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Varick Frissell: the New England Filmmaker Who Died in the Biggest Hollywood Disaster Ever

In 1930, Varick Frissell traveled north to Canada to make the deadliest movie ever. Twenty-six people would die in the filming, including Varick Frissell himself.

The dramatic film dealt with the friendship and rivalry of two men aboard a fishing vessel in White Bay in Newfoundland. One of the characters thinks he’s a jinx.

As the story plays out, the men must survive the wreck of their ship, the Viking, during the Canadian seal hunt. They then have to struggle to survive while marooned on the ice.

Boston to Canada

Movie Poster for the Viking

Frissell was born in Boston in 1903 into a well-off banking family. He graduated from Yale, and spent time volunteering doing charity work in Newfoundland. On his travels north, Frissell shot footage for two documentary films, The Lure of Labrador and The Swilin’ Racket (a local term for seal hunting).

The films were well-received. The Paramount movie studio then offered to fund a commercial version of the films that would highlight the lives of the fishermen. By 1930, Frissell had completed most of the filming on the movie, with the working title White Thunder. But Frissell wanted to add a few more scenes of the ship at sea.

Varick Frissell

So he and a movie crew traveled to Newfoundland and boarded the Viking to shoot the final frames on White Bay.

It was March 15, 1930. Crew and passengers aboard the ship Viking reported concerns about the way blasting powder was being handled. Some had spilled on deck, and men were smoking near it. As most of the people on the boat were below decks attending a church service and singing Nearer My God to Thee, Frissell was on deck fastening a danger sign to the deck house that stored the explosives.

White Bay, Newfoundland

Frissell and two others had been filling canisters with powder, anticipating that they would be blasting the following day. Ships working in the waters off Newfoundland carried powder to blast through ice jams when they got caught up in them.

Varick Frissell’s Final Moments

A witness later said that one of the men working with the powder was smoking a pipe when an ash fell into some spilled powder. The explosion at the stern of the ship split its hull and toppled the masts. Nine casks of kerosene caught fire. The 27-year-old Frissell was last seen trapped in the rigging of the fallen mizzen mast, shouting for help.

Bernt Balchen’s plane on the ice in Greenland after a rescue.

Word of the disaster reached the United States, and the number of dead was, at first, unclear. A Connecticut short wave radio operator reported that a priest in Newfoundland had radioed that Frissell and the movie crew survived. Newspapers across the country carried the headline: “Frissell Safe.”

However, as survivors began to reach land the fate of Frissell became clearer. One-hundred eighteen passengers and crew on the ship managed to escape to the Horse Islands by walking across the ice. They were rescued by other fishermen, but Frissell was not among them.

Frissell’s father hired daredevil pilot Bernt Balchen, who had experience flying Arctic expeditions, to search for his son. But no signs of Varick Frissell ever surfaced.

Disaster Sells Movie Tickets

In 1932, the studio released Frissell’s film under the title The Viking. The film’s producers used the disaster to promote the release of the film. Newspaper ads and movie posters noted: “This is the picture that cost the lives of Varick Frissell and 25 others in the Sealer Viking Disaster.”

Howard Hughes in 1938.

Howard Hughes promoted the opening of his new chain of movie houses with billboards that announced: “26 men died to open the Hughes-Franklin Studio Theatres.” Critics called the promotion “a hideous attempt to commercialize” the Viking disaster. Hideous but probably quite successful.

The Viking burned to the waterline in the disaster, and it sank. Frissell’s body was never found. A grave memorial for him is located in Middletown, R.I. You can watch The Viking online here.

Image of Varick Frissell: By Screenshot – White Thunder (film) DVD (2002), screen capture made using Snap N’ Drag software, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48496507. White Bay By Adavyd – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91575485.

This story was updated in 2021.

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The Rolling Thunder Revue Visits Jack Kerouac’s Gravesite

Bob Dylan returned to some of his most important roots when he came to Massachusetts, particularly Cambridge and Lowell, with his Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.

