Chicle

Jennifer P. Matthews, 2009.

Ridiculously short one-page description: The history of chewing gum in the Americas, from the ancient Mayans to William Wrigley.

Rudolf of Habsburg

I have had some wonderful reading experiences when I've chosen books somewhat randomly, based on a momentary pique of curiosity.  When I was younger, before the era of massive brick & mortar bookstores, and online ones of near-infinite scope, I used to go to libraries.  Sometimes I would walk the aisles at random, flitting about the shelves until I found just the right book--interesting, readable and with just the right level of obscurity.  I recall getting one such book at the St. Petersburg Library--a biography of Rudolph of Habsburg, the 16th-century Holy Roman Emperor and part-time alchemist, which I was reading late at night when I was interrupted by Rebecca's laboring with the birth of our first daughter.  But this has nothing to do with chewing gum.

I didn't choose the book Chicle at random, but it seems like I did.  I was doing research for a book I never finished writing, but once I started reading Chicle, I couldn't put it down.  Here's one of my favorite stories in the book:

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna

Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was born in 1794 in the Mexican state of Veracruz to an upper-class family of pure Spanish heritage--a criollo.  His parents wanted him to be a businessman, but he entered a military academy instead, and at 16 joined the Spanish army and fought against the liberation of Mexico from Spain. In 1821 he switched sides and joined the Mexican army, rising to the rank of brigadier general.  When Mexico was liberated from Spain he became governor of Veracruz, and later President of Mexico, a position he would hold for eleven terms.

In 1836 he temporarily resigned his presidency to lead an army of 1500 soldiers to defeat the Texans at the Alamo.  It turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory, suffering heavy casualties, inspiring the Texas rebellion and followed a month later by an attack led by Sam Houston which resulted in 400 Mexicans killed, 200 wounded and 730 taken prisoner, including Santa Anna.  In 1837 Santa Anna signed the treaty giving Texas its independence, and was released back to Mexico in disgrace.  He regained his popularity by fighting and losing his left leg in the Pastry War with France in 1838, and was re-elected to president, serving six more terms.

So what does all this have to do with chewing gum?

In 1855, during his eleventh and final term, the Mexican economy was in shambles and the country had suffered the loss of enormous territory.  Realizing he could be exiled, Santa Anna fled to the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean.  There he met U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, who was scouting for an island to buy to install a naval base.  (In 1867 Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska for two cents an acre, which at the time was derided in Congress and the press as "Seward's Folly.")  Some men used Santa Anna's connection to Seward to swindle him, forging a letter from Seward inviting Santa Anna to come to New York and prepare to lead an expedition against Maxmillian, the Emperor of Mexico, who was backed by France.  Santa Anna invested and lost 40,000 pesos in the fake venture and and wound up broke, living in a modest house on Staten Island.

Getting closer to the chewing gum.

Thomas Adams

Through a mutual friend, Santa Anna was introduced to Thomas Adams, a former Civil War photographer who owned a store as a glass merchant.  Adams was also an inveterate inventor, having developed a new bag for horse feed and a burner for kerosene lamps.  Santa Anna had brought with him some chicle, which is a rubbery sap from sapodilla trees in the Yucatan Peninsula.  Santa Anna had hoped to get rich by finding someone to develop chicle as an alternative to rubber, a booming new industry. Adams--the inventor and entrepreneur--took Santa Anna's chicle and tried to replicate the vulcanization process developed by Charles Goodyear in 1839.  Despite Adams spending $30,000 on the venture, it was unsuccessful.  Santa Anna had returned to Mexico (he died, senile and impoverished, in 1876) and Adams was ready to put the whole chicle fiasco behind him.

Now for the chewing gum part.

While in a store, Thomas Adams overheard a young girl ask to buy some paraffin wax gum.  Paraffin, beeswax and other products had been introduced as substitutes for spruce chewing gum, which had been chewed by Indians for centuries for health and recreational purposes, and had become a minor industry in the U.S., only to dissipate due to the demand for spruce trees in the lumber industry. Adams recalled hearing how the indigenous people from the Yucatan chewed chicle, so with his sons they boiled the leftover chicle in a pot, rolled it into small gray balls and sold it at their store.  It sold out in hours.  They made more.  By the late 1880's, Adams and Sons was employing over 300 workers at a plant near the Brooklyn Bridge.  They produced five tons of chewing gum daily, including their best-selling Tutti-Frutti and Black Jack licorice gums.  Adams is generally recognized as the father of the modern chewing gum industry--thanks to Santa Anna.

Related points of interest: Thomas Adams invented the first chewing gum machine in 1871, which he placed in drugstores, and in 1888 commissioned the first penny vending gum machine, for subway platforms, They introduced Chiclets in 1900.  The family grew rich, and Thomas Jr. and John Dunbar Adams had a double-residence mansion built in Brooklyn (across the street from the Feltman mansion, owned by the German-born Charles Feltman, who first turned a frankfurter into a hot dog and sold them at his shop on Coney Island). The Adams mansion featured the first elevator in New York City.  One year, when the Adams' returned from a six-month stay at their coastal home in Bay Shore, New York, they discovered four servants who had gotten trapped in the elevator and perished from starvation.

In 1919, now the American Chicle Company, the Adams' spent $2 million on a massive five-story 550,000-square-foot building on Long Island. It was producing five million packages of chewing gum a day.  The company survives today, through Black Jack licorice gum, Chiclets, and Cadbury-Adams LLC.

So chew on that.

In 2017 I'm revisiting 50 books I've enjoyed over the years.  This is 7/50.

