On a Killer

Albert Pierrepoint killed somewhere between 450 and 600 people during a 25-year “career.” For those who believe such behavior runs the families, Albert did indeed follow in the footsteps of his father, Henry, and his uncle, Thomas, in doing so. But Albert eclipsed both their records for killing. Let me explain.

Albert was born in 1905 in Yorkshire, England. As a youth, he had a job as a butcher, and it was there that Albert developed the sense that death was merely a part of life. He also worked in a factory for a time. Perhaps one reason Albert’s father didn’t reach his killing record was that he was a prodigious drinker, and, as a result, the family had financial issues. That poor example of a work ethic prompted Albert to work hard to achieve his dreams and goals. By the time he was a teen, Albert knew he wanted to kill. At the young age of 27, he stood by as an observer as he witnessed his uncle take a life, sort of a macabre apprentice. Soon, Albert began killing on his own.

It was during World War 2 that Albert really came into his own as a killer. In fact, the 1940s was probably his most busy and prolific decade. During the war, Albert killed some Germans who were in Britain as well as some American servicemen who had come over for the war as well. But killing didn’t pay well, he found, and he decided that he needed more steady income. From the mid-1940s until the 1960s, Albert chose Lancashire in which to open and run a pub called, ironically, Help the Poor Struggler. Yet, Albert took killing seriously; it was an almost sacred thing he did, he would testify later. He saw it as a public service.

Killing, he believed, was to be done quickly and professionally. It required a certain amount of dignity, too. Of course, discretion was the key to the task, Albert said. Anyone who passed him on the street should never be led to believe he was anything other than a common man simply going about his business. Nothing should draw attention to himself–not dress, walk, or manner or speaking. In fact, Albert rarely talked at all. And, in the middle of his killing career, Albert managed to find a woman, Annie Fletcher, and marry her. Of course, he never talked about his work with Annie. To her, he might as well have been a shopkeeper or solicitor or postman or doctor.

If you’ve made it this far, you might be curious as to how Albert killed the people he did. Well, to be blunt, it was all over in a matter of seconds, from the moment Albert would put a rope around a person’s neck, or, rather a person’s chin. Albert killed by breaking the person’s neck clean. The rope under the chin caused the head to be snapped back quickly when pulled, and that snapped the vertebra at the base of the skull instantaneously. Death was painless, Albert would explain. No one suffered, he said.

And you might be wondering how Albert’s killing was finally stopped. Well, it wasn’t stopped as much as Albert retired in the 1950s and devoted himself to running the pub. Today, we have the record of every person Albert killed, every one, neatly entered in a notebook he meticulously kept that lists names, dates, places, and any extraneous notes that might be important. When he died in the 1990s, Albert’s tale was more widely told, and the story surprised some who only knew him as a nice, quiet, man who ran their local pub. They had no idea that Albert was such a prolific killer.

You see, like his father and uncle before him, Albert Pierrepoint was an Executioner of His Majesty’s Prison Service.

On A Scam Artist

You’ve either seen or are aware of the Steven Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can. The film is a story of a con man named Frank Abagnale, a teenaged runaway who is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio. In the film, the Abagnale character begins by forging checks and eventually poses as a substitute teacher, airline pilot, attorney, and doctor. In the end, Abagnale gives up the life of scamming and becomes a wealthy consultant to banks, law enforcement, and others who are interested in learning how to avoid falling victim to con artists like him. However, the reality of Frank Abagnale’s life is, in an odd way, much different than the one the film presents.

For over 50 years, Abagnale has told variations of these stories that you see in the film to audiences on TV game shows, talk shows, and before college students and other groups, often receiving large sums of money to tell them. He has written books that detail his past as a scammer and con man. In fact, he has made a rather lucrative career trading on his sordid record as a young man. And that may be Abagnale’s greatest scam of all.

What the film gets right about his past is that he was born in the Bronx in 1948, and his parents did get a divorce when he was 15. He lived with his father and step-mother before using his father’s credit card to run up a bill of over $3,500. That theft led his father to send him away to a boarding school. That’s the point that the facts about Abagnale’s past become murky. He has claimed at various times that it was a prestigious prep school but has also said it was a Catholic-operated reform school. A three-month stint in the US Navy was followed by several arrests for petty theft, car theft, stealing and forging checks, and for impersonating various police and federal officers. All of this activity saw him spend the next several years in and out of jails and prisons.

