On this date in 1939 the Wepner family in New York City welcomed the arrival of a son, Charles. The lad grew up in straitened circumstances in Bayonne, New Jersey where he learned how to fight at an early age. After a spell in the Marines, Wepner became a professional boxer at a high level, earning fights with (and losing decisively to) pugilistic luminaries such as Sonny Liston, George Foreman, Mike Tyson, and Muhammed Ali. He once fought a bear, and was reputed to be the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, but what brings him to your attention today is his famous nickname: “The Bayonne Bleeder”.
Since the days of bareknuckle contests, boxers have had nicknames – heavyweight champ James John Corbett, for example, whose sobriquets “Gentleman Jim” and “The Dancing Master” spoke to his stylish technique. Similarly named were “Sugar” Ray Robinson and Archie Moore, “The Mongoose”.
Some monikers are bestowed because of geographical origins — John L.Sullivan, “The Boston Strong Boy” or Argentinian Luis Firpo, “The Wild Bull of the Pampas”. Jack Dempsey was “The Manassa Mauler” and Tommy Hearns of Detroit was “The Motor City Cobra”. Larry Holmes was “The Easton Assassin”. Barry McGuigan who first saw the light of day in Clones, County Monaghan, Ireland was inevitably known as “The Clones Cyclone”. Who said Voltairean wit was dead?
Size can get a guy a name. Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera was called “The Ambling Alp”, “The Gentle Giant” and “The Vast Venetian”.
Some nicknames were racial, as in the case of Peter “Black Prince” Jackson or Gerry Cooney, “The Great White Hope”. Did you know that, before he was dubbed “The Brown Bomber”, Joe Lewis was saddled with hearing himself referred to as “The Dark Destroyer”, “The Sepia Socker” and “The Coffee-Colored KO King”?
Many sportswriters cannot avoid puns and so we have Michael “Second to” Nunn or Manny “Pac-Man” Pacquaio. Breidis Prescott defeated hitherto-unbeaten Amir Khan and was thereafter known as “The Khanqueror”. James Broad could not escape the tag “Broad-Axe”.
Most boxing nicknames, however, attempt to convey an aura of menace. Roberto “Hands of Stone” Duran; Jake LaMotta, “The Raging Bull”; “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier; “Bonecrusher” Smith (who actually had a university degree in business administration); and my favourite, Marco Antonio Barrera, “The Baby-Faced Assassin” whose scientific thrashing of the insufferable Prince Naseem Hamed was such a pleasure to watch in 2001.
The people of the eastern Baltic were the last Europeans to be Christianized, clinging to their polytheism despite attempts by the Catholic and Orthodox Churches to evangelize them. The orders of the Northern Crusade – the Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Order – took it upon themselves to wage war against the pagans (and occasionally their Orthodox neighbours), enforce conversion, and spread Germanic hegemony. History records many notable battles fought by these western knights, the most famous of which was the Battle on the Ice memorialized by Sergei Eisenstein in his epic 1938 film Alexander Nevsky.
(It’s a jolly little piece of Stalinist propaganda with a musical score by Prokofiev that I will deal with here in the future.)
The knights lost that fight, but on this day in 1336 they were triumphant in an attack on a pagan stronghold of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the hill fort at Pilėnai. A force of some 6,000, mostly German but also French and Austrian nobles and their detachments, approached the fort in which thousands of refugees had sought shelter. According to medieval chroniclers, the people panicked and resolved to kill themselves rather than be captured and enslaved. One elderly woman was said to have axed 100 people to death before killing herself. The commander of the defenders, Duke Margris, slew his own wife and guards before committing suicide.
The significance of the fight was its role in buttressing Lithuanian nationalism. The battle inspired epic poems, novels, operas, and historic re-enactments.
The Great White Way has seen its spectacular successes over the years. We are still humming the tunes from Broadway musicals such as Showboat, Camelot, The Music Man, Annie, and Phantom of the Opera. (On request, I believe I could produce creditable renditions of most of the songs from Finian’s Rainbow.) Comedies such as The Producers or Barefoot in the Park and dramas such as Death of a Salesman, Come From Away and Amadeus are the stuff of legends.
Legendary too are the great flops – shows that were badly-cast, ill-conceived, overly-ambitious, or just too expensive to stage. Rockabye Hamlet, for example; a 1976 attempt to put the Prince of Denmark to music with lines such as this piece of advice from Polonius to Laertes: “Good son, you return to France/Keep your divinity inside your pants.” It lasted 7 performances, which is two more than Carrie: the Musical managed to stage in 1988. Apparently there was less of an audience for pig’s blood showers than the producers anticipated.
