On a Nuclear Threat

We have lived with the distinct possibility of wide-spread nuclear war as a species for 70-some-odd years. The Cold War split the world into two camps, Us and Them, and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union and then the end of that Cold War found nuclear weapons had made their way into the hands of many nations. Today, at least 9 nations boast nuclear capability. But, at the height of the period of tension between the US and the USSR, each side had hundreds if not thousands of nuclear bombs that pretty much guaranteed the planet’s destruction.

The United States developed a strategy of splitting their nuclear arsenal into three areas, known at the Nuclear Triad: Land-based missiles (in silos scattered across the US), bombs on large air bombers, and missiles placed on submarines. This made the US arsenal a bit more “secure” than the Soviet’s almost complete reliance on land-based missiles because, if the Soviets destroyed one of the US’s triad branch, the other two would still be able to carry out attacks. So, the US and the USSR faced each other with nuclear guns pointed at the other’s head for decades. And the men and women who were trained in these nuclear weapons were under tremendous pressure to protect their respective homelands and ways of living.

Take Stan. He was a nuclear technician in the military who monitored the missiles of the other side. The time was September, 1983, and tensions were especially high because the Soviet Union had recently shot down a Korean air liner that had flown over Soviet airspace. Both sides ordered their monitors to be on high alert. Stan was an officer, and his duty was to make sure that his superiors received adequate notification if and when any possible attack was taking place.

And that’s what happened. Stan was watching his team’s monitoring screens when he noticed that a missile had been fired from the central area of the enemy’s territory. Soon, four other missiles were seen to have been fired. Now, you might think that five nuclear bombs would be not so many, but please remember that these were missiles–not the bombs themselves. Each missile had something called MIRVs–Multiple Independently (targetable) Re-entry Vehicles–meaning that, when the missile reached the edge of space and began its descent over the opponent’s land, 10-15 different, individual, and large-scale hydrogen bombs would be released from the missile and hit a different target. Thus, five missiles meant at least 50 nuclear bombs, each of which used a Hiroshima-sized bomb as a detonator.

Protocol–in fact, direct orders–said that Stan was required to report the launching of the missiles to his superior. But something made Stan take a closer look. His training had taught him that the enemy, if he were to launch a nuclear attack, wouldn’t merely launch 5 missiles at first. No, conventional wisdom said that the first-strike by either side would be designed to take out the entirety of the other side. Five missiles? It must be an error at best or an accident at worst, Stan reasoned. And, so, he failed to trigger the early warning system that was in place.

Sure enough, not only was the missile launch a mistake, but it was also not a missile launch at all. Come to find out, sunlight, reflecting on high-altitude clouds over the missile silos, gave a “false positive” reading to Stan’s launch monitors. By disobeying his orders, Stan may have saved the world from a nuclear war. But he was in a bit of a pickle. While his superiors praised him for his restraint in not kicking the false missile launch up the chain of command, they were also worried that admitting that their system couldn’t tell the difference between sunlight reflection and missile launches would make them look as if their much ballyhooed missile defense system was garbage.

So, privately, Stan was applauded by the military, but it would be years later, after the Soviet Union fell, that Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Red Army would receive credit for stopping a nuclear war.

On A Loyal Companion

People say you’re fortunate if you have one or two people in your life outside of your family in whom you can completely confide and on whom you can completely count. Lem had such a friend in John. The pair met at a prestigious prep school, Choate, in the 1930s. Both boys were from wealthy families in the Northeast, and both came from families where the father was largely absent and distant. So, in many ways, it was quite natural that the two would become best chums.

They roomed together at the boarding school for several years. In fact, Lem, a year older than John, thought so much of the friendship that he agreed to re-do his senior year so he could graduate with his best friend. And John was forever grateful for Lem’s sacrifice. They formed a secret society, called the Muckers, whose aim was to play pranks on the staff and on the school at large. Each young man needed someone in his corner, someone who would have the other’s back unreservedly. And they were indeed that for each other. Then, in 1937, the pair spent that summer traveling around Europe. The bond between the two grew even tighter.

