Some Word Origins...

Geek: In the circus, a performer who sank sufficiently low would do horrible things (like biting the heads off live chickens) for booze money. The poor soul was called a geek. How it later came to describe smart people is unknown, but I am sure 80’s movies helped it along.

Two Cent’s Worth: During the Civil War, the cheapest cigar you could buy cost two pennies. “Two-center” cigars became synonymous with cheapness, and by the late 1800’s, people who wanted to project fauxhumility would offer their two cent’s worth.

Shoddy: A scandal erupted during the Civil War when some textilers sold the army uniforms made out of the scraps left over from their wool-making process. This cheap fabric was called shoddy. In no time, the noun turned into an adjective.

White Paper: In Victorian England, policy and legislation were delivered to Parliament in gigantic books with blue covers called Blue Papers. Lesser, shorter government business was delivered in smaller books with white covers, called White Papers.

Pundits: Brits who traveled to India met Hindi scholars who taught religion and law. They were knows as pandits. Soon enough, scholarly Londoners were known as pundits.

Kiosks: In Turkey, outdoor pavilions used for public meetings were called kiushks.

Haywire: In the 1800’s, New England loggers took bales of hay into the forest with them to feed their horses. These bales were bound with thin wire that was also used to make small repairs on the loggers’ equipment. The more that stuff broke, the more wire the loggers needed. Logging companies and groups of loggers that ended up using a lot of hay wire on their equipment, they were called haywire outfits. Slowly the term began to describe the actual process of the equipment breaking down and not working properly.

The $10 Bill....

In 1861, the first $10 bill was issued near the outset of the Civil War.

It featured a portrait of Lincoln and is the only time a sitting president appeared on U.S. currency.

In 1861, a $10 bill could have bought you an entire barrel of flour, a month’s stay in a New York City tenement, or a ride on the Great Eastern steamship from Manhattan to Cape May, New Jersey.

In 1901, the $10 bill depicted explorers Lewis & Clark on the edges with a large American bison in the middle, and bought you ten private ballroom-dancing classes, a housepainter’s labor for eight days or a full eye exam and 10 pairs of glasses.

In 1929, all U.S. currency was changed to its standard size of today. Despite the popular belief, the car on your 1929 standardized $10 bill is not a Model T Ford, but a composite of cars from the day. In 1929, your $10 bill got you a year’s worth of accident and sickness insurance, a waffle iron, or a one-minute phone call from New York City to London.

In 1942, just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, special $10 bills were printed for Hawaii with the state’s name printed on the front and back and the serial numbers printed in brown ink instead of red. This was done so that if the Japanese invaded Hawaii, the U.S. Treasury would declare these $10 bills worthless.

Keep an eye out for the new $10 bill coming early in 2006. Its design is still mostly green, but now features shades of orange, yellow and red and has renderings of the Statue of Liberty torch and the words, "We The People..."

Why Is Ben On The C-Note?

Have you ever wondered why Benjamin Franklin is the only person featured on American paper currency who is not a former President of the United States? To find the answer, we must travel back to Ben Franklin’s day, but make a quick stop in an America on the brink of civil war.

When Abraham Lincoln took over the presidency, despite nearly one hundred years of existence, our fine country still did not have a federal, nation-wide currency. Realizing that war was eminent, and that a federal currency would be needed to fund and control war-time spending in the North, Mr. Lincoln ordered the first printing of the US federal dollar.

So, what did America do for money for the first hundred years? Would you believe that local banks printed currency notes themselves? You went to your bank, withdrew a note for a pre-designated amount and traded it with a store owner for goods on the pretense that the store owner could go to your bank and draw on the bank’s funds or have money put in his account to cover the amount of your purchase.

Bank notes back then worked much like a check works today. One of the main problems with this bank note system was that at any given time in pre-Lincoln America, up to 2/3 of the bank notes being passed around were counterfeit. In fact, one of the major British war efforts in the 1770s was to flood the American colonies with fake bank notes to destabilize our new, independent economy.

