Archive for history
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
Thirty-six years ago, the worst song of all time reached #1 on the Billboard charts.
That sounds like opinion, but it’s almost morphed into fact.
The poll was conducted by CNN in 2006. The winner (loser?) was Paul Anka’s ode to his expectant wife, “(You’re) Having My Baby,” which found itself on the top of the charts on this day in 1974.
Anka, whose songwriting prowess cannot be denied, penned a stinker when he wrote “YHMB,” which was written in celebration of the impending birth of Anka and his wife’s fifth child. Anka wrote the song while appearing at Lake Tahoe.
At the suggestion of United Artists recording executive Bob Skaff, Anka was asked to change the song from a solo effort to a duet with virtually unknown vocalist Odia Coates, who made the mistake of being present in the studio when the song was about to be recorded.
Anka took a lot of abuse from women’s rights activists, who saw the lyrics and the spirit of the “YHMB” to be highly chauvinistic, egotistical, and basically obnoxious.
Among other issues, the song was criticized for declaring the child was the man’s, rather than the couple’s. Anka would later replace the line “you’re having my baby” with “you’re having our baby” while performing in concert.
The song was so vilified that Anka would often simply omit it when he sang a batch of his old hits in concerts.
Then there’s the 2006 CNN poll, which placed “YHMB” at the top of the heap when it comes to all-time bad songs.
Paul Anka
The National Organization for Women gave Anka the satiric “Keep Her in Her Place” award during “its annual putdown of male chauvinism” in the media on Women’s Equality Day. Ms. Magazine “awarded” Anka their “Male Chauvinistic Pig of the Year” award.
All that, yet the song achieved great commercial success.
One of the lines from the song that took some heat stated that while the woman could have “swept it from [her] life” (abortion), she hadn’t because it was “a wonderful way of showing how much she loves him” In response to feminists, Anka said the song was “a love song”.
The song is typical 1970s shlock—a syrupy melody and an arrangement that screams lounge singer.
But it topped the charts, 36 years ago today.
Perhaps no Paul Anka quote is more appropriate for this discussion than the following.
“I believe in criticism,” he once said.
And he’s gotten a ton of it, for a song he probably innocently wrote over three decades ago.
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
We’re doing all the wrong things in our cars nowadays.
We’re texting, talking on the phone, shaving, putting on makeup. Driving falls somewhere in the middle of the pack.
I like what we used to do in our cars—like eating (when the car is parked) and watching movies with speakers hanging on the windows.
The Woodward Dream Cruise is this weekend, so it’s impossible not to turn on the wayback machine.
They ran rampant in the 1950s and ’60s—drive-ins of both food and cinema.
Woodward was one of the main providers of the greasy spoons at which you’d park and a gum-chewing, sassy girl would take your order. Maybe she was on roller skates.
But other main thoroughfares were drive-in havens: Gratiot, Groesbeck, Jefferson.
Now, all you can muster for a drive-in food fix is the occasional A&W or the newish Sonic locations.
If you wanted dinner AND a movie, you could do that in your car as well; but the drive-in theaters are pretty much gone, too.
I missed the cruising by a hair; I grew up in the ’70s, and didn’t start driving until 1979. By then, cruising was fading fast. But it sounds like fun: zooming up and down a busy pike, windows rolled down, flirting and having a good old time.
Then, when your stomach growled, you pulled in to any one of many joints where you could eat in your buggy.
I was able to enjoy a couple drive-in eateries as a child: the Big Boy at the southwest corner of Plymouth and Farmington Roads in Livonia, and Daly’s at Merriman and Plymouth. They’re both still there, but the Big Boy hasn’t been a drive-in for years. You can still eat in your car at Daly’s—home of the foot long Daly Dog coney.
“Get the Daly Habit!,” it still screams on all their bags and containers.
I remember eating fish and chips from Big Boy in the car, back when they served it in a basket lined with faux newsprint from the U.K. to give it that “genuine” British fish and chips feel.
Menus on stands with speakers at every parking space, under a large awning; what a cool concept.
I still go to Daly’s, by the way—usually when we visit my mother in Livonia. She likes it, too. Always has.
It’s good food at a low price, and it’s filling and hearty.
Another cool concept.
