Red,
White & True Mysteries
Syndicated weekly newspaper columnist, NIE vendor and author
155 Babbling
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Red,
White & True Mysteries |
Welcome to the official
home of the
RED,
WHITE & TRUE MYSTERIES syndicated newspaper column
Below are eight stories from the RED, WHITE & TRUE MYSTERIES series. The stories reveal the interesting little-known stories behind the men and women who shaped American history. The stories are available in printed form, as well as in video form for newspaper websites. The stories are from Paul Niemann's syndicated newspaper column, which has appeared in more than 110 newspapers nationwide since it made its debut in six newspapers on January 3, 2003.
Enjoy the sample stories below.
Best Regards,
Paul Niemann
Office: 800-337-5758
Cell: 636-477-8000
niemann7@aol.com
Bonaparte,
He was a general, born hundreds of years ago. His first
name was so unique that he probably didn’t even need to tell people his last
name. Or his middle name, for that matter, as it is known throughout the whole
world. Yet he was as American as baseball and your mom’s apple pie.
He led his troops in a well-known war that you learned
about in History class.
His name?
Napoleon Bonaparte. And he wasn’t really exiled to the
He had something in common with George Washington and
Thomas Jefferson, but it had nothing to do with being the leader of his country.
You probably didn’t know that George Washington was an
agricultural chemist long before he was so well known. In fact, he created many
new products from plants. He is responsible for axle grease, meat tenderizer and
talcum powder, among many other products. He also was the director of Ag
Research at Tuskegee
Like Napoleon and
He had a daughter who went on to become a first lady,
married to a
Before you think that I’m trying to rewrite history, let
me clear things up a bit.
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The George Washington who created new products from
plants and led the ag research department at The Thomas Jefferson whose daughter went on to become
a first lady was Thomas Jefferson Taylor. The descendent was actually his
daughter, Claudia “Lady Bird” Taylor, who married Lyndon Baines
Johnson. And it wasn’t that
Napoleon Bonaparte who was mentioned at the beginning of this story, but
rather Napoleon Bonaparte Buford. He was born in 1801 in |
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Until now.
So what exactly did Napoleon Bonaparte Buford do to earn a
spot in this column?
It was his first and middle name that did it for me.
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The good doctor was no
doctor at all
Ted was born in Springfield
in 1904. Like the hometown of The Simpsons, his home state is irrelevant to this story. In case
you’re wondering, though, there are 35 states that have a
His parents were Theodor
and Henrietta Geisel, and he had two sisters. He was known by his title of
doctor, and was beloved by kids everywhere for his work. In fact, nearly
everyone knew his name, but it wasn’t his actual name. He wasn’t a doctor,
either.
Ted’s mother ran a bakery
before she married Ted’s father. When she had trouble getting him to sleep,
she would use a certain rhythm to chant the names of the pies that she had
baked. This type of rhythm stayed with Ted all his life, and it influenced
his work to the point where he would use this rhythm all throughout his career.
While a student at
As a result, he was forced to
resign his post as editor. In order to continue writing for the magazine,
he signed his work with a disguised identity. He simply dropped his last
name and used his middle name instead, which was also his mother’s maiden
name.
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Ted attended After working briefly as a
cartoonist, Standard Oil offered Ted a job in their advertising
department. When a competitor offered him a similar position, he made his
decision by flipping a coin. Hmmm, there’s a lesson in here somewhere.
His first children’s book, “And
to Think That I Saw It on Ted went on to publish 44
books from 1957 to 1996, and several of them have been adapted into films
and animated TV shows. Twenty-four of his books became best-selling
children’s books. |
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Then why did he use the title of
doctor in his name? It was because his Dad always wanted a doctor in the family!
His full name was Ted Seuss Geisel. You know him as Dr. Seuss.
Here are a few little-known pieces of trivia about Dr.
Seuss you can use to impress your friends ....
In case you’re still wondering
where Dr. Seuss was born, it was
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video version of this story?
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Mr. Tatanka Iyotaka really is a
household name
With a name that is unfamiliar to most Americans, Tatanka
Iyotaka became a legend among the native Lakota Sioux Indians. He fought
alongside them as they tried to prevent the American government from claiming
their land.
His people even fought General George Custer. Yes, Tatanka
Iyotaka was pretty well-known in his day, and he’s just as well-known 117
years after he died. Later in his life, he performed with Buffalo Bill Cody’s
Wild West Show alongside Annie Oakley. In fact, it was Tatanka who gave Annie
Oakley the nickname of “Little Sure Shot.”
Born in 1831 near the
And just what was he doing fighting General Custer?
Winning.