Now, at this point, we have to say what you might be thinking. Yes, there was a sexual attraction in play here, but it turned out that only Lem had romantic feelings. John didn’t, but that didn’t stop John from loving Lem as his best friend and closest confidant. John knew that Lem was gay. While Lem would have preferred something more that best friends, he was content that John was in his life in that role if nothing else.

And that’s the way the relationship remained. Lem was in John’s wedding. John’s wife would later joke that her marriage to John came with a built-in houseguest because Lem was always staying over. He often spent holidays at John’s family’s house, and, to keep people from gossiping, he even took John’s sisters to social events. But, society being what it was then, Lem had to remain in the closet.

Both young men served in World War 2 with distinction. They remained close after the war. In fact, they roomed together for a while as bachelors as John began his career and Lem put off attending Harvard Business School for a graduate degree. As John’s career took off, Lem became his closest advisor and confidant, a role he’d had since the two were at Choate together. He was at John’s side when John faced the toughest decisions of his life. John offered Lem positions that would let them work together, but Lem turned them down. He felt strongly that working together would somehow change the nature of the relationship, and he didn’t want to run that risk. John appreciated that sense of love and loyalty in his friend for the rest of his life.

So, yes; having a close companion and a loved and trusted best friend is a rare and precious thing. But the fact that he was gay is a major reason you don’t know the important role Lem Billings played in the life of John F. Kennedy.

On A Feminist

On June 3, 1968, a woman approached two police officers in Times Square, New York City. “Here,” she said, reaching into a bag she carried. She brought out two pistols, one a .32 semi-automatic and one a .22 revolver, and handed them over to the shocked uniformed men. “I shot him,” she confessed. “He had too much control over my life.”

Valerie Solanas had a difficult past with men, apparently. Born in the 1930s, Valerie suffered abuse at the hands of her father. After her parents divorce, Valerie became an incredibly rebellious girl. Her mother had her removed from the household, sending her to live with her grandparents. However, the grandfather was a drunk, and he beat her often. Valerie had suffered enough. At age 15, she left the home and took to the streets. Sometimes during the 1950s, she had a child with a married man, but she gave up the child, a boy, for adoption and never saw him again. At that point, Valerie managed to complete a high school education and enter college. She received a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, graduating with honors. That was followed by some graduate courses at the University of Minnesota and some a Cal Berkeley. It was during her graduate work that Valerie began writing a document that came to be known as the SCUM Manifesto.

Now, you can imagine what the document said. By this time in her life Valerie was a committed feminist. Rumor had it that SCUM stood for the “Society for Cutting Up Men.” The work was a satire against the patriarchy. Valerie’s writings advocated for the elimination of men in the world, stating that the world would be a better place without them. And, even though the writing was satire with a definite tongue-in-cheek tone to it, given Valerie’s background, it’s easy to see that there was a good bit of truth to what she wrote. Men had abused and used her for as long as she could remember. So, the manifesto gave voice to her feelings of helplessness in the face of the abuse she suffered. The work has been translated into many languages and is often included in lists of feminist must-reads.

Valerie also wrote a play about a street-wise, man hating prostitute who ends up killing one of her customers. Apparently, much of the play is autobiographical. She gave it to a friend, an influential artist, who promised he would he would read the manuscript and see what he could do to help her get it produced. After some time, Valerie followed up with the man to see what progress had been made on the script. The man said that, sadly, he had misplaced or lost the manuscript, and he was unable to help her. Valerie became understandably furious. Here was another example, she felt, of men using her and lying to her. She reportedly told a friend that she was going to shoot the artist and then, she felt, the publicity over the shooting would cause the play to be produced.

