by Tom Friedman
IF I KNEW WHO YOU WERE, THAT WOULD INDICATE THAT I HAD REASON TO REMEMBER YOU
When Winston Churchill was asked, “Remember me?” by someone who escaped his memory, he would reply, “Why should I?”
NOT YOU, OF COURSE. I MEAN THAT OTHER TERRIBLE WOMAN
When Sir John Gielgud told Elizabeth Taylor that Richard Burton’s acting had gone downhill “since he married that terrible woman,” he clearly had forgotten that the woman Burton had married was Taylor herself.
UH-OH
New York wine merchant William Sokolin was entrusted with selling a bottle of Chateau Margaux 1787 that once had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. At auction, where Sokolin set a minimum price of $500,000 on behalf of an anonymous customer, no bidder would meet his price. Afterward, he had the unfortunate idea of taking it along to dinner at the Four Seasons restaurant. As he was getting ready to leave, an absentminded waiter carrying a coffee tray suffered a physical senior moment. To the horror of everyone nearby, he bumped into the bottle and broke it, spilling the precious contents across the floor. (Although the bottle was insured, it was for less than half of Sokolin’s asking price.)
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DON’T SAY
One day Benjamin Jowett, the dean of Balliol College at Oxford University, took a long walk with a student. In the beginning of their walk, the undergraduate made various efforts at starting up a conversation, but the absentminded Jowett was lost in his own thoughts. In fact, he didn’t speak to the student at all, only occasionally murmuring to himself before lapsing again into silence. Yet at the end of the walk Jowett turned to the hapless student and advised him in no uncertain terms, “You must cultivate the art of conversation. Good morning!”
SEE? THIS PROVES MY POINT
Dallas City Council member Roland Tucker was known as a strong advocate of crime prevention. He even researched making it illegal for people to leave their keys in unattended cars. Naturally, he himself soon left his car keys in the ignition, not to mention leaving his research on preventing crime on the seat. The car was then stolen.
AND AMNESIA IS THE LANGUAGE OF THE ABSENTMINDED
The writer and radio personality Nigel Rees once asked a guest on the BBC Radio program Quote . . . Unquote the following question: “Who said, ‘Violence is the repartee of the illiterate?’” The guest, journalist and author Alan Brien, searched his memory. “I don’t think I’ve heard it before,” he said. “Modernish? It can’t be very old. Bernard Shaw would be too good for it. Perhaps it’s Chesterton. Is it?” No, the quote was from Brien himself.
REHNQUIST? WHO’S REHNQUIST?
Richard Nixon could never remember the name of his assistant attorney general, William Rehnquist. A month after they were introduced, Nixon was calling him “Renchburg.” A few weeks before nominating him to the Supreme Court, Nixon still couldn’t get it right and was referring to him as “Bill Rensler.”
AND I MIGHT EVEN REMEMBER TO PAY THE FARE
Max Schödl, the Austrian still-life painter, once hailed a cab in Vienna. When the driver asked, “Where to?” Schödl thought it over for a while and replied, “Number six,” which is all he could remember, at least for the time being. “I’ll tell you the street later on,” he told the confused driver.
SADLY, THE 10-POUND NOTES WERE A TRIFLE OVERCOOKED
It was a very busy New Year’s Eve at the New House Hotel in Wales, and chef Albert Grabham chose the safest place he could think of to temporarily put the restaurant’s cash and charge slips: the oven. Who would look there? Apparently no one—not even Grabham. The next morning, in preparation for New Year’s lunch, he lit the oven with the money still inside.
BUT I’LL TELL YOU ONE THING: THE PERSON WHO WROTE IT KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING
It has long been known that the use of drugs and alcohol makes it harder to remember what happened under the influence. Even so, Sir Walter Scott seems to have experienced an extraordinary memory lapse while he was addicted to laudanum, an opium-based painkiller. In 1819 when Scott read the proofs of his just-completed novel, The Bride of Lammermoor, he confessed that he didn’t recognize a single character, incident, or conversation in the entire work.
WHO DOESN’T PREFER A TIDY NUMBER?
The mathematical constant pi, represented by the symbol π, is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. It’s an infinite decimal but is commonly approximated to 3.14 or 3.14159. You can’t get through school without learning it in order to solve simple mathematical problems. Nevertheless, in 1897 the members of the Indiana house of representatives suffered a collective memory lapse when, without explanation, they passed a bill declaring that the value of pi was 3.2. This would have ensured that mathematical and engineering calculations throughout the state would go terribly wrong, had not sharper memories in the state senate prevailed.
