Category: History

Is Edinburgh Manor in Iowa Haunted?

I have no idea whether an old former county home in Jones County is one of the most haunted places in the Midwest or Iowa or the USA. And I wouldn’t be saying that if Sena and I had not watched a TV show called “Mysteries of the Abandoned” (broadcast on the Science Channel) which aired a 20-minute segment about Edinburgh Manor the other night.

Supposedly, Edinburgh Manor started off as a county poor farm back in the 1800s, which didn’t do well and then quickly declined into an asylum for the mentally ill. When a couple bought the old place after it closed sometime between 2010 and 2012, they started to report having paranormal experiences and it was then off to the races for the place to become a haunted attraction, for which you can buy tickets for day passes and overnight stays.

There’s a 10-minute video by a newspaper reporter who interviews the wife and which shows many video shots of the house. I can’t see any evidence that it’s on the National Register of Historic Places.

What this made me think of was the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm here in Iowa City, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. We’ve never visited the site, but you don’t pay admission and the tone and content of the information I found on the website is nothing like what’s all over the web about Edinburgh Manor. There are no ghosts tickling anybody at the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm.

There’s a lot of education out there about the history of county poor farms in general. In Johnson County, Chatham Oaks is a facility that houses patients with chronic mental illness and it used to be affiliated with the county home. It’s now privatized. The University of Iowa department of psychiatry used to round on the patients and that used to be part of the residents training program (including mine).

I found an hour-long video on the Iowa Culture YouTube site about the history of Iowa’s county poor farms. It was very enlightening. The presenter mentioned a few poor farms including the Johnson County site—but didn’t say anything about Edinburgh Manor.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 2025 Events and Some Thoughts

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Week started January 20, 2025. There will be several very worthwhile events, many of which are listed here.

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Humanities Medal, will deliver the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Distinguished Lecture on February 5, 2025 at the University of Iowa Medical Education and Research Facility (MERF); Prem Sahai Auditorium. General admission is free although it’s a ticketed event, more information here.

I was searching the web for articles about whether and when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Iowa and found one that sparked personal memories of defeat, which Dr. King talked about when he visited my alma mater, Iowa State University in Ames in 1960, where he said:

“The Negro must not defeat or humiliate the white man, but must gain his confidence. Black supremacy would be as dangerous as white supremacy. I am not interested in rising from a position of disadvantage to a position of advantage.”

This quote was in an article entitled “Mentality Has Outrun Morality” in the January 23, 1960 issue of the Ames Tribune.

It reminded me of two episodes in my life which left me with a strong sense of defeat in the context of racism.

One of them was ages ago when I was a young man and somehow got involved in a pickup game of basketball with guys who were all white. I was the only black man.  This was in Iowa. The members of my team were those I worked with. The opponents were men my co-workers challenged to a game of basketball. I had never been in such a contest before. I think we lost but what I remember most vividly is a comment shouted by one of the opponents: “Don’t worry about the nigger!” I sat on the bleachers for the rest of the game while they played on. I remember feeling defeated—and wondering whose team I was really on.

The other incident was also long ago (but I was a little older), when I was a member of a debating team at Huston-Tillotson College in Texas (now Huston-Tillotson University, one of America’s HBCUs). We were all black. We were debating the question of whether capital punishment was a deterrent or not to capital crime. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise with my opponent. He just kept a running speech going, punctuated with many “whereas” points, one of which I’m pretty sure included the overrepresentation of black men on death row. I had never been in a debate before. My professor remarked that my opponent won the debate by being bombastic—for which there didn’t seem to be a countermeasure. I remember feeling defeated—and wondered if I was on the wrong team.

There’s a lot of emphasis on defeating others in sports, politics, religion, and the like. On a personal level, I learned that defeat didn’t make me feel good. I’m pretty sure most people feel the same way.

Dr. King also said “We can’t sit and wait for the coming of the inevitable.”

I’m not sure exactly what he meant by “the coming of the inevitable.” What did he mean by the “emerging new order”? Did he mean the second coming? Did he mean the extinction of the human race when we all kill each other? Or did he mean the convergence of humanity’s insight into the need for cooperation with the recognition of the planet’s diminishing resources?