Zen Story: Bankei

When Bankei held his seclusion-weeks of meditation, pupils from many parts of Japan came to attend. During one of these gatherings a pupil was caught stealing. The matter was reported to Bankei with the request that the culprit be expelled. Bankei ignored the case.

Later the pupil was caught in a similar act, and again Bankei disregarded the matter. This angered the other pupils, who drew up a petition asking for the dismissal of the thief, stating that otherwise they would leave in a body.

When Bankei had read the petition he called everyone before him. “You are wise brothers,” he told them. “You know what is right and what is not right. You may go somewhere else to study if you wish, but this poor brother does not even know right from wrong. Who will teach him if I do not? I am going to keep him here even if all the rest of you leave.”

A torrent of tears cleansed the face of the brother who had stolen. All desire to steal had vanished.

Talent is Overrated

Geoff Colvin, 2008.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description: Excellence in any endeavor is primarily a function of persistent and grueling "deliberate practice," and not innate talent or native intelligence.

I've always enjoyed Geoff Colvin's work in Fortune, and the topic was in my wheelhouse, so it's no surprise that I enjoyed this book. Two years later David Shenk published The Genius in All of Us, which I thought was remarkably similar.  Talent is filled with fascinating research, but it opens with perspectives on why some of history's most notable "prodigies" were more made than born.

• Mozart's father, Johann Georg Leopold Mozart, was a renowned expert in music pedagogy and a domineering parent who started young Wolfgang on an intensive training regimen in composition and performance at the age of three.  As a result, Mozart's early compositions as a child earned his some renown, supported by his father's promotion of his "prodigy."  But historians note that none of these early compositions are in the child's own hand.  Rather, they were "corrected" by his father, who just
  
  happens to have stopped his own composing when his son took up the practice.  Further, none of Wolfgang's early compositions are highly regarded, and are mostly unoriginal arrangements of Bach's work, under whom Mozart had studied in London.  In fact, Mozart's first great work wasn't until he was 21 years old, and had been devoting his life to music for 18 years, living with an expert teacher who was consumed with his success.
• Earl Woods, Tiger's father, was a golf fanatic with plenty of time on his hands and a single-minded ambition to teach his son to golf.  He gave Tiger his first putter at seven months.  He'd set Tiger on a high chair in the garage and have him watch as Earl hit hundreds of balls into a net. Before Tiger was two, they were at the golf course playing and practicing regularly.  By the time Tiger rose to national prominence, as a 19-year-old Stanford student, he'd been an avid, dedicated student of the game for 17 years.

Colvin makes a compelling case that high levels of excellence and achievement in all endeavors, including business, do not spring from inherent intelligence, memory or any other genetic endowments.  Rather, they are a function of persistently hard work; and specifically, what Colvin refers to as "deliberate practice," which is a mentally intense, focused effort to improve one's skills.

In 2017 I'm rereading 50 books I've enjoyed in recent years.  This is 6/50.

Zen Story of the Day

The Emperor asked Master Gudo, "What happens to a man of enlightenment after death?"

"How should I know?" replied Gudo.

"Because you are a master," answered the Emperor.

"Yes sir," said Gudo, "but not a dead one."

The Buccaneers of America

Alexander O. Exquemelin, first published in 1678.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description: A former buccaneer's account of life, raids and battles in the Caribbean in the 17th century, with particular attention to the exploits of Captain Henry Morgan.

I first heard of this book while reading the fascinating Pirate Hunters (Robert Kurston, 2015).  It's a mostly first-hand account of buccaneering in the Caribbean, mixed with stories and tales the author heard which he presumes to be true.  Exquemelin recounts the customs, tactics and exploits of the buccaneers, but also accounts of the islands, the settlements, the flora and the fauna.  What surprised me most were his descriptions of the seemingly incongruous blend of extreme cruelty, tactical precision, military discipline and a refined sense of justice and democracy; at times, truly honor among thieves. I often don't have the patience for first-person accounts, but this one gripped me.  A few snippets:

• Buccaneers were a cross between genuine privateers, commissioned to defend a country's colonies and trade, and outright pirates.  There were clear economic and survival advantages to playing both roles.
• "The planters have few slaves... Some of them make it their business to go to France looking for labourers in the country towns among the peasants. They make big promises, but when the lads get to the island they are sold and have to work like horses, harder in fact than the Negroes. For the planters admit they must take greater care of a Negro slave then a white bondsman, because the Negro is in their service for life, while the white man is theirs only for a period."
• "The English treat their servants no better, but with greater cunning. The lads are usually indentured for seven years, and when they have served for six they are ill-treated beyond endurance, so that they are driven to beg their master to sell them to someone else ... which means they are sold for another seven years."
• "The captain (of a buccaneer ship) is allowed no better fare than the meanest on board. If they notice he has better food, the men bring the dish from their own mess and exchange it for the captain's."
• "When the provisions are on board and the ship is ready to sail, the buccaneers resolve by common vote where they shall cruise."
• Contrary to my going-in beliefs (from Pirates of the Caribbean? Captain Hook and Peter Pan?), the captain did not rule the ship. Rather, he served the men, as a contractor of sorts. However, the best captains earned the respect and support of their crews through leadership skills and a track record of successful missions--as measured by survival rates and profitability.
• Those wounded in service would be compensated by common decree, something like this: 600 pieces of eight or six slaves for loss of a right arm; for a left arm, 500 pieces of eight or five slaves; a left leg, 400 or four slaves; an eye, 100 or one slave.
  