So, that brings us back to June 3, 1968, and the surrender of Valerie’s guns and herself to the two policemen in Times Square. It turns out that Valerie’s victim was shot outside of his building, two of her bullets ripping through several internal organs. He flatlined before doctors were barely able to revive him. The man would suffer from the effects of the shooting for the rest of his life, dying at age 58. Of course, the year Valerie shot him, 1968, assassinations and attempted assassinations filled the news. Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot in Memphis that April. Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles only two days after Valerie shot her victim. Therefore it’s easy to forget that on the 3rd, Valerie Solanas shot and almost killed the most famous artist in the world at that time.

Andy Warhol.

On The Right Choice

Steve Daniel married Betty in 1973. They were both 24, and the reasons they hadn’t married before, Steve later said, was that God knew the other one was waiting for them. Steve had a good job, stability, and marrying Betty made him feel that his life was complete. Oh, sure, he knew that the future would have challenges and difficulties, but he felt that the bond that he and Betty had would see them through any possible issues that might arise.

Steve’d grown up in San Francisco with his mother. His father had a farm in Texas, and Steve spent every other summer growing up with is dad, working on the farm. He didn’t like having to leave what he knew behind every other year. That disconnect that came from being uprooted from the familiar, the “known” and secure, made Steve vow that when he became a father, he would make sure that such a feeling of insecurity and feeling isolated and separated from a sense of stability wouldn’t happen to his kids.

Betty and Steve had three kids, all boys, between them. When Steve would come home from his work in the water department, the boys would run to meet him and tell them all about their daily adventures. And, to his credit, Steve would make time to spend some quality one-on-one time with each of them. Betty had dinner ready and the house clean every day, and Steve thought life couldn’t get much better.

Later, Steve would say that change usually happens gradually in life. He was referring to how an outside influence began to creep into their lives, specifically Betty’s life. It began with Steve’s older brother, Charles. You see, Charles had a checkered past, and he was trying to change his life for the better. And Charles had found a Christian group that was specializing in giving people second and third chances in life. Soon, Steve’s family began going with Charles as he attended meetings of this group.

Now, Steve had never really been a church-going man, but he loved that Betty and the boys were getting involved in a group that seemed to have such a positive impact on the community. The church actively pursued local charitable works like a food pantry and a homeless shelter and a free kindergarten for low-income families. It was, as Steve said, they type of place that he always thought church should be but rarely ever was. And Steve saw how happy Betty and the boys were when they’d come back from church filled with stories of helping other people. Going there seemed like the right thing to do, the right choice, the best choice.

Through the other members of his family like Charles, most of the people in Steve’s circle were going to the church at this point. It was then that Betty came home from church one day and excitedly told Steve about a opportunity the church was offering to do some work on a temporary overseas mission. Now, when I was involved in church work, I took several of these short trips such as a week in Costa Rica helping to build a church building. I get it.

And Steve, despite his misgivings, thought that if Betty was so excited about going on this trip, then it must be the right choice. She said that the boys were excited about it, too. That’s when Steve balked. He didn’t want his boys going overseas, he said. Perhaps it was the memory of his summers in Texas, being separated from his family as a youth, that made him not want his kids to leave the US. But Betty’s excitement–and the fact that other family members were going as well–finally convinced him to allow the four of them to make the trip. He agreed under the stipulation that she would call, write, and stay in contact so that the boys could feel the connectedness he didn’t feel when he was their ages.

And so, Steve Daniel took his family to San Francisco Airport, hugged them goodbye, and never saw them again. Ever since, Steve has questioned the choice he made when he put them on a jet bound for Guyana and the compound built by Betty’s minister, a man named Jim Jones.

On a War

Zanzibar. You have no idea where it is, right? Would you believe me if I said it was in northeast Asia, off the coast of Korea? See? You don’t even know if that’s true. The truth is that Zanzibar is off the coast of southeast Africa, just off shore from Tanzania, and it is a semi-autonomous province of that nation. For real. The purpose of this little joke is that Zanzibar isn’t on anyone’s radar, so why would Britain go to war with Zanzibar in 1896? Well, it seems that wars during the Victorian Era was what Britain did. To be somewhat fair, the archipelago was on one of Britain’s shipping lanes from Suez down the east coast of Africa to Britain’s colonies in the southern part of the continent.

