Category: History Blog

Great stories from the past!

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The Tax That Changed London’s Architecture

One subtle feature of London’s architecture you might not notice until your third or fourth visit to the city is… the sheer number of bricked up windows. Once you know to look for them, they’re EVERYWHERE. But why?

Bricked Up Window #1

Because King William III enacted a tax on windows in 1696. Windows were expensive back then, so the theory was the tax would get most its revenue from the wealthy, since they had the most windows.

Bricked Up Window #2

Except EVERYONE started gaming the system immediately. In some places, the tax was tiered, so you paid x tax on 1-6 windows, more on 7-12 windows, etc. A homeowner with 7 windows thus only needed to brick up 1 window to drop into the lower bracket.

And of course the poor inadvertently felt the brunt of the law. Many “apartment buildings” were houses converted into apartments. For tax purposes, they were considered one dwelling. So landlords would brick up all the windows on the first floor, where the cheapest rents were, or would brick up windows of tenants they just didn’t like.

The TRULY wealthy steered into the skid. Although Derbyshire’s Hardwick Hall predates the window tax by 100 years, its striking use of windows flips a finger at the taxman and shows the world who could REALLY afford to live large:

Hardwick Hall

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Great Southeast Music Hall

The Great Southeast Music Hall was a legendary Atlanta music venue at least a decade before my time. The list of acts to play that stage is almost unbelievable. The most famous has to be the Sex Pistols’ show on January 5, 1978… but the venue is really known for hosting acts that would one day become huge. In the 1970s, you could go to Great Southeast Music Hall and see “nobodies” like Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett or Lynyrd Skynyrd for 3 or 4 bucks. Even if they were known – like Jim Croce, Muddy Waters or Linda Ronstadt – chances were good that there wouldn’t be much of a crowd (the official maximum capacity was only 500).

One night in the mid 1970s, Steve Martin and Martin Mull were supposed to do a double-bill as “The Steve Martin Mull Show”. Local legend Darryl Rhoades describes it:

“Steve had a college date on a Thursday night so they brought in Tom Waits for that show and Martin asked if I wanted to set in so I played drums with Jonny Hibbert on sax and Keith Christopher on bass with Martin on guitar and Tom on piano. That was one of my more pleasant memories at the Music Hall.”

The best part is, only around 14 people bought tickets, so the two Martins cut the show short and invited everyone – the crowd and venue employees – to the nearby Express Lanes bowling alley, where Martin and Mull bought several pitchers of beer and rented a couple lanes for the rest of the evening.

Can you imagine how cool that would have been? How much geek cred would you have with your “I saw Martin Mull open for a pickup band with Steve Martin and Tom Waits and only 13 other people showed up, so they took us bowling and bought pitchers of beer!” story?

NEAT FACT: Jonny Hibbert played sax, but is mostly known for starting Atlanta-based label Hib-Tone Records. The label only ever released four singles. Three of them were pretty forgettable… but the other one was R.E.M.’s first version of “Radio Free Europe”.

HIbtone Records

NEAT FACT 2: Keith Christopher was a founding member (and namesake) of a short-lived Atlanta band called “Keith and the Satellites”. After several personnel changes (including Keith’s departure) they renamed themselves “The Georgia Satellites”.

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About CD Longboxes

In 1982, no one knew if Compact Discs were going to be a flop or fad or just something audiophiles with $1,000 stereos bought. Music retail was dominated by independent shops and regional chains back then, and they were loathe to spend tens of thousands on new display racks on a format that might tank.

So record companies introduced the longbox. For most of the 80s and into the early 90s, CDs were sold in long cardboard boxes:

CD Longboxes

Some folks say the longbox was to “help endcap marketing” with big graphics or “to cut down on shoplifting” by making it harder to stuff into your trousers undetected.

The longbox did help those 2 things, but its primary use was for display in stores. Two longboxes side by side were exactly 12″x12″, the same size as an LP. So record stores could display them in existing LP bins and not have to order special CD bins. And they could transition from LPs to CDs (or back again) simply by altering the ratios of each format from the distributor when ordering.

Ironically, some artists (especially R.E.M.) loudly decried the waste of cardboard longboxes were. So they were largely ditched. Some places switched to lockable, reusable plastic versions… but most just broke down and bought all new display cases instead. So hard to tell what was the bigger waste: all that cardboard, or all the particle board that made CD bins.

I mentioned R.E.M. because their album “Out of Time” was due for release in ’91, but there was a feud between R.E.M. (who were ADAMANTLY against it coming out in a longbox) and their record label (who genuinely didn’t have time to come up with an alternative).