• "These amounts having first been withdrawn from the capital, the rest of the prize would be divided into as many portions as men on the ship. The captain draws four or five men's portions for the use of the his ship."
• "When a ship has been captured, the men decide whether the captain should keep it or not: if the prize is better than their own vessel, they take it and set fire to the other. When a ship is robbed, nobody must plunder and keep his loot to himself. Everything taken--money, jewels, precious stones and goods--must be shared among them all."
• "They (the buccaneers) see justice done among themselves. If anyone has a quarrel and kills his opponent treacherously, he is set against a tree and shot dead by the one whom he chooses. But if he has killed his opponent like an honorable man--that is, giving him time to load his musket, and not shooting him in the back--his comrades let him go free. The duel is their way of settling disputes."

In 2017 I'm rereading 50 books I've enjoyed in recent years.  This is 5/50.

The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan (The Immortal Irishman), 2006.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: The Dust Bowl told from the perspective of a couple of small towns in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.

This is one of my favorite history books, mainly because I knew so little about The Dust Bowl before I read it, and also because Egan covers the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon illustrated by the stories of human perseverance and tragedy.

History is the search for causality in past events.  In that regard, the Dust Bowl is a rich vein to mine, as the events that led to it are, to borrow an ironic metaphor, the perfect storm.  Consider this:

• The Great Plains was previously referred to on maps as the Great American Desert. Those familiar with the area knew that with its oppressive weather and limited rainfall, it wasn't good for much more than grazing land, and even then, ranchers struggled to survive periods of drought.  The land was covered with native buffalo grass.
• In the 1870's, Russian emigrants introduced turkey red wheat, a hearty variety better suited for the plains climate.
• Part of General Phillip Sheridan's plan to defeat the Indians of the Great Plains in the 1870's was to kill all the buffalo. Once the buffalo were dead and the Indians on reservations, the government owned land that it didn't know what to do with.
• In 1882 the Texas Legislature sold 3 million acres to a syndicate from Chicago with British investors for $1.23 per acre, to raise money to build a new statehouse.
• The syndicate sought to recoup their investment by marketing the land as good for "dry farming."  They advertised in Europe, the American South and in port cities.
• Land speculators purported the theory that plowing the ground induced rainfall.  The Sante Fe Railroad issued a map that showed the rain line (where it rained 20 inches or more annually) moving west with civilization about 18 miles a year.
• In 1908, the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company sold 3000 town lots in Boise City, in the Oklahoma Panhandle, for $45 each, using brochures that showed tree-lined streets, an artesian well in the center of home, and "houses any banker would be proud to call home." Unfortunately, the town of Boise City did not yet exist.
• In 1909 Congress amended the homestead act for the western half of the Great Plains, which doubled the amount of land a person could own through improvements to 320 acres.  It was a desperate act that was heavily promoted by railroad companies and prairie state senators to encourage settlement in an area that had never been kind to settlers.
• The Great War in Europe (WWI) increased the demand for wheat, with prices rising from $.80 a bushel in 1920 to $1.60 in 1915, after which the government guaranteed the price of $2.00 per bushel.  This moved wheat from a family farm staple to a commodity export product. Farmers in the Great Plains were getting rich, and many of the struggling settlers became farmers.
• The invention and availability of tractors had a dramatic effect on farming and wheat production, in particular.  In the 1830's, it took 58 hours of work to plant and harvest a single acre. By 1930, it was only three hours.
  
• Tractors were also a stimulus for mortgages, which banks had previously avoided in the area.  But efficient technology along with a few good rain years made mortgages plentiful. Farmers mortgaged everything they had to buy more land to plow up and produce more wheat.
• As the railroad expanded westward it become substantially cheaper to transport wheat to meet the market demands.
• The 1920's featured years of high rainfall.  Many people naively assumed it would last forever, or at least acted that way.  They got while the getting was good.
• In 1917 about 45 million acres of wheat were harvested in America. By 1919, it was over 75 million acres. And the expansion continued even in the decade after the war.
• By the late 1920's there was a worldwide wheat surplus and prices started dropping, down to $1.00 a bushel in 1928.  To make up for the lost pricing revenue, farmers planted more wheat. 
• In October 1929 the stock market crashed.  While only about 10% of Americans owned any stock, the ripple effect on businesses, banks and unemployment were felt deeply in the Great Plains.  
• By 1930, the price of wheat dropped to $.24 a bushel, well below the cost to produce it and bring it to market.  Some farmers held on and plowed even more ground.  But many others simply left their farms.
• On September 14, 1930, the first black duster hit, rolling through towns like a mound of black crud, and carrying enough static electricity to short out cars.  It was a fascinating phenomenon, but people didn't think much more about it.
• 1931 brought the beginning of a drought that would last for eight years in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles.  It was also a record year for wheat harvests, with 250 million bushels, an unprecedented agricultural feat in world history.  It sold for below cost.
• Without the buffalo grass and blue gram, which had held the soil for centuries, and with millions of acres of unplanted wheatfields, winds would pick up the dust, creating great dark walls, some of which extended more than 20,000 feet in the sky and moved, sometimes, for hundreds of miles.
• On May 9, 1934, whirlwinds which began in the Dakotas and Montana, carried dust all the way to the New York and Boston, over 350 million tons, and dropping an estimated 6000 tons on Chicago.
• The 1934 Yearbook for Agriculture stated that 100 million acres of farmland had now lost all its topsoil.

Other snippets:

• In the late 19th century, doctors often prescribed a change in geography to treat respiratory ailments, such as what brought Doc Holliday to Dodge City, Kansas. "Every good-sized town in the arid belt had a sanatorium offering various amenities."
  
