Paul Harvey’s The
Rest of the Story – Paul Aurandt, Jr.
Seer Samuel
I don't know if you believe in ESP, but let's say you
do. Let's say you believe that thought
waves travel through air like radio waves. . . or that dreams can predict the
future. Every modern-day psychic and
seer seems to remember the first awareness of that gift. Edgar Cayce was a child when he began to
absorb knowledge from books . . . without opening them. Peter Hurkos' only talent was painting houses
. . . until he fell off a ladder. After
days of unconsciousness, he awakened to his remarkable abilities. Today, his psychic services are rendered to
police departments throughout the nation . . . to aid them in the apprehension
of criminals. But this is the story of Samuel
. . . a prophet's name if ever there was one.
He was born under a comet . . . died under one, too. Some mystics might say that's
important. And if you're amazed by his
first brush with ESP, just wait till you hear THE REST OF THE STORY. Seer Samuel was not born in Tibet,
but in Florida. His young life, though exciting to him, was
not extraordinary . . . until one night.
The night he had a dream.
Samuel's brother Henry had shipped out on the Pennsylvania. One day, the ship's captain swore at brother
Henry and struck him. As is the
inclination of older brothers, Samuel went on board after hearing of the
incident and decked Henry's assailant.
Yes, Samuel was quite protective, quite fond of his brother Henry. So much so that his hatred for the Pennsylvania's
captain survived that impulsive retaliation.
Perhaps his mind was there. . . that night at his sister's house. . .
the night he had a dream. No sooner had
Samuel fallen into slumber than a picture welled up before his closed eyes. . .
a dreadful picture. It was a corpse in a
coffin. . . a metallic coffin, supported by two chairs. Half wanting to know, half not wanting to
know, Samuel, in his dream slowly approached the coffin. At his bedside one might have heard Samuel
cry out as he turned away, still dreaming, from the sight. For the corpse. . . in that coffin of metal.
. . was Henry, his brother. And on
Henry's breast. . . a red rose. Samuel
awakened with a start, sat upright in bed.
Tears kissed the darkness as he fumbled for the light, got up, and went
to awaken his sister. He told her
everything. About the coffin of
metal. About the two chairs. About the red rose. And about. . . Henry. It was just a bad dream, his sister assured
him. And they would both forget about
it. . . until one sultry mid-June morning. . .
The Pennsylvania was
docked, was loading wood . . . when four of her eight boilers exploded. The Pennsylvania. Henry's ship.
Her front end was blown away, and in a disaster comparable to a
yet-plane crash today, a hundred and fifty lives were lost. Brother Henry was among the less fortunate
who lingered and, scalded beyond recovery, suffered terribly for six days. Each of those days and nights, Samuel sat
beside him. When it was over, for the
first time in almost a week, he slept.
The next day, Samuel went to the room where the bodies of the dead
awaited burial. Each in a coffin of
unpainted wood. Except one. Those who held deathwatch with Samuel had so
admired the gentle, gallant young Henry, who had suffered so . . . that they
had collected sixty dollars and bought for him a metallic casket. It sat supported on two chairs. As Samuel stood beside his brother, seeing
that awful dream materialize in every detail but one . . . an elderly lady
entered the room and placed on the breast of the dead brother. . . one red
rose. Now, whether Samuel was really a
seer, I'll leave up to you. But if
dreams of the future continued to come true, that side of his life has been
obscured by a perhaps great gift. For
seer Samuel, born under a comet, was born in Florida.
. . Florida, Missouri. The steamship Pennsylvania
was a riverboat. And the lad who had
that bad dream come true, Samuel Clemens, you know . . . as Mark Twain.
Dr. Bell is Alive and Well
Everybody has a favorite teacher. Artie Doyle had a favorite
teacher. Artie Doyle was a medical student. First year med school, he had a
favorite teacher … a professor named Bell.
Dr. Bell must have been a fascinating instructor, because Artie remembered him
all his life. In fact, that’s how we know about Dr. Bell. From Artie. The thing
that made Dr. Joseph Bell so interesting was the way he taught. It was so
special that he kept students on the edge of their seats. Joseph Bell had
started at the bottom as a hospital attendant and wound up head of the Edinburgh
University medical school. If you
knew Dr. Bell, you’d say he made it because he knew how to think. That’s what
he was always telling his students: You’ve got to learn how to think or all you
know won’t get you anywhere. Bell
used to demonstrate this to his students. He had an outpatient facility where
he interviewed patients, and sometimes he would invite his class to join him
there. He’d have them stand around and watch while these new patients came in
to see the doctor. The stories make Bell
sound a lot like Dr. Gillespie, squinting over his glasses and intimidating his
patients with a childishly wicked expression. Then he’d say something like,
“Oh, you must be either a cork cutter or a slater!” The startled patient would
acknowledge that he was, in fact, a slater. Dr. Bell would then turn to his
class and wink. He had observed a slight callus on one side of the forefinger
and a little thickening on the outside of the thumb. For observant Bell
that was enough to identify the trade of his patient. Another time, Dr. Bell
turned to his class immediately before interviewing a patient. “This man’s a
cobbler,” he told them. And he was right. Bell
had caught a glimpse of the man’s trousers. There were worn at the inside of
the knee … right where the cobbler’s lapstone sits. Now, you say this doesn’t
sound much like medicine. But what Dr. Bell was trying to impress upon his
students … what he was trying to cultivate in them … was the power of
observation. You must notice everything, he told them. A good doctor has to
notice everything! Still another time, Dr. Bell told a brand-new patient that
he, the patient, was not long discharged from the Army. Bell
had no readily obvious way of knowing this. The man was wearing street clothes.
