vice Presents The People's Lists

From

The Book of Lists #3

by Amy Wallace and David Wallechinsky.

Illustrations by Laura Park.

The People’s Almanacs and the Books of Lists were two series of amazing books that were started by a father, son, and daughter in the 1970s. For us, they are a great feat of alternative reference material—kind of like Wikipedia before there was an internet. We recently called up David Wallechinksy, the son part of the team, and asked him if we could maybe, you know, start a new feature in Vice based on his and his family’s work because, um, you know, he kind of, like, changed our life and got us into wanting to research and write about arcane trivia and current events.

To our teenage-Beatles-fan-in-1964 levels of excitement, he said, “Sure, that sounds good.” So here we have the first installment of The People’s Lists, in which we choose some of the best bits of these essential (but hard to find now) books and have them illustrated by a girl named Laura Park, who just so happens to be one of our favorite new artists.

A DAREDEVIL’S FINAL FALL Bobby Leach was a colorful character who first became famous in 1911 when he went over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He continued to perform dangerous exploits, including parachuting over the falls from an airplane. In April 1926, Leach was walking down a street in Christchurch, New Zealand, when he slipped on a piece of orange peel and broke his leg so badly that it had to be amputated. Complications developed and he died. THE BURDEN OF MATRIMONY William Shortis, a rent collector in Liverpool, England, and his wife, Emily Ann, had not been seen for several days. Worried friends and a policeman entered the house on August 13, 1903, and were horrified to discover William, dazed and dying, at the foot of the staircase pinned to the floor underneath the body of his 224-pound wife. A coroner’s jury concluded that the elderly couple had been walking up the stairs when Emily Ann fell backward, carrying her husband with her. Mrs. Shortis died immediately from a concussion, but William remained in his unfortunate position for three days, too seriously injured to extricate himself. THE WORST NIGHTMARE OF ALL In 1924, British newspapers reported the bizarre case of a man who apparently committed suicide while asleep. Thornton Jones, a lawyer, woke up to discover that he had slit his throat. Motioning to his wife for a paper and pencil, Jones wrote, “I dreamt that I had done it. I awoke to find it true.” He died 80 minutes later. THE PERFECT LAWYER Clement L. Vallandigham was a highly controversial Ohio politician who engendered much hostility by supporting the South during the Civil War. Convicted of treason, he was banished to the Confederacy. Back in Ohio after the war, Vallandigham became an extremely successful lawyer who rarely lost a case. In 1871 he took on the defense of Thomas McGehan, a local troublemaker who was accused of shooting Tom Myers to death during a barroom brawl. Vallandigham contended that Myers had actually shot himself, attempting to draw his pistol from his pocket while trying to rise from a kneeling position. On the evening of June 16, Vallandigham was conferring in his hotel room with fellow defense lawyers when he decided to show them how he would demonstrate his theory to the jury the next day. Earlier in the day, he had placed two pistols on the bureau, one empty and one loaded. Grabbing the loaded one by mistake, Vallandigham put it in his trouser pocket. Then he slowly pulled the pistol back out and cocked it. “There, that’s the way Myers held it,” he said, and pulled the trigger. A shot rang out and Vallandigham explained, “My God, I’ve shot myself!” Thomas McGehan was subsequently acquitted and released from custody. A FATAL TEMPER On April 15, 1982, 26-year-old Michael Scaglione was playing golf with friends at the City Park West Municipal Golf Course in New Orleans. After making a bad shot on the 13th hole, Scaglione became angry with himself and threw his club against a golf cart. When the club broke, the clubhead rebounded and stabbed Scaglione in the throat, severing his jugular vein. Scaglione staggered back and pulled the metal piece from his neck. Had he not done that, he might have lived, since the clubhead could have reduced the rapid flow of blood.