By the time he was 20, the young con artist impersonated an airline pilot and moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He moved in with the family of an airline flight attendant he had met while pretending to be a pilot. For several months, he scammed that family and stole from their bank and credit card accounts. When he was found out, he was convicted of theft and forgery. But, before he could be sentenced, Abagnale escaped custody and flew to France in an effort to get away from all his trouble. More scams were conducted there and in Sweden. Again, he was caught and served a few months in prison. Finally, he was extradited back to the US.

Now about age 22, Abagnale served some more time for other cons he had done. Then, once he was out of jail, he bounced from job to job and con to con and jail to prison and back out again. Finally, in 1975, he had an idea. That’s when he approached a bank with a proposition. He would teach the bank’s employees how to spot bad checks in exchange for a consulting fee. He promised that if the bank found his work unsatisfactory, that they didn’t need to pay them. That was the start of Frank Abagnale’s security consulting firm. The other caveat of that first “straight” job was that the bank would tell other banks about his service. Soon, the banks were lining up to have him teach their employees all of his check faking tricks.

Of course, when he presented that first bank his credentials, the bank didn’t bother to check that he had made up most of his misdeeds and overstated his experience as a fraudster. This is about the time he began speaking to groups about his so-called (and self-labeled) exploits as a master forger. Truth told, he never forged more than a few thousand dollars’ worth of checks. But the stories fascinated audiences, even if they were, well, forgeries. All that exposure brought by the speaking engagements led to the book, which led to the TV appearances, which led to the film, which led to a sizeable income for the man.

Thus, most of what you saw on the movie screen was hokum. In fact, it’s fair to say that the best scam Frank Abagnale pulled was to convince everyone that he was a better crook than he really was.

On a Garbage Strike

In spring, 1968, and only six weeks into his new administration, Memphis, Tennessee Mayor Henry Loeb came face-to-face with a problem that divided his city along social lines and racial lines. The black garbage men of Memphis walked off the job in order to call attention to poor working conditions and poor wages. The strikers also asked for city recognition of a sanitation workers union.

For the 47-year-old Mayor Loeb, the issue was a simple one. The strikers, as government employees, stood on shaky legal ground he believed. In 1965, the Tennessee State Supreme Court ruled that, as essential workers, government employees could not strike. The mayor spoke of this ruling as his primary reason for opposing the strike. In his mind, he was simply following the court’s decision regardless of how he felt about the issue as an individual.

For his constituency, which consisted of at least 87% white at the time, there were other, more pressing issues involved in the situation. Attempts to set up a labor union by the black sanitation workers in Memphis touched off deeply rooted feelings of hatred among Loeb’s mostly white, Anglo-Saxon/Protestant, deeply southern constituency. These feelings are reflected in a letter of support the mayor received in the weeks of that winter and early spring 1968, a letter from a woman named Pauline Johnson. She wrote, “I sleep better knowing you are our loyal mayor [and] I’m praying that you will be blessed as you stand tall and big in your job.” The word big was underscored. “Thank God for men like you,” she says in her conclusion. That letter was typical of the support Loeb received from not only local letters but also from people all across the south as news of the garbage strike spread.

Different people wrote to call the strikers anarchists, a goon squad, and a bunch of hoodlums. The word communists was used often in the letters, and some even called the union organizers “satanic.” They made reference to Lucifer as well. Some saw Loeb’s stance against the strikers as being god-inspired work. Typical of these more strident letters is the one by a man named R H. Koons who said he was 76 years old. He begged Loeb to “please stand firm and don’t give in.” He tells the mayor that all the problems of Memphis was the union’s fault. “Most of the union heads are Catholic,” Koons advised, showing that some Loeb supporters were anti-Catholic as well as anti-union and racist. And Koons also invoked the Bible. “Anyone who understands the New Testament in the Bible can prove that [nowhere] Jesus ever told his followers to disregard the law.” Like many other letter writers, Koons used language that was both apocalyptic and millennial. He used racist rhetoric against the strikers. And many others wrote letters like Koons did.

Loeb felt the letters expressed the will of the people who had elected him. It would have made sense that his natural inclinations would be to support the unions, but he didn’t. Loeb was a staunch segregationist, which is somewhat surprising given his background And, besides, he felt duty-bound to support the court system. Loeb came from a Jewish family in Memphis, a city with a large middle-class Jewish community. Both of his father’s parents had immigrated to the United States from Germany one hundred years before. His grandparents knew what racial and social discrimination was like.

