Now I Know More (2 page)

Here's a crass joke: A man is at a dinner party in a fortieth-floor apartment. He announces to the rest, “You know, the wind out there is so strong that if you jump out the window, it will blow you all around the building and right back in!” The other guests laugh, but the man persists: “I'll prove it!” He jumps out the window and, sure enough, he floats around the building and re-enters safely through the same window. Another guest, wanting the thrill of a lifetime, quickly jumps out the window before anyone else can stop him—and plummets to his death.

The host glares at the first guest and says, “You can be a real jerk when you're drunk, Superman.”

Again, that's a joke. But on December 2, 1979, Elvita Adams showed that sometimes, even everyday people can be a little bit super.

That evening, Adams, then age twenty-nine and living in the Bronx, decided to take her life. The reasons are unclear, but she had been in a fight with her landlord and was about to be evicted; she also suffered from depression. She went to the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan to the observatory on the eighty-sixth floor, scaled a seven-foot fence (replete with steel spikes), and jumped.

That, in and of itself, is nothing terribly peculiar. A few dozen people have jumped to their deaths from the Empire State Building, the first occurring before the building was even completed when a laid-off worker took his life that way. In 1947, a twenty-three-year-old jumped, leaving a crossed-out suicide note about how an unnamed man would be “much better off without [her]” and that she would not have made a very good wife. Her body was found on a limousine at the building's base, and
LIFE
magazine ran a picture of her body, titling it, “The Most Beautiful Suicide.” Just a few years ago, a fifty-four-year-old Manhattan woman ended her life in similar fashion.

But Adams did something almost none of the others had done: she survived. A wind gust—a very strong one—caught her and blew her back toward the building, albeit one floor down. She landed on a ledge, where a security guard found her before she could make another attempt. The only damage to her body? A fractured hip.

Adams was taken to a mental institution to recuperate. Her current whereabouts are not publicly known.

Henry Rippey, a local drunk, was in jail. His crime was taking the life of another, known only as Bummer. When word of this reached his cellmate, David Popley, the latter extracted some vigilante justice. Popley punched Rippey in the nose.

Inmate-on-inmate violence is, unfortunately, not all that rare, making the punch a nonstory. The fact that this happened in San Francisco in 1865 doesn't add much to it either. Add that Rippey's murder weapon was his shoe—he kicked Bummer to death—and maybe we're getting a little closer . . . but not really. Even the fact that Mark Twain wrote Bummer's obituary doesn't make Popley's defense of the victim's honor all that unique.

But here's the thing: Bummer was a dog.

And yes, Mark Twain really did write his obituary.

Dogs weren't always domesticated in California in the 1860s. Around that time both Los Angeles and San Francisco had problems with “free-ranging” dogs—ferals and strays—running amok and often outnumbering people. Dogcatchers were common municipal authorities, and when a dogcatcher nabbed himself a stray, the dog was put to sleep with poison. But one ability could save a stray pup from death—ferreting out and killing rats.

By all accounts, Bummer was a great ratter, but his rise to fame came when, in 1861, another dog found himself on the losing side of a battle with a third, larger dog. Bummer came to the smaller dog's aid and rescued him from the skirmish. Afterward, Bummer brought the smaller dog food and kept him warm. The second dog, later named Lazarus, survived, and for the rest of his life, he was Bummer's sidekick. As a team, the two were even more efficient at catching rats; one source reports that they once nabbed eighty-five rodents in roughly twenty minutes.

Their reputations made them local heroes. When Lazarus was caught by a new dogcatcher in 1862, a groundswell of public support resulted in his release and the pair's exemption from anti-stray ordinances. Legend has it that, a week later, they helped stop a runaway horse, which was dragging a cart through downtown San Francisco.

Lazarus passed away in 1863, and the
San Francisco Chronicle
published a lengthy obituary in his memory. Two years later, the previously mentioned Mr. Rippey caused the death of Bummer when he kicked the dog in a drunken stupor. The city arrested Rippey after the public demanded justice for the area's unofficial mascot and über-pet.