But Dr. Bell went on to say that the patient had been a non-com officer in a Highland
regiment, and that he had been stationed at Barbados!
Dr. Bell was right on all counts. It was very simple, he explained to his
students. The man was respectful but did not remove his hat. They do not in the
Army; but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He
had an air of authority, was obviously Scottish. As to Barbados,
his complaint was elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British. And to Dr. Bell’s students, something else was
obvious … that for Dr. Bell medicine was sort of, well … detective work. It’s
not a matter of coincidence that complicated mystery stories also fascinated
him. So it was the way he thought and the way he taught that kept his students
spellbound. I’m thinking, however, about Artie Doyle, the first-year med
student who sat enraptured in the back of Bell’s
class. Artie would go on to become a doctor.
Yet you will know him better for another talent. Artie also became a writer …
and though the medicine he learned from Dr. Bell was significant, his professor’s
power of inductive reasoning was even more so. Artie immortalized it, and him,
in a character the world can never forget. Because Artie one day became Sir
Arthur. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And because one classmate remembered him so
well … Dr. Bell is even yet alive and well … a hundred years later and living
in literary history forever as the greatest-ever criminal diagnostician. It was
Dr. Bell who was the author’s model for the master sleuth of all time …
Sherlock Holmes.
Futility
Best-selling books, big box office, and bombshell television
specials are hitting us over the head with a new club. Fact. The once-popular
strictly fiction format is gradually yielding to history, phasing out in favor
of truth. Example: Roots. ABC's
twelve-hour, sure-fire winner. It held
you . . . because it happened. Here's
another novel of historical significance: Futility. That's the name of the book, Futility, and
you say you've not heard of it? You'll wonder why you haven't, when I tell you
THE REST OF THE STORY. The novel
Futility is about the maiden voyage of a fabulous ocean liner, a ship far
larger than any previously built, labeled "unsinkable." The vessel
sets sail for New York from Southampton
with a cargo of complacent passengers, strikes an iceberg en route, goes
down. And the ship was called . . . the
Titan. So why didn't author Morgan
Robertson come right out and say it? His
Titan . . . is obviously the Titanic.
Both liners were touted as the biggest, the grandest, the most luxurious
. . . and foolproof. Both struck
icebergs on their maiden voyages between Southampton and
New York. Both were inadequately
stocked with lifeboats, resulting in heavy casualties. And both sank at exactly the same spot in the
North Atlantic, each on a cold April night. It would seem clear that the real-life ship
Titanic is the setting for the novel Futility, so why would the author have
allowed for such minor discrepancies as these?
The Titanic, the real liner, displaced sixty-six thousand tons. Robertson's vessel, the Titan, displaced
seventy thousand tons. The Titanic was
eight hundred eighty-two and one half feet long; Robertson rounded off his ship
to eight hundred feet in length. Even
the apparent abbreviation of the name Titanic to Titan seems hardly worth the
use of literary license. After all, both
liners were triple-screw, could travel up to twenty-five knots, could carry up
to three thousand people. All of the
specific similarities were there, and yet author Morgan Robertson did not call
it history. Why? In the first place, Robertson's characters,
the passengers aboard the Titan, were purely fictional. Their personal interactions, problems, fears,
were examined closely, and at last the ship sank. Hence the novel's title,
Futility. But there was another type of
"futility" demonstrated in Robertson's book . . . a hopelessness that
not even the author himself could have recognized. For the novel that so accurately described an
authentic disaster in the Atlantic, the book that chartered
an invisible course through the water to an appointment with death . . . owned
up to its title beyond the wildest dreams of its readers. For the literature that in every way seemed
to recount . . . in reality foretold. In
1898. Fourteen years before the
real-life Titanic set sail!
The Letter
Edwin Thomas had a genuine genius for Shakespearean tragedy,
so the drama critics have said for over a century. With whom might we compare him today. Olivier? Burton?
Williamson? During the latter half of
the 1800's, in the midst of a legion of theatrical challengers, Edwin Thomas
had few rivals. Although he was a wholly
competent and versatile actor, this small, slight, dark man with the
magnificent voice possessed an uncanny genius for tragedy. How ironic that his own life should have been
so marked by it and that his fame should have been overshadowed, his spirit
broken, and his reputation nearly ruined by an occurrence with which he had
nothing to do! He died with a letter in
his pocket that might have set the record straight. But that's THE REST OF THE STORY. Edwin Thomas made his acting debut at the age
of fifteen, when he played Tressel to his father's Richard III. Two years later in New
York, Edwin himself took the role of Richard III, but
he was not to achieve any real acclaim until after his father's death, in
1852. IN the years that followed, he met
with phenomenal world-wide success. IN New
York he performed Hamlet for one hundred consecutive
nights. . . in Boston he quickly
overcame his contemporaries. . . in London
he used the true text of Shakespeare, anticipating by years a similar reform in
England. Edwin had two brothers, John and Junius, who
were also actors. Neither was of Edwin's
stature, though the three together gave a memorable performance of Julius
Caesar at New York's Winter
Garden Theater in 1863. The fact the
Edwin's brother, John, took the role of Brutus during that performance is
particularly significant when you understand that he was on the brink of
organizing a dark conspiracy in real life.