• In 1872-73, seven million pounds of buffalo tongues were shipped out of Dodge City.  One estimate was that 25 million buffalo had been killed.
• Car owners in the Dust Bowl dragged chains from their cars, which served as a ground to protect it against the static electricity of the dusters.  Men avoided shaking hands with each other because the static electricity was so great it would knock a man to the ground.
• During one storm in 1935 the wind was clocked at 40 mph or higher for 100 straight hours.
• In 1930, 1350 banks failed, followed by 2294 in 1931. At the end of 1931, the Bank of the United States in New York, which had $200 million in deposits, collapsed.  Twenty-five percent of the workforce was without jobs or prospects.
• Many people blamed the Jews, and "Jewish banking" for the collapse. One Christian religious leader would "out" Hollywood celebrities as Jews on his radio show, which was listened to by over a million people.
• The 1930's was the first decade in U.S. history when the number of young children declined.
• People had various theories for how to induce rain.  One was to kill snakes and hang them in the sun.  In Southwest Kansas, dead snakes were hung for miles on barbed wire fences. Another "scientific" theory was aerial bombing, dating back to Plutarch's observation that rain followed battles.  One proponent of this theory was C.W. Post, of Post cereal fame, who owned land in West Texas.  He tried attaching dynamite to 150 kites, and also using a Howitzer, to no avail.
• At it's peak, the Dust Bowl covered 100 million acres. More than a quarter million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930's.  It remains the greatest man-made ecological disaster in the nation's history.

"And then the dispossessed were drawn west--from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land." 

Grapes of Wrath, 1939, John Steinbeck.

In 2017 I'm rereading 50 books I've read in recent years.  This is 4/50.

The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed our Minds

The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis (Liars Poker, The Blind Side, The Big Short, Moneyball), 2016.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: Two brilliant Israeli psychologists form an extraordinary friendship that leads to ground-breaking scholarship on how people make decisions.

Michael Lewis is adept at explaining complex phenomena (baseball sabermetrics, the sub-prime mortgage collapse) in the context of a fascinating story. And while I enjoyed this book, it doesn't have nearly the same page-turner appeal of his other books. Nevertheless, the story of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman needed to be told.

A few snippets and insights below.  Note, a great companion read is Kahneman's best-selling Thinking Fast and Slow, which explains in detail many of the theories he and Tversky worked on, and their application to decision-making.

• "No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story." (Daniel Kahneman)
• "When they made decisions, people did not seek to maximize utility. They sought to minimize regret."
• After the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, Israel invited Jews from around the world to emigrate to Israel. Over the next five years, 730,000 immigrants, from many different countries and speaking many different languages, arrived in Israel.  Many of these immigrants had suffered terrible atrocities in World War II. However: "No one was encouraged to speak about what he'd experienced in war ... Part of the job of being an Israeli Jew was to at least pretend to forget the unforgettable."
• A favorite Kahneman principle: "When someone says something, don't ask yourself if it is true. Ask what it might be true of."  In other words, don't try to disprove it; rather, try to understand it.
• Amos Tversky's reply to Nobel laureate (physics) Murray Gell-Mann: "You know, Murray, there is no one in the world who is as smart as you think you are."
• On a related note, Tversky's colleagues at the University of Michigan developed this simple intelligence test: The sooner you figure out that Amos is smarter than you, the smarter you are.
• Tversky taught himself to be an optimist, because when you're a pessimist and bad things happen to you, you experience them twice--once in anticipation and once when it happens.
• Kahneman and Tversky conducted countless experiments to uncover errors in logic and judgment that appear systemic to human nature.  These experiments were often done with their university students, but also younger students or even prison inmates.
• Some of the fallacies, misconceptions, biases, heuristics and decision-making errors that the pair researched include: The Law of Small Numbers, The Gambler's Fallacy, Framing Heuristic, Anchoring, Availability Bias and Loss Aversion.
• One of the fascinating examples of how biases can negatively impact decision-making is research on expert analysis.  For example, radiologists were able to detail the principles of how to read an x-ray to diagnose cancer.  From these principles, the researchers created an algorithm to perform the diagnoses without the input of an actual radiologist.  Even though the radiologists had provided the principles, the algorithm was a consistently better predictor of cancer than even the best of the live doctors.  This same principle has been demonstrated in other fields as well, including many medical fields.  (Think about that the next time a doctor gives her opinion.)

For 2017, I am revisiting 50 books I've enjoyed over the past few years and sharing a few interesting facts and findings I discovered in them.

The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, 2012.

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: Habits can be changed if we understand how to do it, and changing certain "keystone habits" will make it easier for us to change others.

Random snippets:

• A 2006 Duke University study found that more than 40 percent of our actions are habit, not conscious decisions.
• "Habits emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.  Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any routine into a habit."
• "Chunking" is the brain converting a sequence of actions into an automatic routine. This process is key to forming habits.
• The brain can't tell the difference between good and bad habits.  Habits never disappear, so both good and bad ones are always just a trigger away.
• In the 1920's, ad man Claude Hopkins stimulated the habit of teeth brushing for Americans with Pepsodent ads that featured a trigger (film on teeth) and a reward (attractive smile).  Before the ads, less than 7% of Americans owned toothpaste.  Ten years after the ads, 65% of Americans brushed their teeth regularly.
• For a new habit to last, the body has to expect and to crave the rewards--e.g. an endorphins surge or a sense of accomplishment.  For Pepsodent, people craved the cool, tingly feel of the citric acid and other chemicals which originally were added to improve the taste.  Today's toothpastes still contain additives, now expressly designed to provide that cool tingle after brushing, which our bodies crave.
• To change a habit you need to keep the old cue and reward, but change the routine.
• A study of alcoholics found that those who believed in something were much more likely to conquer the habit.  Belief in God often generated other beliefs about change.
• Small wins can be the key to creating keystone habits.
• A West Point study found that factor most correlated to success was "grit," defined as "the tendency to work strenuously toward challenge, maintaining effort and interest over years despite failure, adversity, and plateaus in progress."
  
