Found at /r/ historyporn via /u/cholmes.
Author Archives: The Old Wolf
The Salt of the Earth
If you ever wondered where your salary comes from… Well, at least the Romans did; the Latin word salarium, whence we get our word “salary,” shows that there was a solid link in place between employment, salt, and soldiers, although the link is no longer as clear as it seemed earlier.
Be that as it may, salt has been a critical commodity since the beginning of human history, whenever that was. Æons ago, I read a lovely story to my children, which was since republished by Nina Jaffe and Louise August as “The Way Meat Loves Salt: A Cinderella Tale from the Jewish Tradition“.
Many years ago in Poland, there lived a rabbi who had a wife and three daughters. One day, the rabbi asks his children a powerful question: “How much do you love me?” His older daughters profess their love in gold and diamonds, but his youngest daughter, Mireleh, declares she loves her father the way meat loves salt. For this remark, she is banished from her father’s home.
As the Rabbi comes to learn, Mireleh’s declaration was the most powerful of all.
Salt is essential for life. We can’t live without it; salt is composed of sodium and chlorine, and absent sodium in the diet, hyponatremia can cause coma or even death. Notice that doctors put blood pressure patients on low sodium diets, but not no sodium diets; some is always required to keep the body’s functions balanced. Add to that the valuable nature of salt as a preservative, and you can see why it’s been sought after since the dawn of time. In fact, if you want to read a charming science fiction short story about the discovery of salt as a cooking spice, read “First” by Anthony Boucher.
Have you ever wondered where our nation’s salt supplies come from? Thanks to the Salt Institute, here a map of North America’s major salt deposits and production facilities (click for expanded view):
Salt production has been central to the area around the Great Salt Lake since the arrival of Mormon pioneers in 1847, and continues today, although Morton now has a near monopoly on salt production in the area.
Salt was so essential to human life that many proverbs sprang up around its use; the following list was located at Seventh Wave:
- “Give neither counsel nor salt till you are asked for it” English Proverb
- “A kiss without a beard is like an egg without salt” Dutch Proverb
- “The fish requires salt” Latin Proverb
- “Without salt the feast is spoiled” Polish Proverb
- “Bread and salt never quarrel” Russian Proverb
- “Don’t buy the salt if you haven’t licked it yet” Congolese Proverb
- “Don’t slaughter more pigs than you can salt” French Proverb
- “If I peddle salt, it rains; if I peddle flour, the wind blows” Japanese Proverb
- “What is salt to tasteless food what is a word to a foolish head” Turkish proverb
- “Manage with bread and salted butter until God brings something to eat with it” Moroccan Proverb
- “As a daughter grows up she is like smuggled salt” Chinese Proverb
- “The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea” Swedish Proverb
- “Better a salt herring on your own table, than a fresh pike on another man’s” Danish Proverb
- “With fortune on your side you can sow salt and harvest grass” Kurdish Proverb
- “Eternity makes room for a salty cucumber” Russian proverb
- “The lucky eagle kills a mouse that has eaten salt” Ugandan Proverb
- “By bread and salt we are united” Moroccan Proverb
The Salty Old Wolf has spoken.
A profession you probably didn’t even know existed…
… and which doesn’t exist any more.
The “Kargadoor” (lit. “Cart-Move-Onward”) would help pushcarts over Amsterdam’s many humpback bridges (photo 1922).
I spotted this photo over at Reddit, posted by /u/lordsleepyhead, and found it intriguing.
Thanks to a friend, I found some further information over at De Jordaan (translation is mine)
High bridges were a source of income for the Kargadoor; these were men who pulled heavy hand carts over a bridge with a rope and hook. Their tool was a long rope with a hook on it. These cart pullers generally had a leather patch on their shoulder to keep from getting hurt by abrasion.
What’s more, this Kargadoor was in turn a source of income for the landlord of the slijterij de Grote Slok (Big Gulp Liquor Store) on the corner.
One of the bridges over the Prinsengracht was the domain of Kiki the Kargadoor. He would leave his permanent home when he had gathered six or seven cents; Kiki would disappear to spend his money on drink, all the while keeping the bridge in sight.
He was a bandy-legged little man who could swear like a champion; children always considered him to be a good language teacher.
Kiki was born in 1865 and had a home in the Boomstraat. He passed away at the Municipal Nursing Facility at the Roerstraat in 1940.
Hoist a glass to Kiki, the Kargadoor!
The caption on the sign reads, “Today Kiki is 75. He’s been a Kargadoor for 50 years.”
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Never, ever, make this mistake.
(This is a re-enactment; no one was harmed in this film)
Every 10 days a child dies from vehicular heatstroke. If you want more grim details, read this 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning article by Gene Weingarten.
“What kind of person forgets a baby? The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist. Last year it happened three times in one day, the worst day so far in the worst year so far in a phenomenon that gives no sign of abating. The facts in each case differ a little, but always there is the terrible moment when the parent realizes what he or she has done, often through a phone call from a spouse or caregiver. This is followed by a frantic sprint to the car. What awaits there is the worst thing in the world.”
If you see a child locked in a hot car, phone 911, break a window and save the child. Let the consequences fall where they may.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Theater District, 1944/45
New York, New York. Notice the uniformed sailor crossing the street in the foreground.
Market Street,1905
Police Officer speaks with girl on Market Street, San Francisco, 1905.
Four years before my father was born, and a year before the great earthquake.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Postwar rations
A typical week’s food ration for a postwar Austrian housewife c. 1945-47
Nit allzuviel. No wonder that Austrian cooking went heavy on the oil later, when it became available again; there’s nothing quite like a Wiener Schnitzel fried in lard.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Makes me wonder
Is it possible that the proprietors read Mad Magazine from the 50’s?