Within two years, John would quietly enter the rear of a box in
Washington Theater . . . and discharge a pistol at the head of President
Abraham Lincoln. You see, Edwin Thomas'
last name was Booth. His less gifted
brother, in whom the assassin Brutus was reborn . . . was John Wilkes
Booth. There were two murders on that
April night in 1865. The same gunshot
that sent a ball deep into Abraham Lincoln's brain somehow sent another into o
the heart of Edwin Thomas Booth. The
great actor's reputation eventually survived his brother's infamy, but his
name, Edwin's, was to be obscured by the stigma of John's deed. Shortly after the assassination, a
disconsolate Edwin retired from the stage to agonize over the question
"Why?" When he returned to the
stage many years later, the bombast that characterized his earlier style was
gone. Some critics say that the quieter,
more introspective manner that replaced it singularly foreshadowed the realism
of twentieth-century acting, but Edwin might have told them differently. He carried with him to his dying day one
supreme, secret irony that at last made him on with the tragic characters to
whom he confined himself. For Hamlet,
Macbeth, and Othello the strutting was over, the fretting had begun . . . and a
letter made the difference. It was a
letter of thanks for an act of courage at the peak
of Edwin Booth's career. The actor was waiting on the station platform
in Jersey City to board a train one
evening when suddenly, without warning, the coach he was about to enter started
with a jolt. Edwin turned fast, then
broke into a cold sweat. A well-dressed
young man nearby, pressed by the crowd, had lost his footing and fallen between
the station platform and the moving train.
Alert, Edwin locked one leg around a railing and, holding on with one
hand, grabbed the boy by the collar with the other and pulled him back to
safety. After sighs of relief were
exchanged, the lad recognized his rescuer as the famous Edwin Booth. He shook the actor's hand warmly . . .
expressed his gratitude. Edwin smiled
and turned away. Edwin did not recognize
the admirer whom he had saved. He found
out several weeks later in a letter from then-Vice-President Ulysses S.
Grant. He carried that bittersweet
letter to his grave. It was as though by
some terrible tipping of the scales that Edwin had spared the son of his
brother's victim. While one brother had
killed the President, the other had saved the life of the President's son . . .
Robert Todd Lincoln.
A Truth of Grain
The sacking of agricultural officials has become a virtual
tradition in the Soviet Union. A recent Kremlin house cleaning swept
agricultural minister Dimitri Polyansky and his two deputies right out of
office. And they won't be the last. In fact, it's so hard to make Russian soil
grow grain the Professor R.B. Farrell of Northwestern
University calls the Soviet
Union's agricultural ministry "one of the most dangerous
assignments in the country." Of
course, bounced bigwigs are merely targets for a scapegoat-seeking
Kremlin. Even Khrushchev's fall was
partly due to an ineffective farm policy.
There's been a lot of guessing as to why Soviet grain yields are so
predictable pitiful each year -- bad weather, bad resources, and so forth --
but the basic truth of the matter is that the Russians just can't seem to grow
the stuff! Few remember the
golden-egg-laying goose they booted out of the nest, but that's THE REST OF THE
STORY. For all the flavors of religious
diversity in the United States,
the Mennonites leave a particularly pleasant taste on the public's palate. Theirs is a warm, quiet breed that believes
in neither oaths nor infant baptism nor military service nor the acceptance of
public office. They favor unobtrusive
dress and plain living, and in their own very special way, they're remarkably
colorful. The Mennonites. We owe
them. During the 1890's, the Atchison,
Topeka and Santa
Fe were selling large tracts of land in Kansas. What they really wanted was homesteaders to
farm this land and send their crops to market by rail. The Mennonites were
among the first takers. Now, when these Mennonites moved to Kansas,
they perpetuated their gentle traditions . . . continued their unassuming lives
. . . grew wheat in their own special way from their own special seed. Then came the big drought. The worst in
years. It was so bad that the Department
of Agriculture sent an expert from Washington
to examine the withered crops. And it
must have been a barren sight . . . acre upon acre of parched Kansas
prairie. Then the government inspector
came to the Mennonites' land. What he
found started a revolution on the plains.
While others' wheat had failed . . . the Mennonites' wheat was thriving,
reaching bravely for the killer sun! In Kansas
today, the Mennonite strain of wheat seed is still being used. So hearty is this strain that it can be
planted in the fall and harvested in the spring, actually resisting
"winter kill." Needless to
say, drought continues to be a small obstacle for Mennonite wheat to
overcome. Now let me direct your
attention to some 1975 Soviet statistics:
The Russians needed to harvest a hundred and eighty-five million tons of
grain to meet the domestic demands.
Because of a formidable drought, they got only a hundred and forty
million. To avoid mass starvation, the
Soviets bought wheat . . . from the United
States.
Wouldn't Russia
be lucky to have the Mennonites! Well,
at one time . . . they did. Nearly a
century ago, there were Mennonites in Russia. But remember, their religion precludes the
taking up of arms . . . and that's just what the Czar wanted them to do. With Europe
periodically in turmoil, people who would not go to war for their ruler were
particularly unwelcome. That included
the Mennonites. At any rate, they were
kicked out, and guess where they came . . . .
That's right. The same Mennonites
who were forced to leave Russia
came to America
. . . where religious freedom was a written promise. Where they would not be forced to compromise
their ideals, their way of life. And you
might be interested to know that they were invited to the United
States by the Atchison,
Topeka and Santa
Fe . . . by railroad agents who were selling land in Kansas. It was a matter of coincidence that the
Mennonites brought with them wheat seeds . . . called "red wheat" . .
. from their homeland in the Crimea. What the story boils down to is this: If the
Mennonites had not been driven out of Russia
. . . the United States,
instead of selling, might now by buying wheat . . . from the Russians.