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
The only thing we know for certain about Jimmy Hoffa’s fate is that he’s dead.
The former Teamsters union leader and jailbird disappeared 35 years ago this Friday, and was probably dead hours later, if that.
You’ve heard the rumors, the speculation, the jokes, about what became of Hoffa after he pulled into the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant on Telegraph and Maple in Bloomfield Hills on July 30, 1975.
For days and weeks afterward, though, there was still hope that Hoffa would be found.
Likely, though, Hoffa was murdered moments after hopping into a car to go visit mob bosses.
Hoffa was about to take control of the Teamsters once more. At least, that was his hope, after serving jail time for racketeering and other charges.
According to the most reliable accounts, Hoffa thought he was meeting mobsters Tony Provenzano (of New York/New Jersey) and Tony Giacolone (of Detroit) when he went to the Machus Red Fox. Police later found Hoffa’s car in the parking lot but no sign of him.
For their part, neither Provenzano nor Giacolone were proven to be near the restaurant that afternoon (Hoffa disappeared at roughly 2:45 p.m.), nor did they acknowledge to having had a meeting scheduled with Hoffa, period.
Hoffa was declared legally dead on July 30, 1982—seven years after his disappearance.
It’s one of the most famous cold cases in history, but I never really understood the fascination.
Hoffa was dead, we all knew that. So if you’re not a cop or the FBI, or a member of Hoffa’s family, why do you care what happened to him and by whose hand?
I don’t mean to sound cavalier, but I think we all kind of know how this thing went down. We just don’t have the details.
Even the most lay of laymen knows how these mob things work. You go for a ride, you don’t come back. And if they (the mob) don’t want your body found, it won’t be found. If they want it found, they’ll make sure of that, too—on their terms.
Yet for years there has been no end to the rumors and so-called confessions about what ultimately happened to Hoffa—how, and where his remains were disposed of.
He was buried under the then-new Giants Stadium, which opened in 1976. He was chopped up in a wood chipper. He was shot dead in a house in Detroit and buried beneath the floorboards.
Blah, blah, blah.
Sure, it would be kind of neat if a definitive, verifiable account of what happened to Hoffa ever came to light. Just as it would for Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, and any other high-profile missing persons case.
Don’t hold your breath.
If we haven’t had a deathbed confession by now or a best-selling book that proves, once and for all, what befell Hoffa after he shut off his engine at the Machus Red Fox on July 30, 1975, then I got news for you, folks: we ain’t never getting one.
What could possibly come to light now that would hold any water? And how could it be proven to be the real deal?
We’re getting to the point now where most of the people who could have provided salient, certifiable information are dead.
Hoffa, had he lived until today, would be 97 years old.
He would have made a good baseball umpire.
“I may have many faults,” Jimmy Hoffa once said. “But being wrong ain’t one of them.”
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
The smoking gun document leaked out, and its words were damning for the words’ originator.
The President of the United States, no less, was being called out by a powerful general for having a different sort of wartime strategy than the general would prefer. If the president’s path was taken, the words said, then the ramifications could be dire.
The president, after huddling with his Defense Secretary and the Joint Chiefs, rendered a decision: the general would have to be replaced. Because no one calls out the Commander in Chief on military matters, especially during wartime.
And that’s how it came to be that Harry S. Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur.
If you had Stanley McChrystal’s name on the brain, you’re forgiven. But it’s another example of the adage: if you stick around long enough, you’re liable to see history repeat itself.
The Korean War was the conflict in 1951, when much-decorated General MacArthur, commander of the forces defending South Korea, became mystified by President Truman’s “limited war” strategy.
MacArthur wrote a letter critical of Truman, and it fell into the hands of U.S. Rep. Joseph William Martin, Jr. (R-Massachusetts). Rep. Martin read it on the floor of Congress, along with providing copies for the press.
The letter ended, “It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words; that if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.”
It was obvious that the “some” in that first sentence refers to Truman, as does “you” in the second-to-last sentence.
The letter of April 1951 wasn’t the first time MacArthur had been critical of Truman.
President Truman and General MacArthur, in happier times
On August 26, 1950, Gen. MacArthur was addressing the 51st National Encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In condemning President Truman’s policy toward the island of Formosa, MacArthur said: “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.”