Loeb, however, bowed to the pressure of the white community and opposed the strikers, refusing to bow to their demands as the garbage began piling up on the streets of the city he led. The strike went on for over two months. Violent clashes began to be waged in various Memphis neighborhoods. Loeb ordered the police to break up any marches or demonstrations, using violence if needed. In a previous role for the city as the Public Works Commissioner, Loeb had overseen the sanitation department, and, in that capacity, had done nothing to improve the plight of the garbagemen. He didn’t allow overtime, there were no sick days allowed, and outdated equipment that was dangerous and unsafe was not replaced. As mayor, Loeb again refused to take action to make their jobs better. That’s when the almost 1,500 minority members of the sanitation department went on strike.

One letter Loeb received stands out from the majority. It came from a garbageman named John Jones. Jones sent a poem along with a letter to the mayor. The poem said, in part, that it was “not by her houses neat/not in her well built walls/not yet again/neither by her docks or streets/a city stands or falls by her men.” Jones was calling for the mayor to do the right thing, the American thing, the moral thing, and support the improvement in the working conditions. But Loeb wouldn’t budge. The atmosphere was ripe for violence to continue because of Loeb’s staunch segregationist inaction.

And a man not from Memphis but who strongly supported the union came to stand with the strikers and march with them, even if it meant facing that violence to achieve the needed changes to the garbagemen’s working conditions. His plan was to combat the strong-arm tactics of Loeb with peaceful non-violence. Sadly, that man would face violence on April 4, 1968. That’s when, while leaving his motel in Memphis to attend a strikers’ meeting, Martin Luther King, Jr., would be shot and killed.

On a Boy’s Letter

In the National Archives of the United States, there are reams and reams of letters that people have sent to the occupant of the Oval Office over the years. The Archives are working tirelessly to digitize those letters. With permission, any American can access these records and see what people wrote to the various Chief Executives. Sometimes, people from other countries wrote to the American President.

We don’t know why the boy from the Caribbean island wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Perhaps, as children do, he simply wanted to express his admiration for a man who seemed to be so inspirational at a time when the world was going mad with economic disaster and world war. For many, FDR represented one of the last bulwarks against the fascism that was sweeping the globe from Japan to Paris in the war’s first full year. Roosevelt had been recently re-elected for an unprecedented third term, and some breathed a sigh of relief that he was still in control of the last great democracy on earth save Great Britain.

The boy, aged 12, took a pencil and wrote the great man to express his admiration and to ask a favor. The letter begins, “Mr. Franklin Roosevelt, President of the United States, my good friend Roosevelt.” In broken English, he wrote to say that he had heard about FDR’s election win, and he expressed that he “was very happy to hear” the election results over the radio. It was that medium of radio that Roosevelt had utilized to speak directly to the people during the Great Depression and throughout the 1930s in a series of talks called the Fireside Chats. Those talks to the American public resonated beyond the US borders, carried by the airwaves into the Latin American sphere and the island nations like the one the boy came from.

In his letter, the boy’s grasp of English is obviously limited, but his admiration for the American President shines through. He admits that, “I don’t know very English,” and when he congratulates FDR on his reelection, the lad doesn’t know the English word “term.” So, he inserts his native Spanish word “periodo” instead. It’s an earnest and honest letter as well. Near the end, the boy makes an interesting request, however. He asks the American leader for a new $10 bill. He calls the note a “green American,” probably somehow confusing the term “greenback” as slang for an American bank note. He adds, “because never, I have not seen one,” the boy says by way of explanation.

It could be that the boy wrote the letter as part of a school exercise in his homeland. The letter is written on school stationery, and it has the school’s address in the upper left-hand corner. When he asks for the $10 bill, he repeats the address of the school as where the gift could be sent. Then, as the letter drew to a close, the boy reiterates that his English knowledge is limited, but he says that perhaps Roosevelt’s knowledge is Spanish was limited as well. “You are American,” he said, “but I am not American.” “Good by,” he says by way of signing off. And then, the boy signs the letter.

“Your friend,

Fidel Castro.”

