As Casey Stengel Said …

Iam an inveterate collector of trivia and miscellany. Some of the purloined stories, quotes, and facts edge their way into my writings, while others sit forlornly in file folders. It occurred to me that the unwanted orphans might make for a colorful, crazy-quilt collection:

Sixty-five thousand Americans drink Coca-Cola for breakfast. Half a million Americans buy plastic flamingos each year.

In 1870, fully 60 percent of employed American women worked as household servants. Fifty years later, inventions such as electric vacuums and washing machines had made virtually all such jobs obsolete.

The word latchstring has six successive consonants.

The 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa made the loudest sound ever; it could be heard clearly in Ceylon, 2,058 miles away.

Bats spend most of their lives hanging upside-down in caves. Their knees bend the opposite direction from ours so that they can walk around the roof of the cave without scraping them. A female bat gives birth upside-down, folding one wing underneath her body to catch the baby, and nursing mothers can suckle their young in flight.

Ho Chi Minh worked as a short-order cook in Harlem in the 1920s.

Nikola Tesla was the eccentric inventor of the alternating current method of generating electricity. During electrical storms he would sit on a black mohair couch by a window and privately applaud bolts of lightning—one artist appreciating the work of another.

Little is known about San Isidro, patron saint of Madrid, except that he was a peasant. His very lack of learning helped his status in sixteenth-century Spain where conservatives, who were reacting against educated Jewish converts, approved only of uncultivated cristianos viejos—old Christians.

Toward the end of his life, Albert Einstein removed the portraits of two scientists—Newton and Maxwell—from his wall and replaced them with portraits of Gandhi and Schweitzer. He explained it was time to replace the image of success with the image of service.

A journalist researching gangs in Los Angeles County came up with the following statistics on compensation:

• A youth gang worker trying to save the lives of teenagers earned $1,100 a month.

• A teacher trying to educate teenagers earned $1,700 a month—slightly more than a mail carrier.

• A lawyer hired to deal with the legal problems of teenagers earned about $4,500 a month.

• A TV producer who made documentary films about teenage gangs earned $8,000 a month.

• A Hollywood star who killed teenage actors with a prop Uzi machine gun earned an incalculable sum.

Cyrus the Great could address every soldier in his army by name.

Picasso, after painting Guernica, was asked by police, “Did you do that?” His reply: “No, you did.”

In czarist times, Russian folk orchestras were composed of illiterate peasants who had no musical training. The conductor would assign each player a single note, say, E-flat or G-sharp, and teach them all when to play their respective notes in the piece. (To simplify matters, many Russian folk tunes had just four or five notes in the melody.) Once the following notice appeared in an old Russian journal: “Reward: F-sharp and A-flat escaped from the orchestra. F-sharp is tall, bald, big blue eyes; A-flat is shorter, rounder, dark hair.”

Julius Caesar especially valued one honor granted him by the senate: the right to wear a laurel wreath at all times. It helped hide his baldness, the cause of much embarrassment.

Once a knight fell asleep while Emperor Caligula’s favorite actor was giving a performance. Caligula ordered the knight to travel to distant Mauritania with a sealed message to the king, Ptolemy. When Ptolemy opened the message, he read, “Do nothing at all to the bearer, either good or bad.”

A Roman senator said to Tiberius Caesar, “But if you speak first no one will want to refute you, and if you speak last we will not want to have spoken against your position.” The problem with tyrants, precisely.

When Benigno Aquino stepped off the plane in Manila, just before his assassination, he was holding a speech that contained the following quote from Gandhi: “The willing sacrifice of the innocent is the most powerful answer to insolent tyranny that has yet been conceived by God or man.”

In his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin tells of one of his ancestors in Catholic England who taped an English Bible to the underside of a stool. To read to his family, he would hold the stool upside-down in his lap—with a lookout posted at door to watch for church authorities.

Saint Teresa of Avila, offended by the sexual content of the Song of Solomon, held public burnings of the book, and led campaigns against anyone who preached or taught from it.

Queen Victoria’s advice to her daughter on her wedding night: “Close your eyes and think of England.”

The following questions appeared on a 122-question application form for the Christian Dating Club of Minneapolis, an organization that seeks to match compatible singles:

• Contrary to Acts 15:20, do you order and eat meat rare or medium rare?

• Should an employed wife pay one-half of the rent and grocery bill, instead of wasting her paycheck on travel, hairdressers (especially male hairdressers), unnecessary and expensive clothes, antiques and knickknacks, psychologists, drugs, etc.?

• Should a pre-engaged couple share the same bedroom?

• Should paintings and photos of nude men in museums be restricted to viewing by men only, and paintings and photos of nude females restricted to viewing by females only?

Casey Stengel, then manager of the cellar-dwelling Mets, on being mathematically eliminated from the pennant race in early July: “Well, now that the pressure’s off, maybe we can play better.”

I will conclude with the most profound comment of all from my files: Publisher Wilfrid Sheed opines, “One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.”

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