First of all, Captain Mason made the decision to have a piece of metal welded over the leak to reinforce it (which took less than a day) instead of having the boiler replaced (which would have taken three days). While the boiler was being repaired, the waiting soldiers did everything they could to muscle their way onto the ship. Bribes were paid, and more and more men packed on. When the repairs were completed, Mason was eager to get underway, so he broke another rule. He let all of the passengers get onboard before their names were logged in. Result: The ship was overloaded and no one on shore had a complete or accurate copy of the passenger list.
When an Army officer raised his concerns, Mason assured him that the Sultana was a competent vessel that could more than carry the load. “Take good care of those men,” the officer told him. “They are deserving of it.”
THE MIGHTY MISS
Four years of war had been hard on the series of levees and dikes that control the flow of the Mississippi River. The spring of 1865 saw heavy rains, which, combined with winter snowmelt, caused the river to rise to flood stage. By April it was several miles wide and the icy current was much stronger than usual.
But the Sultana was solid and Captain Mason an able river man. As the ship trudged slowly upriver, she made a few more scheduled stops, picking up even more men at each one. The huddled passengers filled every bit of space on the 260-foot-long vessel—the bottom hull, the lower decks, the cabins, the pilothouse, and the hurricane deck on top. Yet even though the soldiers were tired and packed in like sardines, their spirits were high. They sang songs, told war stories, and shared their plans for when they finally got home…unaware of the disaster to come.
On the cool night of April 26, 1865, the Sultana disembarked from Memphis around midnight, carrying an estimated 2,300 people—six times its capacity. There were only two lifeboats and 76 life preservers onboard.
Twenty-four people have traveled to the moon, but only 12 got to land on the surface and walk around. (Or did they? See page 278.)
HELL AND HIGH WATER
At around 2 a.m., the overloaded Sultana had made it nine miles north of Memphis when her weakened boiler could take no more. It exploded. The other two boilers went in quick succession.
The tremendous blast split the ship in two. Burning-hot coals shot out like bullets. The horrified passengers were jarred awake, some sent hurtling through the air into the icy water, others scalded by the tremendous blast of steam. Still others were trapped on the lower decks to either suffocate, burn, or drown. The men on the top decks had a choice—albeit a dismal one: stay and face the spreading flames or try to swim to shore, more than a mile away in either direction.
One survivor remembered, “The men who were afraid to take to the water could be seen clinging to the sides of the bow of the boat until they were singed off like flies.” Others who had waited too long on the hurricane deck were crushed when the two large smokestacks collapsed on them. Others slid down into the hottest part of the fire when the burning deck gave way.
Shrieks and screams pierced the night, as did the crackling of flames and the booms of small explosions. But loudest of all was the hissing sound as sections of the flaming steamboat sank into the water. Another survivor described it like this:
The whole heavens seemed to be lighted up by the conflagration. Hundreds of my comrades were fastened down by the timbers of the decks and had to burn while the water seemed to be one solid mass of human beings struggling with the waves.
What was left of the Sultana drifted downstream until finally banking on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi River. The ship’s broken, burning body then slowly disappeared into the dark water.
DAWN OF THE DEAD
As first light rose on the river, the devastation was overwhelming. Hundreds upon hundreds of bodies were floating down the Mississippi. Dotted between the corpses were dazed survivors floating on makeshift rafts of driftwood and ship parts. Some sang marching songs to keep their spirits up. Others just floated silently among the carnage.
All the way to Memphis, men—alive and dead—were washing up onshore. Barges and other steamships were dispatched for search and rescue. At least 500 men were treated at Memphis hospitals; 200 of them died there. Because the passenger list went down with the ship, no one knows for sure how many lives were lost that night, but most estimates put the number around 1,700—including Captain Mason.
INTO THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY
So why is the Sultana disaster such an unknown part of U.S. history? Mostly because of timing. After the bloodiest war in U.S. history, the nation was largely desensitized to death. What was another 1,700 in the wake of hundreds of thousands of casualties? The newspapers were full of articles about the end of the war, a new presidency, and a nation rebuilding. On the day before the disaster, the last Confederate army had surrendered and John Wilkes Booth had been captured. The story of the sinking of the Sultana was relegated to the back pages.
Another reason for the minimal coverage was that it was an embarrassing story. A lot of people—from the ship’s captain to the army officers in charge of boarding—had failed miserably at their jobs. The Army was not anxious to publicize such a horrible dereliction of duty.
But the fact remains that the explosion and sinking of the Sultana was—and still is—the worst maritime disaster in U.S. history. Her bow is still lying on the muddy bottom of the Mississippi River as a sad memorial to the men who never made it home.
* * *
REAL-LIFE COURT TRANSQUIPS
Q: So, you were unconscious, and they pulled you from the bucket. What happened then?
A: Mr. Stewart gave me artificial insemination, you know, mouth-to-mouth.
Plaintiff’s Attorney: Why do you think your home developed cracks in the walls?
Defendant’s Attorney: Objection! The witness has no expertise in this area, there is an obvious lack of foundation.