Bad, Bad Ed O'Hare
The speckles in the Pacific night sky were bombers. Nine twin-engine Japanese bombers, in
formation, on course to their target:
the aircraft carrier Lexington. Butch O'Hare could see them all clearly from
the cockpit of his Grumman Wildcat F4F.
He was their lone-wolf pursuer, tagging along in the darkness. If he did not seize the opportunity now to
attack from the rear, his home base, the carrier Lexington,
would be obliterated--sent to the ocean floor in fragments of twisted
steel. So Butch gripped the controls,
palms sweating in anticipation of what he knew he must do. The engine roared and the Wildcat lunged for
its prey. Before it was over, five of
the nine Japanese bombers had been dumped into the Pacific. Butch was ripping away at a sixth when he ran
out of ammunition . . . and his comrades arrived to finish the job. That was February 29, 1942, and the daring of
Lieutenant Commander Edward Henry "Butch" O'Hare . . . the Navy's
number-one World War II ace, the first naval aviator to ever win the
Congressional Medal of Honor. A year
later, Butch went down in aerial combat.
But his home towners would not allow the memory of that heroic
accomplishment to die. So the next time
you fly into Chicago's O'Hare
International Airport, you'll know for whom it was named, and why. What you don't yet know is that you'll be
passing through a shrine . . . a monument to a very special kind of love . . .
and that's THE REST OF THE STORY. Chicago. The roaring Twenties. The time and territory of gangster Al Capone. And of all the Capone cronies . . . of all
the unsavory soldiers who served in that army of crime . . . only one earned
the nickname "Artful Eddie."
Eddie was the fast lawyer's fast lawyer.
Through his loopholes walked the most glamorous rogues in the gallery of
gangland. In 1923, Eddie himself was
indicted on an illegal booze deal, two hundred thousand dollars' worth, but he
won his own reversal. Later, Al Capone
picked up Eddie and put him in charge of the dog tracks nationwide. You see, Eddie had already swiped the patent
on the mechanical rabbit. Pretty soon
Artful Eddie, as the Capone syndicate representative, became known as the
undisputed czar of illegal dog racing.
Nothing could have been easier to rig in favor of the mob. Eight dogs running . . . overfeed seven . . .
it was as simple as that. In no time,
Artful Eddie became a wealthy man. Then,
one day, for no apparent reason, Eddie squealed on Capone. He wanted to go straight, he told the
authorities. What did they want to know?
The authorities were understandably
skeptical. Why should Artful Eddie, the
pride of the underworld, seek to undermine his own carefully constructed
dog-track empire? Didn't Eddie know what
it meant . . . to rat on the mob? He
knew. Then, what was the deal? What could he possibly hope to gain from
aiding the government that he didn't already have? Eddie had money. Eddie had power. Eddie had the pledged security of the one and
only Al Capone. What was the hitch? That's when Artful Eddie revealed the
hitch. There was only one thing that
really mattered to him. He'd spent his
life among the disreputable and despicable.
After all was said and done, there was only one who deserved a
break. His son. So Eddie squealed . . . and the mob
remembered . . . and in time, two shotgun blasts would silence him forever.
Eddie never lived to see his dream come true. But it did. For as he cleansed
the family name of the underworld stain, his son became acceptable to . . . was
accepted by . . . Annapolis. He became the flying ace who downed five
bombers and went on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor. So the next time you fly into Chicago's
O'Hare International Airport, remember Butch O'Hare . . . and his daddy, Edward
J. "Artful Eddie," the crook who one day went mysteriously straight .
. . and paid with his own life for his son's chance to make good.
Wagner's Collaborator
Among the most renowned and successful opera composers of
all time was Richard Wagner. His first
thirty years marked by failure, historians and musicologists generally concede
there was a turn-around time in his career, a point at which Wagner became officially
recognized and accepted. Considering a
sudden spark of genius at the age of thirty to have been unlikely, biographers
went back to the year 1843 . . . and guess what they found! In 1843 . . . the year Wagner began writing
Tannhauser . . . the theretofore hapless composer took on a collaborator, a
trusted critic who aided Wagner in his work.
Why the name of this unsung co-composer does not appear on Wagner's
manuscript is THE REST OF THE STORY. As
composers go, Richard Wagner had a late start.
He was already well into his teens before writing music had interested
him, and then he began on his own. He
took out a library book on compositional technique, studied the scores of other
composers, began lessons on conventional harmony with a neighborhood
instructor. In four years, young Richard
began writing an opera called The Wedding.
The music was so bad he couldn't bear to finish it. A year later, he began another opera: The Fairies.
He finished that one, but no one wanted to produce it. Two more years went by. This time it was an opera called The Ban on
Lovew, based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. The subject matter was racy but not
sufficiently intriguing, despite Wagner's music. It opened and closed the same night. During these years of musical ill fortune,
the composer's financial situation began to deteriorate. He owed money all over Europe,
was forever sneaking across borders and sailing away in the dark of night to
avoid debtors' prison. He once was even
forced to take lodgers and shine their boots, while he himself stayed home
because his shoes had no soles. Still,
he continued to write. An opera, Rienzi,
met with moderate success. Another, The
Flying Dutchman, didn't quite make it.
So Richard Wagner, aged twenty-nine, in debt and disheartened, left town
again, and this time moved to Dresden. And it was in Dresden
. . . in 1843 . . . that Wagner's luck changed.
By 1844, Tannhauser had been written.
On October 19 of the following year, it was given its premier
performance. And Richard Wagner . . .
the composer voted least likely to succeed . . . succeeded. Tannhauser was a genuine masterpiece . . .
and no one knew that its composer had help in writing it! That's right.