On A Returning God

Sometimes in history, the stars align and everything works out exactly right according to one person’s perspective. On the other hand, the same alignment of heavenly bodies bring doom and destruction to the next person. This is a tale of an example of the latter type. You see, it pertains to the prophecy that the god was going to return to a certain group of people. And that returning god, at least in this case, brought with him certain death and the eradication of the group that believed in him.

What happens when you expectantly look for your god to return in the fulfillment of prophecy, but then, when he does return, you are not only disappointed, but you are also destroyed?

To understand the prophecy clearly, we have to travel to the ancient past, when the first stories of this god appeared. It seems that the god had been banished by other gods from the homeland of the people for reasons that had become shrouded in mystery over the centuries. Most stories centered around his having to perform a series of Herculean tasks and the travel far and wide across the earth before being allowed to return to his homeland. The prophecy said that he was destined to return one day–that much was certain. Then, fast-forwarding to the 16th Century, it seemed to the people that their god had finally finished his sojourn and decided to return to his people.

That’s because all the stories of the traveling god–his appearance and where he came from and even the time of year he would return–all converged into one major event that happened to this group of extremely religious people. The prophecies said he would come from the east. They said that he would be wearing feathers. The further said that the god would have a beard, a feature that the genetics of this particular group of people didn’t have. He would bring with him mythical animals they had never seen, either. Additionally, the god was predicted to return in the Year of the Reed, and that’s when the god did appear. Finally, the god was said to return to the homeland on a boat unlike any the people had seen or imagined, a boat that featured metal on its sides like a porcupine.

Within two years, this god not only destroyed the capital city of this culture, a city that had approximately 250,000 citizens in it, but he and his small group of fewer than 500 seemingly minor deities completely eradicated the society itself. While it seems to be a work of fiction, I assure you this was the case. How did this happen? Well, when the god arrived in what is now Mexico, he completely ignorantly and inadvertently fulfilled the Aztec prophecies. He came from the east, certainly, but he also sported a feathered helmet, he sat astride a creature we call a horse, he happened to arrive in the correct time frame, and his warship bristled with cannons on its sides.

And that’s why Montezuma, the Aztec Emperor welcomed the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes and his soldiers into the capital city without putting up any fight.

After all, wouldn’t you let god come into your home?

On a Heroine

Louise Julien died at a much-too-early 38 years old of tuberculosis on the British island of Jersey. She went there in 1853 for her health after leaving France by way of Belgium, but by the time she reached Jersey, the illness was too far gone in her weakened body. Louise had been born in Paris, the illegitimate child of a seamstress and a minor Portuguese nobleman. Louise came into the world at a time of great upheaval in the history of France. Napoleon had only recently been removed and exiled, his attempts at European domination finally thwarted. France had to get used to a new government, and the changes brought about by the French Revolution and Bonaparte’s reign were still being processed by the culture and society.

From a young age, Louise was different than other girls. Strong-willed and almost foolishly brave, she eventually married a tailor but chose to go by the last name Julien rather than her husband’s name. She made money singing in workingmen’s clubs, becoming rather popular in those circles. And that experience helped her develop a sense that workers were, by and large, still at a disadvantage in French society despite the changes the revolution had brought. In addition, she made a reputation as a poet.

In 1848, France experienced another revolution, as workers rose up and demanded more rights and accommodation in the public weal. It began in Paris, and Louise was at the forefront of the movement. The Second French Republic was proclaimed as a result, and some major changes were made in society. But then, Napoleon III, the nephew of the former emperor, staged a coup and declared himself the new French Emperor. Again, Louise took to the streets in protest, urging her comrades to march against the illegal takeover by public demonstrations. The will of the people must be heard, Louise said, and the only way those in power would hear the people’s voice would be through mass demonstrations. In a skirmish with government troops, Louise was injured and then arrested by the new government for being a dangerous revolutionary. It was in prison that she contracted the tuberculosis that eventually took her life on Jersey.

At her funeral in Jersey, the famous author, Victor Hugo, and the poet of the Second Revolution, Joseph Déjacque, gave eulogies over her coffin. Hugo’s speech in particular was so moving that Parisian newspapers reprinted it, and the story of Louise’s heroic efforts on behalf of the revolution and French workers was retold for generations afterward. But that’s not why most people remember her today.