The relationship between Truman and MacArthur began to be strained from that point on, though the two worked together without much incident.
Then came the April 1951 letter, and Truman had had enough.
The decision to fire MacArthur was portrayed as being pretty much unanimous among the President and his close military advisers, along with the Joint Chiefs. While it was agreed that MacArthur hadn’t been guilty of out-and-out insubordination, he had come perilously close and that was enough to render his leadership counter to the greater good.
General McChrystal’s brain fart, in the form of his profile in Rolling Stone Magazine, made it impossible for President Barack Obama to keep McChrystal in command of the forces in Afghanistan.
The President had no choice but to fire McChrystal.
If an “old soldier” like the esteemed General Douglas MacArthur can be fired for publicly challenging his president’s—and thus the country’s—war strategy, then who can’t be?
It took almost 60 years this time, but these things have a way of cycling back, sooner or later.
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
Whatever you think of unions, this one can’t go unacknowledged.
The UAW turns 75 this month.
It’s true. The United Auto Workers union was founded in Detroit in May 1935. It was first born under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Seems that the AFL’s focus was primarily on craft unions at the time, and some within were getting restless. Then union leader John L. Lewis, at the AFL’s 1935 convention, created a splinter group of industrial unions and called it the Committee for Industrial Organization—the original CIO.
After just one year, the AFL suspended the unions within the CIO, so Lewis and his people—including the new UAW—formed the “new” CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
It wouldn’t be until 1955 when the CIO would rejoin with the AFL, forming the aptly named AFL-CIO.
But back to the UAW.
The UAW was one of the first major unions that was willing to organize African-American workers, which is no surprise when you consider that one of its early stalwarts became a Civil Rights leader.
Walter P. Reuther was his name, and he died 40 years ago this month in a small plane crash near Pellston, Michigan.
May is a big month in UAW history, because it doesn’t end with the formation of the UAW and the death of Reuther, the former union president who put the UAW on the map politically.
May is also the anniversary month of “The Battle of the Overpass.”
Haven’t heard of it? Well, let me tell you a little story…
It’s 1937. There’s an issue at Ford Motor Company between the UAW and management. The union wants an $8/hour, six-hour workday. Ford prefers the existing $6/hour, eight-hour day.
The UAW wanted its $48 per day in quicker fashion.
Reuther, along with fellow union leaders Bob Kanter, Richard Frankensteen and J.J. Kennedy, gathered on the pedestrian overpass over Dearborn’s Miller Road at Gate 4 of the Rouge Complex.
They were going to pass out leaflets pumping their idea of what a workday should be.
The distribution was to take place around 2:00—at shift change time, so as to maximize the number of passersby.
Ford management didn’t like this.
So along came some goons from Ford’s Service Department, an internal security force—and they took the word “force” literally.
As photographers snapped pictures of Reuther et al, the Service Department goons advanced. Disregarding the photogs, the goons attacked the labor leaders, beating them brutally.
Frankensteen got the worst of it. His jacket was pulled over his head and he was kicked and punched incessantly. Reuther was tossed down the steps of the overpass.
Big mistake—for the Ford people.
One of the photographers who didn’t have his plates broken or confiscated was Scotty Kilpatrick, from the Detroit News.
Kilpatrick snapped several pics of Reuther and the boys getting their butts kicked. And he had the wherewithall to hide them under the backseat of his car after being chased to the vehicle. He handed over useless other plates from his front seat to the Ford goons.
The results?
Kilpatrick’s photos were splashed all over the country, even finding their way on the pages of the New York Times.
(From left): Bob Kanter, Walter Reuther, Richard Frankensteen, and J.J. Kennedy prepare to pass out leaflets on the pedestrian overpass near Gate 4
Moments later, Frankensteen fights for his life against goons from Ford’s internal security force (both photos: Scotty Kilpatrick, Detroit News)
The images of Ford’s security people beating up union leaders didn’t do the automaker any favors. Though not photographed, some of the beating victims were even women, who had arrived thinking they were going to help pass out leaflets. Instead, the goons beat them up, too. Nice guys.
The other result was that Kilpatrick’s photos were so compelling that it was deemed that a Pulitzer Prize should now be awarded for photography—and Scotty Kilpatrick was the first winner.