IT WAS THE “WHATNOT” THAT REALLY BROKE THE BUDGET
President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the department known as H.E.W. (Health, Education, and Welfare) in 1953, but he couldn’t seem to remember what the letters stood for. He kept calling it “Health, Welfare, and Whatnot.”
BEETHOVEN’S FILTH
Beethoven often forgot to keep fires going in his room in the dead of winter. He never remembered to have his windows washed or change his shirts unless someone reminded him. Once, a local policeman, convinced that the great composer was a tramp because Beethoven hadn’t remembered to put on fresh clothes for days, threw him in jail.
THE SIXTH ANNUAL G. K. CHESTERTON AWARD FOR ABSENTMINDEDNESS GOES TO . . . G. K. CHESTERTON!
Chesterton once wrote to a friend: “On rising this morning, I carefully washed my boots in hot water and blackened my face, poured coffee on my sardines, and put my hat on the fire to boil. These activities will give you some idea of my state of mind. . . . ”
NEXT TIME, HOW ABOUT WE JUST TAP HER ANKLE WITH A STICK?
In the early days of BBC television, Jasmine Bligh was one of the network’s first announcers. The floor managers had decided to cue her by activating a small electrical device tied around her ankle. This device was supposed to deliver a barely perceptible jolt so she would know when to start speaking. In what has to be considered one of the more potentially fatal senior moments in history, the management forgot to test the setup in advance. The first time it was used, the director in the control room called out “Cue, Jasmine,” a button was pushed, and Bligh cried out, “AAAAARRGH! And good evening.”
WHAT A CHEAPSKATE!
To impress a woman on a date, entertainer Harry Richman sometimes tipped a waiter fifty dollars after being handed the menu. Once, Richman asked the head waiter at the deluxe Stork Club, “What’s the biggest tip you’ve ever received?” “A hundred dollars,” the waiter told him. So Richman gave the man two hundred dollars. “Now tell me,” Richman asked, “who gave you the hundred?” “You did, Mr. Richman,” the waiter replied.
AND HERE’S A PHOTO OF ME BEATING HIM UP
In the summer of 2012, Michael Ruse of Hampshire, England, forgot the cardinal rule of Internet postings: When in doubt, don’t post. On trial for assault, he thought his defense was going so well that he bragged on Facebook, “I think I’m going to get away with it!” When the incriminating post fell into the hands of the prosecution, his fate was sealed. After sentencing Rouse to forty-six weeks in prison, the judge pointed out that, essentially, Rouse had fully confessed—just not in court, where he probably would have received a lighter sentence.
YET SOMEHOW SHE HAS NO TROUBLE READING ROYALTY STATEMENTS
According to the husband of author Anne Rivers Siddons, when she is preparing to begin work on a new book she becomes so preoccupied that she sometimes walks into walls. Once she put a carton of orange juice out their back door and their kitten in the refrigerator.
NUMBER 16: LEAVE LIST IN CAR SO POLICE CAN CATCH US
Two escaped prisoners fro
m Marble Valley, Vermont, were forced to abandon a stolen car when a police officer approached them. Inside was a very helpful list the forgetful fugitives had written to help them remember what to do: “Drive to Maine, get safer place to stay, buy guns, get Marie, get car—Dartmouth, do robbery, go to New York.” The prisoners were later picked up in Manhattan getting off a Maine-to-New York bus.
HOME IS WHERE THE SHORT-TERM MEMORY IS
One afternoon, 50-year-old Jermund Skogstad was busy moving into his new apartment in Oslo, Norway, when he decided to grab some lunch. But after he finished eating at a café some distance away, he reached into his pocket and realized he had forgotten his wallet, which contained not only his money but also his new address—an address he couldn’t remember, no matter how hard he tried. In a newspaper article about Skogstad’s plight, the Norwegian said he hoped his new landlady would read the story and rescue him from further embarrassment.
OH, YOU MUST WANT TO SEE MY DAUGHTER, WHO’S JUST ABOUT YOUR AGE
The great Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats was already 54 when his daughter, Anne, was born. Once, when Yeats and Anne got off the bus that stopped in front of their house in Dublin, Yeats absentmindedly turned and, not recognizing her for a moment as she reached the gate, said hazily, “Oh, and who is it you wish to see?”