No, we remember her for Hugo’s memorialization of her, at least indirectly. You see, when it came time some years later for Victor Hugo to put pen to paper and write the great novel of the French Revolution of 1848, he used Louise as the inspiration for one of literature’s most enduring characters. He was looking for a character who, like Louise Julien, lifted herself from humble beginnings and attempted to make her world a better place. Thus, you know Louise Julien best as the character Cosette, the girl adopted by Jean Valjean, in Hugo’s landmark story, Les Misérables.

On Three Jealous Lovers

Oh! beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.-Othello, Act 3, Scene 3, by William Shakespeare

Shakespeare knew that jealous was powerful and hungry and often incredibly dangerous. We feel jealousy’s threat with the Bard’s warning to “beware.” And history is filled with stories of jilted lovers and of people who have almost literally lost their minds over love. More recent news stories tell us that nothing has changed much over the millennia. Here are three of the more odd and drastic examples of the green-eyed monster rearing its ugly head.

Take the story in 2013 of a man in Saudi Arabia who loved and married the woman of his dreams. Social media’s prevalence has given the public many more opportunities to find out about people cheating on their significant others. This man discovered what he thought was evidence of proof of his wife’s infidelity online. That’s when this Saudi man, as we say, “lost it.” He confronted his wife over the post online that showed her kissing the cheek of a rather handsome fellow. How dare she, he said, when had been completely faithful to him. Of course, the wife protested. In fact, she literally laughed off her husband’s accusations at first. How could he be so ridiculous, she asked. She didn’t deny the post and didn’t deny the kiss. However, she said it was obvious that the kiss meant nothing to her other than a sign of friendly affection. He was not to be daunted. He filed for divorce, citing the online photo as evidence. Even though the photo didn’t prove anything, the court granted the man a divorce. And, while the divorce was final, even the court also had to laugh at the man’s irrational jealousy. The ex-wife wasn’t sorry about the divorce, either. She felt that the man’s irrationality should have been something she saw earlier in the relationship. You see, the photo definitely showed the kiss. But the object of the wife’s kiss was a beautiful Arabian horse.

In 2012, Lowell Turpin of Tennessee flew into a rage over a photo on his wife’s computer. Lowell didn’t have the best judgement in the first place, and he had a history of violence and jealousy towards his wife. If any man spoke to his wife, even a cashier or checkout person, Lowell would threaten the man with revenge. The photo Lowell found on his wife’s laptop was of an attractive man, a bit older than she was, with a chiseled jawline and a full head of hair with a touch of gray at the temples. And he had a winning smile to boot. Right on cue, Lowell flew into a rage and snatched the laptop from his wife’s hands. “You slut!” he kept screaming, over and over. He threw the computer against the wall, shattering the machine into dozens of pieces. “Tell me who he is!” His brow-beaten wife, right before she called the police and had Lowell arrested, obliged him. “That man,” she explained calmly, “is Mitt Romney.”

The last tale is one you probably remember from the news at the time. Lisa Nowak lost her mind in 2005, at least temporarily. She left her husband for another man, a co-worker, a few years before. To Lisa, the new guy became her obsession. An old adage says that if he’ll do it with you, he’ll do it to you, and, in this case, it was true. The man she left her husband for left her for another woman. And that’s when Lisa lost it. She drove almost 1000 miles to confront the woman she’d lost her lover to. Tracking and stalking the woman to the airport in Orlando, Florida, Lisa first accosted and harassed the woman before pepper spraying her through her open car window. When she was arrested, Lisa’s car revealed that she had been shadowing the woman and the former boyfriend for some time. In her defense, Lisa claimed a temporary breakdown, but the obsessive behavior was shown to have gone on longer than “temporarily.” Thus, Lisa Nowak became the first active-duty astronaut to be charged with a felony and dismissed from NASA and received a less-than-honorable discharge from the US Navy.

We often associate colors with moods and emotions. Cowardice is yellow. Sadness is blue. Anger is red. But the green of envy, the monster of jealousy, can be the most irrational at times as these three stories prove.

On Idle Gossip

Is there anything more delicious or more dangerous that gossip? A rumor that takes wings and soars over our ears, passing from one throat to the other, each telling of the tale making the story only slightly more luscious and salacious and opprobrious. We’ve all played the whisper game in school, where a simple sentence is told to the person next to you, who passes it on to the next, and so on, so that at the end, the sentence rarely bares any resemblance to the original message.