Because the battle in which he inspired the Sioux Indians
against George Custer was the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876. This turned out
to be the Sioux Indians’ greatest military victory. It was also the beginning
of the end for Tatanka Iyotaka.
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He was regarded as a holy man among the Sioux
Indians, and his biggest contribution to the Battle of Little Big Horn was
spiritual. He was not present at this historic battle; however, during a
sun dance ritual, he had a vision which inspired the others – a vision
in which he saw hundreds of fallen cavalry soldiers. One year after the Battle of Little Big Horn, Iyotaka
and his men fled to In 1885 Iyotaka had another vision. In this vision, a
bird landed on a hill beside him and said, “Your
own people, the Lakotas, will kill you.” |
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In December of 1890, five years after his vision, Indian police came to arrest
the 59-year-old Iyotaka for supporting the Ghost Dance movement. The Ghost Dance
was intended to get rid of white people, hence the name “Ghost Dance.”
But things went terribly wrong when a few of his people
threatened the Indian police. One of his men fired a shot at the police, and
when the police fired back, they hit Iyotaka in the head and chest, killing him
instantly. Twelve more Indians were killed in the gunfight, along with three
others that were injured.
It might seem a bit odd that Tatanka Iyotaka was killed by
Indian police because he was Indian himself. In fact, it was his Indian
name by which you know him … Sitting Bull.
But you knew that all along, didn’t you?
# # #
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watch the video
Nine-year-old girl supports
family with her hunting ability
Phoebe Moses lived an interesting
life. As a nine-year-old girl, she hunted for food to support her family. As a
teenager, she starred in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. When she was 21, she
beat a man in a shooting contest and then married him. In 1903, she was accused
of having a cocaine habit. She also spent her entire fortune on the
charities that she supported.
There’s one other thing about her that’s significant:
If she hadn’t been such a good shot, there might never have been a
World War I (known then as “The Great War” since it was the only world war
up to that point in history).
Phoebe (that’s pronounced
“Phoebe”) was her given name, but it was her stage name by which you know
her.
Phoebe was the fifth of seven
children born in a log cabin to Jacob and Susan Moses in 1860, a Quaker couple
living in rural western
She lost her father when she was
just six years old. A few years later, she began hunting for food to help feed
the family. She was such a good aim that she could shoot the head off a running
quail.
She was so good at hunting that
she was able to support the family by selling her game to local residents. Local
hotel owners preferred the animals that Phoebe shot because she always shot it
in the head, meaning that there would be no buckshot left in the animal. She did
well enough to pay off the mortgage on the family home in just three years!
This petite woman – who stood only five-feet tall as an
adult – went on to become one of the Wild West’s biggest celebrities. She
could split the edge of a playing card with her first shot, and then shoot five
more holes in that same card before it hit the ground.
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In 1881, the spunky little Phoebe competed against a
famous shooter named Frank Butler in a contest near So she became Phoebe Ann Butler, the greatest
American woman to ever shoot a gun, right? Wrong. This woman, who would go on to perform with
Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, would take a
nickname of her own; actually, it was more of a stage name than a
nickname. She took her stage name after the
Cincinnati
neighborhood in which she and Frank lived. |
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Phoebe Moses became known
as Annie Oakley.
You’ve heard the story of William Tell shooting the apple
off of a man’s head? Well, Annie Oakley once shot a cigarette out of the lips
of
And what ever happened with the accusation that she
had a cocaine habit?
Newspaper publisher William
Randolph Hearst published a story that Annie Oakley was arrested for stealing to
pay for cocaine. It turned out that a burlesque performer was the guilty one
and, when arrested, she told the police that her name was Annie Oakley. When the
real Annie Oakley took Hearst to court and won, he refused to pay up. She went
on to win 54 out of 55 libel suits against newspapers who re-printed the story.
Why only 54 out of 55? It turns out that Annie Oakley was better at shooting guns than she was at winning lawsuits.
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Former
USC football player Marion Morrison becomes national icon
His
name was Marion Morrison, and he
was born in Winterset, Iowa, exactly one hundred years ago. I wasn’t sure where that was, so I
looked it up. Turns out that it is between Missouri
and
His
father, Clyde, was the son of a Civil War veteran.
Clyde
and Mary had one other son, named
Robert, and they were of Irish descent. The family moved to
His great-nephew, Tommy Morrison, is a professional boxer, who starred in one of the Rocky movies. I think it was Rocky 16, but I could be mistaken.
Marion’s voice was as distinctive as Paul Harvey’s, but he wasn’t a radio star. No, Marion Morrison was an actor. In fact, his father ran a drugstore that was housed in the same building as a movie theatre, and young Marion was allowed to see several movies a week as a boy, for free. This no doubt instilled in him a love of movies.