• Willpower is the single most important keystone habit for individual success.  Self-discipline is more important than IQ, and can be created as a habit.  "Willpower isn't just a skill.  It's a muscle."
• Organizations have habits, too, and their actions are often guided more by institutional habits than by reasoned, independent decision-making.
• Pathological gamblers get a rush not only from winning, but also from near misses.  Non-pathological gamblers recognize near misses like any other loss.  As a result, gaming machines are designed to give a high rate of near wins.
• William James said that the will to believe is the most important ingredient in creating the belief in the possibility of change.

For 2017, I am revisiting 50 books I've enjoyed over the past few years and sharing a few interesting facts and findings I discovered in them.

Father, Mother and Best Friend

This time every year always invokes memories for me.   January 7th was my father's birthday, January 8th my mother's and January 9th my best friend Randy Cooke's.  All are gone.

Dad was born 98 years ago, in 1918, which still amazes me.  It was the year that World War I ended--a war that involved 70 million combatants and took over 16 million civilian and military lives.  It was also the year of the most deadly flu pandemic in history.  Casualty estimates vary wildly, ranging from 20 million to as high as 100 million.  In the U.S., the average age dropped ten years.  It was also the year of the Cloquet-Moose Lake Fire, near Mahtowa, where Dad was born, which killed 452 people and destroyed 38 towns and villages.

Sorry for the tangent. The second oldest of 13 children, Dad spent much of his youth working on the family farm.  A graduate of Barnum High School, he got his B.S. from the University of Minnesota, a Master's of Social Work from USC, and served in the Army in World War II as a medic in New Guinea.  He was humble, hard-working and honest as the day is long.  He loved to visit relatives, take saunas, garden, cook and play cards, especially bridge and solitaire.  He spent most of his career as a social worker in the St. Louis County Welfare Department. Looking back, I wish we would have talked more, but that wasn't the Finnish way.

Mom was born 10 years and a day after Dad, in Kettle River, Minnesota, also to Finnish farmers.  She fell in love with the violin at an early age and moved to Duluth to live with a violin teacher during high school.  Music would be an important part of her life, as she spent her years teaching high school orchestras and playing in a string quartet and the Duluth Symphony Orchestra.  She was an inveterate learner, but would jump from one interest to another, flitting like a dilettante from cross-stitch to refinishing furniture to learning Chinese and joining Toastmistress.  She was perpectually engaged in something new, but always had time to talk to me, or play chess or Stratego with me (which I always won) or Scrabble and Milles Borne (where we were more evenly matched).

But the thing I remember most is her generosity of spirit.  She served tirelessly in church, and tended to the needs of those no one else would find time for.  It struck me that these wounded spirits were weird, and I wanted nothing to do with them.  Mom could somehow overlook their faults, and refused to judge them, or at least to let any judgment influence her willingness to serve.

Mom and Dad married late in life, he a life-long 45-year-old bachelor and she a divorcee, both steeped in the Finnish culture and recent converts to the LDS church. Unable to have children of their own, and given their advanced age, they adopted me as an 11-year-old hellion.  Being adopted was an unusual blessing for someone of my age "in the system."  It changed the trajectory of my life and for that I will always be humbly and profoundly grateful.

And then there's my best friend growing up--Randy Cooke.  He died of cancer in 2008, but I still think about him and our many adventures, and sometimes he appears in a dream, usually outdoors, and always speaking softly and walking with long strides.

January 7-9, 2017.  Thanks for the memories.

Isaac's Storm

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, Erik Larson (The Worst Hard Time; Devil and the White City --both highly recommended).

Unreasonably short one-sentence description of the book: The story of the hurricane that decimated Galveston, Texas in 1900, centered on Isaac Cline, the resident meteorologist stationed there.

Random snippets:

• The city was not evacuated, despite sufficient evidence that a deadly storm was approaching. Many of the more than 6000 lost lives could have been saved were it not for politics, egos and a tragic unwillingness to admit the possibility of errors in judgment.
• Prior to the flood, Galveston was a bustling city of great promise, with over 500 saloons.  "The city exhibited a rare harmony of spirit. Blacks, whites, Jews and immigrants lived and worked side by side with an astonishing degree of mutual tolerance. Through the Negro Longshoremen's Association, Galveston's black population controlled wharf labor and enjoyed a standard of living higher than almost anywhere else in the country."
• During this period, meteorology was an emerging science and the National Weather Bureau was trying to establish credibility with a skeptical public.
• Generally, people believed that no storm could be greater than the worst of the past--a common human fallacy. Cline, a respected meteorologist, labeled those that suggested Galveston could be ravaged by a hurricane as suffering from "absurd delusions." "It would be impossible for any cyclone to create a storm wave which could materially injure the city."
• Related fact: A tsunami is a small hump of water travelling at great speeds--up to 500 mph--which explodes when it hits shores.
• So many Galveston citizens were washed away in the sea that many people would not eat fish, shrimp or crabs for several years.  Those corpses that remained were stacked and burned, the stench of the pyres carrying miles out to sea.
• The Galveston Flood exhibit was one of the most popular at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where a machine launched an artificial tidal wave over a model of the city.
• In 1910 a seawall was constructed, rising 17 feet above the beach and behind a wall of 27-foot granite boulders, which was referred to as "one of the greatest engineering works of modern times."  In addition, the entire city was elevated; using manual screw jacks to raise 2000 buildings, which were supported by 11 million pounds of fill.
• Galveston's Relief Committee was a new form of government, with a strong mayor overseeing commissioners for various functions.  This was hailed as a new dawn, supplanting Tammany style city organizations.