While Britain didn’t officially colonize or take over Zanzibar, it did determine who ruled the small nation. And, when the hand-picked ruler of Zanzibar died in 1896, a ruler emerged in the country that wasn’t as friendly to British interests as the one they themselves had chosen. According to a deal of “protection” between Zanzibar and Britain, any potential Sultan of Zanzibar was required to receive British approval. The new Sultan, the nephew of the previous ruler, didn’t do that. And, so, the British representative in Zanzibar issued an ultimatum: Relinquish power or the British would force him out. Well, the new Sultan called Britain’s bluff. He sent a message saying, in effect, you guys wouldn’t dare remove me.

Apparently, this man hadn’t learned the rule that he who rules the waves waves the rules. And, in the late 1890s, Britain’s navy was the world’s most powerful. It was British policy that their navy would be the size of the next two navies in the world combined in an effort to protect Britain’s vast empire and insure the flow of trade goods to and from Britain. And, when the new Sultan of Zanzibar rebuffed Britain’s demands to step down from power, the Royal Navy sent ships to deal with the situation. Britain, the world’s largest empire at the time, declared war on tiny Zanzibar.

The war started with the naval vessels bombarding the Sultan’s palace. Several members of the Sultan’s household were killed, and the mostly wooden structure caught fire. The fire spread quickly, and the palace was largely destroyed. The fire reached a cache of cannonballs and gunpowder, and the ammo dump exploded, thereby almost completely eliminating the Zanzibarian supply of ordinance. Meanwhile, the only ship in Zanzibar’s navy, a retired British ship gifted to the previous Sultan, tried to fire on the British ships, but it was quickly sunk by a British salvo in the shallow harbor, its top masts still sticking out of the water for several months afterward. The incredibly accurate and experienced British ships used their naval superiority to quickly disable the stationary guns Zanzibar had aimed at the harbor where the British ships lay.

Needless to say, the British won what is now called the Anglo-Zanzibar War. The Sultan was whisked away from the scene by the German consulate to the coast of what was then the German colony of Tanzania. Britain quickly installed a Sultan that they approved and one who would continue the mutually beneficial relationship (well, more beneficial to Britain, but still). The British rebuilt the royal residence into a better and more stable building. Order was restored.

And the Anglo-Zanzibar War, lasting all of 38 minutes, is known as the shortest war in history.

On a Philanderer

The title of this story isn’t exactly correct. The man in question wasn’t careless in his relationships with the women in his life in the sense that he had a series of anonymous affairs. No, rather, he carefully planned and took great pains to create the lives he lived with four different women over the course of over forty years. With these four women, the man had at least 13 children. At least, because those are only the relationships we know about.

The man, an American, traveled frequently for business. He was a consultant for several major airlines in the period after World War 2, and those travels took him often to Europe, specifically Germany. It was there that the American kept three of his “families” each made up of an adoring woman and her children. The children in one of the families knew him only as “Mr. Kent,” and he would visit them two to three times every year. On each visit, he would shower them with gifts and affection. Never, however, did the children learn that this man was actually their mother’s lover and their own father. The man had met their mother when he was in his 50s and she was only 31.

Another “family” the man had was with the sister of the first woman. Apparently, the two women never realized that the father of their children was actually the same man. This second family gave him two children. Again, the children had no idea that the tall, lanky American who came and went throughout the years was their father.

The third German family the man created was with his German secretary and translator. This woman birthed a son and daughter by the American. The same scenario played out with that group as well–gifts, rare visits, no acknowledgement of parentage.

Realize, please, that this man was happily married back in the United States. His American family had six children, although one of the children had died in infancy. The man’s wife never betrayed that she knew anything about her husband’s proclivities while he was alive. From all outward appearances, the couple appeared happy and content. None of the man’s friends suspected that he lived, well, not a double life, exactly, but more of a quadruple life. Years later, after finding out about the other siblings and the other women, one of the man’s children from his relationship with his wife bitterly commented that the complications and logistics of keeping at least four separate families must have been exhausting to her father.