Some of the bank notes were easily forged by the monarchy, while others were very difficult to copy. And whose were the most difficult to copy? Why, the ones designed and printed by Mr. Benjamin Franklin of Philadelphia, or course. Hence, the well-deserved honor of gracing the $100 bill.

The Lesson Of Columbia

The first time I saw the space shuttle Columbia, I was six years old, sitting on the floor of my grandmother’s den, watching the very first launch of a space shuttle into space in 1981. The very last time I saw Columbia, I was lying on the floor of my living room, talking on the phone with my brother who was not even born until over four years after Columbia made her maiden voyage into space. I had gone to sleep just a couple of hours before we lost Columbia on Saturday.

On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was on a whale watching field trip with my sixth grade class and I missed the launch of the Challenger. I was actually sitting on the beach in Newport, eating lunch when I heard what had happened that morning. 

I pride myself on my patriotism and being appreciative of the gifts I have been given by this nation, but I am afraid that I, too, was guilty of complacency when it came to our space program.

One of the first things I bring up whenever talk turns to 9/11 is my shock...not my shock at what happened, but my shock that our entire nation had its head so far in the sand that no one saw it coming.

I began to talk about an attack on New York even when I was in high school in 1990, and I definitely was talking about it in 1998 when I made the comparison of our state of the nation in 1998 to our state of the nation in 1941.

In 1981, I took great pride in the success of Columbia and in 1986, I grieved with the rest of our nation at the loss of the Challenger crew. Throughout my life, I have enjoyed reading about the space program, watching the launches and live interviews with the crews from space. I also still marvel at the progress of the International Space Station.

I am currently compiling pieces for decorating my bedroom which I am calling the “America” room, but even as I was putting together pieces reflecting the Civil War, World War II, our Cold War culture, 9/11, and the spirit of old New York, the thought never crossed my mind about including our space program.

I am forced to place myself in a category of Americans who had taken the dangers of our space program far too lightly. Saturday, I mourned with the rest of the nation at the loss of the Columbia crew, as well as the symbolism of the loss of the first space shuttle to venture into orbit.

If you watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there is a grouping of artwork on the recreation deck of the ship that shows the ships that bore the name Enterprise. One of them is the space shuttle Enterprise, the only of one the six shuttles never to actually fly in space.

It was a novelty in 1979 to show the space shuttle Enterprise in the movie, but as we sit here in 2003, this is now just one of the many small things in life that will remind us of our space shuttle tragedies for years to come.

Whenever I saw a space shuttle, I almost immediately remembered the Challenger. Now, I have two tragedies to remember. Science fiction attempts to teach us where we are going in the future, and also, what we need to do to get there. Remember back to 1979...who could have known then that by 2003, two of the six space shuttles would be gone, and who could have known that we would be stuck in a quandary on February 1, 2003, about how to get our long-term space explorers home from an International Space Station?

On top of it, who would have known in 1979 that in 2003, one of our options would be to rely on the help of our Russian friends? There is in all of this, a lesson to be learned. We lost Challenger in 1986, but we went back up. We lost Columbia in 2003, and we will go back up. We tamed a wild continent called America, even though it took 200 years. We will tame the final frontier, no matter how long it takes.

I am sorry that somewhere between 1986 and 2003, I took for granted the bravery and sacrifice of each person that straps on a space suit and then straps themselves to a controlled explosion to get into space. These people, just as much as any soldier on the battlefield, have helped make America what it is today through their bravery. These are the people who would climb into Discovery, Atlantis, or Endeavor today, despite everything, to go and do their job, whether it be research, defense, or bringing stranded astronauts home.

These are the people that died in a capsule fire, trying to get us to the moon...these are the people that spent the last seconds of their lives, some in 1986, and some in 2003, aboard a space shuttle. Such determination can be summed up in one small phrase...“We are Americans.” I have learned my lesson...I will not forget again...