Once the king of folk music, he reunited with the queen, Joan Baez, during the rollicking, improvisational concert tour.

Rolling Thunder Revue played Cambridge, where Dylan had once haunted coffeehouses, and Lowell, Mass., so Dylan could visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Critics called the Rolling Thunder Revue some of the best live music Dylan ever performed.

Before the Rolling Thunder Revue: Dylan and Baez sing a duet.

Joan Baez

According to the popular legend, Bob Dylan left Hibbing, Minn., at the age of 19 for New York City. He fell in love with Joan Baez, already a star who helped him rocket to fame. But he took an important detour to Massachusetts, where he fell under the influences that shaped his music.

Joan Baez came to Boston when her father, Albert Baez, moved the family there to teach physics at MIT.

(He’s credited with co-inventing the x-ray microscope.) She enrolled in Boston University but got so bored she dropped out after six weeks.

In the late ‘50s, every college town and city seemed to have a coffeehouse scene, where, as writer David Hajdu wrote, ‘coffeehouses modeled upon European cafés emerged with foreign-film festivals and bookstores that sold imports of Henry Miller novels as outposts of intellectual and sensual dissent.’

The folk revival began in such coffeehouses, as did the protest movements of the 1960s.

Cambridge featured coffeehouses like the Club 47 and Tulla’s Coffee Grinder. Across the river, Boston had the Salamander, The Turk’s Head, the Yana, the Unicorn and the Golden Vanity. They featured such young folk musicians as Tom Rush, Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal.

Baez started out at the Club 47 in 1958 and quickly achieved stardom, the first of the iconic young folk singers. Later she brought the boy she was dating – and singing duets with — to Cambridge. Club 47 was so well known for launching careers that Dylan played there for free.

Bob Dylan in Cambridge

In Cambridge, Bob Dylan met Eric von Schmidt, Richard Farina and his wife, Carolyn Hester. Farina would later marry Joan Baez’s younger sister, Mimi.

Von Schmidt exposed him to many traditional folk songs, all of which Dylan remembered when he returned to New York.

The Boulevard at Revere Beach

One summer day, von Schmidt invited Dylan and the Farinas to Revere Beach, just north of Boston. According to Hajdu, they talked about coming up with a new kind of music.

“We should start a whole new genre,” Farina said. “Poetry set to music, but not chamber music or beatnik jazz, man. Music with a beat. Poetry you can dance to. Boogie poetry!”

Dylan, stunned by the comment, did exactly that six months later. He played harmonica on Carolyn Hester’s third album, which gave him an entrée to Columbia Records and to his manager, Albert Grossman.

Eventually he broke up with Baez and married another woman. He famously became known as the ‘voice of his generation,’ something he didn’t want. At the height of his fame in 1966 he had a motorcycle accident and didn’t perform for another seven years.

Dylan and Ginsberg during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. By Elsa Dorfman.

Rolling Thunder Revue

In 1975, Bob Dylan haphazardly recruited musicians like Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Mick Ronson to play the Rolling Thunder Revue. Playwright Sam Shepard joined the tour, as did Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and actress Ronee Blakley.

They held the first concert at the Plymouth War Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 30-31, then played at Southeastern Massachusetts University in North Dartmouth. Then the Rolling Thunder Revue went on to Lowell, where Dylan wanted to visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Twenty years earlier, Kerouac had written a long poem called Mexico City Blues. According to Ginsberg, Dylan told him someone handed him Kerouac’s poem in St. Paul in 1959. “It blew my mind,” he said.

He said it was the first poetry he read that spoke his own American language, and Beat writing influenced his own.

On November 2, 1975, the Rolling Thunder Revue crammed 14,000 into a gym at the University of Lowell, recently formed from the Lowell Technological Institute and Lowell State College.