When Wagner moved to Dresden
. . . when he began writing Tannhauser . . . he was joined by a collaborator .
. . an undeliberate but talented critic.
Now, I should point out that this music critic had no formal training in
the art of composition . . . but Wagner so trusted his judgment that the
composer dared not enter a single line of music into Tannhauser without first
seeking his collaborator's approval. So
it was that composer Wagner enjoyed a certain immortality in his lifetime
though his collaborator settled for anonymity.
There is no mention of his name in Wagner's manuscript . . . perhaps
because it might have sounded incredible.
It was incredible that a starving and penniless composer . . . in a
last-ditch effort to succeed . . . struck musical gold . . . discarding every
melody not approved by his collaborator's bark!
I mean, this collaborator would sit behind Wagner's piano bench . . .
and when the composer had found the magic combination, the right tune, the
collaborator would bark his approval.
One page saved, two pages in the wastebasket . . . and after more than a
year, the incomparable Tannhauser was born.
The collaborator? Peps, Wagner's
dog!
Escape!
Of all the positions in the field of journalism, that of war
correspondent is perhaps most dangerous.
Some are captured, some escape.
Some die. Twenty-five year-old
Leonard Spencer was the London Morning Post's newest correspondent. His assignment was the Boer War, in South
Africa.
Had young Leonard foreseen the peril awaiting him, he would probably
have taken the assignment anyway. That's
how Leonard was. About twenty miles from
Ladysmith, Leonard could hear the booming guns.
He was aboard a British armored train that would take him as close to
the front as he could get. The train got
too close. There was a sudden
crash. The train had struck a boulder on
the tracks . . . a Boer booby trap. It
was an ambush! Immediately, a fusillade
of rifle fire followed. Surprised,
British troops on the train fired back.
And Leonard? Leonard ignored the gunshots and exploding shells. He jumped off the train, directed the British
defense, helped to clear the wreckage.
In fact, without the aid of this youthful correspondent from the Morning
Post, the train might well have been lost and the British troops
massacred. Instead, the wreckage was
cleared, the train did pull out of the trap and carried a good many British
soldiers with it. The one left behind to
face the enemy . . . was Leonard! No,
the story does not end sadly there.
Leonard was captured, unharmed.
Even though Leonard was technically a war correspondent, the Boer
commander was sufficiently impressed with his bravery . . . to have Leonard
thrown into prison at Pretoria. The Pretoria
prison was among the world's most carefully guarded strongholds. Still, that did not stop Leonard from
plotting an escape with two other "British captives. As darkness fell, the trio waited for their
opportunity. It was now pitch
black. The sentries exchanged
posts. Leonard sprang across an open
area, hurdled a fence of barbed-wired mesh.
When he looked back, there was no one.
His comrades had missed their chance!
Three hundred miles of hostile territory lay between Leonard and his
freedom. For a while, he followed the
railroad tracks to the east, stumbling alone, through the dark, dodging enemy
patrols. Tired, hungry, thirsty. . .
Leonard plodded long into the night, knowing that, each painful foot of the
way, one false could be his last. The
night turned to day and back to night again, until the days and nights
blurred. Finally Leonard reached a
mining town. His luck wearing thin but
holding, he knocked on the door of the only Britain
in the territory and was smuggled onto a train loaded with bales of wool. The train would carry him to the British
consul. To safety. And that's how Leonard Spencer, the London Morning Post's
fledgling correspondent, got his story . . . and his reputation for
daring. History has all but forgotten
this incident in his life in order to make room for later glory. The fortune that once seemed to be wearing
thin had only begun . . . and on the day rubbed off on all of England. For the young correspondent who once upon a
time saved a British armored train and escaped the enemy under impossible
circumstances . . . continued to do the impossible for the rest of his
life. We him as Sir Winston Leonard
Spencer Churchill! And now you know THE
REST OF THE STORY.
The Kiss
Charlie Ross was the teacher's pet. High school graduating class 1901. The teacher was Miss Tillie Brown. An English teacher. Young.
Attractive. Everyone knew Charlie
was Miss Brown's favorite . . . and because Miss Brown was such a popular
teacher, it placed a lot of pressure on Charlie. Charlie had to work very hard to defend his
title "teacher's pet." He had
to read and to study a little bit more than everyone else. Even at that, the other students made jokes
behind Charlie's back. Charlie had
better amount to something someday, they said, or Miss Brown would never
forgive him. As you have guessed,
Charlie did amount to something one day . . . and perhaps, directly because of
what happened during graduation exercises.
Addresses had been made. Diplomas
had been handed out. And something else
no one had expected. When Charlie Ross's
turn came to receive his diploma, Miss Tillie Brown . . . the beloved English
teacher . . . rose to congratulate Charlie personally . . . with a kiss! That did it.
Charlie may have been class valedictorian; he may have been editor of
the student yearbook; he may even have been the teacher's pet. Did that entitle him to such an honor, a kiss
from the class's cherished Miss Brown?
After graduation exercises were over, there should have been laughing,
shouting, excitement. Instead, there was
quiet disappointment. Many of the
graduates, especially the boys, resented Miss Brown's unabashed display of
favoritism. So much so that a handful of
them approached Miss Brown, and one of them asked her why others had been so
conspicuously neglected. Miss Brown
stood firm. She said Charlie had earned
the special recognition. She said when
the others had done something worthwhile, they'd get kissed, too. She'd see to it. If this made the other boys feel a little
better, it made Charlie Ross feel worse.