This “busy” American man died in 1974. He reached out to each of the three German families shortly before his death, and he asked them to keep his involvement with them a secret. They did so–for over two more decades. When some of the children from these relationships finally discovered and then revealed who their father was, they said they weren’t looking for money. Rather, they only wanted simple acknowledgement.

And that’s how the world found out about the other families of that most famous of aviators, Charles Lindbergh.

On Lost Letters and Pronunciations

In the late 1960s, my hometown of Cullman, Alabama, had an incredibly progressive education system. Cullman was a town of about 10,000 souls back then (it boasts over 18,000 today), and it spent a great deal of its city budget on school building and hiring excellent teachers. And, when I was in first grade at East Elementary, the city school system introduced a new way of teaching reading called the Initial Teaching Alphabet–ITA. It was made up of 44 sounds found in standard English. Thus, when I entered first grade, my knowledge of the 26 letters in the English alphabet was almost useless. We had to learn about the 44 letters in ITA. And that brings me to the 26 letters of our alphabet–and the several letters English has lost over the centuries.

Take the letter thorn. Here it is: þ. It looks a little like a cross between a b and a p, doesn’t it? You actually know it without knowing that you know it. As recently as Shakespeare’s time, the thorn was used. It’s supposed to be a replacement for the two letters “th” at the beginnings of words. When printing presses in Europe were used to print books in English, their typesets didn’t have the thorn, so they substituted a “y” instead of the thorn. Eventually, even sign painters used the “y” instead of the thorn. That’s why some signs today say, “Ye Olde Shoe Shoppe” or somesuch. It’s not actually “ye,” it’s actually “the” instead because of the thorn.

Another lost letter is ash, or æ. Again, it’s a sort of mashup of two letters, obviously an a and an e. We have eliminated that letter because, when we use the sound, we either use the two separate letters (archaeology, for example) or we in the US have eliminated the “e” from the equation (encyclopedia rather than encyclopaedia).

Then, there’s ð, called eth. It’s more like the thorn, but where thorn is less tongued in pronunciation, eth fully uses the tongue between your teeth to make, well the -th sound in teeth. Eventually, English speakers replaced eth with the thorn when writing and eventually replaced the thorn with a th.

There are others also lost to history. And that brings me back to ITA. Several lost letters in English were used by the ITA creators to represent sounds that the 26 standard alphabet makes. I knew what an eth was and an ash was because of ITA. But the language system didn’t last long. Too many children had difficulty making the transition from ITA back to the standard English alphabet when reading books outside of ITA classrooms. But the experiment serves to remind us that our language is evolving. There are some who are proposing a simplified English alphabet that more closely aligns with standardized pronunciations. That may mean either adding to or taking away certain letters in our standard 26 letter alphabet.

For example, there is the word GHOTI. Ask someone to pronounce it, and they’ll most likely say “go-tee” as in the word goatee. But this word has been used to demonstrate that English is finicky when it comes to the randomness of its pronunciation rules. Some have argued that if you take the -gh from rough, the -o- from women, and the -ti- from either nation or ration, you can say the word in a completely different but nonetheless perfectly acceptable way.

Fish.

On a Plate Appearance

As we make our way towards October, the end of the baseball season nears. What used to be the National Pastime has been shoved unceremoniously aside brusquely by American football. Yet, it is the history of baseball, the tradition, that still enthralls a hard-core group of fans across the globe. Part of the appeal of baseball for many is that the sport is made up of statistics, and those statistics are finite and fixed and documented. We can re-create entire games based on a scorecard or a box score, for example, as far back as there are records. For some baseball aficionados, the more arcane, the more obscure the statistic, the more interesting it is.