I don’t know. I’m just an old man who hopes things will get better.

Did You Know They Won’t Be Making Yardsticks Any Longer?

Anecdote alert! Sena just got back from shopping and had a priceless little story about shopping for a yardstick for measuring window film to apply on a door window. I suppose I should say that the title of this post is a dad joke that some people might not get.

Sena asked a Menards worker where to find a yardstick. She said the guy looked like he was in his thirties. His English was probably a little rough. He looked puzzled and directed her to the lawn and garden center. She clarified that a yardstick was something like a ruler. He replied that they didn’t carry school supplies.

Another worker was in the same aisle and chuckled. He directed her to where the yardsticks were.

You know, I haven’t seen a yardstick in a long time. We don’t own a ruler although we have a tape measure. Just to let younger people know, a yardstick is typically a piece of wood 36 inches long (which is 3 feet), marked off into inches, and used for measuring things.

The worker who didn’t know what a yardstick was could probably relate to football games because the length of the field is still divided into yards—but only if he’s a football fan, I guess. But you don’t measure distances to a first down on a football field with a yardstick. . Incredibly, they measure it with a chain between two sticks. None of your lasers for the officials.

We had a yardstick in the house where my brother and I grew up. You could also use it to reach stuff that rolled under tables. You could make comparisons by saying “By any yardstick, blah blah.”

And you can make dad jokes about yardsticks. By the way, the company that makes yardsticks won’t be making them any shorter either.

Remarks on Svengoolie TV Movie Phantom of the Opera 1943 and More

We watched Phantom of the Opera (1943 version) last night. And then, just for good measure, we watched the Phantom of the Opera (1925 silent film) today. We watched the latter on the Internet Archive.

I’ll say one thing, the absence of commercials in the 1925 version is great. Even though I like cornball jokes on Svengoolie, it’s good to have a break from that too sometimes.

We’ve never read the novel by Gaston Leroux but there’s a pretty good Wikipedia article about it. We’ve never seen the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage version nor the 2004 movie.

That said, we’re struck by the differences between the 1925 and 1943 versions. It’s difficult to develop any sympathy for the Erik the phantom (played by Lon Chaney Sr. in 1925). He’s pretty much a monster from beginning to end. We tend to think that it’s easier to be sympathetic to Erique Claudin (played by Claude Rains in 1943) who has a rough path downhill after losing his job and a place to live early on, inability to sell his concerto or get a date with Christine and so on, after which he starts killing people left and right.

It’s worth pointing out that in Leroux’s book (according to the Wikipedia article), the phantom’s childhood was pretty traumatic because he was born ugly and deformed, which didn’t endear him to his mother. She was simply not good enough, which I think appeals to my training in psychiatry.

The 1943 film was pretty comical at times. For example, the two guys competing for Christine’s attention, singer Anatole (played by Nelson Eddy) and Raoul (played by Edgar Barrier) get stuck in doorways and eventually end up going to dinner together instead of one or the other going out with Christine. Their forced politeness with each other in front of Christine is priceless.

On the other hand, the 1925 version is a little more like what you’d expect from a movie on the Svengoolie show—it’s a horror flick, only classier. Lon Chaney’s makeup job makes him look like a proper monster, which made women faint according to some articles. Claude Rains’ makeup is barely suggested on part of his face.

The murders committed by the phantoms in both movies are bloodless, although the comedy in the 1943 version distracts you from what you expect; for example, after the Phantom drops the huge chandelier on the audience. No mangled bodies or gore, move along, nothing to see here. People continue to sing, dance and cavort, possibly hopping over any corpses lying about.

There was mostly dark music in the 1925 Phantom of the Opera film. However, in the 1943 version there was lullaby theme that ran throughout and was even a point of connection between Christine and the ill-fated Erique. Somebody found a full version of it years later, entitled Lullaby of the Bells. The one who posted it mentioned the composer and the performer.