Rose Oettinger found a way to make idle gossip pay, and pay well. But she didn’t start out that way. Rose was born in Illinois in 1881, and she wanted to be a serious journalist at a time when most middle class women rarely worked outside the home. She wrote for her local newspaper for a time after her schooling, given stories by the editor about weddings and societal events. From there, she learned how to write scenarios for silent films in the ‘teens and early ’20s. She also published a book detailing how to write for the movies. It was a modest success. Ruth then got a plumb job writing about film for a Chicago paper. She loved that work. But then, the newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst, bought the paper and fired Rose because he didn’t think film warranted news coverage.

Out of a job, Rose moved to New York and continued writing about film for a paper there. Part of her job included conducting interviews of up-and-coming movie starlets and young stars, as film journalists today have to do as well. And Rose was good at ferreting out those interesting tidbits of information that the public wanted to know about their new favorite film actors. She said it helped that she was from a small town, and that gave her an advantage over her city-raised competitors. She knew what small-town America was wanting to know, and she gave it to them.

One of those starlets Rose interviewed was a lovely girl named Marion. Like Rose, Marion came from fairly humble origins. She had been a chorus girl on Broadway for a time before her big break came and she was able to star in a feature film. Sadly, most film critics panned Marion’s performance, a mark that could have been a career killer for a new starlet. But Rose liked Marion from the get-go, and the two became good friends as a result of the interview Rose conducted. When she wrote her article about Marion’s film, Rose told people to give the girl a chance, that she saw great things for Marion’s future. Because of that glowing interview, the film producer who had backed Marion’s film became a cheerleader for Rose’s writing career. That patronage led to Rose being given a job writing about film for a newspaper in Hollywood at the rate of almost $2000 per week in today’s money.

Then, in 1924, Rose was invited on a short trip down the southern California coast on a private yacht, the Oneida. Onboard that boat on that trip were some famous people, including the legendary Charlie Chaplin, famous (at the time) producer/director Thomas Ince, and Rose’s actress friend, Marion. Something happened on that boat, but we aren’t sure what it was exactly. The result was that Thomas Ince was dead. What many people believe is that the owner of the boat, a wealthy businessman and Rose’s boss, shot Ince in a jealous rage. You see, what we know for sure is that the boat’s owner was in love with the much younger Marion. It has been speculated that the wealthy older man flew into a jealous rage when he thought Chaplin was flirting with Marion, and he shot at the silent film star but hit Ince instead. The inquest that followed said that Ince died from heart failure, but his body was cremated before a full inquiry could be made.

Whatever happened, Rose and the others on board never said. What resulted is that shortly after the trip, Rose was given a hefty raise and a life-time unbreakable contract if she would write gossipy stories about Hollywood’s stars. Rose agreed. Of course, you don’t know her as Rose Oettinger (if you know her at all). No, she wrote under her first name and her married name.

Oh, and that wealthy man who was in love with Marion? He was the same newspaper tycoon (and one of America’s most powerful men), William Randolph Hearst, who had fired Rose years before. He and Marion stayed together for the next three decades.

And, until she died, gossip columnist Louella Parsons never disclosed what really happened aboard the Oneida during that trip.

On A Scatological Park

We’ve looked at several odd museums over the course of this blog. There was the one that featured the pair of pants made from human skin in Iceland. Remember the book library/museum in Norway that will eventually house only 100 books? Then there was the place that showcased the red ruby slippers from Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. This time, it’s a museum in Suwon, South Korea dedicated to, well, poo.

Technically, it was a house that once belonged to the former mayor of the city, a man named Shin Jae-Deok. And, after his death in 2009, the city decided to make his house into a shrine to the man and to his most famous and significant contribution to the city–the improvement of the city’s toilets. Shin had made it his life’s work to make the removal of human waste a better experience for all the citizens of his city. And he succeeded. Thus, it seemed prudent and fitting to turn his home into a celebration of that life’s work.

So, you’ll find exhibitions on both historic examples of commodes as well as the most modern and sophisticated models. In fact, the whole litany of toilets can be found there. You can find out the effects of toilets on culture throughout the centuries (whose life isn’t complete without this knowledge?). The inaugural meeting of the World Toilet Association met there a few years ago. In fact, they were the major sponsor of the building of the museum. The impetus for beginning the museum was also the declaration by the United Nations of the International Year of Hygiene.