“I had a lazy eye as a kid and it gradually spread to my whole body.” —Tom Cotter
NOW THEY TELL US
The “experts” told us one thing…and then a new set of experts comes along.
USDA FOOD PYRAMID
They Used to Say: A healthy diet includes lots of bread and cereal, plenty of dairy products, red meat, and very little fat. That’s what the USDA—with the grateful support of the farming industry—had recommended since the 1950s, packaging it into a triangle-shaped “Food Guide Pyramid” in 1992.
Now They Tell Us: The Food Pyramid is unhealthy, will make you fat, and puts you at greater risk for heart disease. Leading nutritionists slammed the guidelines in 2001. “The food pyramid is tremendously flawed,” said Dr. Walter C. Willett of Harvard. “It says all fats are bad; all complex carbohydrates are good; all protein sources offer the same nutrition, and dairy should be eaten in high amounts. None of this is accurate.” A new guide is scheduled to be released in 2005.
BRAIN CELLS
They Used to Say: You can’t grow new brain cells.
Now They Tell Us: Oh yes you can. Researchers at Princeton University did an extensive study and proved in 1999 that many areas of the brain do indeed grow new brain cells, or neurons, throughout an adult’s life. “The assumption has been for over a hundred years that there are no new neurons added,” said psychologist Charles G. Gross, a co-leader of the study. “We have shown they are added, and to the regions of the brain involved in the highest cognitive function.”
SIPPY CUPS
They Used to Say: The sippy cup is a healthy way to wean a child from a bottle. Doctors have been recommending them for 50 years.
Now They Tell Us: According to childhood development experts, sippy cups make it harder for kids to learn the complicated action of drinking from a glass. That, in turn, slows the development of articulate speech. And because children often sip milk, juice, or other sugary drinks over several hours, sippy cups can promote tooth decay.
Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi.
Subject: Daily sleep r
equirements
They Used to Say: You need at least eight hours of sleep a day.
Now They Tell Us: Sleeping eight hours a day might be fatal. The University of California did a six-year study in which they monitored such factors as the lifestyle, health, and sleep patterns of 1.1 million people. They found that subjects who slept eight hours a day were 12% more likely to have died during that six-year period than people who slept seven hours a day. People who slept nine hours were 23% more likely.
Subject: Iron
They Used to Say: Iron-rich foods are good for you.
Now They Tell Us: Drop that can of spinach, Popeye! One study at the University of Washington in 2003 suggested that people with a diet high in iron were 1.7 times more likely to get Parkinson’s disease than those with a low-iron diet. Sources of iron: red meat and poultry. And, if it’s combined with manganese, the risk goes up to 1.9 times more likely. Sources of iron and manganese: spinach, beans, nuts, and grains. But you’d have to eat an awful lot of these to overdo it. The researchers said that more study was needed before they could recommend any dietary changes.
Subject: Planets
They Used to Say: There are nine planets in our solar system.
Now They Tell Us: You’re spaced out—there’s only eight. Seventy years after it was first classified, the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, one of the nation’s leading astronomical centers, removed Pluto from its list of planets in 2001. They said it’s far too small—smaller than our moon—and is probably just a big lump of ice. The announcement drew much criticism from traditional astronomers, but officials at the center say they’re just being defensive. “There is no scientific insight to be gained by counting planets,” said Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of the planetarium. “Eight or nine, the numbers don’t matter.”
In 2002 the average driver spent 62 hours stopped in traffic. L.A. drivers spent 136.
SO LONG, NEIGHBOR
One thing that nearly all Americans born after 1965 have in common is that they grew up watching Mr. Rogers. He was one of the true pioneers of children’s television. We haven’t written much about him before, and when he passed away in 2003 we decided it was time we did.
HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
In 1951 a college senior named Fred McFeely Rogers finished school in Florida and went home to stay with his parents in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. He wasn’t exactly sure what he wanted to do with his life. For a while he wanted to be a diplomat; then he decided to become a Presbyterian minister. He’d already made plans to enroll in a seminary after college, but as soon as he arrived home he changed his mind again.
Why? Because while he was away at school, his parents had bought their first TV set. Television was still very new in the early 1950s, and not many people had them yet. When Rogers got home he watched it for the very first time. He was fascinated by the new medium but also disturbed by some of the things he saw. One thing in particular offended him very deeply. It was “horrible,” as he put it, so horrible that it altered the course of his life.
What was it that bothered him so much? “I saw people throwing pies in each other’s faces,” Rogers remembered. “Such demeaning behavior.”
KID STUFF
You (and Uncle John) may like it when clowns throw pies and slap each other in the face, but Fred Rogers was appalled. He thought TV could have a lot more to offer than pie fights and other silliness, if only someone would try. “I thought, ‘I’d really like to try my hand at that, and see what I could do,’” Rogers recalled. So he moved to New York and got a job at NBC, working first as an associate producer and later as a director.
Then in 1953, he learned about a new experimental TV station being created in Pittsburgh. Called WQED, it was the country’s first community-sponsored “public television” station. WQED wasn’t even on the air yet, and there was no guarantee that an educational TV station that depended on donations from viewers to pay for programming would ever succeed. No matter—Rogers quit his secure job at NBC, moved to Pittsburgh with his wife, Joanne, and joined the station.
