Setting Priorities
After the first month passed without spotting a ship or plane, Mundell considered sailing to the nearest inhabited island 460 miles away, but decided to stay put…where at least he had food and water.
On the 50th day, he spotted a ship a few miles away. Taking no chances, he did everything he could to get the crew’s attention—flares, smoke signals, and mirror flashes. The ship, the French research vessel Coriolis, answered with their searchlight. Rescue! Once aboard the Coriolis, he discovered how he had miscalculated his location: he hadn’t—Caroline Island was actually 15 miles east of its charted position.
Hot stuff: Oysters can change gender according to the temperature of the water they live in.
THE SPIRIT
In 1974 Ray and Ellen Jackson, experienced sailors, bought a 42-foot yacht called Spirit and spent the next year outfitting her with every safety feature money could buy. They left California in 1975 and cruised 8,000 miles all over the Pacific. But after Ray injured his back in Hawaii, they decided to fly home and asked Ellen’s brother, Jim Ahola, to sail the boat back to California.
Ahola had considerable experience with the Spirit but still decided to hire more experienced help, Bruce Collins to captain and Durel Miller to crew. His girlfriend, Camilla Arthur, and her friend, Nancy Perry, asked to come along, too. On September 12, 1976, the Spirit left Hawaii bound for California.
Sinking Spirit
On the morning of September 27, without warning, there was a huge bang and the ship keeled over. Had the boat been hit by whales? Did it strike floating debris? Had a submarine surfaced beneath them? They never found out. Although the Spirit righted itself, there was a hole in the bow and it quickly began to sink. Flying debris had smashed the radio—so no SOS could be sent. There were two life rafts on board, but the survival kits had been washed away. Collins, Ahola, and Arthur got into one raft and Miller and Perry took the other. Five minutes later the Spirit was gone. They were 750 miles from land.
The castaways tied the two rafts together and distributed the meager supplies. They had no food, no fishing gear, and little water. Eleven hours later, the tether broke and the two rafts drifted apart. The raft carrying Miller and Perry drifted for 22 days. Miller was an experienced seaman but Perry was a complete stranger to the sea and was debilitated by seasickness. By the 12th day, she was incoherent and helpless. By the time they were rescued, she had lost 43 pounds (she only weighed 113 pounds to start with). Miller lost 55 pounds but cared for her constantly, kept a lookout, and flagged down a ship called the Oriental Financier on the 22nd day.
The average American woman thinks about politics 12 min. a day. Average man: 6 min.
Another Survivor
A subsequent search for the second raft covered nearly 200,000 square miles. On the sixth day of the search it was found, but with only one survivor on board, Captain Bruce Collins—Ahola and Arthur were dead. Collins reported that they ran out of fresh water on the 12th day and he had survived by drinking the foul-tasting rainwater he collected from the canopy of the raft. The others had refused to drink it, fearing it was poisonous. Ahola died on the 19th day. His death devastated his girlfriend, and she died two days later.
Camilla’s mother sued the Avon life raft company for failing to provide enough survival gear to keep her daughter alive. A court awarded her $70,000, but the company appealed. It was settled out of court.
PIZZA FACTS
• First takeout pizza. In 1889 King Umberto and Queen Margherita of Italy wanted to sample the Neapolitan street food but didn’t want to go out. So she asked pizzeria owner Raffaele Esposito to bring the pizzas to her. He made three kinds, including one with tomato paste, fresh basil, and a new ingredient, mozzarella cheese.
• First pizzeria in the United States. Opened by Gennaro Lombardi in 1905, on Spring Street in New York’s Little Italy.
• The first mozzarella cheese. It was made from the milk of water buffaloes, first brought to Italy from India in the seventh century.
• The first deep-dish pizza. Invented in the 1940s by Chicago’s Pizzeria Uno.
• The first commercial pizza-pie mix. Called Roman Pizza Mix, was produced in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1948 by Frank A. Fiorello.
• The first frozen pizza. Marketed by Celentano Brothers in 1957.
• The first Pizza Hut. Opened in 1958 by two brothers attending Wichita State University.
Oops! Herbicide use has created at least 48 “superweeds” that are resistant to chemicals.
DOES YOUR COUCH HAVE HAIRY PAWS?
One of the most fascinating stories of lost treasure is the story of General John Cadwalader’s furniture. Seriously. They’re among the most valuable antiques on Earth. And who knows—you may be sitting on his couch right now.
STRAIGHT SHOOTER
Revolutionary War general John Cadwalader is famous for two things: defending the honor of George Washington in a duel, and having extremely odd taste in furniture.
Cadwalader fought his duel with General Tom Conway, after Conway schemed to have Washington replaced as commander in chief of the Continental Army. Cadwalader won—he shot Conway in the face and nearly killed him (Conway recovered and moved to France).
HOME IMPROVEMENT
Cadwalader’s unique taste in furniture dates back to before the Revolution. In 1769 he and his wife, a Maryland heiress named Elizabeth Lloyd, bought a three-story Georgian house in one of Philadelphia’s most exclusive neighborhoods and then spent a fortune refurbishing it and filling it with furniture. They were determined to make their new home the most fashionable address in the city, and by all accounts they succeeded; one member of the Continental Congress who visited the home wrote that it “exceeds anything I have seen in this city or elsewhere.”