He had been the object of this minor scandal. He had been the cause of all those hurt
feelings. In life after school, Charlie
would most certainly have to prove himself worthy of Miss Brown's
congratulatory kiss. And he did. In the years that followed, Charlie worked
very hard. He entered the newspaper
business and eventually so distinguished himself that he was hand-picked by
President Harry Truman to be White House press secretary. Now, the selection of Charlie Ross for the
job was no mere accident. The leader of
the boys who approached Miss Brown for the graduating class of 1901, the one
who told her that he and the others felt left out, was Harry Truman
himself. And it was to him that she had
said, "Do something worthwhile and you'll get your kiss." Is it any wonder that Charlie Ross's first
duty as presidential press secretary, his very first assignment, was to call
Miss Tillie Brown in Independence, Missouri? The message Ross delivered from the President
of the United States: "How about that kiss I never got? Have I done something worthwhile enough to
rate it now?" He got his kiss. That is THE REST OF THE STORY.
Better Late Than Never
He is lying there in the grass, hiding and thinking. He has studied the little girl's habits. He knew she would come outside her
grandfather's house mid-afternoon to play.
He hated himself for this. In his
whole miserable, messed-up life he'd never considered anything so callous as
kidnapping. Yet here he was, lying in the grass, hidden by trees from the
house, waiting for an innocent, red-haired, two-year-old girl child to come
within reach. It was a long wait; there
was time to think. Maybe all his life
Harlan had been in too much of a hurry.
He was five when his Hoosier farmer daddy had died. At fourteen he dropped out of Greenwood
School and hit the road. He tried odd jobs as a farm hand, hated
it. Tried being a streetcar conductor
and hated that. At sixteen he lied about
his age and joined the Army--and hated that, too. When his one-year enlistment was up he headed
for Alabama, tried blacksmithing
and failed. He became a railroad
locomotive fireman with the Southern Railroad.
He liked that. Figured maybe he
had found himself. At eighteen he got
married, and within months, wouldn't you know she announced she was pregnant
the day he announced he'd been fired again?
Then, one day, while he was out job hunting, his young wife gave away
all their possessions and went home to her parents. Then came the depression. Harlan couldn't win for losing, as they
say. He really tried. Once, while working at a succession of
railroad jobs, he tried studying law by correspondence. But he dropped out of that, too. He tried selling insurance, selling
tires. He tried running a ferryboat,
running a filling station. No use. Face it--Harlan was a loser. And now here he was hiding in the weeds
outside Roanoke, Virginia,
plotting a kidnapping. As I say, he'd
watched the little girl's habits, knew about her afternoon playtime. But, this one day, she did not come out to
play, so his chain of failures remained unbroken. Late in life he became chief cook and bottle
washer at a restaurant in Corbin. And
did all right until the new highway bypassed the restaurant. And then his expected life span ran out. He's not the first man nor will he be the
last to arrive at the twilight of life with nothing to show for it. The bluebird of happiness, or whatever, had
always fluttered just out of reach. He'd
stayed honest--except for that one time when he had attempted kidnapping. In fairness to his name it must be noted that
it was his own daughter he'd meant to kidnap from his runaway wife. And they both returned to him, the next day,
anyway. But now the years had slid by
and a lifetime was gone and he and they had nothing. He had not really felt old until that day the
postman brought his first Social Security check. That day, something within Harlan resented,
resisted, and exploded. The Government
was feeling sorry for him. You had all
those hitless times at bat, the Government was saying, you've had it. It's time to give up and retire. His restaurant customers in Corbin said
they'd miss him, but his Government said sixty-five candles on the birthday
cake is enough. They sent him a pension
check and told him he was "old."
He said, "Nuts." And he
got so angry he took that $105 check and started a new business. Today that business is prospering and so, at
age eighty-six, is he. For the man who
failed at everything save one thing . . . the man who might have been a
law-breaking kidnaper had he not also failed at that . . . the man who never
got started until it was time to stop . . . was Harlan Sanders. Colonel Harlan Sanders. The new business he started with his first
Social Security check . . . was Kentucky Fried Chicken. Now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.
Black Bart's Threat
His name was Charles E. Boles. You know him, history remembers him, as the California
outlaw who terrorized Wells Fargo for more than seven years. Black Bart.
By the second year of his infamous career, Black Bart was among the most
frequently repeated names in the California
newspapers. Feature writers glorified
his daring, for Black Bart . . . worked alone!
When he was least expected, Bart would appear in the middle of a
stagecoach trail, brandishing a double-barrel, twelve-gauge shotgun, his face
concealed beneath a hood. And though
Bart was indeed a menacing figure, he was an amateur poet too! He usually left his incredulous victims with
a few lines of original verse. From the Sierra
Nevada foothills to the Sonoma Coast of California was outlaw territory. But not even an outlaw could pass that way
without thinking twice . . . about Black Bart.
During Bart's reign of terror, between 1875 and 1883, he is credited
with twenty-nine stagecoach robberies.
And so bold were those twenty-nine robberies that the lone, hooded
bandit became the most celebrated desperado of his time. His penchant for stagecoaches contracted by
Wells Fargo led many to believe that Bart had a vendetta against the company. While this might have been true, the
romanticized fiction o Black Bart as a gallant hero fighting single-handedly
against a giant corporation became so popular that even some Wells Fargo
officials started believing it. As it
turns out, the facts surrounding Black Bart's criminal career are more
incongruous than the fantasies. For
example, Bart was finally caught not by a gun-slinging sheriff or by an armed
posse . . . but by a detective! During
Bart's last robbery, he was wounded, got away.
