[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.

Will Rogers

 

A race track is a place where windows clean people.

Danny Thomas

 

I intend to live forever. So far, so good. 

Steven Wright

 

Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week. 

Spanish proverb

 

It's one thing to recognize that the gap between the rich and everybody else
is growing like a cancer; it's another thing to come up with useful
solutions.

Molly Ivins 

 

Those who hoot with the owls by night, should not fly with the eagles by
day. 

Unknown

 

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Sugar daddy

 

Is it true the term sugar daddy came from Alma de Bretteville, mistress and
then wife of sugar magnate, Adolph Spreckels, who said "I'd rather be an old
man's darling than a young man's slave"?

 

An intriguing story is associated with the early history of sugar daddy but
this probably isn't it.

 

Adolph Bernard Spreckels, scion of the California sugar family, was 23 years
older than Alma de Bretteville. They were married in 1908 and continued to
be until his death in June 1924. No contemporary reference links sugar daddy
with either of them. The only one FOUND in print is in a detailed story
about the couple by Joseph Potocki in the Bay Time Informer dated 17
November 2009. Alma de Bretteville's comment is a proverb known from the
sixteenth century. Proving a negative is difficult and it's possible she
invented the first and used the second. But it feels more like a factoid of
the internet era.

 

The first known use of sugar daddy is in an episode of a surreal tale with
the title Fat Anna's Future that appeared in the Syracuse Herald on 27 March
1923. Coincidentally, its notorious introduction to the wider American
public would come in the following day's newspapers. The story had actually
begun two weeks before, when the body of Dorothy Keenan King was found in
her New York apartment. "Dot" King was a former model and unsuccessful
actress who had become what people then called a vamp, a woman who used her
undoubted attractiveness to target men. She had been set up in the apartment
and given lavish presents by a 50-year-old tycoon named John Kearsley
Mitchell III. He used the pseudonym of Mr Marshall but was publicly unmasked
in press reports on 28 March below a formal posed photograph:

 

John Kearsley Mitchell, son-in-law of K. T. Stotesbury, multi-millionaire,
of Philadelphia, has been revealed as the mysterious "Mr Marshall," who was
the "heavy sugar daddy" of Dorothy Keenan King, New York model, who was
chloroformed to death in her New York City apartment. - Kingston Daily
Freeman (New York), 28 Mar. 1923.

 

Her murderer has never been found. Claims were made at the time that she had
been killed because she refused to go along with a criminal group who wanted
her to help blackmail Mitchell. Dot King's story became a cause celebre and
was widely publicized, often mentioning her pet name for Mitchell, heavy
sugar daddy. It gained instant public recognition, and it has been in the
language since, though heavy was soon lost.

 

The term seems to have been a New York creation of the louche and criminal
worlds linked to Broadway in Prohibition days. Sugar was a long-established
slang term for money and heavy sugar was a lot of it. Sugar was also an
endearment, which originated around this time in African-American slang and
which reached a wider white audience via blues lyrics. Daddy was an obvious
reference to an older man, but it may similarly have had a link to
African-American slang of the time, in which a daddy was a lover with no
implications of age. Heavy sugar daddy was literally an older man with lots
of cash but in the theatrical world it specifically meant a rich man who
pursued actresses for immoral purposes.

 

Herbert Corey wrote about the term in a widely syndicated newspaper article
about Broadway slang the following year:

 

A daddy is a good thing, and when the daddy is a very good thing indeed, he
becomes a sugar-coated daddy, as vide recent stories in which unfortunate
vamps of Broadway appeared as the victims of murder. When a vamp gets a
sugar-coated daddy she puts him on the merry-go-round until his money has
spilled. Some say he goes through the separator. But Broadway slang is of
the day only. - The Sioux City Sunday Journal, 2 Nov. 1924.

 

It certainly was. A newspaper report only a year later said sugar daddy had
been replaced on Broadway by big butter and egg man, a prosperous farmer or
rich small-town citizen who came to New York and tried embarrassingly hard
to be a playboy. It was created in 1924 by Mary Louise "Texas" Guinan, who
ran a New York speakeasy called the 300 Club. The story goes that a shy,
middle-aged man was so flattered by her friendliness that he paid the steep
cover charge for every guest and pressed $50 notes on all the entertainers.
When he said he was in the dairy business, she introduced him as "the big
butter-and-egg man", borrowing a term for a dairy farmer that had been
around for decades. It became the title of a Broadway play in 1925 and Louis
Armstrong recorded a song with that title in 1926.

 

But sugar daddy has outlasted it.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

The first automobile race in the United States had a top speed of 15 mph.

 

The last vehicle to offer a cassette player as an option was the 2011 Ford
Crown Victoria.

 

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen, build in 1886 by German inventor Karl Benz (as
in the co-founder of Mercedes-Benz), is widely considered to be the world's
first production car.

 

Most car horns honk in the key of F.

 

About 65% of all Rolls-Royce cars that were ever built are still on the
road.

 

NASCAR was created because of Prohibition. When moonshine bootleggers needed
a way to transport their goods in a hurry and without raising too much
suspicion, stock cars were created, paving the way for the racing that we
see today.

 

Oklahoma City, on July 16, 1935 first used parking meters.