The most skilled artisans in the city spent months on end crafting hand-carved paneling, ceilings, moldings, and surrounds for the windows, fireplaces, and doorways. Some of the pieces were carved with flowers, others with ribbons, birds, allegorical figures, even dragons.
While this was going on, the Cadwaladers were also ordering furniture. Lots of furniture—the finest in the colonies—also hand-carved by Philadelphia’s most skilled craftsmen. They commissioned enough furniture to fill the entire house. For their gilded front parlor alone, they commissioned two card tables, three large sofas, and a huge easy chair that was almost as wide as a loveseat. The furniture was constructed by a master cabinetmaker named Thomas Affleck.
You’d have to be pretty blessed to see such a thing: A group of unicorns is called a “blessing.”
FOOT SOLDIER
The Cadwaladers were fans of the then-modern Rococo style, whose distinguishing feature was bold, elaborate carved ornamentation. One detail appealed to them in particular: “hairy lion’spaw” feet. Have you ever seen an antique chair or table with legs carved to look like animals’ feet? It’s a common design element in antique furniture, but most people preferred eagle claws or hairless lion paws, not “hairy-paws.”
In fact, most people considered hairy-paws to be quite ugly—and very few 18th-century examples survive. Not in England, where hairy-paws originated and quickly fell out of favor, and not in the colonies, where they never caught on at all.
In the late 1780s, the ornate Rococo style gave way to the much simpler Neoclassical style, which drew its inspiration from the austerity of Greco-Roman architecture and art. Now the Cadwaladers’ furniture wasn’t just ugly, it was considered gaudy and passé. And since nobody wanted to buy Rococo furniture anymore—not even the stuff without hairy-paws—furniture makers stopped making it. Cadwalader’s furniture was unique to begin with; suddenly it became rare.
COLLECTIBLES
Cadwalader’s furniture has just about everything that a collector looks for in an antique. It was made of the highest-quality materials. It was fashioned by some of the best-known, most highly skilled master craftsmen of the late 18th century. Its style is both very bold and very rare—it’s considere
d to be some of the finest examples of American Rococo furniture ever made. And it was commissioned by one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in the colonies, a family headed by a Revolutionary War hero, one who defended George Washington in a duel and who entertained the future president and numerous other founding fathers in his home in the very years that the United States of America was being born.
All aboard! Andrew Jackson was the first U.S. president to ride a train.
It’s very likely that Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and other luminaries sat in Cadwalader’s hairy-paw chairs, lounged on his hairy-paw sofas, were served tea on his hairy-paw tea tables, and perhaps even played cards at his hairy-paw card tables. Would you pay extra for an antique chair if you knew there was a good chance that Washington sat in it? If you said yes, trust us—you aren’t alone.
PAPER TRAIL
But there’s one more thing that makes the Cadwalader pieces interesting and among the most sought-after antiques: General and Mrs. Cadwalader saved all of their receipts.
It appears that the Cadwaladers saved every single scrap of paper associated with the remodeling and refurnishing of their home—not just receipts but also handwritten letters, bills of sale, inventory lists itemizing each piece of furniture, even day-to-day documentation of the work as it progressed. Everything. Many of these documents survive to this day and have been carefully preserved by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. How do we know that the Cadwaladers ordered two card tables, three sofas, and a huge easy chair for their front parlor? How do we know that they were made by Philadelphia cabinetmaker Thomas Affleck?
Because it says so on the bill of sale.
MISSING LINK
Saving receipts may not sound like a big deal, but it is in the world of antiques. The Cadwalader suite of furniture “is one of the few extant suites of furniture that has all its documentation in place,” says Jack L. Lindsey, curator of American decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns a number of pieces of Cadwalader furniture. “There were probably similarly ornate and extensive suites of furniture that were produced for other Philadelphians during the time period that are presently unrecognized because all the documentation is scattered,” he says.
Any hairy-paw furniture made in the late 18th century is rare enough to be quite valuable, something worth many thousands of dollars. So if you happen to find one at a yard sale, you’re very lucky. But if the piece you find happens to be listed on Cadwalader’s receipts and can be definitively linked to the family, the value of even a single side chair soars into the millions of dollars.
The average American will use 2/3 of an acre’s worth of trees in wood products this year.
And that’s just the side chairs. In the mid-1980s, General Cadwalader’s giant easy chair was discovered sitting in the library of a Delaware school, where it was on loan from the owners (who considered it too ugly to keep in their own home). Several months passed before the chair was finally authenticated, but once it was, it sold at auction at Sotheby’s for $2.75 million. At the time of the sale—1987—it was the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of furniture, shattering the record set by an antique French cabinet used at the Palace of Versailles that sold for $1.6 million in 1984.
The general’s easy chair was the most valuable chair in the world.
GREAT AMERICAN ANTIQUES
So, would you like to find the rest of the missing furniture? It won’t be easy. Mrs. Cadwalader died in 1776, not long after giving birth to her third child; General Cadwalader remarried, had two more children, and then died in 1786. His five surviving children divided his furniture among themselves and rented out his house; it was later sold and then demolished in about 1816.
