Did You Know…Always More

The writer Ernest Hemingway was given a kitten with 6 toes from sea captain Stanley Dexter, Ernest named Snow White.

  Sailors favored these cats, believing they were good luck. Their extra toes enhanced their abilities as mousers, often called “mitten cats.”

  Snow White’s descendants live on in Key West, Florida at Papa’s home now a museum, to this day. 

  My other favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut, named his son Mark after his favorite, Mark Twain. 

  U.S. Presidents, John Quincy Adams, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan were avid swimmers. Adams swam naked daily in the Potomac, JFK was a member of the Harvard College Swim Team, and Reagan while attending Eureka College in southern Illinois, received an athletic scholarship as a member of their swimming and football teams.

   Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Barack Obama also swam like guppies. 

   The White House Pool given to FDR as a gift from the people of New York State along with school children encouraged to donate their pennies knowing that water eased his polio, became a playground for JFK and his young, willing female staffers whenever Jackie left town.

  Hey, from what I’ve read, she wasn’t even out of the driveway before Jack yelled…

EVERYBODY IN THE POOL!

   Then good old Dick Nixon deserving his name, turned it into a bowling alley, now empty beneath the White House Press Corps storing computer equipment.

   In 1876, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi in his Parisian atelier began creating the Statue of Liberty,  a gift of eternal friendship from France to the United States. When it came time ten years later for her New York debut, there was one problem.

  The stand for her to perch on President Ulysses S. Grant promised to provide, had not been made.

OOPS!

  Grover Cleveland, President at the time known for his miserliness, refused asking Congress for the money resulting in Lady Liberty hopelessly languishing in 214 wooden crates.

  Though her torch and head went on tour, the rest of her just sat insulting France causing embarrassment for the country.

  Not until Joseph Pulitzer, Newspaper Publisher of The New York World, posted that anyone who gave even a penny to the Lady would have their name printed in the paper that any action was taken.

  120,000 people donated raising $100,000 for Lib’s pedestal.

  But here’s my favorite part…Grover Cleveland, the fat, narcissistic blowhard that he was, came to give the keynote speech at her unveiling.

  As he bloviated from a ship decorated in red, white and blue bunting, Mother Nature stepped in with a huge wind blowing the scrim off our Lady of the Harbor as thousands cheered drowning Fatty out.

  Like my mother always said whenever we’d see her from the Staten Island ferry…

“Look Sue, look at Lady Liberty…she’s waving,” as we happily with patriotic enthusiasm, waved back.

 “She’s always home,” my mother would then say.

  Yup, that she is. 

SB