Dylan ambled onstage and sang about five songs, dedicating A Hard Rain.to Kerouac. Larry Sloman, who documented the tour, wrote that after the intermission,

…the curtain rose to an incredible sight, Bob and Joan, together again after all these years.

They sang Blowin’ in the Wind to a thunderous response. Then more songs, and a finale with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Dylan’s mother onstage singing This Land Is Your Land.

Ginsberg, who frequently visited Lowell, hung out with Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies. He tried to educate the Rolling Thunder Revue about Jack Kerouac.

The next day, Dylan, Ginsberg and various band members visited Kerouac’s gravesite.

Watch it here.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Dylan and Ginsberg By Elsa Dorfman – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1724930.

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Caleb Gibbs Leads George Washington’s Secret Service

At the dawn of the American Revolution, George Washington realized he needed personal protection. And so he formed the Commander-in-Chief’s Guard in March of 1776. The guard functioned as his personal security service, similar in many ways to today’s Secret Service. To lead the guard, Washington chose Marblehead’s Caleb Gibbs, who greatly admired Washington. However, they didn’t always have an easy relationship.

Fifty-eight men were assigned to the guard, and Gibbs ran it for nearly four years. Originally from Newport, R.I., Gibbs had moved to Marblehead where he served in Glover’s Regiment. He fought at Lexington, Mass., at the start of the war. During the Siege of Boston, he came to the attention of Washington, then headquartered in Cambridge, Mass. Gibbs’ ability to create order and his command presence impressed Washington. He appointed him captain of his new guard.

George Washington takes command of the troops in Cambridge, Mass.

Made up of four corporals, four sergeants and 50 rank and file, the guard originally served as Washington’s security detail. But Gibbs soon took on the role of managing Washington’s household as well, as he moved southward from Cambridge during the Revolution.

Guns and Butlers

Washington had the guard outfitted to dress like him, in buff and blue. He also demanded the men adhere to high standards of personal conduct. And Gibbs had the curious responsibility of running a military unit whose duties overlapped with the household staff.

Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze, 1851.

In May of 1777, Washington tasked Gibbs with procuring a steward for his household. “If you could get a man who had been employed in that capacity, or as a Butler in a Gentleman’s Family and who could be well recommended and by such as may be depended upon for his honesty—Sobriety—and care, he would answer the purpose much better than a mere greenhorn,” Washington wrote.

Washington went on to note his own servants’ shortcomings. They “stand so much in need of being checked for their extravagance, and roguery, in making away with Liquors, & other Articles laid in for the use of the Family,” he wrote.

Washington gave Gibbs dozens of other assignments, such as procuring salt, flower, wine and socks. All were in short supply during the war.

Caleb Gibbs in the Soup

By October of 1779, Washington and Gibbs had fallen out. Apparently they had a disagreement over a tent. Washington had reduced the number of officers in the guard. Though still serving as captain, Gibbs no longer dined with Washington.

In a letter discussing the matter, Washington writes: “What Major Gibbs’s plan is, and what his present line of conduct tends to, I shall not take upon me to decide; nor shall I at this moment enquire into them.”

“I mean to act coolly & deliberately myself, and will therefore give him an opportunity of recollecting himself,” Washington wrote. “He has been guilty of a piece of disrespect; to give it no worse a term—such an one, as I much question if there is another officer in the line of the army would have practiced,” he continued. “And because I would not suffer my orders to be trampled upon; a supercilious, and self-important conduct on his part is the consequence.”

The matter blew over. Gibbs apparently returned to the dinner table and continued rendering loyal service. In October of 1780 he even dipped into his own funds for $1,600 to pay Washington’s household expenses. The Continental Army at the time faced a shortage of funds.

Washington, meanwhile, tolerated Gibbs’ shortcomings. He was apparently not fully versed in how to run a proper household. That made him something of a curiosity to Washington’s southern society friends. Yet he made up for his weaknesses with a wonderful sense of humor and a love of singing.