For 2017, I am revisiting 50 books I've enjoyed in the past few years and sharing a few interesting  facts and findings I discovered in them.

The Immortal Irishman

Perhaps the most demoralizing passage I have read in many years. I was born a Farley.  My father was a Farley and his Irish heritage burned deep in his soul. We traveled there once together, the only visit for each of us, and it was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.  So the history of oppression of the Irish people feels a little personal to me.

This from one of my favorite authors, Tim Egan: The opening paragraphs of his fascinating biography of Thomas F. Meagher, The Immortal Irishman.

"For the better part of seven centuries, to be Irish in Ireland was to live in a land not your own.  You called a lake next to your family home by one name, and the occupiers gave it another.  You knew a town had been built by the hands of your ancestors, the quarry of origin for the stones pressed into those streets, and you were forbidden from inhabiting it.  You could not enter a court of law as anything but a criminal or a snitch.  You could not worship your God, in a church open to the public, without risking prison or public flogging. You could not attend school, at any level, even at home. And if your parents sent you out of the country to be educated, you could not return. You could not marry, conduct trade or go into business with a Christian Protestant. You could not have a foster child. If orphaned, you were forced into a home full of people who rejected your faith. You could not play your favorite sports--hurling was specifically prohibited. You could not own land in more than 80 percent of your country; the bogs, barrens and highlands were your haunts. You could not own a horse worth more than 5 sterling. If you married an Englishman, you would lose everything upon his death. You could not speak your language outside your home. You would not think in Irish, so the logic went, if you were not allowed to speak in Irish.

"Your ancient verses were forbidden from being uttered in select company. Your songs could not be sung, your music not played, your Celtic crosses not displayed. You could be thrown in prison for expressions of your folklore or native art. One law made it a felony for "a piper, story-teller, babler or rimer" to be in the company of an Englishman. Another six statutes banished bards and minstrels. You could not vote. You could not hold office.  You were nothing. "The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic," said John Bowes, an eighteenth-century lord chancellor of the island. Nor could any such person draw a breath without the Crown's permission.

"The melodies of this nation and its favorite instrument were a particular target of English hatred. At one point, your fingernails could be removed if you were caught playing the harp. The Irish married to the sounds that came from that instrument, and they grieved in some of those same keys. But the indigenous music came to be seen as subversive--too nationalistic, too connected to the old stories. In 1603 it was proclaimed that "all manner of bards and harpers" were to be "exterminated by martial law." That same year, a few months before her death, it was said in Ireland that Queen Elizabeth had ordered her troops to "hang the harpers, wherever found, and destroy their instruments." The Virgin Queen allowed Shakespeare and Marlowe to reach great heights during her long reign, but Elizabeth had not a thimble of tolerance for a people she considered primitive. To encourage the elimination of one musical aspect of that culture, the government paid a bounty to anyone who turned in outlaws of the harp. The musicians were easy to round up; many of them were blind, music their only refuge and source of income.

"What had the Irish done to deserve these cruelties? They had refused to become English."

Leon Russell

Sittin' on a highway in a broken van
Thinkin' of you again.
Guess I have to hitchhike to the station;
With every step I see your face
Like a mirror looking back at me
Sayin' you're the only one.
Making me feel I could survive.
I'm so glad to be alive.
Nowhere to run and no guitar to play.
Mixed up inside and it's been raining all day
Since you want away.
Manhattan Island Serenade.

Leon Russell has always been one of my favorite performers.  As a teenager, my friend Randy and I would buy his albums as they came out, and I remember us listening repeatedly to the eponymous Leon Russell, Leon Russell and The Shelter People, Leon Live, Hank Wilson's Back and--still one of my favorite albums for late-night solo road trips--Carney.

He was a gifted songwriter, and many of his songs became hits for other leading musicians. like This Masquerade (George Benson), Superstar (The Carpenters) and A Song for You (Danny Hathaway and many others).  He was highly respected throughout the music industry, producing for many of the top stars (Stones, Dylan, Sinatra) and often performing as well (keyboards, guitar). Elton John says Russell was his biggest influence as a pianist and songwriter.

I saw him in concert in Florida in the 90's. He was already prematurely hobbled then, walking with a cane and sitting at the keyboards throughout his performance. But his voice was still distinctive and captivating and the concert featured both his mournful love songs and the high-energy rockers that always made him fun.

R.I.P. Leon Russell.  Today I'm singing a song for you.

What Goes Around ...

I had the good fortune of taking a car full of teens to a mentor picnic.  One of them, a 14-year-old Hispanic boy named Walter (the only Latino I have ever met with that name!),  said he liked music. So we took turns sharing some of our favorite songs.

He started with the powerfully emotive Disturbed cover of Sounds of Silence. (I felt very with-it, having already heard it.)  Of course, I had to expose him to the exquisite harmonies of  Simon & Garfunkel in the original version, which was new to him.

After sharing a few more songs, including turning him on to Odetta's Midnight Special, Walter shocked me with this pick from his personal library, "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire," by the Ink Spots, which was a big hit in 1942!  My faith in the next generation has been restored.