Probably not, but it sure felt that way.
Notice that even though Dave Berg didn’t fully draw it out, probably for legal reasons, that’s the unmistakable Carvel logo up there on the Ice Cream store (and they’re still in business.)
The Old Wolf wants custard!
My brush with infamy, airplane edition
A friend of mine from Norway, on the way back home from a visit to New York (although he didn’t eat at Piccolo Angolo, and is therefore in the doghouse forever), had an interesting experience when, 45 minutes into the flight, his plane began losing cabin pressure and had to return to Newark for servicing. It was newsworthy because Norwegian ski star Aksel Lund Svindal happened to be on the flight as well; a Norwegian website, Aftenposten, recorded the event (you can run it through Google Translate for a fairly readable English version). ABC also briefly mentioned the incident.
This put me in mind of my own scary story, which took place when I was 11 years old and journeying from New York to Salt Lake to visit my mother’s brother for the summer. The plane I was flying in, United Airlines flight 725, lost partial hydraulic power and were not sure what kind of landing they would be able to accomplish. Pilots managed to lower the landing gear manually, and operate the flaps with a backup electrical system; the flight was diverted to Hill AFB in Ogden, which had a longer runway, and the landing was uneventful. However, the stewardesses (that’s what they were called back then, not “flight attendants”) duly gathered up all sharp objects from the passengers, passed out pillows for us to tuck under our seatbelts, and we spent what seemed like an eternity in “crash position.” I remember being intrigued, but not afraid; I think at that age, I wasn’t truly aware of my own mortality, and I don’t think I understood how serious the situation could have been.
The thing that miffed me the most at the time was that I didn’t get a mention in the article as the youngest passenger on board. Ever the attention-seeker, it would seem. At any rate, here for your gratuitous pleasure is the news article from the Salt Lake Tribune of June 29, 1962, chronicling the near-disaster.
In retrospect, of course, boring and anonymous is much better than burned to a crisp and famous.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
Some things just deserve to be shared.
I found this by chance over on Reddit, serendipitously, without looking for it, in a random discussion about Portland, Oregon. There were a lot of humorous comments – the article had to do with a dispute between passengers and a cabdriver, but then the conversation drifted into the nature of Portland as a city.
And then this gem popped up, written by /u/fwaht. I’ve corrected one or two things for spelling and style, but it’s otherwise unedited. The added emphasis is mine.
The “Successful” Person
If you’re what society calls a “successful” person, then you’re probably making more than two standard deviations above the mean, and you probably have a family. And you’re probably working a 9-5 job, or something like it, where you spend roughly ⅓ of all the waking time you’ll ever have doing it. And your employer wants your best time, the time where you’re most energetic and willing to get things done. Your other time is probably spent in a lethargic daze staring at a television (and as you age it gets worse). And why are you watching television instead of doing something you can look back on in ten years be proud of? Because only unsocialized losers haven’t seen the latest episode of American Idol or the latest sports event.
The average company is not run as a meritocracy. If you were a boss, would you want to see the person that quietly does excellent work and all but ignores you and everyone else get the promotion? Or would you want your “friend,” the guy that talks with you about football and your kids and makes you happy, to get the promotion even though he doesn’t do such great work?
No, you need to play the game. Most every business is its own Machiavellian-themed nightmare or kingdom depending on the ease with which corruption and deception and social lubrication comes to your character (and if it doesn’t come to you easily, then you will fall behind those that are better at it).
And what do you win after having beat this game? Retirement? You mean 10-20 years of low-quality life where you have the freedom that you could have had all your life if you chosen a life of less responsibility, of placing less importance in what’s expected of you than trying to do what you’ve always really, really wanted to do. Did you need those new cars, that large house and expensive furniture, the expensive meals, and so on and on? No, they made you happy for a short while, but then you just slid back into normalcy – you were on a hedonistic treadmill. Here you are, 60 years old, with all sorts of aches and pains, and remembering the senility your parents drifted into around this age. Remembering how you wished they just died quickly while feeling your intelligence diminish every year as it has since you reached 50.
And on your deathbed, what are you going to look back on and be proud of? Your children? They will die soon, and so will their children. In a short while you’ll be long forgotten as they will, and any trace of your genetic legacy will have disappeared – you aren’t Genghis Khan. Nothing of you will remain. And why should you care about such a thing after you’re dead anyway?
The “successful” person has sculpted their future and life into a hell worse than the one given to Sisyphus, and yet as miserable and meaningless as they are, they still come to think they’re better than others somehow.
While this may sound a bit negative, it’s a very accurate distillation of business and working life, and a wakeup call to those who find themselves on the treadmill. This would be a good place to share another good tidbit I found while surfing around:
In the United States, it’s getting harder to build a successful business or enterprise on a shoestring; increasing regulation, coupled with the consolidation of wealth at the highest levels, has made it more challenging to get off the treadmill than it was for great-grandpa who started life manning a vegetable pushcart in Little Italy in 1900. Harder, but not impossible.
If a person is really interested in success that lasts, they won’t be able to measure it by the standards found in Corporate ‘Murica. From where I sit, true success can only be measured by the number of people one has served, and the level to which one has raised the human condition. Efforts of this nature will ripple through time, whereas the accumulation of stuff and the generation of progeny who will walk in the same corporate rut will, as fwaht has noted, be forgotten within a span of time so short as to be insignificant in social terms.
I am proud of my children – each of them is looking for ways to make a difference rather than to die with the most toys. It’s not easy, but keeping one’s eye fixed outside the societal box of corporate norms is the only way to ensure that one’s efforts count for something after our bodies have returned to dust.
The Old Wolf has spoken.