Martha Daingerfield Bland wrote of him: “Capt. Gibbs of the General’s Guard (is) a good natured Yankee who makes a thousand blunders in the Yankee style and keeps the dinner table in constant laugh.”

At the Close of War

Gibbs eventually transferred out of Washington’s personal guard, possibly because he wanted a more active assignment. He continued serving in the Army and suffered wounds at the Battle of Yorktown.

Siege of Yorktown. Washington and Rochambeau give orders just before the attack. Painting by Auguste Couder.

After the war, Gibbs had some setbacks. He struggled to find work. At one point he wrote to Washington asking to be repaid money that he had advanced the household during the war. In it, he bemoaned the fact that “The unequal distribution of this world’s goods amongst mankind make it necessary for those in a dependent Line to look seriously about them for the mere comforts and necessaries of life.”

Washington advocated for Gibbs several times. He nominated him for a post in the Army, but Gibbs had apparently rubbed some in Congress the wrong way. The nomination was blocked.

Secretary of War James McHenry told Washington that, while Gibbs might have made a good officer, he could not back him. He wrote: “it is a fact, that his character is very low in Boston, that he is looked upon as a trifler, and has no weight whatever in that quarter of the union.”

Nevertheless, Gibbs and Washington maintained friendly relations. Gibbs organized a celebration for Washington when he toured New England in 1789. And Washington wrote references for Gibbs, attesting to his character.

Gibbs finally found work as a clerk in the Boston Navy Yard, and would eventually work his way up to superintendent. He died in 1818 at age 70.

If you enjoyed this story, you might like: George Washington Breaks Up a Snowball Fight at Harvard. This story was updated in 2021.

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How the French-Canadian Textile Worker Came to New England

The story of a French-Canadian textile worker named Phillippe Lemay is the story of thousands of Quebecois farmers who came to New England to work in the mills.

They had no money, large families, little education, a strong work ethic and a deep attachment to the Roman Catholic Church. As soon as they stepped off the train in their homespun clothes, they were identified as ‘frogs,’ ‘Canucks’ and ‘pea soup eaters.’ The Irish especially disliked them – and that dislike turned into murder at least once.

Phillippe Lemay survived it all. In late 1939 and early 1940, he told his story to Louis Pare, an interviewer with the Federal Writers Project for the Folklore Project.

“The picture of one French Canadian textile worker and the picture of another are just as much alike as deux gouttes d’eau, or, as we have learned to say in English, like two peas in a pod,” Lemay said.

Weaving room of an Amoskeag mill.

The Quebec Diaspora

Phillipe Lemay was born June 29, 1856, the fourth child in a family of 14 children, on a small farm in St. Ephrem d’Upton near Montreal. The farm couldn’t support the growing Lemay family, so when Phillippe was eight years old his father decided to take the family to Lowell, Mass., and look for work.

french-canadian-textile-workers-lowell-mill

Lowell textile mills

The trip alone cost them nearly everything they had. The Lemays had to faire encan – auction off all their household goods — to pay for railroad tickets, food and lodging.

The wood-burning trains of the era moved slowly during the day, not at all at night. And so Phillippe Lemay’s family took four days to go from St. Ephrem d’Upton to Lowell. Today the trip takes about 4-1/2 hours by car.

Lowell

The Lemays arrived in Lowell with little more than the clothes on their backs and a new baby born during the journey. They joined 20 or so French-Canadian families in the city.

But after the Civil War ended, many more French-Canadians moved to Lowell in a great wave of migration. Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 residents of Quebec moved to the United States. One-third of Quebec moved to New England to neighborhoods called Little Canadas.

They were attracted to New England’s textile factories, which paid a living wage, albeit barely. But at least they earned enough to survive, which they couldn’t do back home.

In the early years, French-Canadian textile workers earned 50 cents a day. Their board cost $2 a week, and they worked from 5 am to 8 pm with a half hour each for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Later, the mills shortened the workday from 6 am to 6 pm.

