If You Can't Stand the Heat, Get Out of the Police Station

Curt Garfield's grandfather Seneca Hall was the first police chief of Sudbury, Mass.

Standing in his yard on Boston Post Road, Hall would watch for speeders by seeing how quickly the car passed stripes painted on telephone poles, Garfield writes in "The Parson's Cat."

"Once he was sure that his victim was over the limit, he would sound a blast on his police whistle. The yahoo in question would generally screech to a stop as grandfather put on his hat, pulled his ticket book from the bib pocket of his overall and proceed to write out a speeding violation."

When asked what the police station looked like when he was a boy, Garfield had no problem recalling.

"It was our kitchen." [Link]

Where the Boys (and the Girls) Are

I wrote a year ago about a map showing the distribution of men and women in America in 1890. Compare that map (taken from the David Rumsey Collection) to Richard Florida's Singles Map of the United States, based on 2006 Census Bureau data. Overlaying one map with the other (as I've clumsily done below) shows that things haven't changed much in 116 years. Men still predominate in the West; women still outnumber men in the East. And I still can't get a date.

An Appreciable Appreciation

Nadra Kissman's great-great-grandfather, John Wilkinson, bought 2,500 acres on Lake Michigan in 1854. He later "fretted about how to pull a profit out of the sandy duneland."

He complained about the taxes, which amounted to $6 one year in the 1870s.

Kissman said: "He wrote in a journal: 'What to do with this worthless lakefront land. Won't grow good corn'."

If they could come back to life, pioneers like Wilkinson might be amazed to see that the sand has turned to gold.

One current property listing offers 200 feet of "one-of-a-kind perfect Lake Michigan frontage" in Chikaming Township for $5.45 million. That would be $27,250 a foot, or $2,271 an inch. [Link]

But He Had a Pair of Pants

Micki Smith says that your great-great-great-grandfather probably owned just one shirt.

Why did your ancestor own only a single shirt?

Well, Smith said, in order to provide it, your great-great-great-grandmother had to grow, gather, ret, clean, spin and weave the flax, to create linen, or raise the sheep, shear them, skirt the wool, wash, dry, pick, card and spin it, and then weave or knit the garment.

Plus, this was in addition to minding the children, doing the laundry, milking the cow, cooking the meals, tending the house and garden, etc., Smith said. [Link]

How Little We've Grown in 1,000 Years

Despite what you may have heard, your medieval ancestors were not dwarves. After examining 3,000 old skeletons, scientists have concluded that people have not grown substantially in the past millennium.

From the 10th century through to the 19th, the average height of adult men was 5ft 7in or 170cm - just 2in below today's average.

Women were an average of 5ft 2in or 158cm - just over an inch shorter than today.

But what about all those low doorframes in medieval buildings, and the tiny suits of armor cluttering museums? Sebastian Payne, chief scientist for English Heritage, explains:

"The reason why you get small pieces of armour is they are the ones made for rich small kids which didn't get heavily used and so survived.

"Small doorways are more to do with heating efficiency than anything else." [Link]

Somebody Make It Stop!

Anna T. Burr turns 107 on Monday, and remembers a time when telephones inspired panic.

"My mother and father went away, and left me and my brother, who was three years older than I, alone with the maid," she recalled. "The telephone started to ring and the maid panicked because she didn't know how to turn it off," she said. [Link]

Too Big For Their Britches

Studies show that the average man in the Civil War era stood 5 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed 147 pounds. Since then, the average man has grown 2½ inches and packed on an extra 44 pounds. For anyone trying to walk a mile in his ancestor's shoes, that means a tight fit.

Don Hotchkiss, a civil engineer in Las Vegas and a descendant of Civil War veterans, is an avid Civil War re-enactor. Early on, he and his brother tried to sleep in an exact replica of one of the old tents.

It was too small, Mr. Hotchkiss said. He is six feet tall and stocky. His brother, a police officer in Phoenix, is thinner, but 6-foot-2. The tents were made for men who were average size then. “In the past 145 years, we’ve ballooned up,” Mr. Hotchkiss said.

At a recent meeting of a Las Vegas chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, eight burly men crowded into a library meeting room. All had experienced the equivalent of the Civil War tent problem.

“At the re-enactments, all the directors, all the costume directors say the re-enactors are just too darn big,” said George McClendon, a hefty 67-year-old retired airline pilot. [Link]