Now, I know you’re looking at the calendar and thinking that it’s way, way too early for April Fool’s Day. But this museum is no joke. In fact, besides the exhibits inside, the land surrounding the house has been rebuilt with more, well, interactive exhibits. Sculptures adorn the grounds, and they depict various human figures in the act of elimination, both liquids and solids.

I don’t want you to get this South Korean museum confused with the toilet museum that’s located in Delhi, India. That particular museum is more dedicated to the sanitation issues in India specifically rather than the world-wide problem of how to make a better crapper. And don’t forget that there’s a similar permanent exhibition in Kyiv, Ukraine, but, because of the situation with Russia right now, that museum is closed. That Ukraine one does have the world’s largest collection of chamber pots, but, again, the South Korean museum is better because of its wide-ranging nature of the cultural aspects of pooing.

By the way, the name of the museum is, in Korean, Haewoojae. Translated, that means “House of Relieving Anxiety.” Apropos, don’t you think?

So, if you find yourself in Suwon sometime, do yourself a favor.

Go.

On a Smuggler

Ludwika (Louise) Jędrzejewicz was a most unlikely smuggler.

The daughter of a proper Polish family, Ludwika was born in 1808 in Warsaw. Her father was a Frenchman who had emigrated to Russian-controlled Poland some years earlier as a businessman and tutor in French. She and her siblings grew up being multi-lingual, and Ludwika had a relatively privileged upbringing compared to most young girls her age. Czarist Russia had control over Poland at that time, and the Polish people desperately wanted independence from their Russian overlords. At the same time, Russia worked hard to keep efforts at Polish independence and patriotic expressions among the Polish people to a minimum.

Ludwika became a musician and composer, something that was unusual for a woman in that time and place. Her music was unique and well-received; the Poles pointed to it as an example of the quality of Polish culture and creativity. She and one of her siblings, a sister, wrote anonymous pro-Polish propaganda against the Russians, too. She supported organizations that advocated Polish nationalism. In 1832, Ludwika married a lawyer, a man named Józef Jędrzejewicz. Even though the marriage produced a child, it was an unhappy pairing.

Then, in the summer of 1849, Ludwika received a letter from her younger brother, Frederic. He had moved to France to work on his own music career, and he was in poor health. He asked if his older sis could come help him, nurse him back to heath, and, maybe, help him return to Poland and the family. Ludwika agreed, much to her husband’s chagrin. Józef accused her of putting her birth family before her own child and marriage, but she ignored his complaints and went to Frederic. She nursed her brother and cared for him as best as she could, but the man had tuberculosis. He had always been thin and frail, and his body was not able to fight off the illness. He died that autumn in Paris, his loyal and loving sister at his side. However, before he died, Frederic asked his sister for a favor. He wanted her to smuggle something into Poland for him. “Take it to the church,” he said to her in one of his last sentences before his death. “Promise me,” he said. Through her tears, his devoted sister promised. Frederic was buried in Paris, and Ludwika began making her plans to return home to Poland.

By this time, Józef had left her, fed up with her loyalty to her brother. So, with literally nowhere else to go, she decided to return home to her mother’s house near Warsaw. But she still wanted to honor the departed Frederic’s wish to return “home” the item he made her promise to give to the church. And to do so, Ludwika had to smuggle the item past not only the Russian border and customs authorities, but she also had to smuggle it past the guards at the Austro-Hungarian border as well. So, she did what any decent, self-respecting woman would do. She hid the item under her dress. Surely, no customs official would search a lady’s person, even someone as rude as a Russian border guard.

And she was proved right. Her voluminous skirts proved a perfect hideout for smuggling the item back into Poland. After sitting on her mother’s fireplace mantel for a time, Frederic’s item was given to the Warsaw’s Holy Cross Church. Ludwika would mirror her brother and die young from a disease in 1855. But she felt that she had shown honor to Frederic by keeping her promise. The item she gave to the church in Warsaw is still there today, and it occupies a prominent place in the building, where it has been a national treasure ever since. It has survived revolutions, two world wars, and several occupations. And it stands as a monument not only to Frederic and his sister, but it also represents the patriotic spirit of the Polish nation. You see, Ludwika’s maiden name was Chopin. Her brother, Frederic Chopin is today one of history’s greatest composers and a Polish national hero.

And the item he had his sister smuggle into Poland, the item that is the pride of the Holy Cross Church is Frederic Chopin’s heart.