Virgin Records US executive Jeff Ayeroff was pissed by censorship of 2 Live Crew and so formed “Rock the Vote” to get young adults to register to vote. The campaign was pretty famous in its day: seems like all the big stars made “Rock the Vote” public service announcements, which were heavily promoted on MTV.

Ayeroff saved the day when he got R.E.M. to allow Out of Time to come out in a longbox if it included a detachable postcard petitioning Congress for the Motor Voter bill and if Warner Brothers promised to come up with a “solution” to the longbox issue before the release of R.E.M.’s next album:

R.E.M.'s "Out of Time" longbox

Both things were successful: Rock The Vote’s petition generated tens of thousands of responses, which were displayed in mail bags on the floor or the US Senate. And with other Motor Voter campaigns pushing, Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993… and longboxes quietly went away.

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A Helluva Bet!

This is Thomas Edward Fitzpatrick. On September 30, 1956 he was completely hammered in a bar on St. Nicholas Ave. in Manhattan. He made a drunken bet that he could make it from New Jersey to New York City in 15 minutes.

Thomas Edward Fitzpatrick

Fitzpatrick thus drove his car to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, stole a small plane from the Teterboro School of Aeronautics and flew it, drunk and without lights or radio, and landed on St. Nicholas Avenue, stopping directly in front of the bar in which he’d made the bet. Long story short, because the airplane wasn’t damaged, the school refused to press charges, and just wanted it to go away. So Fitzpatrick was fined $100 for the stunt. Which is just around  $1,100 in 2025 dollars. It’s a fair amount of money, but all things considered it’s still a slap on the wrist.

The best part of the story is, a couple years later Fitzpatrick was once again drunk in a Manhattan bar, and someone refused to believe that he was the one who’d pulled off the original stunt.

Guess what Fitzpatrick did?

He drove back to Teterboro Airport and stole another plane from the school and landed this one in front of a Yeshiva University building at Amsterdam Ave. and 187th Street. This time the court decided the prank had gone too far, and sentenced him to six months in prison. For his part, Fitzpatrick blamed it all on “the lousy drink”.

Although that was the end of his aerial adventures, that wasn’t the end of his fame: before any of this, Fitzpatrick was known as “the first New York City resident to be wounded in the Korean War”.

He also had a drink named after him for his late night stunts: the Late Night Flight:

Ingredients:

½ ounce Kahlua
1½ ounces vodka
½ ounce Chambord
5 blackberries
1 egg white
Dash simple syrup

The idea here is to create a layered representation of NYC’s night-time sky.

Pour Kahlua into the base of a cocktail glass.

In a separate mixing glass, muddle the blackberries, add Chambord and one ounce of vodka, and shake with ice. Strain carefully into a layer over the Kahlua.

In another mixing glass, shake egg white, syrup, and remaining half ounce of vodka — without ice — to create an emulsion. Layer this fluffy white foam on top – like the clouds through which Fitzpatrick piloted.

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Moe Berg, Enigma

This is Morris “Moe” Berg, and he was probably the most interesting baseball player of all time.

Moe Berg

Moe was born in New York City in 1902. He was fluent in English and, being Jewish, knew Hebrew and Yiddish, too. He went to NYU and then Princeton, where he learned Latin & Greek, and became a fluent speaker of French, Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit. He got a degree from Columbia Law School and attended the Sorbonne in Paris. After college he learned Japanese and Portuguese “for fun”. He read 10 newspapers a day and was an occasional guest panelist on Information Please, a popular NBC Radio quiz show.

But Moe is mostly remembered as a baseball player, with stints with the White Sox then the Red Sox with stops in Cleveland and Washington along the way. He was a pretty good catcher, but was a horrible batter. In 15 years of major-league baseball, Moe only hit six home runs and six triples, and ended up with a lifetime .243 batting average. Teammates joked that Moe “can speak 10 languages, but he can’t hit in any of them”.

Although Moe loved baseball, he wouldn’t let it dictate his life. He’d take off after a season ended just to go to Italy for a few months. He skipped spring training one year to go to Paris… where he decided to just stay and start classes at the Sorbonne.

In 1934, a man named Herb Hunter put together a bunch of baseball all-stars – Babe Ruth, Jimmie Fox, Lou Gehrig and, for some reason, Moe Berg – to go on a goodwill tour of Japan. Berg flattered his hosts at a welcome dinner by delivering a speech in perfect Japanese. He floored fans by signing autographs in Japanese.

To the Japanese government Moe Berg was “just a baseball player”. So they didn’t bother to put him under surveillance. Berg visited Saint Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo, officially to visit the American ambassador’s sick daughter. Which he did. But he also used his new movie camera to film the city and its ports from the roof of the hospital, “in case war broke out later”. For years there were rumors that this footage was used to plan the famous Doolittle Raid, although it later came out that Doolittle was being planned months before Berg turned his footage over to the government.