Fancy a dramatic investigation of the Shroud of Turin? Into the Light was turned off after six performances in 1986. The Broadway version of the Odyssey, entitled (wait for it) Home Sweet Homer, starring Yul Brynner closed after a single show – the producers had wanted to avoid putting it on altogether but Brynner’s contract stipulated that at least one performance was required. Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark might have continued had not the production cost $75 million before opening and requiring $1,000,000 a week to keep the lights on.
But when Broadway mavens gather around the campfire and tell chilling stories about truly desperately bad shows, talk always turns to The Moose Murders, a “mystery farce” which opened (and closed) on this day in 1983. Trapped by a storm in a wilderness lodge, the characters play a murder mystery game. Killings, flaccid slapstick, failed gags, incest, and a kick in the groin to a man in a moose costume made for a deathly silence from the audience and a closing after the first night. Movie and radio legend Eve Arden was to star but withdrew when it became obvious she could no longer memorize lines. (She did send a gracious note to the cast.)
Critics were not kind. It has been called “the golden standard of awfulness against which all theatre is judged.” The New York Times writer Frank Rich said it was “the worst play I’ve ever seen on a Broadway stage”. In fact, in a magazine’s list of Great Disasters of the Twentieth Century the play ranked Number Five (just behind New Coke). The play’s author Arthur Bicknell did manage to make a bit of money from it by penning Moose Murdered, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Broadway Bomb.
This engagement, fought during the Second Anglo-Boer War, was the first time that men in Canadian uniform, fighting in a Canadian unit, made war overseas. Troops from The Royal Canadian Regiment of Infantry under William Otter (who had taken part in putting down the Northwest Rebellion in western Canada in 1885) helped pin down some 4,000 Boers. Advancing by night towards the enemy lines, quietly digging trenches on high ground 65 yards from the Boer lines, they forced the enemy kommando to surrender.
It was the first significant British victory of the war, despite the blundering of British officers such as General Kitchener who insisted on frontal attacks on entrenched Boer positions — always a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of men on both sides, including 31 Canadians, died at Paardeberg.
Precarity is today’s topic. We are, all of us, mortal – pre-programmed to strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then be heard no more, at least upon this earthly stage. We are all destined to die, but medical advances of the last 150 years have led us to trust that we will spend our last days as elderly creatures awaiting a painless slide into whatever we hold to be beyond the veil. Early death is deemed a tragedy, an unexpected and unfair curtailing of what was supposed to be a long and healthy life.
Our ancestors held no such delusions. Death was ever-present and life was expected to be rough and painful and short. Prophets, poets, and philosophers for centuries mused upon mortality as the chiefest of subjects. The best meditation on the theme came from the pen of Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century English clergyman, in the opening paragraph of his 1651 classic The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. Taylor conjures up a series of metaphors as he struggles to find the best image to describe just how temporary and contingent human life is. We will meet some of the perils of early-modern life that he mentions in further posts.
A Man is a Bubble (said the Greek Proverb); which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, All the world is a Storm, and Men rise up in their several generations like Bubbles descending, from God and the dew of Heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from Nature and Providence: and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of Water, having had no other businesse in the world but to be born that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man: He is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning Mushromes, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulnesse; some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of Vanity be expired, and then peradventure the Sun shines hot upon their heads and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a childe, of a careless Nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a Doves neck or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are phantastickal; and so he dances out the gayety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humor: and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances, and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing were equally the issues of an Almighty power. And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit mans condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf, the smallest, the weakest piece of a short liv’d unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow: Another, the dream of the shadow of smoak. But St James spake by a more excellent Spirit, saying, Our life is but a vapour, viz., drawn from the earth by a celestial influence: made of smoak, or the lighter parts of water, tossed with every winde, moved by the motion of a superior body, without vertue in it self, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the Sun its Foster-Father. But it is lighter yet. It is but appearing; a phantastick vapor, an apparition, nothing real: it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia’s chair, or Pelops shoulder, or the circles of Heaven: appearances, for which you cannot have a word that can signify a veryer nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive; a vapour, and phantastickal, or a mere appearance, and this but for a little while neither; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departeth, or like a tale that is told, or as a dream when one awaketh: A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The summe of all is this: That thou art a man, then whom there is not in the world any greater instance of heights and declensions, of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of laughter and tears, of groans and death.
“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So said L.P. Hartley in a 1953 novel The Go-Between (made into a 1971 film with the divine Julie Christie.) Though human nature has remained unchanged since Adam and Eve were evicted from their garden tenancy, human customs change wildly over time. Our ancestors have done things very differently. In the next few postings I’m going to show mindsets that are alien to those of today.