How to Create a Mind: Ray Kurzweil

Another favorite book from my library--notes from rereading it today:

• The story of human intelligence begins with a universe that is capable of encoding information. The odds of this happening are astronomically small.
• Only homo sapiens have a knowledge base that evolves, grows exponentially, and is passed down from one generation to another.
• Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR) states that an evolutionary process inherently accelerates and its products grow exponentially in complexity and capability.  An example of this would be the human genome project: The amount of genetic data the world has sequenced has doubled every year for the past 20 years (book was published in 2012).
• The world is inherently hierarchical.  Trees have limbs, limbs have branches, branches have leaves.  The brain stores and reassembles memories in a similar hierarchical structure.  Paragraphs are composed of sentences, then of words, then letters, and most fundamentally, strokes.  Our brain stores each of these strokes in separate locations. restoring them as patterns as needed.
• Our memories are listed in forward order, and we can only remember them as such.  (Try reciting the alphabet backwards.)
• The neocortex is the part of the brain responsible for memory, perception and critical thinking. The basic algorithm of the neocortex is pattern recognition. The basic unit of the neocortex, according to Kurzweil, is a collection of neurons which is a pattern recognizer.
• Images are stored as lists of features which are elements of patterns.  Hence there is much overlap and redundancy with similar images.
• "Identity lies not in our genes, but in the connections between our brain cells."  MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung.
• Our memories are sequential and in order.  They can be accessed in the order they are remembered.  We are unable to directly reverse the sequence of a memory.  (Try reciting the alphabet backwards.)
• Our memories are stored as sequences of patterns.  There are no videos, images or sound recordings stored in the brain.  Memories that are not accessed dim over time.
• Our conscious experience of our perceptions is actually changed by our experience. We are constantly predicting the future and hypothesizing what we will experience.  This expectation influences what we will actually perceive.
• A human master in a particular field has mastered about 100,000 chunks of knowledge.
• The neocortex is "plastic," i.e. can change.  For instance, if one portion is damaged or injured, another portion of the neocortex can take over those responsibilities.  In an extreme example, there is evidence that the visual cortex in blind people can be used for language processing. This is possible because all sections of the neocortex use the same basic pattern-recognition and prediction algorithm.  It's what the brain does.
• Only mammals have neocortexes.  the human neocortex is much bigger than other mammals. Those folds in the brain allow broader surface area of the neocortex to fit into our skulls.

Memento Mori

There are few better illustrations of the sometimes curious vestiges of fame than Lil Johnson, a female blues singer who recorded in the 1920's and 1930's. Johnson's specialty was hokum, a popular form of early blues based on thinly veiled sexual metaphors.  (It's not hard to find elements of hokum in the majority of blues songs from that golden era.) Johnson was one of the more risque practitioners, whose popular recordings included "Press My Button (Ring My Bell)," "Get 'Em From the Peanut Man (Hot Nuts)," and "Anybody Want to Buy My Cabbage?"

A diligent search on the web reveals almost nothing about Johnson's life.  Blues historians can't ascertain when or where she was born, anything about her family or what happened to her after she quit recording in 1937.  All we have is her music--and as I sit here listening to her sing "You'll Never Miss Your Jelly Till Your Jelly Roller's Gone," I wonder where she came from and where she went and how she saw her career.  Perhaps she thought that, but for the twists of fortune, she might have had the success of Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith, or at least Ida Cox or Victoria Spivey. But I can only imagine.

This from "You're Just a Cream Puff":

You're like an automobile:
You wanna go fast.
But before you get started
You run out of gas.

R.I.P Lil Johnson.  Ars longa, vita brevis.

The Invention of Air

I have been thinking that it might be fun to take interesting tidbits from some of the books I've read recently and post them.  I don't want to write  book reviews; rather, just note a few of the things that caught my attention. (I have an ulterior motive--to aid in my memory.) I'm starting with a book I just finished today: The Invention of Air, by Steven Johnson.  It's a terrific book about Joseph Priestly, one of the seminal thinkers of the late 18th and early 19th century and a leading scientist of the Enlightenment.

• Ben Franklin (a great friend and mentor to Priestly) was the first to map the path of the Gulf Stream across the Atlantic, which was very beneficial to the shipping industry in accelerating the east-bound transatlantic voyages.
• In the 18th century, science was referred to as "natural philosophy."
• Franklin was really a significant figure in the early development of the science of electricity. I'd always thought he was just a dabbler, and that his kite experiment was on the fringe of the science. Actually, Franklin coined the terms "charged," "battery" and "conductor."
• In the early days of electricity in the mid-1700's the primary application was parlor tricks.  Here's a drawing of a boy hanging from a silk rope that transfers static electricity to a young girl by touch. Volunteers would be called from the audience to experience the voltage first-hand.  Those that practiced this magic for entertainment were known as ... electricians.
  
• Samuel Boswell, speaking wryly on politicians: "I said that, as it seemed to be agreed that all members of Parliament became corrupted, it was better to chuse (sic) men that were already bad, and so save good men."
• European men in the 18th century were two inches shorter than in the 21st century. Five-foot-eight-inches was considered tall.
• Marx correctly identified three new macro processes that would drive change in the coming centuries: Class struggle, the evolution of capital and technological innovation. 
• Most great inventors in history have been blessed with the gift of leisure time.
• Priestly was the first to make carbonated beverages, but incorrectly believed drinking them would prevent scurvy.  
• As Johnson has written elsewhere, the emergence of coffeehouses in the 17th and 18th centuries played a major role in the development of thought and innovation.  One reason was that coffeehouses became hubs of cross-disciplinary interaction.  Another was that, prior to the introduction of coffee into Europe, the most popular beverages were beer and wine, because the fermentation made them a much safer drink than water.  It was not unusual for men to drink beer for breakfast and throughout the day. As most college students can attest, caffeine is a more effective intellectual catalyst than beer. 
• One of the highly debated areas of 18th-century science was why things burned up. One popular (but famously incorrect) theory was that all things that could burn contained a substance call phlogiston, which was used up in the burning process.
• Giantism was a defining characteristic of the Carboniferous Age, between 350 million and 300 million years ago, before the earliest dinosaurs. The fossil record reveals giant dragonflies, ferns the size of oak trees, flies as big as birds and 50-foot tall grasses.  By 250 million B.C. the scale of things was restored to what we see on Earth today.  This phenomenon was the result of an unusually high level of oxygen in the air--35% vs. the current 20%.  
• One of the keys to the eventual success of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War was Franklin negotiating the purchase of 200 tons of a superior French gunpowder, which gave the Americans a superior firing range vs. the British.
• Priestly's book "History of the Corruptions of Christianity" got him chased out of England. A Unitarian minister, Priestly believed that the magic and mysticism of Christianity, including the concept of the Trinity, were all added long after Christ had died. His view was highly controversial and incendiary, but was embraced by his good friend Thomas Jefferson, as it reconciled science with a new form of Christianity.  Jefferson once wrote "I am a sect by myself, as far as I know."
• Priestly was the first scientist who sought exile in America.  He settled in North Central Pennsylvania, not far from Williamsport.
• The early definitions of the term "innovation" were essentially negative, i.e. a new development that threatened the existing order in a detrimental way.
• Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4, 1926, 50 years to the day after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Dinwiddie and Dylan