That Donut Song by Washboard Sam

I got a kick out of a song by Catfish Keith last night on the Big Mo Blues Show on KCCK radio. It was “Who Pumped the Wind in My Doughnut.” He always sings songs with lyrics that I mostly don’t understand and that was one of them, at first. I’ll give you a hint; it’s not a Christmas tune. Catfish Keith covers some old-time blues songs and this one is for adults only.

Judging from the title of the song and some of the lyrics, you might guess it’s about doughnuts but it’s not. Don’t bother with the Artificial Intelligence (AI) description, which I did not ask for. AI just pops up in a web search whether you want it to or not:

“Who pumped the wind in my doughnut” is a playful, nonsensical phrase meaning someone has exaggerated or inflated a situation or story to make it seem much bigger than it really is; essentially, they’ve added unnecessary drama or hype to something, like adding air to a doughnut to make it appear larger.”

Once again, we see that AI makes stuff up as it goes along, creating a little story which is really concrete and far from the truth about something for which it was not programmed—to process language that is not literal but a form of humor riddled with innuendo to express something about sexual infidelity, in this case resulting in a lot of children which don’t resemble the singer because they aren’t his.

Anyway, I found a little background on the song which was originally performed by a guy called Washboard Sam (born Robert Clifford Brown). He was a blues artist in the 1930s. He performed “Who Pumped the Hole in My Doughnut” under the name Ham Gravy. I found a reference which says that Washboard Sam performed it and Robert Brown wrote it. And I found another which shows a picture of the actual record which has the name Johnny Wilson on it with the name Ham Gravy just below it. I don’t know whether Johnny Wilson was just another pseudonym. You can find the lyrics of the song identifying it as being by “Washboard Sam via Johnny Wilson.”

You can find a mini-biography about Robert Brown on, of all things, a WordPress blog called The Fried Dough Ho. It has a fair number of posts about doughnuts too. The author knows the song is not about doughnuts. There are also some pretty comical impressions in a blog post entitled “What is he talking about?” regarding the meaning of the lyrics of the song on a Blogger site called The things I think about, when I wish I were sleeping. One of the comments is fairly recent, from 2023. You can also find a Wikipedia biography.

You may never feel the same about doughnuts.

The Greatest Christmas Record of All Time

Last Friday night on the Big Mo Blues Show on KCCK radio, I heard Eric Clapton sing a song that I later found out was a cover of a song originally co-written by William Bell and Booker T. Jones, “Every Day Will Be Like a Holiday.” A Wikipedia entry about it reports that it has been called the greatest Christmas record of all time by Hot Press magazine in 2017. It has been covered by many musicians.

That song is still in my head. I had never heard of William Bell. He’s been a top rhythm and blues performer for decades. He’s 85 years old and is still going strong. I hope he has a lot more Christmases to go.

Amaryllis or Hippeastrum Trio?

The Amaryllis trio are reaching for the stars, and “star” may be the operative word because I just found out the name of the flower may be in dispute.

It turns out that the actual name of the Amaryllis is probably Hippeastrum due to a change in the genus classification of this striking bloom. My word processor kept highlighting Hippeastrum, so I had to add it to the dictionary.

The usual name, which has been Amaryllis, sounds pretty and has a romantic story behind it based in Greek mythology. The short version is that a maiden named Amaryllis fell in love with a shepherd named Alteo. Alteo insisted that he would fall in love with a girl only if she brought him a new flower he’d never seen before. She went to the Oracle of Delphi who advised her to literally bleed for him—which she did by stabbing her heart every day and spilling her blood on the ground outside his house. On the 30th day, a gorgeous red flower bloomed out of the blood. After that she and Alteo were definitely an item. You can find this story on many gardening web sites.

On the other hand, the unromantic name Hippeastrum (it seems there are two ways to pronounce it, both of which sound like a sneeze) was given to the flower by someone named William Herbert. You can find the complete and erudite story about it on a WordPress blog called Professor Hedgehog’s Journal in the post, “Plant of the Month: February 2018.” The name means something like Knight’s Star.

I’m betting that stores are unlikely to change the name on the boxes, out of which the flowers burst impatiently on to the shelves.