Take, for instance, this image. It’s an ostrakon, a potsherd (or, occasionally as in this case, a piece of limestone) which was used in the ancient world as a surface to write on. Athenians used shards of broken pottery as ballots when voting on whether to exile (thus ostracize) over-ambitious politicians. This example was used in Egypt, c. 1250 BC, as a way to record absences from a work site.
As you might expect, illness is the most frequent reason for not showing up to work but other reasons reveal a world far from our contemporary lives. How many modern Human Resources offices have received the following excuses?
A grumpy nineteenth-century critic of the English Valentine’s Day said that it was “now almost everywhere a much degenerated festival, the only observance of any note consisting merely of the sending of jocular anonymous letters to parties whom one wishes to quiz, and this confined very much to the humbler classes.”
An eighteenth-century English Valentine custom was described thusly:
On the eve of St. Valentine’s Day the young folks in England and Scotland, by a very ancient custom, celebrate a little festival. An equal number of maids and bachelors get together: each writes their true or some feigned name upon separate billets, which they roll up, and draw by way of lots, the maids taking the men’s billets, and the men the maids’: so that each of the young men lights upon a girl that he calls his valentine, and each of the girls upon a young man whom she calls hers. By this means each has two valentines: but the man sticks faster to the valentine that has fallen to him than to the valentine to whom he is fallen. Fortune having thus divided the company into so many couples, the valentines give balls and treats to their mistresses, wear their billets several days upon their bosoms or sleeves, and this little sport often ends in love.
In the 1750s an English magazine article described this girlish fortune-telling practice:
Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and the night before, I got five bay-leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle: and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk, and filled it with salt: and when I went to bed, ate it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers’ names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water; and the first that rose up was to be our valentine. Would you think it?—Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay a-bed and shut my eyes all the morning, till he came to our house: for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world.
Since Chaucer’s day it has been imagined that February 14 was linked to the love life of birds. John Donne made this connection in a poem celebrating the wedding of England’s Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine (aka “the Winter King”) which took place on Valentine’s Day 1615.
Hail, Bishop Valentine! whose day this is: All the air is thy diocese, And all the chirping choristers And other birds are thy parishioners: Thou marryest every year The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove: The sparrow that neglects his life for love, The household bird with the red stomacher: Thou mak’st the blackbird speed as soon As cloth the goldfinch or the halcyon– This day more cheerfully than ever shine, This day which might inflame thyself, old Valentine!
Early in the 16th century much of Italy was a battlefield as armies of independent city states, France, Spain, and the papacy vied for control of the peninsula. On this date in 1503 French and Italian knights battled, not over politics, but national honour.
In southern Italy a number of French knights were taken prisoner in a skirmish and brought as captives to the town of Barletta. In chivalric fashion, they were invited to a banquet where one of them, a mouthy individual named Charles de la Motte, made disparaging remarks about the courage of Italian men of war. Feelings were hurt, an argument ensued and the upshot of it was a challenge: 13 Italian knights would joust with an equal number of Frenchmen. Winners would be awarded the horses and weapons of the vanquished as well as 100 ducats. De la Motte would lead the French and Ettore Fieramosca, a famous leader of condottieri would be at the head of the Italian knights.
In a series of encounters that went on all day and into the evening, the Italians emerged triumphant, winning all 13 battles. The French were forced to apologize for their intemperate speech. News of the challenge spread throughout Italy and became the stuff of legends. A monument was set up in Barletta to commemorate the event, but 300 years later when Napoleonic armies invaded the area, French troops tore the statue down. It was put back up when the Corsican Tyrant was defeated and to this day Barletta is nicknamed Città della Disfida, “City of the Challenge”. An annual festival celebrates the encounter and costumed figures recreate the day of battles.
On the poster above you can see the coats of arms of the 13 Italian knights and the arms of the City of Barletta.
Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) was born in Halicarnassus, an Ionian city occupied by the Persian empire, at the eastern periphery of the Greek world where Greeks and foreigners met regularly, a place where a cosmopolitan attitude would have been natural. [But remember that the Greek word for foreigner was “barbarian”.] Herodotus came from a wealthy family, influential in politics and the arts — an uncle had written an epic poem called Ioniks on the foundation of the Ionian cities. Though the Persians were the city’s overlords, they had permitted a local tyrant to rule directly — this was the remarkable woman Artemisia (who appears played by Eva Green in the execrable movie 300 Rise of an Empire). Herodotus participated in an attempted coup against her and after its failure he was exiled. He returned later and, probably with the help of Athens, overthrew a tyranny led by Artemesia’s grandson but he found that he was unpopular with the citizenry and left his native city again. When the call when out for colonists to settle at Thurii in southern Italy in 443 BC, Herodotus volunteered along with the famous sophist Protagoras. He may well have died here, probably around the year 425 BC.