If “filming Imperial Japanese Navy ports” sounds like something a spy would do… well, that’s because Moe Berg was a spy, too. In fact, Berg is one of the very few spies the American government has ever acknowledged.

After Pearl Harbor, Berg got in touch with a friend, who arranged a meeting between Berg and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the WWII predecessor of the CIA. Donovan liked Berg, and eventually put him on Project Larson, in which Berg was parachuted into Italy, and where he and fellow spies would follow the retreating Germans as closely as possible and kidnap Italian physicists before the Nazis could kill them or take them back to Germany.

But that was only half of it: Berg was also part of Project AZUSA, in which he was to interview as many scientists as he could to determine if Werner Heisenberg – of “uncertainty principle” and Breaking Bad fame – was actually working on a nuclear bomb or was just stalling for time until the war was over. Berg was to get as close to Heisenberg as possible, and if Berg believed he was developing a bomb, he had orders to kill him. Berg was apparently willing to do this, but in the end he didn’t have to: he determined that Heisenberg was mostly trying to protect as many German scientists as possible, and that even if he was, the Germans almost certainly didn’t have the resources to actually build one.

But Berg was, first and foremost, a baseball player. When US Army officials were given the names of the OSS agents in Project Larson, an aide – clearly not a baseball fan – asked his boss: “Do you know what they gave us? A ballplayer named Moe Berg. You ever hear of him?”, to which the general replied, “Yes, the slowest baserunner in the American League.”

One last mystery: President Truman awarded Berg the Medal of Freedom for his actions during WWII… but Berg turned it down. And we’ll probably never know why: he went to his grave never telling anyone why he turned it down. After he died in 1972, his sister requested the award, which she then donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

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Gone With The Wind

Hollywood superstar Rudolph Valentino (center) talks to Atlanta Georgian reporter Bert Collier (left) and Atlanta Journal reporter Peggy Mitchell (right) on the roof of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, 1923.

Accessing the roof meant ducking through a low window with a four foot drop on the other side. When Mitchell had problems getting back inside, Valentino gently picked her up and carried her back into the hotel, which Mitchell called “the thrill of a lifetime”. She would later write a hugely popular novel under her given name, Margaret Mitchell.

Valentino-Mitchell

Speaking of Gone with the Wind… contrary to popular belief, the world premiere of the film wasn’t at the Fox Theatre. It was at the nearby Loew’s Grand, where 300,000 people showed up hoping to catch a glimpse of Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. A special, temporary “Tara” façade was even built on the front of the cinema:

Loew's Grand

Loew’s was built as “DeGive’s Grand Opera House” in 1893, and burned down in a “mysterious” fire in 1978 (wink-wink). The Georgia-Pacific Tower now stands on the site.

Georgia-Pacific Tower

Some of the bricks from the Loew’s were salvaged to build the Houston’s restaurant at 2166 Peachtree Rd.;

Houston's Restaurant

The lobby chandelier from the Loew’s now hangs in The Tabernacle, a music venue inside a former Baptist church:

The Tabernacle Atlanta

The Fox Theater was the site of the world premiere of Disney’s Song of the South. Walt Disney himself attended the event. But poor Walt just couldn’t bear the thought of criticism, so he quietly left just before the movie started, walking across Peachtree Street to his room at the very same Georgian Terrace Hotel… where he chain-smoked and paced around his room for the next two hours.

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Check vs. Cheque

There are many words in American English which were once commonplace in British English before the American Revolution. Folks on both sides of the Atlantic regularly used words like “fall”, “diaper” and “faucet”. The British moved on to “autumn”, “nappy” and “tap” decades later, while American English stubbornly kept the older words.

One word in particular – check, as in “a financial instrument” – seems to really set off Brits. Many Brits assume American English switched from “cheque” to “check” because of Noah Webster. But that’s not how this story works: for around 125 years, “check” was the dominant form. Although “cheque” was used in Britain, it was used almost exclusively by goldsmiths. “Check” was by far the most popular spelling in Britain and the only spelling used in America.

In 1827, an English banker named James William Gilbart (below) published a book called Practical Treatise on Banking. Universities widely adopted it as a textbook and banks used it as an instruction manual. While writing the book, Gilbart decided to standardize on “cheque” to eliminate any confusion with other uses of “check”… and within 20 years “check” was completely gone from the British banking system, and British English generally.

James William Gilbart

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The Death of Ken McElroy

On July 10, 1981, a man named Ken McElroy was shot and killed in broad daylight, by two different people, on his town’s main street, in front of somewhere between 30 and 46 witnesses. Despite investigations by local police and the FBI, no one has ever squealed on the shooters.