Take, for example, the stories of Major League Baseball players who played only one game in the majors. Even more specifically, let’s look at players that had only one at bat but never actually played in the field. And, to bore down even more into specific stats, let’s focus on those one at bat players who reached base successfully. That’s a pretty small and select group. Only five such players can be found in the entire history of baseball. And one of those players, a man named Eddie Gaedel, stands head and shoulders above the rest. In fact, his autograph is worth more than that of the titan of the sport, Babe Ruth.

Eddie was born in 1925 in Chicago. His father, Carl, had immigrated to the US from what is now Lithuania. Helen, his mother, took care of Eddie and his siblings. From a young age, Eddie was a baseball fan, but, then, so were most American boys of that era. He worked during World War 2 as a riveter as a teenager, doing his part to help the war effort despite being too young to be drafted. For many reasons, Eddie’s start in pro baseball got off to a late start. In fact, it wasn’t until he was 26 that he signed his first pro contract with the St. Louis Browns (a team that is now known as the Baltimore Orioles).

On August 15, 1951, Eddie made his debut–and only appearance–in a MLB game. It was against the Detroit Tigers, the second game of a double-header. The fact that the Browns began the game by pulling the leadoff man (the first batter) and substituting Eddie was quite unusual. Fans and even sportswriters and broadcasters were left scrambling for information about the last-minute substitute. They found him on the roster as a last-minute addition, and he was listed as batting right handed but throwing left handed. Eddie confidently strode to the batter’s box and took the traditional stance next to the plate–a stance that bore a striking resemblance to that of baseball great Joe DiMaggio.

The Detroit pitcher, a man named Bob Cain, looked at his catcher, another man named Bob (Swift), and shrugged. The catcher went down into his crouch, and the umpire yelled, “Play ball!” Cain’s first two pitches to Eddie were serious attempts at a strike, but both, interestingly, sailed over his head. The last two pitches by Cain were no more than lobs, with the pitcher almost laughing as he tossed the ball to Swift. The ump yelled, “Ball four!” and Eddie trotted triumphantly to first base. The Browns’ manager, Zach Taylor, called for time, and a pinch runner came into the game, replacing Eddie at the first base bag. In the style of a major leaguer–because he was, at that point–Eddie smacked his replacement on the backside and trotted into the dugout. The crowd of over 18,000 in St. Louis went wild with cheers. It would be his only appearance in a game. His on base percentage remains a perfect 1.000.

Now, you may wonder why this remarkably short professional baseball career merits our time. In the large scheme of things, it’s not even a blip on the baseball radar. There should be no reason why a four-pitch walk should cause Eddie Gaedel’s autograph to bring more than Babe Ruth’s.

That is, until you realize that Eddie Gaedel stood 3′ 7″ (109 cm) tall and weighed only 60 pounds.

On an Inspection

The 1950s and early ’60 were a time in white middle class America when gender roles and rules of social decorum were fairly strictly defined and generally observed. Women wore hats and gloves to church and, often, even to the store; men wore suits to dinner and even to the movie theater. The reason some people watch reruns of the old TV show Leave It to Beaver today is to see what was the reality for many families at the time–a nostalgia for a period when the men worked while the woman stayed home and raised the kids, and people lived in nice suburban comfort. All of that changed, of course, in the 1960s beginning with such things as John Kennedy not wearing hats and the emergence of the counter culture that followed in the wake of the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests. Allow all of that to serve as the societal background to the meeting of two women when one was moving into a new home in 1961.

Now, the two had met before because their husbands were in the same business although there were a generation apart. The occasion was that the younger woman’s husband had recently received a promotion, and an upgrade in the family’s living situation was in order. The older woman, the one who had been living in the home, was not happy that this younger woman and her husband and children were moving in to the place she and her husband had called home for almost a decade. But, social custom demanded that she take the younger woman on a tour of the house, an inspection of sorts. And it was no secret that the older woman disliked this younger woman.