The squiggle over the ‘n’ in mañana is called a ‘tilde.’
“I thought, ‘What a wonderful institution to nourish people,’” Rogers recalled. “My friends thought I was nuts.”
LOW-INCOME NEIGHBORHOOD
When Rogers arrived at WQED in 1953, the station had just four employees and only two of them, Rogers and a secretary named Josie Carey, were interested in children’s programming. The two created their own hour-long show called The Children’s Corner and paid for all of the staging, props, and scenery (mostly pictures painted on paper backdrops), out of their own meager $75-a-week salaries.
Because The Children’s Corner had to be done on the cheap, Rogers and Carey decided that much of the show would have to revolve around showing educational films that they obtained for free. Rogers was in charge of hustling up the free films and playing the organ off camera during the broadcast; Carey would host the show, sing, and introduce the films.
LUCKY BREAK
That was how The Children’s Corner was supposed to work, but the plan fell apart about two minutes into their very first broadcast. The problem wasn’t that Rogers couldn’t scrounge up any free films, it was that the films he did manage to get were so old and brittle that they were prone to breaking when played. Sure enough, on the first day of the show, on WQED’s first day on the air, the first film broke.
Remember, this was before the invention of videotape, when television shows were broadcast live—so when the film broke, the entire show came to a screeching halt. On the air. In the broadcast industry this is known as “dead air”—the TV cameras are still on, and the folks at home are still watching, but there’s nothing happening onscreen. Nothing at all.
PAPER TIGER
At that moment Rogers happened to be standing behind a paper backdrop that had been painted to look like a clock. He quickly looked around and spotted “Daniel,” a striped tiger puppet that the station’s general manager, Dorothy Daniel, had given him the night before as a party favor at the station’s launch party.
Nice doggie: British mailmen report fewer dog bites than those in any other country.
“When the first film broke, I just poked the puppet through the paper,” Rogers remembered years later, “and it happened to be a clock where I poked him through. And he just said, ‘It’s 5:02 and Columbus discovered America in 1492.’ And that was the first thing I ever said on the air. Necessity was the mother of that invention, because it hadn’t been planned.”
The puppet worked and the old films didn’t, so The Children’s Corner became an educational puppet show. Daniel Striped Tiger, who lives in a clock, remained a fixture on Rogers’s shows for the rest of his broadcast career. Numerous other characters, including King Friday XIII, Lady Elaine Fairchilde, and X the Owl all made their debut on The Children’s Corner.
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
The Children’s Corner stayed on the air for seven years; then in 1963 Rogers accepted an offer from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to host a 15-minute show called Misterogers, the first show in which he actually appeared on camera. (That year he also became an ordained Presbyterian minister.)
By 1965 Misterogers was airing in Canada and in the eastern United States, but it had the same problem that The Children’s Corner had—not enough money. Misterogers ran out of funds and was slated for cancellation…until parents found out: when they learned the show was going off the air, they raised such a stink that the Sears Roebuck Foundation and National Educational Television (now known as the Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS), kicked in $150,000 apiece to keep the show on the air.
Lengthened to a full half hour and renamed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the show was first broadcast nationwide on February 19, 1968.
INNER CHILD
Very early in his broadcasting career, Rogers drew up a list of things he wanted to encourage in the children who watched his show. Some of the items on that list: sel
f-esteem, self-control, imagination, creativity, curiosity, appreciation of diversity, cooperation, tolerance for waiting, and persistence. How Rogers encouraged these things in his young viewers was heavily influenced by his own childhood experiences:
And it floats! When filled, the oil tanker Jahre Viking weighs 1.13 billion pounds.
• His grandfather. Many of the most memorable things Rogers said to children were inspired by things his own grandfather, Fred Brooks McFeely, said to him. “I think it was when I was leaving one time to go home after our time together that my grandfather said to me, ‘You know, you made this day a really special day. Just by being yourself. There’s only one person in the world like you. And I happen to like you just the way you are,’” Rogers remembered. “That just went right into my heart. And it never budged.” (Rogers named Mr. McFeely, the show’s Speedy Delivery messenger character, after his grandfather.)
• The neighborhood of make-believe. Fred Rogers was a sickly kid who came down with just about every childhood disease imaginable from chicken pox to scarlet fever. He spent a lot of time in bed, quarantined on doctors’ orders. To amuse himself, he played with puppets and invented imaginary worlds for them to live in. “I’m sure that was the beginning of a much later neighborhood of make-believe,” Rogers said.
• Explanations. Like most children, when Rogers was very little, he was frightened by unfamiliar things—being alone, starting school, getting a haircut, visiting a doctor’s office, etc. “I liked to be told about things before I had to do them,” he remembered, so explaining new and unfamiliar things became a central part of the show. (On one episode he even brought on actress Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, to explain that she was just pretending and that kids didn’t need to be afraid.)
• Sweaters. Rogers got most of his sweaters from his mother, who knitted him a new one every year for Christmas. He wore them all on his show.
Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader Page 46