Afterward, while they were combing the hills for a trace of him, a
bloodstained handkerchief was discovered.
On this handkerchief, in one corner . . . F.X.O.7. A laundry mark! That's right, the telltale laundry mark on a
piece of fine linen led to the arrest and conviction of California's
most feared outlaw. San
Francisco super-sleuth Harry Morse canvassed a hundred
laundries and laundry agencies in that city before making the right
connection. When he did . . . when
Detective Morse found the right establishment, who was there to pick up his
laundry? Black Bart himself! Bart went into custody peaceably. He returned the loot from his last heist,
pleaded guilty to the robbery, received a light sentence. After four years serving as druggist for the
prison doctor at San Quentin, he was back on the street. As far as anyone knows, Charles E. Boles . .
. the original Black Bart . . . never committed another crime. If you're wondering how the hooded,
shotgun-wielding tyrant of the stagecoach trails got off with a virtual
reprimand, you should know what the authorities discovered about Black Bart . .
. when the hood came off. Instead of a
hard-riding equestrian, they found a man who was so frightened of horses, he
traveled to and from all his robberies on foot.
Instead of a bloodthirsty young desperado from Death Valley,
they found an aging gentleman from Decatur, Illinois
. . . who never once in all his career as a bad man fired a shot . . . because
he never once . . . loaded his gun! And
now you know THE REST OF THE STORY.
Remember The "Maine"?
Remember the Maine? The Maine
was the United States
battleship that got us into the Spanish-American War. Not by the damage it did, but by the damage
that was done to it. When the news
screamed that a Spanish mine had sunk our ship in Havana
Harbor, the now-famous war cry began
that would hurl us into war with Spain:
"Remember the Maine!" Her story is THE REST OF THE STORY. . . At 9:40 P.M. on February 15, 1898, the American battleship Maine
exploded in the harbor of Havana,
Cuba. There were 354 officers and men aboard; 266
lost their lives. The 300-foot vessel
had been moored at the same spot since late January. Her purpose had been to defend American
interests during the civil war that Cuba
was fighting against Spain. When news reached the mainland that a Spanish
mine had dumped the Maine in to Havana
Harbor, the United
States became actively involved. IN six weeks, war was declared. "Remember the Maine!"
was the battle cry of that war. How dare
they sink our ship! "Remember the Maine!"
we cried as we went to war. For data
concerning the incident, we'll turn to Admiral H. G. Rickover and to
representatives of the Taylor Naval Ship Research and Development
Center and the Naval
Surface Weapons Center. Will you be patient with me while I delineate
the findings of three separate examinations of the wreckage? It is important. One examination was performed in connection
with the 1898 United States
court of inquiry. A second was performed
by Spanish divers, also in 1898. And a
third was performed in connection with the 1911 Board of Inspection and
Survey. The description of the wreckage
contained in the 1898 Court of Inquiry report was obtained basically from diver
inspections in the muddy water. The
Spanish divers who investigated the Maine
the same year were even more handicapped, because they knew less about the
ship's construction. That brings us to
1911. The Board of Inspection and Survey
report. The Maine
had been submerged for thirteen years.
And during those thirteen years, various salvage operations had been
carried out. But when they inspected the
ship in 1911, it would be in the open air.
A cofferdam was built. The Maine
was dewatered. Every bit of the wreckage
was accurately identified. The
displacements were measured. And
photographs were taken. Despite the time
lapse between the explosion and the 1911 inspection, contemporary studies by
the Naval R&D
Center and the Surface
Weapons Center
are based on the 1911 data. These data,
properly and carefully studied, are significantly revealing. The statements in the 1911 report describing
the wreckage . . . and the photographs and sketches of the wreckage. . . are
generally consistent with one another.
The photographs were taken as the dewatering progressed and as the
wreckage was dismantled. In some cases,
material was removed in the interval between pictures, and this was taken into
account in the interpretation of the photographs. I know it seems we're being careful, here, to
document this most recent study of the Maine. But when you hear the conclusion of the
report, you'll understand why it is important that we be certain. This new revelation about our war with Spain
may go mainly against the grain . . . but Admiral Rickover has confirmed his
embarrassing theory with irrefutable fact.
For when experts now observe the photographs of the wreckage, with hull
sides and whole deck structures peeled back, it leaves no doubt. The explosion that sank our ship and
catapulted us into the Spanish-American War was caused by a blast from twenty
thousand pounds of powder . . . from the inside.
James
This is the ultimate success story. It's about a boy, a boy named James, who
entered the Army as a hospital assistant and wound up as Inspector General of
the Army Medical Department. This feat,
remarkable in itself, is exaggerated by the outstanding surgical skill Dr.
James Barry developed during his more than fifty years of service. I'm sorry if you think the ending's been
given away. But what made Dr. Barry
ultimately successful is THE REST OF THE STORY.
On July 5, 1813, a
scrawny eighteen-year-old lad banged on a United States Army registrar's
door. His name was James Barry, he said,
and he wanted to do hospital work.
"Hospital work, eh?" said the army official, smiling a
bit. "And why do you wish
specifically to do hospital work?"
The boy thought for a moment.
"Because I love it!" he answered at last. "And what is your experience in this
field?" the army official wanted to know.
The boy stood in tense silence.
It was then that the registrar really looked at him, observed the
freckled face and the reddish hair.
"You're Scottish, aren't you?" asked the army official. The boy's expression brightened. "Yes, sir!" he said
enthusiastically. "In fact, my
grandfather was a Scottish earl!"
True or not, the answer delighted the registrar, who was already
impressed with the lad's eagerness to serve.