On January 8, 1880, Emperor Norton I collapsed on his way to a lecture at a local university. He died before help could arrive. His death made front-page news in the largest newspaper of the area, under the headline “Le Roi Est Mort” (The King Is Dead). A similar headline was splashed across the second-largest newspaper of the locale. At his funeral two days later, thousands—perhaps as many as 30,000, despite the city's population being only about 200,000—came to pay their respects. The newspaper reported the next day that within hours, the line of mourners was out the door, hundreds of people long.

But his empire wasn't real. Joshua Abraham Norton—or his Imperial Majesty, Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico—was a delusional (or at least, eccentric) pauper with a flair for grandeur. And the city of San Francisco seemed to love him for it.

The United States, of course, has never had an emperor, let alone one who was also the Protector of Mexico (the Monroe Doctrine notwithstanding). That mattered little to Norton. Born in England in the early 1800s, he inherited a large sum of money upon his father's death and moved from South Africa to San Francisco in 1849. Over the next few years, he successfully invested in real estate in the area and was worth a reported $250,000 in the 1850s—the equivalent of well over $6 million today. But he would soon lose his fortune. A famine in China led to rice shortages in San Francisco, and a rapid increase in prices looked as if it was on the horizon. Norton started buying up rice coming in from Peru at twelve and a half cents a pound, expecting to corner the market, but other shipments from Peru made it to the city—and the price fell to about three cents a pound. Norton lost money not only on the transaction but also on litigation to try and void his contract. In 1858, he left San Francisco, bankrupt.

He returned to the city at some point in 1859, but he was no longer interested in the rice or real estate businesses. Instead, Norton fancied himself as some strange kind of political activist, and on September 17, 1859, he sent a letter to various area newspapers proclaiming himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States. At first, the newspapers took it as a strange joke from a formerly well-known well-to-do citizen, but it soon became clear that Norton had lost more than his riches when the rice deal went bad. In October, the self-crowned emperor issued his first decree, abolishing Congress. (When Congress did not vacate, Emperor Norton ordered the army “to procede [
sic
] with a suitable force to clear the Halls of Congress.”) He also instituted what may be the world's first swear jar, when he called for a $25 fine for anyone who used a certain F-word—“Frisco.”

Despite his apparent madness, Norton was eminently likable and well received by the community. A local army post gave him a uniform befitting a commander of a real army, not just the one in his own head. Norton, being a sovereign, issued his own currency, and local citizens and businesses used it in day-to-day transactions.

Norton is buried in Colma, California. His gravestone memorializes him as “Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico,” just as he lived.

“A City on the Move.”

That's the motto of the town of Ulysses, Kansas, which has about 6,000 residents. It's named after Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth president of the United States (not the Homeric hero). It's the largest municipality in Grant County (also named for the president) and is home to about 75 percent of the county's residents.

And that motto is to be taken literally.

Ulysses was founded in 1885 and, according to newspaper reports from that era, was well situated for growth. Not only did it sit on the east-west rail line of the time, but unlike many surrounding areas, the water table was only about thirty feet down, allowing for relatively easy access to fresh well water. (Many other areas required wells a few hundred feet deep.) By 1889, the town had a large schoolhouse, four hotels, twelve restaurants and another dozen saloons, six gambling halls, and an opera house. Nearly 1,500 people had moved to Ulysses.

Then the droughts came, turning this once-thriving boomtown, colloquially, to dust. By 1906, the town's population hovered around 100—a far cry from its peak nearly two decades prior.

To make matters worse, the boom years of the mid-1880s were partially financed through a public debt offering. To meet the infrastructure needs of this growing city, town leaders issued municipal bonds, amassing well over $80,000 in debt. (Accounting for inflation, that's the modern-day equivalent of more than $2 million.) As was probably common for that era, the town's leadership didn't use that money to dig more wells (which might have staved off a drought) or other such improvements. Instead, they pocketed the money and never paid down the debt. Bondholders were less than pleased, and the next generation of Ulysses residents paid for their predecessors' sins via sky-high property (per one report, a 600 percent levy) and residency taxes.