Over the years the furniture was scattered far and wide as each generation of the Cadwalader family passed on, bequeathing their pieces to friends and relatives. Some pieces are still in the family but many have disappeared and some haven’t been seen in more than 200 years. Because the furniture is of such high quality, there’s a good chance that many of the missing pieces are still out there, hiding in plain sight, waiting to to be rediscovered. Waiting to make their discoverers rich.
SCAVENGER HUNT
The Cadwaladers’ complete set of hairy-paw furniture was huge. Here’s just a sample of the items that have already been found, and those that may still be in existence:
• Side chairs. Cadwalader commissioned at least 12 side chairs and possibly as many as 20; five of them turned up in Ireland in the early 1970s, apparently having found their way there when Cadwalader’s great-grandson moved to that country in 1904. The set of five chairs sold for $207,500 in 1974.
As many as 10,000 bags are lost or “mishandled” by U.S. airlines every day.
Then in 1982 a sixth side chair from the set was discovered, this time in Italy. The Cadwaladers had apparently given the chair to their neighbors the Lewises, who brought it with them to Florence, Italy, and then bequeathed it to a family maid in 1933. Still in the servant’s family when it was discovered, the single chair sold at auction for $275,000 that year…and $1.4 million when it came up for auction again in 1999. (A side chair once owned by George Washington sold at the same auction for only $118,000.)
So far, seven hairy-paw side chairs have been discovered, so there may be as many as 13 more still out there.
• Card tables. One table surfaced in Canada in 1969 and was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum, which already owned a second identical card table. A third was located at an inn in Maine in 1964, where it had been since Cadwalader’s great-great-granddaughter Beatrix Jones Farrand had given it to the innkeeper years before. A collector named G. David Thompson bought it for $640; he apparently never realized what he had, because it wasn’t until his widow died in 1982 that it was finally authenticated as a Cadwalader original. In 1983 it sold for $242,000 and was donated to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
• Tea tables. One hairy-paw tea table was found in New England in the summer of 1994, when a Connecticut dealer named William Bartley bought it from an auction gallery that had mislabeled it as an English table. This table is surrounded by more mystery than other Cadwalader pieces that have surfaced. Though it matches the description of a tea table listed in the Cadwaladers’ receipts, and its distinctive ribbon-and-flower carved edge is identical to that on other pieces of Cadwalader furniture, it wasn’t possible to identify a definitive chain of possession leading back to the Cadwalader family. No matter—the table sold for $695,000 anyway. In 2001 a similar tea table still in the Cadwalader family sold at auction for $1.4 million.
• Sofas. Only one of the three sofas listed on Thomas Affleck’s bill of sale has been found. “There are still two sofas out there unaccounted for,” says John Hays, head of the American furniture department of Christie’s auction house. “And they were the most expensive items on the bill: the pair cost Cadwalader £16, four times what the tea table did. They’ve still got to be out there.”
Ready for the million-dollar treasure hunt? Good luck…
Largest city in the United States Confederacy: New Orleans.
SNL PART V: SPARTANS RULE!
We’ve noticed in writing this long piece about Saturday Night Live that it probably drops more names than any other article in the BRI’s history. Here are some more. (Part IV is on page 427.)
OUT WITH THE OLD
Michaels weathered the latest storm of critical attacks and did yet another shake-up after the disastrous 1995 season. The only surviving cast member was Tim Meadows (against NBC’s wishes). And the revolving door kept on bringing in new faces: Impressionist Darrell Hammond; MTV’s Colin Quinn; stand-up comics Tracy Morgan and Jim Breuer; and from the Los Angeles-based improv group, The Groundlings, Cheri Oteri, Jimmy Fallon, Chris Kattan, Ana Gasteyer, Chris Parnell, and Will Ferrell.
In the late 1990s, SNL entered its fourth golden age. How? By getting back to basics. Tom Shales and James Miller explain the resurgence in their bo
ok Live from New York:
In 1996 and again to an even greater degree in 2000, Saturday Night Live returned to its richest vein of humor, American politics, and in the process rejuvenated itself for the umpty-umpth time. The cast was prodigious, the writing team witty and self-confident, and the satire biting.
Will Ferrell, according to many critics and cast members, emerged as one of the funniest people in SNL’s history. His George W. Bush, along with Darrell Hammond’s Bill Clinton and Al Gore, kept the SNL’s presidential-bashing alive and well. Even the real Al Gore studied SNL’s send-up of the 2000 presidential debates “to help understand where he had gone wrong with his own debate performance.”
SATURDAY WHITE LIVE
While SNL has been hailed for its no-holds-barred takes on politics and television, it’s had less then a stellar track record when it comes to dealing with women and minorities. Many who were there refer to the 17th floor as a “good ole’ boys” organization, which is no surprise considering that most of the writers and cast have been white men. And as uneven as the comedy has been over the years, so too has been its take on racial relations.
A typical grain of dust floating in the air is halfway in size between a subatomic particle and the planet Earth.
Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader Page 55