Most French-Canadian textile workers didn’t come to stay. They wanted to go back to their Canadian farms with the money earned in the mills.

Some took leaves of absence from their jobs, perhaps a month in the spring to plow and plant their farm, another month in the fall to harvest. A friend or neighbor would tend the farm during the summer.

Many feared becoming citizens. They couldn’t speak English, a big handicap. They still paid taxes in Quebec and felt they couldn’t pay taxes in the United States.

In the end, about half the Quebecois – including Phllippe Lemay’s parents — returned to Canada.

A French-Canadian Textile Worker

As soon as he arrived in Lowell, eight-year-old Phillippe Lemay became a French-Canadian textile worker. He went to work in Lawrence Mill No. 5 as a bagboy and doffer, replacing full bobbins with empty ones. His father, who worked in a saw mill, wanted him to go to school. But Phillippe saw that his parents needed every penny he could earn. His disobedience earned him frequent spankings.

Doffer boys in a South Carolina textile mill, by Lewis Hine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

“The only ones who had a chance to get an education were the youngest of the children, because older brothers and sisters worked in the mills, helping their parents,” Lemay explained.

At first the newcomers from Quebec boarded with relatives. Then, when they could afford it, they rented tenements, usually owned by the company. The windows had no curtains, just paper shades that had to be rolled by hand. A braided rag rug covered the floor, scrubbed with lye once a week.

Life revolved around the mill and the church. Priests commanded enormous respect. In French-Canadian Old Town, Maine, for example, a popular superstition claimed a priest could cure any disease if he wished to.

Every night after dinner, but before the dishes were washed, the Lemay family prayed together and recited the rosary beads. Saturday nights they had fun during old-fashioned social gatherings in their homes, singing and square dancing. Phillippe Lemay remembered a fiddler who knew one tune and an accordionist who knew another, so they didn’t play together.

French vs. Irish

Lowell’s large Irish community feared the French had come to take their jobs. The Irish began a campaign of petty persecution. Irish boys put dirt in French children’s pails when they tried to get water from the public pumps. They stuck French worshippers with needles and pins during Mass, so much so that the French began to stay home. Phillippe Lemay’s father worked outside at night, when Irish boys threw rocks at him.

french-canadian-textile-workers-amoskeag

The Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

In 1872, when Phillippe was 16, the Lemays moved to Manchester, where the giant Amoskeag mills offered plenty of employment to a French-Canadian textile worker. But they fared no better with the Irish. Before the first French church was built in 1873, the French had to walk through the Irish neighborhood to attend Mass. Irish boys threw swill at them, beat them with sticks and threw rocks.

french-canadian-textile-worker-amoskeag-boy

A young French-Canadian textile worker leaving work at Amoskeag Mills, Manchester, N.H.

The completion of that first French church, St. Augustine, caused an immediate increase in French immigration from Quebec. Five or six families arrived every day on the train from Canada. The French Canadians began to open businesses — bakeries, beer parlors and grocery stores. They built a rectory for their pastor, then a school for French children, then a cemetery. They started to form fraternal organizations like the St. Jean Baptiste Society and to publish their own French-language newspapers.

Murder of a French-Canadian textile-worker

A marching band called the Fanfare Canadienne started at St. Augustine Church. Made up of French-Canadian textile workers, it played popular tunes for fraternal organizations.

One night in 1880, a 23-year-old band member named Jean Blanchette was talking in French with several bandmates near Victory Park in downtown Manchester. Three intoxicated Irishmen came out of a beer parlor and heard the French spoken. They attacked the French-Canadian textile workers, who fought back.

One of the Irishmen fell on a bottle of hard liquor in his pocket, and it broke. He threw the broken bottle at Jean Blanchette, severing his jugular vein. Blanchette died 20 minutes later. A thousand people marched in his funeral procession through the streets of Manchester, which were lined with French onlookers.

