AWESOME FACTS ABOUT EVERYTHING LXXI

1. William Phelps Eno (1858 -1945), was an American businessman responsible for many of the earliest innovations in road safety and traffic control. He is sometimes known as the "Father of traffic safety", despite never having learned to drive a car himself. To his credit are the stop sign, the pedestrian crosswalk, the one-way street, and the traffic circle. Automobiles were rare until Eno was an older man, but horse-drawn carriages were already creating significant problems in urban areas like Eno's home town of New York City. In 1867, at the age of 9, he and his mother were caught in a traffic jam. He later wrote, "That very first traffic jam (many years before the motor car came into use) will always remain in my memory. There were only about a dozen horses and carriages involved, and all that was needed was a little order to keep the traffic moving. Yet nobody knew exactly what to do; neither the drivers nor the police knew anything about the control of traffic."

2. Rosa Parks was not the first woman to defy racist bus laws. That honor belongs to a young woman named Claudette Covin. In 1955, she was the first person arrested for protesting Montgomery's racist bus rule and refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. She was only 15 years old. Of course, it is Rosa Parks who went down in  history for defying the Jim Crow laws in the same way later that year. Colvin knew Parks from an NAACP youth group, and she also knew that Parks was the better person to be a figurehead in their city's growing protest movement. Parks had done prior work for the NAACP and "the organization didn't want a teenager in that role," Colvin explained. 

   After decades in obscurity, Colvin eventually received the praise she deserved for her unsung heroism in Montgomery. She has no regrets over her protest. "I feel very, very proud of what I did." 

3. 2020 marks the 100th year of women winning the right to vote, but the victory wasn't as sweet as we'd like to think. Some of those at the forefront of the suffrage movement, fearful that questions of race would make their battle more difficult, wanted to advocate for White women alone. Ugly racist rhetoric that prioritized "educated, virtuous White women" over Black women, caused Sojourner Truth, the former slave and leading voice for women's rights, to break with Elizabeth Cady Stanton over Stanton's refusal to agree that women of every color deserved the right to vote. 

 

4.  Why did Yankee Doodle Call a Feather Macaroni?

   Back in the 1760's, macaroni was slang for the stylish young men who frequented a fashionable new English hangout, the Macaroni Club, named after a popular food that had just made its way there from Italy.

   So when Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni, he was identifying himself as a bit of a dandy - essentially the hipster of his time.

Credit:

1-3: Reader's Digest

September, 2020

Jacopo della Quercia 

4: Reader's Digest

July/August, 2020