That’s because Ken McElroy was Skidmore, Missouri’s town bully. Ken was suspected of dozens of felonies, and was indicted 21 times for burglary, arson, assault, rape, child molestation, animal cruelty and hog & cattle rustling. But he’d always get away with it, because he’d use severe intimidation of cops, judges and witnesses to beat the rap… until the last time.

Ken McElroy

When McElroy was 35, he fell in love with a 12-year-old local girl named Trena McCloud. He had sex with her multiple times, over her family’s vocal objection. They finally allowed her to marry McElroy… after he burned down their house and shot the family dog. No joke: Ken McElroy was a garbage human being.

Several years later, McElroy and McCloud were at a shop owned by a man named Ernest “Bo” Bowenkamp. When one of their kids tried to steal some candy, Bo objected. McElroy went out to his truck and came back with a shotgun, shooting Bo in the neck. Bo survived. McElroy was eventually charged with attempted murder. He was even convicted of it but was released pending an appeal.

One day, shortly after his release, several townspeople – including Sheriff Don Estes – met at the local American Legion to come up with a plan for dealing with McElroy once and for all. Word reached the group that Ken & Trena were drinking at the D&G Tavern nearby. Estes told the group that, in his official capacity as sheriff, they should simply form a “neighborhood watch” group. He then loudly announced that he had to leave the county “for an appointment”. He got in his patrol car and left the area.

Several townsfolk armed themselves and marched down to the tavern. McElroy sensed trouble, so he and Trena got in his pick-up truck to leave. Townsfolk surrounded the truck. Soon, shots rang out from all angles, possibly on purpose, to mask the identity of the killers.

No one called an ambulance. No one called the cops. No one even called a preacher. Trena identified one of the killers, but with no physical evidence there was little the police could do. The DA refused to charge anyone. And now, 43 years later, none of the witnesses has said a word about the killers.

Not one word.

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The Story of the World Athletes Monument

This is the World Athletes Monument, given to the people of Atlanta by the Prince of Wales in 1995, in honor of the then-upcoming 1996 Olympic Games.

World Athletes Monument

The city placed it at Pershing Point, a small park where West Peachtree dead-ends into Peachtree Street just before you cross the Downtown Connector into Buckhead. The park was already a memorial, named for General John J. Pershing, commander of US forces in Europe in WWI, and dedicated to Atlantans who lost their lives in the Great War. It’s one of three WWI memorials in the city.

FUN FACT: The memorial isn’t in the “park” itself. It’s actually across the street on a small scrap of land originally owned by Georgia DOT, who donated it to the city for the memorial. So that land just kind of became an addition to the park.

Although the Prince of Wales didn’t attend the dedication ceremony – that was led by Lord Morris as personal representative of Queen Elizabeth II, which is actually a status upgrade – the statue is more commonly known as the “Prince Charles Monument” or “Prince of Wales Monument” in the city.

Because of that association, when Princess Diana died over 20,000 people came to the monument to grieve. Anyone living in Atlanta at the time surely remembers local newscasts showing the huge crowds of people and a pile of flowers 6 feet high and 20 feet deep surrounding the monument.

In the immediate aftermath of her death, the city allegedly renamed the area “Princess Diana Square”. I can’t find any official confirmation of that, and no maps show that. What I’m thinking is, the city just passed an honorary resolution about it, like one of those where your state’s governor declares today to be “Fried Chicken Day in North Carolina” things.

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“Smart Alec”

The term “Smart Alec” is thought to have come from the misadventures of 1840s New York City criminal Alec Hoag.

Alec was a pimp and thief. Originally his scam worked like this: his wife, Melinda, would take a “customer” down a dark alley in which Alec was hidden. She’d pick the john’s pockets and hold the loot in her hand; Alec would silently take the goods and disappear into the night while the client was… “distracted”.

Most men would be too embarrassed to report the theft to the cops. But some would, so Alec started paying off local cops by giving them a cut of his ill-gotten gains. For Alec it was win-win.

I’m not quite sure what happened next. Some sources say Alec fell into financial difficulties and couldn’t pay off the police. Others say he simply decided he didn’t want to pay off the cops any more.

Whatever the case, Alec moved his scam into a rented room. Melinda would bring johns back to the room and draw a curtain around the four-poster bed. When the moment was right, she’d cough, and Alec would slip into the room through a false panel and steal the john’s wallet (and anything else of value), then quietly disappear the way he came.

It worked for a while, but when the NYPD found out that Alec had cut them out of his business they arrested him. Some cops took to sarcastically calling him “Smart Alec”, as he was just a bit too clever for his own good.

They say it took a good 20 years, but eventually the phase entered common usage near the end of the Civil War. Although the story hasn’t been proven beyond a doubt, it has consistently been the only story attached to the saying, so it may just be true!