Lizie Borden took an ax

Today, August 4, is the anniversary of the death of Lizzie Borden’s father and step-mother. [If you have never heard of the incident – and I didn’t until I was grown – and have missed the resultant doggerel (below), it was big news in 1892.]

In the mid-1990s I heard a similar piece of doggerel (also below) about a Mr. O. J. Simpson who was also accused and later acquitted of a highly-publicized double murder.

Both of these bits of verse have historical errors [e.g, there is no proof of the death order of the Bordens and it was never confirmed that there was anything other than a eater-waiter relationship between O.J.’s ex and Ronald Goldman] and the latter does not seem to have lasted in the public memory, but likely the memory of the crimes for which both were acquitted will linger for some time.

Lizzie Borden took an axe

And gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done

She gave her father forty-one

O.J. Simpson took a knife

And hacked away his ex-wife’s life

When he saw what he could do

He butchered up her boyfriend too.

Jane Hathaway obit

Jane Hathaway, foundation director, condor advocate,
figured in Commerce Bank scandal

LOS ANGELES [October 18. 1998]

Jane Hathaway, the bank secretary at Beverly Hills’ Commerce Bank who first came to public attention by testifying against and helping convict her boss in the 1972 California Dream banking scandal, died in a Los Angeles nursing home Sunday of complications from cancer at the age of 71.

Hathaway helped convict her long-time boss Milburn Drysdale after his California Dream Landscapes Finance Company and related ventures were revealed as little more than a complicated Ponzi scheme based on fraudulent premises which Drysdale and associates helped devise. She later became an advocate for preserving the California condor also twice sought election as a Republican to the California Assembly.

She was originally a co-defendant with Drysdale, but her attorneys were able to obtain separate trials and won her acquittal. The testimony revealed in her trial helped lead to more charges against Drysdale who was eventually convicted of 27 charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Drysdale died at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas in 1977.

After unsuccessful campaigns for the California legislature in 1976 and 1978, Hathaway went to work in 1980 as Executive Director for the Daisy Moses Foundation, which had been founded by J. D. Clampett, the oil mogul who was Drysdale’s primary victim. Clampett, who lost an estimated $30 million and control of Mammoth Pictures as a result of Drysdale’s crimes, had said he never believed Hathaway guilty at all and paid for her “dream team” defense. Hathaway left the Moses Foundation in 1988 to become director of Biddle Bird Watchers Society. Elly May Clampett, J. D. Clampett’s daughter and granddaughter of Daisy Moses, replaced her at the Moses Foundation.

She met the late P. Casper Biddle, the famed condor advocate and founder of Biddle Bird Watchers in the early 1960’s and became a devoted follower. She left the Biddle Bird Watchers after events following Biddle’s 1993 death led to the dissolution of the Biddle Society.

“If it weren’t for such devoted people as Professor Biddle and Jane Hathaway,” there wouldn’t be any condors left here,” said state senator Diane Kong, frequently described as the legislature’s leading condor advocate. ‘That woman was amazing. She should have been a professional lobbyist.”

“She was the nicest and most helpful person I met in California,” Clampett said from his retirement home in Tennessee. I would have never known what that man [Drysdale] was doing to me if it hadn’t been for her and she stopped things before I was wiped out.”

Services are pending. Golden West Funeral Home in Beverly Hills is handling the arrangements.

Another look at that "natural born" thing again

I have been reading the Constitution of the United States of America since at least when I was in junior high school. I read MacBeth in high school and that was almost as long ago. I imagine that most of the writers of the Constitution had read Shakespeare’s story of the ambitious Scottish king whose story the play purports to tell.

I don’t know why I did not notice until this week an obvious possible constitutional conflict for some people who might wish to be our nation’s head of state.

Our constitution specifically mentions that the president be a “natural born citizen.” The crazy rightists who complain about Obama’s missing birth certificate won’t quit their railing about the president’s alleged foreign birth and the governmental officials in Hawaii who back in 1961 rigged the record so that a baby of mixed-race history could run for president when he grew up.

I don’t participate in that view of conspiracy. But just this week those words “natural born” have just hit me with a different light.

I am advancing the hypothesis that this rules out any person, male or female of any race or birthplace, who was born by Caesarian section.

But MacBeth made it clear that people exposed to British culture [such as the one we were seeking to replace here] knew the distinction between being born of woman and being plucked out of same.

I don’t know my history well enough to know if any of our previous presidents were born that way or not and question whether anybody would be able to document anybody’s status this way, certainly not without infringing upon somebody’s medical records, but this ought to give conspiracy people of another age something to work with.

Ramirez, greater than Mantle?

Manny Ramirez has passed Mickey Mantle on the MLB all-time home run list.

People who follow baseball people continually argue about the value of statistics of one era vs. those of another. If you have ever discussed the game with me you have probably heard some rambles on the theme.

It is the contrast between Ramirez and Mantle which amazes me, specifically the way they treated their bodies.

Mickey Mantle was an old timer who did not treat his body well. Ever since late in his career, people have speculated how many he could have hit had he taken care of himself and better watched what he put in his body.

Manny Ramirez is from the newer age. He is not putting things in his body which he thinks will have a detrimental effect on his career or maybe even his teammates. On the contrary, he was recently suspended for what he put into his body to improve his career.

If I had a son I don’t know that I would want him to grow up to be like either of them.

Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969

Mary Jo Kopechne died forty years ago this weekend. Nobody seems to be noting this. Yes, I know there are other things going on -- health care, Cronkite, Apollo 11.

Ted Kennedy is no longer a pro-life U.S. Senator, but he is still in office.

Sexual harassment is still a problem.

We just never get around to looking at all the stories.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite is dead.

I have to agree that his passing does have to mark something. I recollect seeing him on the television when I was a kid. We usually were eating when the CBS evening news was on and not watching the sin box, but when we did watch a network newscast, his was the one we saw.

All the major media are playing the story, CBS the most. But if I hear the “most trusted man in America” again I think I might reel. Cronkite was good, but I don’t know that he was that especially trustworthy.

And in the middle of all this, we need to remember that even CBS was not always supportive of Cronkite. In 1964 they had him anchor the Republican convention in Daly City, California, but dumped him from the booth for the Democratic convention in Atlantic City the next month. [I remember hearing a rumor that summer that CBS was going to make Cronkite the president of another venture they were acquiring, the New York Yankees. I never heard more of that. That was before the internet made all rumors truth and if not eternal truth, perpetual truth of some kind.]

I overheard it in a store last night that Cronkite had gone on to get an interview with a certain well-known pedophile who recently died. But as much coverage as his passage is getting, it will never catch up with what that guy got.

ferrous faucets

Farrah ‘Fawcett died a few days ago. It was bad timing for her that just as the news of her passing was starting to get national circulation that a pedophile who was more famous, it seems, died whose death eclipsed hers.

But I did start to remember some of what I had known of Ms. Fawcett from her heyday of three decades ago.

And I remember seeing a picture in a newspaper of an old guy holding some plumbing fixtures that he was selling as “ferrous faucets.” Some were labeled “cold.” Others were labeled “hot.” It seemed that Ms. Fawcett [or her attorneys] wanted him to quit selling them since they felt that he was infringing upon

I don’t remember that I ever heard he disposition of the case, but I remember thinking that if Ms. Fawcett prevailed that a former Detroit Tiger outfielder should have a good time taking on the battery companies for their “alkaline” batteries.