Amaryllis Progress and Other Notes

I have a few messages to pass on today. This is the last day of November and the Amaryllis plants are doing so well Sena had to brace the tallest one using a Christmas tree stake and a couple of zip ties. It’s over two feet tall!

I’m not sure what to make of almost a dozen comments on my post “What Happened to Miracle Whip?” Apparently, a lot of people feel the same way I do about the change in taste of the spread. So, maybe it’s not just that my taste buds are old and worn out.

Congratulations to the Iowa Hawkeye Football team last night! They won against Nebraska by a field goal in the last 3 seconds of the game. I had to chuckle over the apparent difficulty the kicker had in answering a reporter’s question, which was basically “How did you do it?” There are just some things you can’t describe in words. There’s even a news story about how thinking doesn’t always have to be tied to language.

Along those lines, there might be no words for what I expect to think of tonight’s 1958 horror film on Svengoolie, “The Crawling Eye.” This movie was called “The Trollenberg Terror” in the United Kingdom version. I can tell you that “Trollenberg” was the name of a fictitious mountain in Switzerland.

I’m not a fan of Jack the Ripper lore, but I like Josh Gates expedition shows, mainly for the tongue in cheek humor. The other night I saw one of them about an author, Sarah Bax Horton, who wrote “One-Armed Jack”). She thought Hyam Hyams was the most likely candidate (of about 200 or so) to be Jack the Ripper, the grisly slasher of Whitechapel back in 1888. He’s a list of previously identified possible suspects. I found a blogger’s 2010 post about him on his site “Saucy Jacky” and it turns out Hyams is one of his top suspects. Hyams was confined to a lunatic asylum in 1890 and maybe it’s coincidental, but the murders of prostitutes stopped after that. I’m not going to speculate about the nature of Hyams’ psychiatric illness.

There’s another Psychiatric Times article about the clozapine REMS (Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies) program. I found a couple of articles on the web about the difficulties helping patients with treatment resistant schizophrenia which I think give a little more texture to the issue:

Farooq S, Choudry A, Cohen D, Naeem F, Ayub M. Barriers to using clozapine in treatment-resistant schizophrenia: systematic review. BJPsych Bull. 2019 Feb;43(1):8-16. doi: 10.1192/bjb.2018.67. Epub 2018 Sep 28. PMID: 30261942; PMCID: PMC6327301.

Haidary HA, Padhy RK. Clozapine. [Updated 2023 Nov 10]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2024 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK535399/

The paper on the barrier to using clozapine by Farooq et al is very interesting and the summary of the barriers begins in the section “Barriers to the use of clozapine in TRS (treatment resistant schizophrenia). I think it gives a much-needed perspective on the complexity involved in managing the disorder.

So what do you think about Miracle Whip?

Svengoolie Hosts the Film “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”

Last night I watched “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” (released in 1948) for the first (and probably the last) time on Svengoolie. I thought I’d be able to watch it while wearing my new Svengoolie Holiday Sweater that Sena ordered for me, but it arrived too late in the evening for me to make the trip down the street to the mailbox pod. There are not enough street lights down there and who knows, the Wolfman could have jumped me. I got the sweater today and it looks great.

Sena watched a few minutes of the movie and gave up on it. I stuck it out all the way to the end in which you hear the voice of Vincent Price but don’t see him lighting up a smoke because he’s reprising the role of the Invisible Man.

Now for some comments about the movie, for which you can find information on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and many other websites. I’ll admit, Costello playing the part of the hysterical Wilbur got too slap sticky for me. On the other hand, the bits between him and the Wolfman (played by Lon Chaney Jr, who also reprised the role of Larry Talbot) were pretty comical.

Frankly, what I really got a kick out of was Svengoolie’s recurring doodling riddle game, “Too Drawn Out” in which he rapidly sketches a few cartoons which, when you put them together in your mind translates to the name of a character in the film or a cornball joke about it.