Sixty years later, Phillippe Lemay said the French-Canadian textile workers didn’t exact revenge from the Irish who killed their friend. Blanchette’s assailant went to prison for five years and died shortly after his release.

Lemay worked hard at his trade and rose through the mill’s ranks. In 1901, he asked for a promotion as an overseer of a spinning mill. His request shocked his superintendent. “What! A Frenchman had the crust to think he could be an overseer!” recalled Lemay.

He got the promotion to the dismay of the American and Irish workers, who stopped talking to him. Eventually more French-Canadian textile workers got promotions to management positions.

By 1906, Manchester had a French-Canadian bishop and in 1918, the first of many French-Canadian mayors. French-Canadians became distinguished doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, architects and bankers.

“To what do we owe our success?” said Phillippe Lemay.

I believe we owe it to the self-sacrificing French Canadian immigrants from old Quebec, to the courage that made them refuse to accept defeat and quit when that would have seemed the natural thing to do; to the cheerfulness that carried us through our trials and tribulation and helps us old-timers to wait happily for the final bell calling us home to rest after our long, hard life in the textile mills. And perhaps the bloody death of Jean-Baptiste Blanchette, a martyr in the true sense of the word, had its share in bringing about the conditions we are enjoying today.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also like to read about Lewis Hine, the photographer who exposed child labor, here. This story was updated in 2023.

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9 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Bobby Kennedy

Many viewed the death of Bobby Kennedy in 1968 as the loss of the last great leader. Assassins’ bullets had taken the lives of his brother, President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. All three men led the struggle against discrimination and poverty, though to varying degrees.

The story of Bobby Kennedy’s life has been told many times: How he became tough and competitive to hold his own among his eight siblings. How his brother named him the youngest U.S. attorney general in history. Then how he evolved into a compassionate populist, an advocate for poor minorities and working-class white people. And finally, how he died at 42 while running for president of the United States.

He thought he’d be killed, not his brother. He learned about John F. Kennedy’s assassination while having lunch at home in Virginia. His reaction:

I thought they’d get one of us, but Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it…. I thought it would be me.

But here are nine things you may not have known about Bobby Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy

1. Bobby Kennedy, New Yorker

He didn’t really grow up in Boston. In 1927, when Bobby Kennedy was two, his father moved the family to a New York City suburb to escape anti-Irish discrimination. Joseph P. Kennedy, though, would become one of the richest men in the United States. (Someone commented he was the only person driven out of Boston in his own railway car.)

The Kennedy family lived in Bronxville, N.Y., until 1938. Then, President Franklin P. Roosevelt appointed Bobby’s father U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and the family moved to London.

Later, of course, he ran and won a race for U.S. Senate from New York in 1964, amid charges of carpetbagging.

Senate candidate Kennedy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention

2. Not Much of a Student

He flunked third grade. The seventh of nine children, he had a hard time adjusting to school. He attended 12 different schools before graduating from Milton Academy and going to Harvard.

Before entering college, though, he had enlisted in the Navy. In 1944, he started his naval training at Harvard and then relocated to Bates College.

Kennedy (second from left) at Bates. Muskie Archives and Special Collections LIbrary.

3. Barroom Brawler

He got into a bar fight when he turned 21, the first time he ever drank too much. Shortly after his birthday, he celebrated by buying a beer in a bar. Then he bought the house a round. When the patrons began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to someone else, he smashed a beer bottle over one of their heads.

He got into another bar fight at 30, when as a Senate lawyer he rode undercover with New York City police officers. When a drunk insulted him in a bar, Bobby Kennedy asked him to step outside and hit him in the face, breaking his nose.