Exile was a common feature of life for prominent Greeks. Every city at any given time had citizens banished for a fixed time or forever, many of them scheming to return and work the same fate for their enemies. Athens institutionalized exile with its practice of ostracism and several of the heroic figures in Herodotus will be exiled by their city. Most such exiles however did not leave Greece but Herodotus seems to have been different in this regard. During his life in exile he made extensive travels through the Mediterranean world where he did his “researches” for his Persian Wars. We know he went to Egypt and made a trip to Tyre and Babylon, then all in the Persian empire; he voyaged into the Black Sea and into what is now the Ukraine and Russia, going 40 days journey up the Dnieper River. Ionia, Greece and southern Italy were all part of the Hellenic world which he knew personally. He does not seem to have spoken any other language than Greek (which may account for his credulity in some instances) and does not seem to have been an assiduous note-taker during his travels…”I seem to remember, etc.”
His book appears to have been written over a long period of time and amended more than once before its publication, which occurred sometime between 430-424 BC. It is a loosely-knit book with numerous digressions (deliberate and enjoyable). Such conventions were from Homer, on whom his audiences were brought up. It also points to the fact that it was meant to be read aloud; some sections are clearly meant for a stand-alone lecture — one of the ways that Herodotus earned his living during his exile. Silent reading was still relatively rare in any work longer than a letter. The Greeks and Romans reacted more responsively and immediately to the spoken word than we do. There is one source that claims that the Athenians voted Herodotus the sum of ten talents after hearing a part of his work. Now Persian Wars is a very pro-Athenian piece at a time when Athens was not popular but ten talents was an unbelievable fortune — 570 pounds of silver? We do know too that Thebes told him to take a hike and refused to let him speak to their young men but that Spartans were great fans of history — they hated thinking but they loved tales of war, politics and conflict.
The picture above shows a handsome modern historian clad in the Tilley hat that is the unmistakeable sign of a Canadian in foreign climes. He stands beside the bust of Herodotus in his home town, now known as Bodrum in southwestern Turkey. It’s a rather gaudy tourist site these days, most visitors coming for the gorgeous sea and the night clubs, but it contains a few memorials to Herodotus, some fragments of the Mausoleum that was once one of the Seven Wonders, and a splendid crusader castle.
Depression-era America was a period in which its criminal element were figures of great public interest. The restrictions of Prohibition and the hardships of the Dirty Thirties helped persuade many law-abiding citizens that the nation’s outlaw class were latter-day Robin Hoods or at least celebrities worth reading about. The names of John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, and Ma Barker were on the lips of school children, reporters, politicians, and furious police officials.
One of the most famed of the banditti was Charles Arthur Floyd, aka “Pretty Boy”, fabled in literature, film, and song. Listen to his tale as recounted by Woody Guthrie:
Well gather round me children, a story I will tell About pretty boy Floyd the outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well. It was in the town of Shawnee on a Saturday afternoon His wife beside him in the wagon as into town they rode.
Then along came the deputy sheriff in a manner rather rude Using vulgar words of language, his wife she overheard. Then pretty boy grabbed a long chain and the deputy grabbed a gun And in the fight that followed he laid that deputy down.
Then he ran to the trees and bushes to live a life of shame Every crime in Oklahoma was added to his name. He ran to the trees and bushes on the Canadian river shore And many a starving farmer opened up his door.
It was in Oklahoma City, it was on a Christmas day A whole carload of groceries with a letter that did say: You say that I’m an outlaw, you say that I’m a thief Well here’s a Christmas dinner for the families on relief.
As through this life you travel you meet some funny men. Some will rob you with a six-gun and some with a fountain pen. As through this life you ramble, as through this life you roam You’ll never see an outlaw take a family from their home.
There is a lot of poetic anti-capitalist license in Guthrie’s version of events. Rather than being forced into a life of crime, Floyd was already a thief and convict by the time he was 21. After his release from prison in 1929 he turned his hand to bank robbing. Despite the killings that often marked his passage, he acquired a reputation as a friend of the common man. Tales spread of his destroying mortgage documentation in banks and giving money to poor farmers, but there is little hard proof of this. What can be proven is a series of murders and thefts in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Ohio.
In June 1933 “the Kansas City Massacre” made the headlines; four policemen and a prisoner were killed in a botched rescue attempt – Floyd was named as a suspect but he publicly denied his involvement. By now local and federal authorities were turning up the pressure on the brigands. Machine Gun Kelly was caught, Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger had been gunned down, vaulting Floyd to the top of the Most Wanted List. In October 1934, after a car crash Floyd was cornered in a farmer’s field and shot to death. Baby Face Nelson was killed within weeks and Ma Barker was shot a few months later. The age of the rural outlaws had ended.