Some people missed the Sven Squad in this show and in last week’s show. The Sven Squad includes Gwengoolie, Nostalgiaferatoo, and IMP (Ignatius, Malvolio, Prankenstein). Importantly (or not) I found out from a web search that the film is actually rerun annually (according to Svengoolie’s summary from the 2021 airing of the movie) because it’s the most requested film by fans. Since the Sven Squad was just put together last year, new scenes were not taped for this movie and the one last week, presumably also a rerun by the same assumption.

As an aside, my Svengoolie sweater has all the members of the Sven Squad on it, and it even includes Kerwyn.

At first, I mistakenly got the idea that Lon Chaney, Jr played Larry Talbot but refused to play the Wolfman because it involved slapstick humor. And somehow, I misread the Svengoolie summary about Glenn Strange playing “the Monster”—which of course meant the Frankenstein monster, not the Wolfman.

But I’m not the only one who’s ever thought that because other fans (I got this from the web) mentioned that Chaney didn’t like how the Wolfman was portrayed in clownish stunts in the film. I thought his sober portrayal of Larry Talbot contrasted sharply with Abbott and Costello’s constant screwball acting. Svengoolie pointed out a goof (which I missed) in the film where Dracula (played by Bela Lugosi) has his reflection clearly showing in a mirror. Nobody’s perfect. And that includes me trying to make up a drawing riddle:

Hey it’s supposed to be Svengoolie!

Fluoride in Your Precious Bodily Fluids

Yesterday, Sena and I talked about a recent news article indicating that a federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review the allowed level of fluoride in community water supplies. The acceptable level may not be low enough, in the opinion of the advocacy groups who discussed the issue with the judge, according to the author of the article.

A few other news items accented the role of politicians on this issue. This seems to come up every few years. One thing leads to another and I noticed a few other web stories about the divided opinions about fluoride in “your precious bodily fluids.” One of them is a comprehensive review published in 2015 outlining the complicated path of scientific research about this topic. There are passionate advocates on both sides of whether or not to allow fluoride in city water. The title of the paper is, “Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove” (Carstairs C. Debating Water Fluoridation Before Dr. Strangelove. Am J Public Health. 2015 Aug;105(8):1559-69. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302660. Epub 2015 Jun 11. PMID: 26066938; PMCID: PMC4504307.)

This of course led to our realizing that we’ve never seen the film “Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love the Bomb,” a satire on the Cold War. We watched the entire movie on the Internet Archive yesterday afternoon. The clip below shows one of the funniest scenes, a dialogue between General Jack Ripper and RAF officer Lionel Mandrake about water and fluoridation.

During my web search on the fluoridation topic, one thing I noticed about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) entry on the web was the first line of its summary of the film’s plot: “In the movie Dr. Strangelove, the character Dr. Cox suggests adding fluoride to drinking water to improve oral health.” Funny, I don’t remember a character named Dr. Cox in the film nor the recommendation about adding fluoride to drinking water to improve oral health. Peter Sellers played 3 characters, none of them named Cox.

I guess you can’t believe everything AI says, can you? That’s called “hallucinating” when it comes to debating the trustworthiness of AI. I’m not sure what you call it when politicians say things you can’t immediately check the veracity of.

Anyway, one Iowa expert who regularly gets tapped by reporters about it is Dr. Steven Levy, a professor of preventive and community dentistry at the University of Iowa. He’s the leader of the Iowa Fluoride Study, which has been going on over the last several years. In short, Dr. Levy says fluoride in water supplies is safe and effective for preventing tooth decay in as long as the level is adjusted within safe margins.

On the other hand, others say fluoride can be hazardous and could cause neurodevelopmental disorders.

I learned that, even in Iowa there’s disagreement about the health merits vs risks of fluoridated water. Decisions about whether or not city water supplies are fluoridated are generally left to the local communities. Hawaii is the only state in the union which mandates a statewide ban on fluoride. About 90 per cent of Iowa’s cities fluoridate the water. Tama, Iowa stopped fluoridating the water in 2021. Then after a brief period of public education about it, Tama restarted fluoridating its water only six months later.

We use a fluoridated dentifrice and oral rinse every day. We drink fluoridated water, which we offer to the extraterrestrials who occasionally abduct us, but they politely decline because of concern about their precious bodily fluids.