Facts I learned from reading

It's no secret that I enjoy reading.  I have certain areas in which I concentrate my reading.  I'm very interested in Spain, Ireland, military history, biographies, sports, espionage, classics and a few other subjects.  I'm not fond of contemporary fiction, although I've read some here and there.

My love of reading stems largely from the fact that as a child I didn't have a lot of friends.  Books kept me company and taught me things about people and places that I'd never know.  I learned about the world, its history and what was expected for its future.  The more I read the more I loved reading.

Karen thinks I need a twelve-step program because of the amount of books I have.  I disagree.  She thinks I should get rid of more books than I do.  The ones I keep I refer to every once in awhile -- some more than others, but I usually refer to all of them at some point.

Because I CLEPed out of two years of history in college, I never had to take a pure history course that wasn't involved in my studies of Spanish or Philosophy.  I've tried to make up for that formal training with my reading.  I've also branched out into other areas to learn about things that merely interested me.

Some of what I read is fluff.  Everyone probably does this.  To keep from being bored, I try to vary the subjects I read each month, so I'll read a military history, a biography, a book on sports and perhaps a classic each month.  The next month I'll read something about espionage, a book in Spanish, a travel book and more military history.  It doesn't always work, but I try.

In my readings, I come across some things that are just very interesting factoids, things that I never knew and probably don't need to know but that I retain nevertheless.  Here are a few of them:

--  The Marx brothers actually lived in Chicago for a time and then owned a farm in LaGrange, Illinois.

--  St. Lucia is actually the first country that saluted the new nation of the United States of America.

--  Schaphism is a particulary devilish torture with which to put someone to death.

--  Walter Cronkite's mother dated Douglas MacArthur's father, meaning that had things turned out differently Walter Cronkite could have been Douglas MacArthur.

--  In the Gulf War, the CIA knew that computers were being transhipped to Iraq in violation of the embargo, and that Iraqi intelligence would inspect the computers for any bugs that would be planted in the computers, so they put the bugs instead in the printers such that when the air war broke out and the Iraqi air defenses started up, the computers shut down once the information they spit out when through the printers.

--   Jimmy Stewart lost his virginity to Marlene Dietrich.

--  The United States and Britain actually invaded the Soviet Union shortly after World War I.

--  Greta Garbo really was bisexual.

--  The owners of the St. Louis Spirit of the old ABA were and continue to be paid money from the NBA's television contract not be a part of the NBA.  The brothers get one-seventh of the money received from the television contract the four teams from the ABA admitted to the NBA generate and have received $255 million since 1976.

--  John Wooden was ready to accept an offer to become the head coach of the Minnesota Gophers but a downed telephone line kept him from accepting the offer.  UCLA swept in and made him a better offer and he became its head coach instead.

--  In 1966, a Spanish fisherman became a millionaire by helping the US military find a hydrogen bomb that was jettisoned into the Mediterranean in an accident.  Using the law of salvage, the fisherman claimed a percentage of the weapon's value, and the US paid him for his help.

--  Whittier, Alaska, has only one road into the town and has 177 inhabitants.

--  British security forces gave Protestant paramilitary groups information on Catholics and the IRA to allow them to murder them.

--  The city of Newport, Rhode Island, used the pineapple as its symbol because back in the day, only the very rich could have them imported, and Newport was a playground for the very rich.

--  During the Cold War, a US submarine tailed a Soviet submarine underwater for forty-five days without being detected.

--  Chuck Daly, the coach of the Dream Team in Barcelona, never called one timeout.

--  The Iditarod started because of an epidemic in Nome and the need to get medicines to the sick population.

--  Minorities did not suffer disproportionate casualties in the Vietnam War.

--  Moe Berg was a major league catcher and a spy for the US government in Japan.

--  Tom Harmon, the winner of the 1940 Heisman Trophy, was shot down in the Pacific in 1943 and used his parachute for his wife's wedding dress.

--  The Kosciuszko Squadron was actually formed in part by Merian Cooper, the man who produced the movie King Kong.

-- Credit card numbers and ISBN numbers are actually codes.

--  Stealth technology was actually a Soviet invention that they did not pursue.

--  Mayor Richard J. Daley and his minions actually planned developments in Chicago to keep blacks separated from whites.

--  The Nazis actually allowed a Jewish symphony to perform regularly in Germany in the first half of World War II.

--  Impact is also actually a verb.

-- The Blackhawks' sweaters, seen here --

-- are the best uniform in all of sport and were actually designed by a woman, Irene Castle, the wife of the then-owner of the Chicago Blackhawks.

-- Al Hirschfeld, the New York cartoonist, put his daughter's name Nina in his cartoons after she was born, and it was so well done that the U.S. Army later used these cartoons as training to train their bombardiers to locate their targets.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles