Bizarre History by Joe Rhatigan Read Free Book Online Page A

was quite fond of fresh milk. Really fresh.
    Woodrow Wilson kept a herd of sheep that he let graze on the White House lawn. He also had a ram named Old Ike that liked to chew tobacco.
    Calvin Coolidge had Rebecca and Horace, raccoons; Ebenezer the donkey; Smoky the bobcat; Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau, lion cubs; Billy the pygmy hippo; several dogs; canaries; a wallaby; a small antelope; and a black bear.

    Herbert Hoover one-upped J. Q. Adams by bringing
two
crocodiles to the White House.
    Franklin Roosevelt once accidentally left his Scottish Terrier, Fala, behind when visiting the Aleutian Islands. Roosevelt was criticized after then spending thousands of dollars to send ships back to find the dog. As Roosevelt was running for his fourth term in office, he had to address the issue. He said, “You can criticize me, my wife, and my family, but you can’t criticize my little dog. He’s Scotch, and all these allegations about spending all this money have just made his little soul furious.” All was then forgiven, and he won the presidency.
    Lyndon Johnson got into trouble when he was photographed holding up his two beagles, Him and Her, by their ears.

WHEN THINGS WERE ROTTEN
    “History is little else than a long succession of useless cruelties.”—Voltaire
    A quick look back at our past would make one think that our ancestors had it a tad rougher than we did. Okay, let’s face it: Things back then sucked! Disease. Torture. Victorian England. It’s a wonder we’ve made it this far. So travel back with us now (five miles through the snow, uphill both ways) to a few of the trifling difficulties our forebears endured.
Wife for Sale … Barely Used
    Single woman in England during the Middle Ages? No problem! You could own property and sign your name to contracts. Married? Sorry, but you are now property of your husband. As one legal entity, as defined by a legal doctrine called
coverture,
you would be completely subordinated to your husband.
    William Blackstone described it best in the late eighteenth century: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”
    So … if you were the property of your husband, could he sell you? Of course! Toward the end of the 1600s all the way through the early twentieth century, there were numerous stories of men selling their wives at auction. Here’s one titillating glimpse gathered by
Ancestors
magazine: “Rodney Hall, a labouring man of idle and dissolute habits … led his wife into the town with a halter round her body … he led her twice round the market, where he was met by a man named Barlow, of the same class of life, who purchased her for eighteen pence and a quart of ale.”
    The magazine goes on to report that in 1897, a shoemaker “on a drinking spree at Irthlingborough” ran out of money and sold his wife so he and his friends could keep drinking. Nice.
Dying Aid
    It was low in calories (not that the Romans were counting), it had a sweet taste, and it killed you. Yes, it seems that in ancient Rome, the perfect diet aid was also the perfect
dying
aid. A popular way to sweeten wine was to throw in some sugar of lead (lead acetate), which was made by boiling grape juice in lead pots. The resulting syrup, called
defrutum,
was then concentrated again into
sapa—
yummy, but deadly. Friends, Romans, and countrymen used sugar of lead in their wine or to preserve fruit. It probably didn’t help that wine was often served in lead cups.
Speaking of Deadly
    Mercury is the only metal that’s liquid at “standard conditions,” which is why civilization has always been fascinated with its silvery awesomeness. So even though it’s extremely toxic, it has been used as a medicine for centuries. It has been found in Egyptian tombs dating