Despite Henry Ford’s assertion that the UAW would organize his company “over my dead body,” the fallout from Battle of the Overpass would lead to Ford Motor Company bedgrudgingly signing a contract with the UAW within three years.
It all happened on May 26, 1937.
Now you know.
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
Forty-two years and a day ago, James Earl Ray, full of hatred, peered through his rifle scope, found his quarry standing on the balcony of a Memphis motel, squeezed the trigger, and within a split second turned Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from a Civil Rights icon into a tragic martyr.
The Lone Nut Theory—the notion that a man bent on violence can, solitarily, snuff out the life of even the greatest of men, as long as he has the proper weapon, a hiding spot, and the opportunity.
Ask 100 Americans who killed Dr. King on April 4, 1968, and all but a small handful (if that) will tell you that it was Ray who gunned down the Civil Rights leader that day.
Ask those same 100 who killed President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and you’ll have a figurative riot on your hands.
The Lone Nut Theory doesn’t seem to wash when it comes to the assassination of Kennedy, no matter how much evidence is presented that Lee Harvey Oswald, and Oswald alone, killed the president.
The conspiracy theorists come out in droves for JFK’s murder, but are quite content to pin the donkey’s tail on Ray in Dr. King’s instance.
Funny, huh?
How can it be so easily accepted—relatively speaking—that a Lone Nut seized the opportunity and killed Dr. King, but that can’t be the case when it comes to Kennedy?
You can kill one man that way, but not the other?
Oswald sure had the opportunity.
Kennedy, of course, rode through downtown Dallas in an open-roofed car. And the Dallas newspapers published the president’s motorcade route in the days leading up to his visit.
Neither of these things would, could, happen today. The security breach that these missteps caused was immeasurable.
Ray seized his opportunity by knowing where Dr. King was staying (the Lorraine Motel) and camping out, a Remington 760 Gamemaster in tow. When the Civil Rights leader stepped onto the second floor balcony to informally speak with supporters below, Ray fired his single, fatal shot.
No conspiracy here, even though Ray feebly attempted to conjure one up by speaking of a mysterious man named Raoul, who he supposedly met in Montreal, and who was the true “mastermind” of Dr. King’s slaying. That story never grew legs, nor gained any traction.
The Lone Nut, James Earl Ray
James Earl Ray was guity as sin, plain and simple. He and he alone brokered and carried out the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. No nefarious, rogue elements involved.
That’s interesting, because if there were such elements that allegedly wanted President Kennedy dead, then there had to have been almost as many who’d have liked to see Dr. King eradicated. Yet Ray is a Lone Nut, and Oswald is a patsy, in many people’s eyes.
I wonder if Dr. King was white, if there’d have HAD to have been a conspiracy.
Lone Nuts can kill the black leaders, but no way could one ever off a president! Not by himself, anyway.
Regardless, two months after Dr. King’s murder, Senator Robert Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles following a victory speech after the California Democratic presidential primary.
Sirhan Sirhan appeared guilty as sin in this instance.
Yet the conspiracy theorists, over the years, have come from the woodwork in RFK’s assassination.
Time hasn’t produced the same phenomena in the King murder.
Interesting.
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
Could Harry Houdini have possibly died on any other day of the year than Halloween?
I always found delicious—or maybe it’s salacious—irony in the fact that the famed magician and escape artist took his last breath on Halloween. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I was certain that it was, somehow, appropriate.
Today I’m not here to talk about Houdini’s death, per se—he died in Detroit after some slugs to the gut in his dressing room in Montreal a week prior—but about his birth.
Harry Houdini, you see, was born on yesterday’s date, in 1874.
He was born in Hungary, as Ehrich Weiss, to Jewish parents. Yet for whatever reason, Houdini would in his adult life, after stardom, claim to have been born on April 6 in Appleton, Wisconsin. Go figure.
Houdini, still using the Weiss name, gravitated toward carnivals and freak shows as a young man, even appearing as a “Wild Man” at a circus. Then he learned card tricks and became known as the “king of cards.”
Growing tired of the card tricks, Houdini/Weiss looked for something else far more challenging and rich to add to his repertoire. Escape tricks filled that bill.