Last night I was listening to some obscure music from 1902--the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet, which specialized in black jubilee music and toured as part of a vaudeville revue.  Suddenly, I hear something that sounds unmistakenly like Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Free," from his The Freewheeling Bob Dylan album.  I listen again, and sure enough, Dylan borrowed the tune from the recording of "The Poor Mourner."

You can listen to both on Spotify or Rdio.

A lot of rock 'n roll songs trace their roots from blues classics, including Statesboro Blues, Midnight Special, CC Rider, Whole Lotta Love, Rock Me Baby, Midnight Hour, Smokestack Lightning and more.  But this one--from the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet in 1902--struck me as the most surprising.

Robert Wilkins

Last night I discovered Robert Wilkins, a somewhat obscure blues singer and guitarist, born in 1896 in Hernando, Mississippi, just south of Memphis.  It was midnight and I was winding down, chilling to his light-fingered Piedmont-style guitar, crisp vocals and thoughtful lyrics, when this line from Falling Down Blues caught my attention:

I'll certainly treat you just like you was white.
I'll certainly treat you just like you was white.
If that don't satisfy you, girl I'll take your life.

All sorts of things crossed my mind.  First, how politically incorrect!  And then, how much things have changed, only to come back.  In a different context, it almost sounds like a contemporary rap lyric.

Robert Wilkins has an interesting story. In 1928 he recorded the song Rolling Stone, for Victor Records.  He only did a few other blues recording sessions, the last one in 1935, and his body of recorded work is limited.  Blues was a rough and rowdy scene in those days. with musicians playing bawdy songs in juke joints, parties and travelling medicine shows, with plenty of home-made liquor and a surprisingly abundant supply of drugs.


The story is that Wilkins' wife became very ill and he prayed at her bedside that if God would let her live he would give up the blues and devote himself to religion. His wife did recover and Wilkins stayed true to his word and became a minister, often playing guitar and singing as part of his service. But he abandoned the old blues lyrics, often replacing them with religious ones.

His most famous song started as a blues tune--That's No Way to Get Along, which was later covered by Eric Clapton, Guy Davis and others. Wilkins rewrote the lyrics and in 1964, at the age of 72, recorded the new version as The Prodigal Son, (by The Reverend Robert Wilkins--Memphis Gospel Singer).  In 1968, a modestly altered version of Prodigal Son appeared on the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet album, but listed Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as writers/composers. When the song was identified as a Wilkins original, the Stones had to re-release the album with the proper credits. Copies of the original Beggars Banquet album with the misappropriated credits are a rare collectors' item.

Robert Wilkins died in 1987 in Memphis, Tennessee, at the age of 92.

New York State of Mind

Rebecca and I were in New York City last week, something we hadn't done together in many years.  I had a long list of things I'd like to do, but as I look back, most of our time was spent riding subways, walking to subways, looking for subways, turning around at the wrong entrances and walking from subways to some mystifying address.

Of course, this wasn't all that we did.  We also spent quite a bit of time deciphering subway maps. And being technologically savvy, we frequently gazed in confusion at Google Maps on our cell phones or iPad. Sometimes, for a change of pace, we turned on the audible walking directions. But since the decibel level on a Manhattan sidewalk is only slightly less than a Deep Purple concert I went to in high school, we couldn't hear a thing.  (By the way, if you reply "What?" or "Huh?" to the Google Maps Navigation, it just ignores you. Very rude.)

And sometimes we just walked around and looked at things, or at people, which there are a lot of in Manhattan.

Lest anyone think our trip was uneventful, that's far from true. We also stepped out and tried something new--using the fast-growing Uber transportation service.  Uber-driving seems to be a very popular new career for Eastern European emigrants. One of the benefits of Uber over taxis is that now the driver and I have each other's cell phone numbers, in case we want to get together for some stroganov and pickled herring.

We did some other stuff, too, but I don't recall what it was.

What the App?

I just received this from a friend who has developed an app, addressed to his "Friends and Family."  An excerpt from the email:

Apple relies very heavily on Ratings of apps to rank you in the App store and so we really need help boosting our number of 5 star ratings.  Could you please take a quick minute and give us a rating in the App Store.  Please also ask your kids or anyone with an iPhone to take a quick minute as well.

And it strikes me that asking friends and their kids to rate an app that they haven't used is less than admirable, both in a personal and business context.  Ask me to try, great.  Ask me to forward something, no problem.  Or to follow, share, etc.  But to say a product is great when I haven't used it ...

I've always been a little suspect about ratings, but now even more so, knowing someone who is a good person seemed quite comfortable with this practice.