Condensed Life Stories Read online

Condensed Life Stories

  Copyright 2011 by Davy Carren

  CLS #88

  In 1878,

  Osbourn Dorsey

  invented the doorknob.

  CLS #33

  Miss Pickford was born a Smith in Canada.

  Her dipso father died when she was three.

  The Bishop of Broadway renamed her Mary,

  and a bartender named a blood-red vodka drink after her.

  In 1909 she was in 51 films,

  but Talkies killed her career.

  She died like her father did,

  from tippling a bit more than a lot—

  though she,

  The Girl With The Golden Curls,

  made it all the way to 87.

  CLS #108

  Spurning conformity,

  On July 23, 1903,

  Dr. Ernst Pfenning

  of Chicago

  became the first person

  ever to own a Ford Model A

  automobile.

  He paid 750 bucks for it.

  CLS #40

  On July 3, 1883 the SS Daphne sank off the coast of Scotland,

  killing almost 200 people onboard—

  also, on that same day, Franz Kafka was born.

  His dad yelled at him a lot,

  and both his parents worked 12-hour days.

  Young Franz preferred his governess.

  At 23 he got his law degree,

  did some clerking in the courts of Bohemia,

  working some graveyard shifts,

  and eventually tried his hand at running an asbestos company

  with his brother-in-law.

  He wrote some fiction on the side

  with his buddies Max Brod and Felix Weltsch;

  they called themselves the Little Prague Circle.

  He courted a few girls,

  but never tied the knot.

  He caught TB in 1917.

  To cure it he became a vegetarian

  and drank gallons of unpasteurized milk.

  It didn’t work.

  He died of starvation in a sanatorium when he was 40,

  with only a few stories published,

  and all of his novels unfinished.

  He had left his good friend Max

  in charge of all of his writings,

  and his last request before dying

  was to have everything burned,

  even his letters, sketches, and diaries.

  Max didn’t follow his orders.

 

 

  CLS #7

  Dummy Hoy caught meningitis at age three,

  and it left him deaf.

  He once, from way out in deep centerfield,

  threw out three runners at home

  in the same game.

  After retiring from The Bigs,

  he settled down on a dairy farm in Mount Healthy, Ohio.

  He died 99 years after he was born.

  CLS #35

 

  Eadweard Maybridge,

  born Edward Muggeridge in England,

  changed his name a lot.

  He moved to The States in 1855,

  settling in San Francisco,

  where he killed a man

  for porking his spouse,

  saying,

  “Here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife,”

  as he shot the guy.

  Pleading insanity,

  he was acquitted.

  He took a lot of pictures,

  and proved that all four of a horse’s hooves

  did in fact leave the ground at once during a gallop.

  He left SF to go take pictures of the Midwest,

  put his son in foster care,

  and, in 1879,

  created the first movie projector:

  the Zoopraxiscope.

  Shortly afterwards,

  he created the world’s first porno film.

  At the age of 74,

  after returning to his native England,

  he died.

 

  CLS #27

  Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born into a family of “swells”

  on New York’s West 37th Street in 1884.

  Her mom called her Granny,

  and when she was 20

  she got hitched to her fifth-cousin once removed,

  who was already a Roosevelt,

  so she never even had to change her name.

  She lived in the White House for 12 years.

  In 1945 her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage,

  and she had to move elsewhere,

  settling in Hyde Park, NY.

  Soon she became a delegate to the United Nations,

  which she did for the next 8 years or so.

  In 1961 she got hit by a car and was badly injured,

  and died the next year.

  A few years later Paul Simon wrote a song for her,

  but changed Roosevelt to Robinson

  because it was a better fit for the movie it was used in.