In 1893, while performing with his brother Dash as “The Houdini Brothers”, Harry met fellow performer Wilhelmina Beatrice (Bess) Rahner, whom he married. Bess replaced Dash in the act, which became known as “The Houdinis.” For the rest of Houdini’s performing career, Bess would work as his stage assistant.
Houdini was no longer the “king of cards”; using his escape shtick, the new nickname was the “handcuff king.”
There really wasn’t anything Houdini wouldn’t try to escape from: cuffs, shackles, chains, straitjackets, you name it. When even that grew stale for him, Houdini added “death defying” to his billing. Water-filled containers were a popular prop for him. The idea that audiences might actually see Houdini perish before their very eyes proved to be an oddly appealing attraction.
Still not satisfied, Houdini kept adding on to his act.
Being “buried alive” was among his most famous addenda.
The end came in 1926 when a McGill University student deciding to help Houdini perform, without warning slugged Houdini several times in his dressing room in Montreal, causing trauma to the magician’s abdomen.
Houdini arrived by train in Detroit on October 24, 1926 with a 104-degree fever. Yet he performed anyway. Not long after, he landed in Grace Hospital. On Halloween afternoon, Houdini died in room 401 from peritonitis from a ruptured appendix.
Contrary to popular belief—we use that term a lot when it comes to celebrity deaths, don’t we?—the blows to the stomach didn’t cause his appendicitis; he was suffering from it for a few days prior to the mishap. And, his appendix might have burst anyway, though the trauma inflicted certainly didn’t help.
In once describing his career, Houdini sounded unimpressed with himself.
“My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.”
Happy 136th, Harry! Your spirit is floating around here somewhere, no doubt.
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
His name was Soupy, but his game was pies.
He was Milton Supman by birth, and like so many stars of that era, his stage name was a cocktail of nicknames and nods to others.
Soupy Sales is gone, passed away at 83 and it would be nice if you had lunch today in his honor. Then, maybe tonight, take a pie in the face to top off the day.
Comedian Sales took, by his unofficial count, about 9,000 pies in the kisser over the years, beginning in the 1950s when he burst onto the scene in Detroit, hosting “Lunch with Soupy.”
The pie-in-the-face routine wasn’t invented by Sales, but no one made it more famous than he. It got so big that stars the likes of Frank Sinatra, no less, would line up to take a pie from Soupy, who wasn’t always the recipient—he could play perpetrator, too.
Soupy Sales was minding his own business as Milton Supman, child of a Jewish dry goods merchant who had emigrated to the U.S. from Hungary in 1894, when his older brothers attained the nicknames Ham Bone and Chicken Bone.
They started calling Milton “Soup Bone,” which eventually got shortened to “Soupy.” Then, while working in radio as a DJ, Milton Supman went by the stage name Soupy Hines. Though spelled differently, Hines sounded just like the famous ketchup and pickle company, so the last name was changed to Sales, after old-time comedian Chic Sale.
Got it?
I’m too young to have grown up having “Lunch with Soupy,” the show he hosted from the studios of WXYZ-TV in Detroit from 1953-59. By 1960, the show had gone national, and Soupy moved to Los Angeles.
“I didn’t want to be an old man, wondering if I could have made it in another market,” Soupy once said.
The show was live, at lunchtime, and though it was targeted at children, lots of those kids’ parents sat and watched, too. The success of the lunchtime show spawned an 11 p.m. version for the adults, which was a variety show with some sketch comedy.
But maybe the thing that truly brought Soupy Sales to the national fore was a stunt he pulled on New Year’s Day in 1965.
Irked that he was working on a holiday, Sales urged his young viewers to go into their still-sleeping parents’ bedrooms and “take all the green pieces of paper with presidents’ pictures on them” and mail them to him.
“Then I’ll send you a post card from Puerto Rico!,” Soupy said on the air.
He never imagined the joke would be taken seriously.
But it did. Within days, money started being received in New York, where Soupy was doing his show at the time, from WNEW-TV. An embarrassingly large amount of money rolled in.
The cash was donated to charity, but WNEW management suspended Soupy. There was an uproar—protests and even picketing—and Sales was reinstated. And much more famous than ever before.