He became one of the most popular actors of all time, and there probably isn’t a person in this country who hasn’t heard of him. He made more than 175 movies in his 50-year career which began in the 1920’s with silent movies, and some of his movies are still being shown on TV, more than 30 years after he made his last movie in 1976.
He won an athletic scholarship to play football at USC. I don’t know what his team’s record was when he played, but I do know that his team wasn’t one of The Undefeated. An injury cut short his college football career. Marion was too scared to tell his coach how he injured himself – it was a bodysurfing accident – and he lost his scholarship and had to get a job in order to pay for school.
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While he was in school in the late 1920’s, he worked at a few of the local film studios. He then went to work as a prop man, earning $75 per week. In
1930 he got his first starring role in a western movie, The
Big Trail. He went on to become nearly synonymous with western movies,
and he still went by the name of Marion ’s movies required him to occasionally ride in a Stagecoach; since he stood about 6’4” and loved riding horses, you could say that he always stood Tall in the Saddle. Speaking of horses, his friend James Arness also rode one in the TV show, Gunsmoke. It was Marion Morrison who recommended James Arness for the role of Matt Dillon. |
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Marion
became such a star that he even had an
airport named after him (in Orange County, California),
as well as an elementary school (in Brooklyn, New York) and a trail (in a state park in
Marion was married three times, all to Hispanic women. He was divorced three times, too. He had four daughters and three sons, and these seven kids produced 18 grandchildren.
There are many things for which Marion Morrison is known, but you know him by both his nickname and his stage name: The Duke, John Wayne.
He starred with legendary actresses such as Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn and Maureen O’Hara. It was O’Hara who once said, “No other description for John Wayne is necessary than this: American.”
There’s one other thing that you should know about the Duke: His drawl and the way he walked were not natural. The man born as Marion Morrison made them a part of his character when he became an actor.
And
how did he get the nickname of Duke? That was the name of the dog he had as a
child. The dog was known as “Big Duke” while
As for all the italicized words in this story, those were the titles of some of his most popular movies.
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to see the video version of this story?
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Eighteen-year-old
Mary Godwin created a monster in
While this column usually reveals the “little-known
stories behind well-known inventions,” we occasionally go off on a tangent,
like the story in this column about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that ran a few
months ago.
Whether the story is about inventions or about other
creations, we like to include an educational aspect to each story. So feel free
to share this column with the kids. Today’s story is not about an invention or
an inventor, but rather an 18-year-old girl whose creation is known the world
over.
As usual, there is more to the story than what you
learned in school. And as always, there is a story behind the story. That’s
where we begin with the story of 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin.
While you might not recognize her name, you’ve heard
about her creation – that is, unless you live in a cave. Or, in this case, a
laboratory.
Mary was born in
1797 in London,
Mary’s mother died ten days after Mary was born, and
she was raised by a stepmother who she did not like. Ironically, the stepmother
also was named Mary (actually, it was Mary Jane). I wonder if she referred to
her stepmother as “the evil stepmonster.” You’ll know what I mean when you
reach the end of this story.
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When Mary was just 18 years old, she created a
fictional character who she named Victor. Then Victor created a character
who became world-famous and has been the subject of a number of horror
movies. In the film versions of this story, the monster was often
mistakenly referred to by Victor’s last name. In 1931, Boris Karloff
became the first actor to portray the monster in a movie. While he was known as a monster, he started out in
life as a gentle creature who just wanted to be loved and accepted. A
monster who was eight feet tall with yellowish skin and scary eyes, to be
exact, but a gentle creature who just wanted to be loved and accepted
nonetheless. Awww, what a sweet monster, you say. Which he was
at the beginning, until he learned evil from a society that shunned him. |
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What monster did Mary’s character (Victor) create?
Mary never officially gave the monster a name in her novel, which was first
published in 1818, when Mary was only 21. Instead, she referred to him as “my
hideous pregeny.” She did, however, once refer to him as “Adam” when she
was telling her story.
Then who was
Victor, the man in Mary’s story who created the monster?
Victor Frankenstein! As in Frankenstein’s monster.
If you didn’t recognize the name Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin, it’s probably because she went by her married name of Mary Shelley.
Her fictional story of Frankenstein’s monster (which is why I wonder if she
referred to her stepmother as her stepmonster) was probably the world’s first
science fiction story.
And why were there electrodes attached to the neck of Frankenstein’s
monster?
Mary Shelley
created the story of Frankenstein’s monster at a time when experiments in
electricity were taking place, in the early 1800’s. It would be another 60
years before Thomas Edison would use electricity to power his incandescent light
bulbs.
But you knew that all along, didn’t you?
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Find out who really
discovered
Today’s story is about a European explorer named Liev.
