The Werewolf as Urban Legend

How much have our thought processes changed since the werewolf scares of the Middle Ages? Sometimes one wonders.

In August 1972, the Ohio Crescent-News reported that police were searching for a “wolf-man” who attacked at night in the town of Defiance, Ohio on three separate occasions within one week. The attacker was described as tall with an "animal-like head". Witnesses said the werewolf was seven to nine feet tall, and wore blue jeans and a dark shirt. He was said to have hairy feet, fangs, and a caveman-like canter.

The Toledo Blade dispatched reporter James Stegall to the scene. Stegall reported, “Three persons have told police that they saw a large beast that resembles a werewolf lurking along railroad tracks near downtown Defiance in the last week. In each case he was spotted during the early morning hours, and one man, a train crewman switching trains, said that he was approached from behind and was struck on the shoulder with a piece of 2-by-4 lumber. But when he ran the "werewolf" also disappeared into some nearby brush. In the other reported incidents the "werewolf" was seen by another train crewman about 3 a.m. Police say the third report came from a motorist who said "it" ran in front of his car about 4 a.m. and then quickly disappeared. ‘We don't know what to think.’ Chief Donald Breckler said. ‘We didn't release it (to the news media) when we got the first report about a week ago. But now we're taking it seriously. We’re concerned for the safety of our people.’”

And thus an urban legend was born. Notwithstanding the fact that Chief Breckler said that he believed that the attacks were being made by a man wearing a mask, within the week at least three hysterical people sought protection from the police. Many people who had not actually seen the creature felt sure they were being watched or were in imminent danger. One woman told the police that every night at 2:00 a.m., something rattled her door knob. Another woman phoned the police to say there was something scratching at her door and she intended to shoot, if anything came through it. No more was heard from the creature after mid-August.



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Benjamin Franklin and Slavery

At the age of 81, Benjamin Franklin became the president of the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. The society, founded by Philadelphia Quakers was one of the first abolitionist organizations in America.

Franklin had not always been such an ardent abolitionist, and is known to have owned two slaves, George and King, who worked as personal servants.

Benjamin Franklin began life as an apprentice, legally bound to a master for a set term. He did not care for the restrictions and ran away from the master, settling in Philadelphia. As an up and coming businessman, however, Franklin had no problem with the institution of slavery. His newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette regularly ran notices regarding the purchase and sale of slaves.

Franklin’s views gradually changed as he grew older. After about 1770 his writings became progressively more anti-slavery, and in a letter to the London Chronicle he called slavery "a constant butchery of the human species by the pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men."

By 1789 Franklin had freed his slaves and become a fervent abolitionist.



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A Plot to Kill Martha Washington?

George Washington died on December 14, 1799. At the time of Washington’s death, there were some 317 slaves living on his Mount Vernon estate in Virginia (123 were owned by Washington outright, forty were rented from a neighbor, and 154 belonged to Martha Washington under the term of her first husband’s will). Under the terms of Washington’s will, his slaves (not including the forty who were rented or the slaves belonging to Martha Washington) were to be freed upon the death of his wife. Only one slave, William Lee was freed outright in Washington’s will.


The terms of the will created an almost immediate problem for Martha Washington. The only thing standing between 123 slaves and their freedom was her life. According to a contemporary letter, Martha Washington “did not feel as tho her Life was safe in their [slaves] Hands”. Martha Washington’s fears may or may not have been misplaced, but they certainly reflected the attitudes of slave owners of her day. The closeness of house servants to their masters, for whom they cooked and washed in the very house where the master slept, made the threat of poisoning terrifying. Nor was this fear groundless. The records of colonial Virginia document the trial of 180 slaves tried for poisoning. Martha freed Washington’s slaves within a year after his death. She never freed her own slaves.




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Berry Gordy: Did Motown Records Build Cultural Bridges?

In the 1960s, Berry Gordy (founder of Motown Records) stressed the creation of music that was, “simple, direct and emotional” with cross over potential. He established a factory like operation, complete with a “finishing school” that polished ghetto kid performers, and produced a consistent string of star performers and hits. Gordy’s emphasis on creating non-threatening performers made blacks and by inference the civil rights movement more palatable to whites. The scenario would play out like this: “I like the music, I like the performer, he/she isn’t so bad. I now have a cultural bridge (however narrow) to relate to other blacks. They aren’t so bad.” Whites begin to relate to blacks in terms of common humanity rather than stereotypes using the cultural bridge provided by the Motown sound. Television impresario Ed Sullivan summed it up when he said, “(The Negro performer) has become a welcome visitor, not only to the white adult, but to the white children, who will finally lay Jim Crow to rest.”