IN PRAISE OF THE ABSENTMINDED
Let’s hope that William James had it right. One day the great psychologist and philosopher was walking down a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with two Harvard students when one pointed out a white-bearded man who was talking to himself. The student remarked “Whoever he is, he’s the epitome of the absentminded professor.” Replied James, “What you really mean is that he is present-minded somewhere else.”
AT LEAST THEY SPELLED RUSHED RIGHT
It’s one thing to absentmindedly misspell a word or two that you rarely use; it’s another thing to go blank when spelling words that you must have used hundreds of times. Consider the candidates for office in Charleston, West Virginia: Two Republicans spelled their party as “Repbulican” and “Repucican,” respectively, while four Democrats wrote either “Democart “ or “Democrate.” Trying to explain away the senior moments, one Republican said, “I was kind of rushed,” while one of the Democrats said—you guessed it—“I was rushed.”
AND FINALLY . . .
Mark Twain, as he did so often, has perhaps the final word on senior moments: “When I was younger,” he said toward the end of his life, “I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.”
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
All the stories in this book are true (so far as anyone can remember). They were adapted from a great many sources, including books, periodicals, and websites—too many, in fact, to list here without straining my memory—but I am especially indebted to the following: 2,500 Anecdotes for All Occasions, edited by Edmund Fuller (Crown Publishers, 1942, 1970); Absent-minded?, by James Reason and Klara Mycielska (Prentice-Hall, 1982); American Literary Anecdotes, by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, 1990); Awful Moments, by Philip Norman (Penguin Books, 1986); Bartlett’s Book of Anecdotes, edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard (Little, Brown & Co., 1985); BBC Top Gear Epic Failures, by Richard Porter (BBC Books, 2014); The Big Book of Senior Moments, by Bennett Melville (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015); The Book of Heroic Failures, by Stephen Pile (Ballantine, 1986); British Literary Anecdotes, by Robert Hendrickson (Facts on File, 1990); Broadway Anecdotes, by Peter Hay (Oxford University Press, 1989); Bumper Crop, by Bennett Cerf (Garden City Books, 1952); The Cannibals in the Cafeteria, by Stephen Pile (Harper & Row, 1988); The Cassell Dictionary of Anecdotes, by Nigel Rees (Cassell, 1999); Celebrities Behaving Badly, by Carol McGiffin and Mark Leigh (Summersdale, 2009); Congressional Anecdotes, by Paul F. Boller (Oxford University Press, 1991); Duh! by Bob Fenster (Andrews McNeel, 2000); Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest, by John J. Kohut and Roland Sweet (Plume, 1996); Dumb History, by Joey Green (Plume, 2012); The Dumbest Moments in Business History, by Adam Horowitz and the editors of Business 2.0, compiled by Mark Athitakis and Mark Lasswell (Portfolio / Penguin Group, 2004); Epic Fail: The Ultimate Book of Blunders, by Mark Leigh (Ebury Publishing, 2013); Eurekas and Euphorias, by Walter Gratzer (Oxford University Press, 2002); The Faber Book of Anecdotes, edited by Clifton Fadiman (Faber, 1985); Fortean Times: World’s Weirdest News Stories, (Dennis Publishing, 2011); Great Government Goofs, by Leland H. Gregory III (Dell Publishing, 1977); Great Operatic Disasters, by Hugh Vickers (St. Martin’s Press, 1985); The Guinness Book of Humorous Anecdotes, by Nigel Rees (Guinness Publishing, 1994); Hollywood Anecdotes, by Peter Hay (Oxford University Press, 1990); Jazz Anecdotes, by Bill Crow (Oxford University Press, 1991); The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, edited by Clifton Fadiman (Little, Brown & Co., 1985); The Lives of the Great Composers, by Harold Schonberg (W. W. Norton, 1981, revised edition); Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, by Clifton Daniel (Arbor House, 1984); The Mammoth Book of Losers, by Karl Shaw (Constable & Robinson, 2014); The Mammoth Book of Oddballs and Eccentrics, by Karl Shaw (Robin Publishing, Carroll & Graf, 2000); The Mammoth Book of Weird News, by Geoff Tibballs (Robinson, 2011); Mathematics: People, Problems, Results, by Douglas M. Campbell (Wadsworth Publishing, 1984); Mould’s Medical Anecdotes, by