He signed up young James, and so began one of the most incredible
careers in the history of medicine.
Within a year and a half, James Barry, not yet twenty, rose to the title
of assistant surgeon. You can imagine
what he must have had to learn in those few months! In another twelve years, Dr. Barry became
surgeon major . . . and the deputy inspector general . . . and finally, after
nearly a lifetime of devotion, James, the man who once stood as an
inexperienced boy before an army registrar, became the Inspector General
himself! The highest-ranking medical
officer in the United States Army.
Notwithstanding his accumulation of stars and bars, there was another
side to Dr. James Barry . . . a contradiction, you might say. Once described as "the most skillful of
physicians and the most wayward of men," this learned and fully competent
doctor was also credited with an unusually quarrelsome temper. At least once that we know of, Dr. Barry,
while stationed at the Cape of Good Hope, fought a
duel. Throughout his army career James
was often guilty of breaches of discipline, often sent home under arrest. Now, you could write this off as the
eccentricity of a medical genius; that's what headquarters did when confronted
with Dr. Barry's offenses. May we
suggest here that these somewhat regular outbursts of macho had another basis
in an otherwise distinguished man? You
see, James Barry was not a rowdy. Quite
the opposite. It was noted that the
style of his conversation was greatly superior to that usually heard at a mess
table in those days. As a matter of
fact, there was a certain effeminacy in his manner which he was always striving
to overcome. Please don't get ahead of
me. At least before you judge Dr. James
Barry too harshly, you'd better learn about the day he passed away. For this has been the ultimate success
story. Yet Dr. Barry was not so much a
success for what he did . . . as for what he hid! James died in London
on July 25, 1865. That's when everyone discovered the secret
he'd kept for over half a century . . . a secret not even suspected by his
servant of many years. When word got
out, an official report was immediately sent to the Horse Guards . . . that Dr.
James Barry . . . the late Senior Inspector General of the Army Medical
Department . . . the highest-ranking medical officer in the United States Army
. . . was a woman.
The Old Man And The Gulls
About sunset it happened every Friday evening, on a lonely
stretch along the eastern Florida
seacoast. You could see an old man
walking, white-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. One gnarled hand would be gripping the handle
of a pail, a large bucket filled with shrimp.
There, on a broken pier reddened by the setting sun, the weekly ritual
would be re-enacted. At once, the silent
twilight sky would become a mass of dancing dots . . . growing larger. In the distance, screeching calls would
become louder. They were sea gulls, come
from nowhwere, on the same pilgrimage . . . to meet an old man. For half an hour or so, the gentleman would
stand on the pier, surrounded by fluttering white, till his pail of shrimp was
empty. But the gulls would linger for a
while. Perhaps one would perch
comfortably on the old man's hat . . . and a certain day gone by would gently
come to mind. Eventually, all of the old
man's days were past. If the gulls still
return to that spot . . . perhaps on a Friday evening at sunset . . . it is not
for food . . . but to pay homage to the secret they shared with a gentle
stranger. And that secret is THE REST OF
THE STORY. Anyone who remembers October
of 1942 remembers the day it was reported the Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was
lost at sea. Captain Eddie's mission had
been to deliver a message of the utmost importance to General MacArthur. MacArthur was headquartered in New
Guinea, and Rickenbacker was given a B-17
and a hand-picked crew to take him there.
But there was an unexpected detour which would hurl Captain Eddie into
the most harrowing adventure of his life.
Somewhere over the South Pacific the Flying Fortress became lost beyond
the reach of radio. Fuel ran dangerously
low, so the men ditched their plane in the ocean. The B-17 stayed afloat just long enough for
all aboard to get out. Then, slowly, the
tail of Flying Fortress swung up and posed for a split second . . . and the
ship went down, leaving eight men and three rafts . . . and the horizon. For nearly a month Captain Eddie and his
companions would fight the water, and the weather, and the scorching sun. They spent many sleepless nights recoiling as
giant sharks rammed their rafts. The
largest raft was nine by five. The
biggest shark . . . ten feet long. But
of all their enemies at sea, one proved most formidable: starvation. Eight days out, their rations were long gone
or destroyed by the salt water. It would
take a miracle to sustain them. And a
miracle occurred. In Captain Eddie's own
words, "Cherry," that was the B-17 pilot, Captain William Cherry,
"read the service that afternoon, and we finished with a prayer for
deliverance and a hymn of praise. There
was some talk, but it tapered off in the oppressive heat. With my hat pulled down over my yes to keep
out some o the glare, I dozed off."
Now this is still Captain Rickenbacker talking . . . "Something
landed on my head. I knew that it was a
sea gull. I don't know how I knew, I
just knew. "Everyone else knew
too. No one said a word, but peering out
from under my hat brim without moving my head, I could see the expression on
their faces. They were staring at that
gull. The gull meant food . . . if I
could catch it." And the rest, as
they say, is history. Captain Eddie
caught the gull. Its flesh was
eaten. Its intestines were used for bait
to catch fish. The survivors were
sustained and their hopes renewed because a lone sea gull, uncharacteristically
hundreds of miles form land, offered itself as a sacrifice. You know the Captain Eddie made it. And you also know . . . that he never
forgot. Because every Friday evening,
about sunset . . . on a lonely stretch along the eastern Florida
seacoast . . . you could see an old man walking . . . white-haired,
bushy-eyebrowed, slightly bent. His
bucket filled with shrimp was to feed the gulls . . . to remember that one
which, on a day long past, gave itself without a struggle . . . like manna in
the wilderness.