being drifting in a metaphorical sea of the artificially intelligent web.

I mean, I’m not walking like an Egyptian, but I am pretty excited to be back.