Steve Silverman - The Flip Side of History

Coral Gables

Copyright 2020 by Steve Silverman

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover Design: Jayoung Hong

Layout: Jayoung Hong

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The Flip Side of History: Strange News, Hard-to-Believe Headlines, and Other Curious Stories from History

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication number: 2020933909

ISBN: (p) 978-1-64250-220-6 (e) 978-1-64250-221-3

BISAC category code HUM016000HUMOR / Form / Trivia

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

PART 1:
Run-Ins with the Law

One of my favorite true crime stories of all time. Its a case in which no one was talking but the green parrot.

A sad, yet unusual, human interest story that caught the attention of newspaper readers all across the United States.

Just what happens when person A attempts to kill person B, who unknowingly gets person C to kill person D instead?

A woman in a nightgown was seen clinging to the front of an automobile as it was being driven down the road. If your first thought was that the womans life was in great danger and that the car should have been stopped, well, you would be wrong.

The unusual story of two high-flying aviators who attempted to pull off the perfect crime.

PART 2:
Entrepreneurs & Daring Minds

Today, we take for granted the fact that women can wear slacks any day and everywhere. Helen Hulick was one of those women who fought for their right to do so.

In the 1870s, newspapers were the blogs of the day. Almost daily, they reported on the Wheelbarrow Man as he made his way along his journey.

Just what would you do if you found a remote island that belonged to no country and that no person lived on? When James Harden-Hickey stumbled across the uninhabited Atlantic island of Trinidad, he claimed it as his own.

Some people will do anything to promote their product, even if that means bombing the city of Los Angeles with perfume.

PART 3:
Inexplicable Oddness

There are some stories that simply make me smile whenever I think about them. This story about people who were smoking banana peels in the 1960s is one of them. It simply borders on the ridiculous.

The crazy true story of how an elderly millionaire attempted to rent a beautiful, young woman from her husband for a one-year period.

Every Christmas, theres that one popular toy that every child must have. Always in short supply, such a gift is so desired by children that parents are willing to pay top dollar to get their hands on one. This is the story of a popular Christmas gift that couldnt fit under the tree. If anything, this unusual gift was more likely to eat the tree.

Just what would make someone want to steal another persons shoes?

During the Great Depression, Le Mars, Iowa, was front-page news for three seemingly unrelated stories, all tied together by an incredibly misogynistic bequest made by one of its prominent attorneys.

PART 4:
Hoaxes & Con Artists

Maybelle Knox was the center of perhaps the greatest mystery to ever occur in Le Mars. A story so fantastic, it captured the attention of an entire nation.

Perhaps the worst high school football team to have ever played was located around Salem, Massachusetts. There was a very good reason as to why they performed so poorly, and it had nothing to do with the quality of the teams players.

Youve certainly heard about Mexican jumping beans, but have you ever witnessed jumping coal? Such a phenomenon was observed at a schoolhouse. At first, no one could explain why the coal was acting so strangely. Was it alive? Could the school have been haunted?

In 1954, Harold Jesse Berney, head of a Washington, DC, television antenna manufacturing operation, said he was chosen by the United States government to be its main contact with Uccelles, a prince visiting our planet from Venus.

The Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake, New York, was once the largest resort in the Catskill Mountains. Few people remember today, but it was once central to one of the most bizarre extortion schemes ever.

PART 5:
Heroes & Survivors

The amazing story of the only person in the United States to have been rescued from slavery four times.

Nothing on earth is permanent. As sure as there are forces that push mountains upward, there are opposing forces that will eventually bring them all back down. And no matter how hard humans may try, nature always wins in the end.

Nearly everyone wishes for a long, healthy, happy life. But a long life will most likely make you outlive everyone you know, which begs the question: is living a long life worth it?

PART 6:
Newsworthy: Past & Present

How would you describe the average man? Clearly, there is far more to him than physical characteristics like height and weight. In 1927, a search was held to find the man who best typified the average male.

The strange, true story of Michael Patrick OBrien. He belonged to no country, and it seemed as though hed be stuck sailing the same back-and-forth trip every single day for the rest of his life.

A story about two lovers who wished to marry over parental objections.

During the winter of 1993, Principal Brian Howard of Chatham High School, the school where I spent my entire career as an educator, asked me to attend a seminar at the University of Albany on the teaching of authentic science research at the high school level. I never could have imagined how that one evening would change my lif e forever.

As presenter Daniel Wulff detailed how the program worked, he repeatedly referenced something that Im quite certain the majority of the audience had never heard of: the internet, specifically email, which was necessary for students to keep in touch with researchers around the world.

Its difficult to describe how slow and clunky the internet was to use in 1993, particularly when accessing it from the rural setting of our school district. It required painfully slow dial-up modem connections over costly long-distance telephone lines that used text-based UNIX commands. As awful as this may all seem, it was cutting edge for its day, and I was immediate ly hooked.

Fast forward to the summer of 1994 and I read about a new invention called the World Wide Web. I fired off an email message to Steve Janoverinstructional coordinator at the Northeastern Regional Information Center (NERIC), and my internet guru in those early daysquestioning him about it. He told me that NERIC was testing the web out, but he wasnt sure if it would catch on. I drove up to see him and he demonstrated the World Wide Web to me.

Upon returning home, I immediately set to work on my first webpage: my resume. A few days later, I began to construct my first real website. I simply uploaded some interesting facts that I had shared with my close friend Jamie Keenan. This included how they placed the Ms onto M&Ms, the history of Vaseline, and other similar stories. For lack of a better title, I remembered that one of my students, Steve Lotz, had told me that I knew more useless information than anyone else. So I typed the words Useless Information at the top of the page, and my website was born.