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Famous Marches on Washington

What do Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, the Vietnam War, the KKK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gay & Lesbians have in common? They all inspired a march on Washington.

Americans have been pretty routinely marching on Washington since 1894. Before 1995 the government made estimates of the number of participants. In 1995 the organizers of the “Million Man March” were so critical of the National Park Services’ conservative estimate of 400,000 participants that the government discontinued making estimates of the number of participants at such events.

There is no effort at making an unbiased count of march participants today. Estimates of the “Restoring Honor” march on Washington range from 87,000 – 650,000. Estimates may vary by ideology.

Below are march numbers based on “conservative” government estimates of earlier marches on Washington:

Woman’s Suffrage March of 1913: 5,000

Ku Klux Klan March to protect America against Blacks, Jews, Catholics, labor unions, and communists of 1925 : Participants 35,000 (Overall national Klan membership reached 6 million paying members in 1924).

Martin Luther King Jr. march on Washington of 1963 (during which King made the “I Have a Dream Speech”): Participants 250,000

March to end the Vietnam War of 1969: Participants 600,000

March to end the Vietnam War of 1971: Participants 500,000

National March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights of 1987: Participants 500,000

Million Man March of 1995: Participants 400,000



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Cocktail History

The first cocktail known to history was described in an American periodical of 1816. The first British cocktail bar was opened in London by the great chef Alex Soyer (of the Reform Club) in 1851. It lasted five months before being closed down as a danger to morals. 

The American exhibition at the Paris Exposition of 1867 included a genuine American bar dispensing New World concoctions. A British journalist, George Augustus Sala, reported, “ At the bar…were dispensed…cobblers, noggs, smashes, cocktails, eye-openers, moustache twisters and corpse revivers.” Sala was amused and delighted. Not so two other English writers, Henry Porter and George Roberts, who deplored the, “…sensation drinks which have lately travelled across the Atlantic…We will pass the American bar, with its bad brandies and fiery wine, and express our gratification at the slight success which, ‘Pick-Me-Up’, ‘Corpse-Reviver’, ‘Chain Lightning’, and the like, have had in this country.”

Eventually, American culture triumphed and cocktails were adopted in Europe. One of the classic cocktails, the “Side Car” was invented at the end of World War I at the bar of the Ritz Hotel in Paris. Not to be outdone, an American variant of the “Side Car” called the “Cable Car”, was created by Abou-Ganim in 1996 when he tended bar at Harry Denton's Starlight Room in the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco.

Few hotels in the country are as synonymous with the city they call home as the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Known by locals as "The Drake," the hotel defines San Francisco. When the hotel opened its doors in 1928, the city had never seen anything like it. Although the city boasted a number of luxury hotels, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel was something else entirely: a sleek state-of-the-art marvel reflecting the dynamic spirit of a new metropolis emerging from the devastating 1906 earthquake.



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Civil War Fashion

War presented special problems for the world of ladies’ fashion in the Confederacy, as is best described in the words of General James Longstreet:

“While we were longing for the (reconnaissance) balloons that poverty denied us, a genius arose... and suggested we.... gather silk dresses and make a balloon. It was done, and we soon had a great patchwork ship.... One day it was on a steamer down on the James River, when the tide went out and left the vessel and balloon high and dry on a bar. The Federals gathered it in, and with it the last silk dresses in the Confederacy.”



For those interested in cultural history, researcher/historian Sarah Mitchell provides an entertaining, meticulously researched and informative look at southern ladies' Civil War and antebellum fashions 1855–1865, in her book by the same name. Mitchell’s book contains historically accurate descriptions of clothing, shoes, and undergarments worn by Southern women from 1855 to 1865, and a look at the ways that Southern women ingeniously kept themselves clothed and shod during the hard days of the Civil War. Sources include newspapers, magazines, letters, and diaries from the period. This work is complemented by her book on a slightly earlier period, Ladies' Clothing in the 1830's.

The Civil War Wedding: available on Kindle

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