4. Philatelist

He collected stamps. So did Franklin Roosevelt. In 1935, Roosevelt learned Bobby Kennedy was a fellow philatelist and sent him some stamps from his collection. FDR’s letter read,

Dear Bob:-
Your Dad has told me that you are a stamp collector and I thought you might like to have these stamps to add to your collection. I am also enclosing a little album which you may find useful.
Perhaps sometime when you are in Washington you will come in and let me show you my collection.

5. Ronnie Beat Down

Bobby Kennedy lost a debate to Ronald Reagan, then governor of California. On May 15, 1967, the two men debated the Vietnam War on television. Reagan believed Bobby Kennedy had gotten him fired as host of the television program, GE Theater, and so he studied hard for the debate.

In the end, Ronald Reagan humiliated Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy stormed out of the studio and said to an aide, “Never again put me on the stage with that son of a bitch.”

6. Spiritual Rivalry

Ethel Kennedy

He dated Ethel Skakel’s older sister for two years before dating Ethel. Ethel had fallen in love with Bobby Kennedy at first sight, but then had second thoughts. When Bobby started dating Ethel after he got dumped by her sister, she thought she wanted to become a nun.

“How do you compete with God?” he asked, but he won the contest.

7. Bobby Kennedy, Amateur

He had no rock climbing experience when he became the first person to ascend Mt. Kennedy, named for his brother after he was assassinated. He joked that his experience amounted to little more than climbing to the top of the stairs at home and shouting for help. In April 1965, Bobby Kennedy broke away from his climbing team and reached the 14,000-foot summit himself as National Geographic photographers took photos.

His brother Ted told UPI:

I wish to point out for the record he is not the first Kennedy to climb a mountain. I climbed the Matterhorn in 1957, which is higher, and I didn’t need the help of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

8. Bobby Kennedy vs. Jimmy Hoffa

He hated Jimmy Hoffa, and Hoffa hated him. Bobby Kennedy spent seven years trying to convict the Teamsters Union president for corruption. They once tried to one-up each other about how many push-ups they could do. Hoffa claimed 35, but Bobby Kennedy claimed he could do more.

Delivering Senate testimony on organized crime, 1963.

Hoffa said Bobby had a weak handshake and deliberately misspelled his name ‘Bobbie.’ As Hoffa later recalled, “I used to love to bug the little bastard.”

As chief counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, Bobby Kennedy dragged Hoffa before hearings in an effort to nail him on perjury charges. As Attorney General he formed a special ‘Get Hoffa’ squad within the Justice Department. In 1964, Kennedy’s Justice Department finally did get Hoffa with a conviction for jury tampering.

9. Clairvoyant, Sort Of

He predicted Barack Obama’s presidency in 1961, but he was off by seven years.

That year, Bobby Kennedy told an audience,

The Irish were not wanted there [when his great-grandfather came to Boston]. Now an Irish Catholic is president of the United States … There is no question about it. In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.

He made the same prediction in 1968, and he was spot on then.

Bobby Kennedy speaking at a civil rights demonstration

This story was updated in 2022. Photos of Bobby Kennedy courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. Featured image By Sven Walnum – https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/SWPC/001/SWPC-001-021, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=85646434

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The Outrageous Comical Brown Comes to Town

If you live in a New England town with town hall, a school, a church or an opera house, chances are good it was visited at least once by the outrageous showman William B. Brown, better known as Comical Brown.

Comical Brown

Born in 1833 in Lancaster, Mass., into a Quaker family, as a child he prepared to become a shoemaker. But at 16 his musical talent took him in a different direction. He began performing small concerts on the violin to help support his blind father. It set the direction for the next 45 years of his life.

At first he took small parts in minstrel shows and regularly performed in the stage play Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on the book of the same name. By the mid-1860s, however, he hit the road as a headliner. An advance man would work the towns on Brown’s calendar, appearing a few days in advance to plaster the town with fliers and newspaper notices for “That Comical Brown!” show.

His act consisted of a number of humorous monologues in which he took the role of cranky, old Yankee or warm-hearted Irishman. He joked with the crowd while spinning yarns and songs designed to draw laughs or groans. Mixed in, he played the violin and turned the stage over to other members of his small troop.