Soupy wasn’t just Soupy, which was entertaining enough. He developed a bunch of characters and penned some novelty songs, like “The Mouse,” which I was caught on 8mm film depicting in one of those silent home movies my parents shot of me in the mid-1960s. Sales even performed “The Mouse” on Ed Sullivan’s show.
Soupy Sales doing “The Mouse,” circa the mid-1960s
There was a brief feud in the 1980s with fellow WNBC radio personality Howard Stern, who shared a studio with Sales and who would complain about the condition in which Soupy left things by the time Stern went on the air. Stern, in 1985, pretended to cut the strings in Soupy’s studio piano, but it was just to “torture” Sales; Stern never harmed the instrument.
Stern, years later, regretted his little tiff with Sales because Soupy was one of Stern’s childhood heroes.
The 1970s and ’80s saw Soupy Sales become a big game show guy, appearing on many of them—usually What’s My Line, Match Game, and Pyramid. Those and other pseudo-reality shows like Almost Anything Goes were good places to find Soupy.
Sales also participated in a TV ad campaign for Big Boys Restaurants and their homemade pies. Guess how those commercials ended?
Sales died in a hospice, afflicted with what was called “numerous” ailments.
Maybe Big Boys can offer up a special in his memory: a bowl of soup and a slice of pie.
Posted by:
greg
| Comments
Adolph Hitler is dead, alright—but maybe not how we thought.
Some recent DNA testing has indicated that what was thought to be the skull of the Nazi dictator is, in fact, not.
Not Hitler’s, but that of a woman, no less, probably no older than 40.
Hitler was presumed to have taken his life in 1945, along with mistress Eva Braun, when he was 56 years old.
University of Connecticut archaeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni knew from the outset that something was amiss. “The bone seemed very thin; male bone tends to be more robust,” he said. “And the sutures where the skull plates come together seemed to correspond to someone under 40.” Hitler had turned 56 in 1945.
It’s been universally accepted that Hitler took cyanide and then blew his brains out with a gun in his Berlin bunker as Allied forces closed in on him, with Braun replicating his actions on herself.
But scientists at UConn conducted tests on the bullet-pierced skull—which had been secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence—and discovered that it belonged to an unidentified woman under 40.
That wouldn’t seem to match Adolph’s description.
So if that’s the case—if the skull fragment long thought to be Hitler’s actually isn’t—then what really happened to him?
It could be that the story of his death is still accurate, and that the skull fragment is simply someone else’s.
“It could be anyone,” Bellantoni says of the piece of skull long thought to belong to Hitler. “Many people were killed around the bunker area,” he added.
Cue the conspiracy wackos.
Hitler escaped!! He lived for decades longer, perhaps plotting more atrocities.
A: Doubtful; B: So what?
Before you pepper me with venomous e-mails, does it really matter when Hitler croaked? After all, not a peep was heard from him after his alleged death occurred. Do you actually think that someone of his ego would simply go away, never to be heard from again?
All that matters is that the world didn’t have to worry about Adolph Hitler anymore after his 1945 “death.”
The presumed bodies of Hitler and Braun were wrapped in blankets, doused with gasoline, and then set on fire.
Bellantoni also doesn’t believe that the skull fragment thought to be Hitler’s is actually Braun’s, despite the gender matching and the age being close. Braun was 33 when she presumably died in April 1945.
Hitler, sadly, has been in the news quite a bit lately. Before this rather startling revelation about his skull, this country has been inundated with Hitler references, by those lesser intelligent of us who have compared President Obama and his health care reform to Nazism.
So be prepared to hear delusions of grandeur about Hitler and his slipping through the Allies’ fingers and dashing off to parts unknown, to live a quiet and simple life, with nary a peep.
He’ll join Elvis that way, I guess. There are folks among us—maybe the same ones who believe the moon landing to be faked—who still refuse to believe that Mr. Presley died.
Sometimes we go the opposite way; remember when rumors began—propagated by Detroit’s own DJ, Russ Gibb—that Beatle Paul McCartney had, in fact, died? And the group supposedly left clues of his demise in their songs?
Isn’t it funny how we, at the same time, are reluctant to believe that folks who died are dead and those that are living are still alive?
Nothing kills a good story like the truth, eh?