His father was Erik Thorvaldsson, an explorer who was expelled from
It was common in Scandinavian countries during this era for
a son to take the first name of his father, and add the word “son” onto it
to form his last name.
Known for his red hair, Erik, in what may be the greatest
example of branding success of all time, discovered and colonized a land to the
west of Iceland
that was more than 85 percent covered in ice. He named it Greenland; his logic was that if people thought the land was green and beautiful, then
they would want to come.
It worked!
Meanwhile, Liev met King Olaf on a trip to Norway. King
Olaf knew Liev’s father well and took a liking to the son. King Olaf converted
Liev to Christianity, while Erik remained a pagan all his life. It was the son
Liev who spread Christianity to
Liev had also heard of a land farther west than Greenland. He bought a boat from his friend Bjarni Herjulfsson and sailed with his crew
to the west, where they soon landed on an area which seemed like one huge slab
of rock. This area is believed to be
There are conflicting stories as to why Liev went so far
west; it was either his intention to do so, or his ship got blown 500 miles off
course. Either way, they settled on what is present-day
There’s one other thing that you might find interesting
about Liev: He was actually the first European explorer to discover America
!
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He came to Then why is so little known about Leif’s discovery
of Leif’s sister, brother-in-law and a small group of
settlers were the only ones to return to |
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Then who was Leif’s father, the redhead? Erik
Thorvaldsson never used his last name on official business. Instead, he was
known by his nickname, Erik the Red.
In 1964, Congress established October 9th as
“Leif Ericsson Day” in
But wait – there’s more to this story!
Even though Leif was the first European to land on American
soil, he wasn’t the first person to see it. Remember when I said that Leif
bought a boat from his friend Bjarni Herjulfsson?
Well, Bjarni sailed to Canada
in 986 A.D. – 15 years before Leif did – but he never landed because the
rocky land didn’t appear to be of any value to him! As a result, Leif Eriksson
– and not Bjarni Herjulfsson – became the first European to set foot in
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Here’s why you’ve never heard of the OTHER person who invented the telephone
We all know that Alexander Graham Bell is credited with inventing the telephone, but did you know that there was another person who tried to patent a different version of the telephone on the very same day as Bell in 1876?
Born in Ohio in 1835, he was a physics professor at nearby Oberlein College, and was a renowned inventor due to the musical telegraph that he invented. Little is known about him because, in what has to be one of the worst cases of being "a day late and a dollar short," he arrived at the patent office two hours after Bell arrived to apply for a patent for his version of the telephone.
His name is Elisha Gray and, as a result of arriving two hours after Bell arrived, most of the world has never heard of him.
What happened?
U.S. patent law states that the first one to invent a new product is the rightful owner of the product, regardless of who applies for a patent first. Adequate records are necessary whenever there is a dispute. Since Bell applied for his patent first, he was initially awarded the patent.
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Gray did prevent the issuance of Bell’s patent temporarily, however, pending a legal hearing. Since he did not keep adequate records of his design, however, he lost any possible rights as Bell's right to the patent was later sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court and the rest, as they say, is history. |
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The basis of Gray’s legal action against Bell was that Bell had filed for his patent before he had a working model of his telephone, according to Inventors’ Digest magazine. But the Supreme Court ruled that a person can prove that his invention is complete and ready for patenting even before a working model has been produced, a ruling that later served as a precedent on a similar type of lawsuit years later.
Gray was not the only other person to stake a claim to inventing the telephone. Daniel Drawbaugh, who was born near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, claimed to have invented the telephone long before Bell filed a patent application in 1875. Drawbaugh didn't have any papers or records to prove his claim, though, and the Supreme Court rejected his claims by four votes to three. Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, had kept excellent records.
Elisha Gray did go on to invent other products, such as the facsimile telegraph system that he patented in 1888. Bell, who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847, became a U.S. citizen in 1882. He went on to become one of the co-founders of the National Geographic Society, and he served as its president from 1896 to 1904.
Elisha Gray, however, has been forgotten by much of the world.
Was Bell's telephone greeted with enthusiasm by everyone at the time?
As is the case with many new inventions, there were those who rejected the telephone for one reason or another. Even President Rutherford B. Hayes was skeptical of the new device when Bell demonstrated it to him at the White House in 1876.
There was also a well-known "investor" who had an opportunity to invest in the telephone directly with Bell, but he rejected the opportunity. According to his writings, he was a big fan of new inventions, but since he had previously invested in several that had failed, he turned down a chance to invest in the telephone. Who was he?
Mark Twain, who patented two of his own inventions.
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© Paul Niemann 2003 -- 2012
The humble scribe,
Paul Niemann
