Category: History Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

You may be under the impression that an Englishman named Thomas Crapper invented the toilet. Sorry – that’s an urban legend.

Flushing toilets go back to Elizabeth I’s time, and for centuries before that it was common to build latrines over rivers or streams, or with a some sort of water storage tank to flush the waste away.

Crapper DID start the most famous toilet company in the UK, and he invented the floating ballcock, the little floating ball in the tank that turns the incoming water off when the tank water reaches a specific level. However, many other mechanisms had been around before that.

The interesting thing about all this is, the slang term “crap” has different origins in the US and UK.

In the UK, the word “crap” comes from Middle English, probably from crappe, which is thought to come from either the Dutch krappen (to pluck off, cut off, or separate) and\or the Old French crappe (siftings or unwanted matter). It referred to bits of loose grain that were inevitably trod on in storage, like a barn. Over time, it came to mean anything worthless in British English, and wasn’t an especially popular slang term at that.

In the United States, there is no record of the word “crap” existing before World War I: not a single known written example. However, 2 million American GIs were sent to the UK to fight against Germany, and these soldiers saw the “Crapper” name on seemingly EVERY British toilet.

His name was as ubiquitous on toilets as “American Standard” or “Sloan” is on American urinals. So GIs started calling all toilets “crappers”, which eventually became multiple terms, like “taking a crap” or the word “crap” itself for waste, which of course itself became a polite euphemism for something not very good, as in “The National’s latest album was crap”.

Mention “digital assistants” these days and most people will think of Alexa or Siri. But they’re way older than that.

When banks were designing the first ATMs in the early 1970s, they weren’t sure people would know how to use them. Consider: if you’d never seen an ATM before, would you KNOW exactly what to do?

The First National Bank of Atlanta thought about that, and created one of the first digital assistants, a friendly blonde avatar named Tillie, to walk customers through their transaction. She was such an integral part of the experience that the machines were called “Tillie the Alltime Teller”. And they were so popular with customers that within weeks of her 1974 debut Atlantans started calling all ATMs “Tillie Machines” or “Tillies”. “We need to stop by the Tillie for some cash,” you’d say.

Banks from all over the country came to Atlanta to see how Tillie worked, and some of those banks liked her so much they licensed the technology and image from FirstAtlanta. This is why, if you google “Tillie Teller”, Google Images will return results for Tillie ephemera from American State Bank of Texas and Florida National Bank.

But HERE’s the part that will blow your mind: Tillie’s voice was that of a woman named Susan Bennett… who would later go on to become famous as… Siri!

So the woman behind the most popular digital assistant in history is the same woman behind one of the very first digital assistants!

In 1995, a regional political party named Shiv Sena came into power in India and followed through on a campaign promise to rename the city of Bombay to Mumbai. Which is understandable. No one wants colonial names around. That’s how [King] Charles Town, South Carolina became Charleston.

Still, Mumbai wasn’t very noteworthy until May 11, 1661. That’s when England’s King Charles (hey, the “Charles Town” guy!) acquired Bombay as part his new wife’s dowry. She was Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal. Charles in turn leased the land to the English East India Company for £10 a year. And when the East India Company got serious about building a trading center there, they didn’t play around. The population exploded from 10,000 Bombayites in 1661 to 60,000 by 1675. Long story short: the East India Company turned Bombay into a gigantic trading city. For decades, it was a money-printing machine for the British Empire.

But here’s the thing: most people settling in Bombay were traders from all over southeast Asia. Which was a problem. With so many different cultures and tastes and religions, it was hard for anyone to run a successful restaurant that suited everyone. So, in Bombay the practice became to just go home for lunch, or have your wife or maid bring you lunch, or meet you at a park… or something. By 1890, Bombay had become enough of a modern business city that many Bombayites were going to offices every day.

This is where dabbawalas come in. Every workday morning they stop by their customer’s houses to pick up a hot meal, prepared by the wife or household staff, packed in a series of stackable metal dishes called a tiffin or dabba. Each dabba is labeled with a unique destination code that uses symbols, colors, letters, and numbers. This system is universal to dabbawalas and is easily picked up by illiterate dabbawalas.

The dabbawala picks up all the dabbas from his customers and heads to the nearest train station. He will meet other dabbawalas and may exchange some dabbas with them, whichever is most efficient. He then takes the train downtown and meets other dabbawalas, again exchanging dabbas. He then delivers all his meals, then rests for bit before doing it all again in reverse, picking up all the empty dabbas from offices, exchanging them with other dabbawalas as needed, and returning them to their homes.

Even though there are no computers whatsoever in this system, and even though most dabbawalas only have a rudimentary education (at best), this system is often claimed to be the most reliable and most accurate delivery service in the world. On a typical workday, dabbawalas deliver over 200,000 meals, and average fewer than 4 delivery errors per *million* transactions. That’s astounding. Dabbawalas take their jobs very seriously. In a city where the trains may not run on time, and the phone\power\internet go down way more often than they should, dabbawalas are SERIOUS about making sure you at least your lunch on time.

This is the Bolton Strid. Many call it “the most dangerous river in the world”. And they’re not wrong: if you were fall in the specific bit of the river shown in the picture, your chances of dying are around 95%.

The Strid is part of the River Wharfe in Yorkshire. As you can see from the picture below, the river is fairly broad a few miles north of the Strid.

So here’s the thing: as it narrows to a space an adult could easily jump over, all that water has to go somewhere. In this case, it goes down, and over the centuries the current has dug trenches as deep as 40 feet (12m) in some places. This means the river effectively turns sideways through the Strid.

But here’s the killer: the first 4 feet (1.2m) of water in the Strid move at a leisurely pace: around 5mph (8KM/h) on a normal day. So ducks can take-off, land and float down the river without a problem. But underneath that there’s another layer running between 25-30mph (40-48KM/h). It’ll sweep you off your feet in an instant, and if you get pushed into one of those 40 foot deep trenches… you’re not coming out. Ever. Not alive, anyway. No amount of human muscle-power can outswim that current, and even if a fully-equipped rescue team watched you fall in, there’s just NOTHING they could do to rescue you.

Red pistachios don’t exist anymore – in the US anyway – because of politics.

Pistachios are native to the Middle East, and Iran used to grow about 98% of America’s supply. The traditional method of harvesting them is to cut down the grape-like bunches and store them until needed. But storing “wet” pistachios for more than 24 hours creates an unattractive (but harmless) mottling on the shell, which Middle Easterners “fixed” by staining them that unnatural shade of red.

Not surprisingly, importing Iranian pistachios was banned in 1979 due to the hostage crisis, so California farmers got into pistachios in a big way. Those farmers learned that, if you put the nuts in an industrial dryer within 24 hours of harvesting, the shells didn’t stain, so there was no need to dye them. Some did, at first, because that’s what consumers were used to. But the whole practice soon died out, so Gen Z kids don’t get the Naked Gun joke at all.