Richard F. Mould (Institute of Physics Publishing, 1996); Movie Stars Do the Dumbest Things, by Margaret Moser, Michael Bertin, and Bill Crawford (Renaissance Books, 1999); My Favorite Intermissions, by Victor Borge (Dorset Press, 1971); Presidential Anecdotes, by Paul F. Boller (Oxford University Press, 1996); Public Speaker’s Treasure Chest, by Herbert Prochnow (Harper & Row, 1963); The Real James Herriot: A Memoir of My Father, by James Wright (Ballantine Books, 2001); The Return of Heroic Failures, by Stephen Pile (Penguin, 1989); Rock Stars Do the Dumbest Things, by Margaret Moser and Bill Crawford (Renaissance Books, 1998); The Seven Sins of Memory, by Daniel L. Schacter (Houghton-Mifflin, 2001); The Speaker’s and Toastmaster’s Handbook of Anecdotes, by Jacob Braude (Prentice-Hall, 1971); Theatrical Anecdotes, by Peter Hays (Oxford University Press, 1987); The Ultimate Book of Heroic Failures, by Stephen Pile (Faber and Faber, 2011); Uncle John’s Weird, Weird World, by The Bathroom Readers’ Institute (Portable Press, 2014); Unusually Stupid Americans, by Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras (Villard, 2003); What Were They Thinking?, by Bruce Felton (Globe Pequot, 2003); The Wit’s Thesaurus, by Lance Davidson (Avon Books, 1994); Wrong Again!, by Jane O’Boyle (Plume, 2000); and the late, lamented Anecdotage.com.
—T. F.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are so many people to thank, but let me single out eight in particular:
The late Peter Workman, the founder of Workman Publishing, had the final say on virtually everything, including the decision to go ahead with the first edition.
Editor in chief Suzie Bolotin oversaw its creation, and guided it into print.
Design director Paul Hanson turned it into the perfect gift book, with the help of Galen Smith.
My great friend Paul Solman was one of the first readers of the manuscript, and offered numerous invaluable suggestions. (I think he liked it, although I no longer remember, of course.)
My dear wife, Christy Newman, was forced to read both editions over and over again, and never screamed once. Without her help and love, I would forget my own name.
Margot Herrera was the indispensable editor of the second edition; it’s been a great pleasure working with her.
And last but not least, there’s my old friend Richard Rosen who hired me back in 2004 to write the proposal for the first edition, and was its greatest champion. A brilliant writer/editor, he shaped it with unceasing attention to detail, great creativity, and unerring instincts (although I still think I was right about that subtitle).
Thank you all.
Photo Credits
Alamy Images—Granamour Weems Collectio
n: p. 7. PA Images—p. 161. PF-(bygone1)—p. 22. AP/ Wide World Photos—pp. 1, 12, 23, 30, 32, 34, 38, 49, 61, 67, 83, 89, 93, 95, 107, 108, 110, 116, 129, 134, 137, 139, 147, 153, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167. AP/ Wide World Photos/NASA—p. 130. Getty Images—Bettmann: pp. 25, 44, 74, 104, 166; Shaun Botterill/Getty Images Sport: p. 71; CBS Photo Archive/CBS: p. 70; Culture Club/Hulton Archive: p. 53; Grafissimo: p. 160; Ernst Haas/Masters: p. 29; Hulton Archive: p. 47; Hulton Archive/Hulton Royals Collection: p. 63; Hulton Deutsch/Corbis Historical: p. 136; John Kobal Foundation/Moviepix: p. 98; Michael Kovac/FilmMagic: p. 2; Danny Martindale/WireImage: p. 21; Mondadori Portfolio: p. 20; Popperfoto: p. 57; Francis Reiss/Picture Post: p. 11; ullstein bild: pp. 35, 91; United News/Popperfoto: p. 77; Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group: p. 85; Kevin Winter/Getty Images Entertainment: p. 14. The Granger Collection, New York—pp. 122, 144. Photofest—p. 149.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Friedman is a writer, editor, and executive producer who worked for public television’s preeminent producing station, WGBH Boston, for nearly 25 years. In 1996, he won a Peabody Award for the science documentary series Odyssey of Life. He is also the author of two books about business: Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield, with Paul Solman, and Up the Ladder.
Copyright © 2006, 2017 by Tom Friedman
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced—mechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopying—without written permission of the publisher. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.