His other acts included Frank Hayden, boy soprano; E.A. Marsh, contralto, singing the Star Spangled Banner; or a trained dog act featuring Scottie and Prince Charlie doing tricks.

As Brown traveled from town to town, he updated his material each year or two so it was fresh whenever he rolled into town. He brought the fun of the vaudeville stage to the small towns of New England and beyond for a remarkable 45 years.

Comical Brown Makes ‘Em Laugh

In 1885 Brown compiled some of his best material and published it as Comical Brown’s Songster – equal parts cornball observations and slyly racy songs. Male/female relationships, man’s personal foibles, the temperance society and other timely topics were staples of his comedy. This number, Of Course It’s No Business of Mine, surely raised the rafters when he belted it out:

Now, for instance, at Mrs. Montgomery’s,
Every afternoon, just about three,
When her husband is out at his business,
A gent with moustache comes to tea.

He stays till half-past eight o’clock,
For the husband don’t get home till nine;
Now I’d like to know what he does there!
But then it’s no business of mine.

Across the way lives dear Miss Baxter,
A nice, dashing, handsome young girl;
Who, for the last twelve months or so,
Has been flirting with Mr. Fitz-Furl;

They say she is going to be married,
Well, I must say I think it is time;
For, if she’s not married, she’d ought to be,
But then it’s no business of mine.

I met Lucy Bell t’other evening,
With her nephew going out for a walk,
And, of course, as soon as she saw me,
She stopped and began a long talk

All about her dear little nephew,
Who she said was between eight and nine,
But some say it isn’t her nephew,
But then it’s no business of mine.

At Mrs. Fitz-Snooks’, round the corner,
Last evening I heard such a din,
And found that she’d not paid her rent,
So the Sheriff they quickly brought in.

I don’t know what she does with her money,
Though her nose always redly does shine,
I think that she spends it for brandy,
But of course it’s no business of mine.

Comical Brown Hits a Sour Note

Contralto E.A. Marsh costumed for The Daughter of the Regiment. (Library of Congress)

The indignities of the comedy circuit were many. The show had to go on each night in a new town, regardless of weather. Comical Brown’s critics suggested there was good reason he never played the same venue two nights in a row: because once the audience heard his act they would warn their neighbors not to bother.

One particularly joyless stop came in Charlton, Mass. where Brown was forced to play in a church rather than the town hall, which had burned. He churned out his music and jokes to a stone-faced audience, whose members were too intimidated by the church sexton glaring from the rear of the church to even crack a smile.

Over the years, Comical Brown moved around New England, living in Somerville, Mass. and Rutland and Barre in Vermont. As he grew older there were hints that he was slipping, though he was still much loved. The Saint Johnsbury Caledonian reported in 1891, “Comical Brown played to a large audience at the Opera House Thanksgiving night. Everybody was kept in good humor and though Brown is not as good as he used to be, he still makes folks laugh.”

Comical Brown’s career finally ended in 1893. At the age of 60 he was found unconscious at a Boston train station, possibly headed for his next concert. He died at the nearby hospital leaving behind a widow and two daughters. His death was reported as far away as California.

The Afterlife

The Comical Brown act lived on for more than a decade after Brown’s death in the form of the “Comical Brown Concert and Comedy Company.” It was also “billed as Comical Brown’s Old Show with a replacement cast.” Finally, his act became synonymous with outdated, stale jokes. Into the 1920s, if someone told a particularly unfunny, old joke, the proper response was, “That’s a great one. I think I remember Comical Brown using it.”

In 1909 Brown’s career was eulogized by Broadway playwright Stanley Rosenfeld in the comedy-drama The Barnstormer, about the star of one-man show traveling to backwoods towns in the waning days of his career. It was not a hit.

This story was updated in 2022.

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