To be fair, the older woman was, to be somewhat impolitic, frumpy. Not that she didn’t follow the social norms, because she did. In fact, she was, in many ways, the quintessential representative of that stolid, solid, middle class that represented much of white America. But the contrast between her and the younger woman was so, well, drastic. This younger woman followed the latest fashion. She had model good looks. And she spoke French! You could hardly find a greater difference between two women despite the fact that they both conformed to the social norms in every other way. And that included the prerequisite inspection of the home.

The younger woman, only two weeks away from a cesarean section and the birth of a boy, was still in a great amount of pain and discomfort. She had asked that the home inspection be postponed because of this, but the older woman insisted. Whether this was out of spite or out of jealousy or even simple lack of empathy is unknown. And when the younger woman came to the house, the older woman waited for her in a hallway. Rather than come towards the woman who was in obvious discomfort, the older woman simply stuck out her hand in unsmiling welcome and forced the younger woman to walk to her to shake it. She then led the hurting younger woman through the entire house, walking quickly, almost intentionally it seemed, so that, by the end of the one hour tour, the younger woman was almost in tears of pain.

As I said, the older woman really didn’t wish to leave the house. It wasn’t her choice, of course. Her husband was retiring, you see, and it was time for them to downsize. And perhaps that was part of the jealousy the older woman felt. Her husband’s useful work life was largely over, while this younger woman’s husband’s period of fruitful work was only then coming into season. We do know, for a fact, that the older one referred to the lovely and elegant younger woman snidely as “That College Girl.”

But we don’t know, for sure, why Mamie Eisenhower disliked Jackie Kennedy so much.

On a Delusional Young Woman

She began hearing the voices in her head when she was 13 or so. The girl, a product of rural peasant stock in Domremy, France, seemed to be a most unlikely person to receive messages from the beyond. She had no education. She wasn’t a religious novice. No, all the girl did was help keep the cows her family farmed. Barefoot, she’d take the animals to pasture during the day and bring them home at night, milking them early and late. Oh, and the voices didn’t speak to her all the time. Bright lights often triggered the voices, she said. And bells. When the church bells in the nearby village would ring, announcing church services, she’d experience the voices more clearly than ever.

As the girl began to tell other people in the area about the voices and their messages of heavenly instruction, those people began to listen. The time period was back when people were much more superstitious, and those superstitions were tied to religion. When someone came along professing to have supernatural, other-worldly insight, the people of that day took notice. She gained somewhat of a following, with other peasant folk starting to seek her out to learn what other messages the divine was sending through the young girl.

Her parents, Jacques and Isabelle, told people that their daughter had been odd for some time. She didn’t always have this gift of hearing the voices, they said. No, she also had visions, but she didn’t talk about those much. She would seem to go into a trance and then reveal what she had seen and heard. Oh, and the family reported that she had a terrible temper; her short fuse often resulted in some mild violence if she felt something displeased her sensibilities, especially when her brothers, Jean and Pierre, would offend her somehow.

Based on these details, modern scientists have made some broad guesses as to what possibly could have triggered the girl to have those visions and to hear those voices. Some have suggested that she had a neurological issue or a psychiatric disorder. Some postulate that she was bipolar or had been the victim of a brain injury sometime in her younger life. Others, usually medical historians, point to some disease that could have given her dementia. The truth will probably never be discovered.

At any rate, by the time the girl was 16, she was noticed by higher authorities in the Catholic Church. And those authorities, in a time when France was locked in war with England, saw in this odd, seemingly god-sent young maiden, someone they could use to rally the people to their cause. The war had gone on so long that people began losing hope, and the powers that were decided the girl could be useful. So, incredibly, the authorities used this possibly mentally challenged young girl to their own ends; they capitalized on her notoriety, gave her a symbolic role in the war, and used her until, well, they couldn’t anymore. Eventually, she was captured by the English and killed for being a heretic.

You might think you know her name, but you’d probably not get it right. She called herself Jehanne la Pucelle–Joanne the Maid–at a time when most people still didn’t have last names as we know them today.

Of course the name you know her best by is the one that was never really used by anyone at the time.

Joan of Arc.