KILLED BY JAZZ Seventy-nine-year-old cornetist and music professor Nicola Coviello had had an illustrious career, having performed before Queen Victoria, Edward VII, and other dignitaries. Realizing his life was nearing its end, Coviello decided to travel from London to Saskatchewan to pay a final visit to his son. On the way, he stopped in New York City to bid farewell to his nephews, Peter, Dominic, and Daniel Coviello. On June 13, 1926, the young men took their famous uncle to Coney Island to give him a taste of America. The elder Coviello enjoyed himself but seemed irritated by the blare of jazz bands. Finally he could take it no longer. “That isn’t music,” he complained and he fell to the boardwalk. He was pronounced dead a few minutes later. Cause of death was “a strain on the heart.” TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING It is almost impossible to die of an overdose of water, but Tina Christopherson managed to do it. The 29-year-old Florida woman, who had an IQ of 189, became obsessed with the idea that she suffered from stomach cancer, a disease which had killed her mother. In an attempt to cleanse her body, Christopherson went on periodic water fasts, during which she ate no food but drank up to four gallons of water a day. By February 17, 1977, she had consumed so much water that her kidneys were overwhelmed and the excess fluid drained into her lungs. She died of internal drowning, otherwise known as “water intoxication.” KILLED BY A ROBOT Kenji Urada, 37, was a worker at the Akashi plant of Kawasaki Heavy Industries in western Japan. On July 4, 1981, he entered a restricted zone to repair a machine on a processing line for automobile gears. Although reports of the incident are confusing, Urada apparently became so engrossed in his work that he failed to notice the approach of a transport robot that delivered parts to the machine. The robot came up on Urada from behind and crushed him to death against the machine. THE DEADLY DANCE In August 1981, 11-year-old Simon Longhurst of Wigan, England, attended a Sunday-afternoon junior disco session where, along with other youngsters, he performed the “head shake,” a new-wave dance in which the head is shaken violently as the music gets faster and faster. The following day, young Simon began suffering headaches and soon a blood clot developed. Three weeks later he died of acute swelling of the brain. The coroner ruled it “death by misadventure.” REVENGE OF THE PLANT KINGDOM On February 4, 1982, 27-year-old David M. Grundman fired two shotgun blasts at a giant saguaro cactus in the desert outside Phoenix. Unfortunately for Grundman, his shots caused a 23-foot section of the cactus to fall on him, and he was crushed to death. WHAT A WASTE TO GO The 70-year-old mayor of Betterton, Maryland, Monica Myers, considered it part of her duties to check on the sewage tanks at the municipal facility. On the night of March 19, 1980, she went to the Betterton treatment plant to test for chlorine and sediment. Unfortunately, she slipped on a catwalk, fell into a tank of human waste, and drowned. THE ELECTRIC GUITARIST Keith Relf, who had gained fame as the lead singer of the Yardbirds, a 1960s blues-rock group, was found dead at his home in London on May 14, 1976. The cause of death was an electric shock received while playing his guitar. Relf was 33 years old. A WISH FULFILLED American revolutionary patriot James Otis often mentioned to friends and relatives that as long as one had to die, he hoped that his death would come from a bolt of lightning. On May 23, 1783, the 58-year-old Otis was leaning against a doorpost in a house in Andover, Massachusetts, when a lightning bolt struck the chimney, ripped through the frame house, and hit the doorpost. Otis was killed instantly.

GEORGE FREDERICK COOKE’S SKULL

Even though Irish-born actor Cooke has been dead for over 170 years, he still gets steady work. Cooke’s skull is owned by the Thomas Jefferson University Medical School library in Philadelphia, which lends it out to theatrical groups as a prop.

PAUL BROCA’S BRAIN In one of the less frequented corners of the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris are numerous bottles containing human brains. Some belonged to intellectuals, others to criminals. But perhaps the most distinguished of the specimens is that of Broca, a 19th-century physician and anthropologist who was the father of modern brain surgery. ALBERT EINSTEIN’S BRAIN What might have been the greatest brain of the 20th century was not buried with the body that housed it. Einstein asked that after his death his brain be removed for study. And when the great physicist died in 1955, this was done. The brain—which was neither larger nor heavier than the norm—was photographed, sectioned, and sent around the country to be studied by specialists. Some of the largest specimens are in Wichita, Kansas. GALILEO’S FINGER The great astronomer died in 1642, but his body wasn’t interred in its final resting place until 1737. During that final transfer to the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, an aristocratic admirer cut off three of Galileo’s fingers as keepsakes. Two now belong to an Italian doctor, but the third—a middle finger—sits in Florence’s Museum of the History of Science pointing skyward. JOSEPH HAYDN’S HEAD The Austrian composer died in 1809. Soon after his burial, a prison warden who was an amateur phrenologist—a person who tries to correlate head bumps with character traits—hired grave robbers to steal the head. The warden examined the skull, then gave it to an acquaintance, and a remarkable 145-year-long odyssey began. The theft of the skull was discovered in 1820, when the family of Haydn’s patron had the body disinterred. Eventually they got a skull back, but it wasn’t Haydn’s. The real item was passed from one owner to another, some of them individuals, others organizations. Finally, it found a home in a glass case at Vienna’s Society of Friends of Music. In 1932, the descendants of Haydn’s patrons once again tried to get it back. But WWII and then the cold war intervened—the body was in Austria’s Soviet quarter, but the skull in the international zone. It wasn’t until 1954 that body and skull were finally reunited. CHARLES LOWELL’S PELVIC BONES Lowell, of Lubec, Maine, fractured his pelvis in a fall from a horse in 1821. The pelvis was treated by Dr. Micajah Hawkes. Lowell walked on it too soon, and it didn’t heal well. Lowell blamed the physician and sued. After three highly publicized trials, the judge threw the case out of court. Lowell, however, apparently couldn’t forget it. His will directed that after his death, which occurred in 1858, a postmortem examination be made. It showed that Lowell had been wrong. The celebrated pelvic bones were preserved in a Boston anatomical museum while the rest of the body was buried in Maine.

JOSE RIZAL’S VERTEBRA

Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines, was accused of sedition and executed by the Spanish in 1896 and buried without a coffin. He was exhumed in August 1898, after the Americans took Manila. Most of Rizal’s remains are interred beneath the Rizal Monument in Luneta—all except one of his cervical vertebrae; it is enshrined like a holy relic in Fort Santiago.

GEORGE WASHINGTON’S HAIR AND TOOTH In June 1793, Washington gave a locket containing a clipping of his hair to his aide-de-camp, Col. John Trumbull. When Trumbull died, he willed the lock of hair to a first cousin of the president’s, Dr. James A. Washington, who passed it along to his family as a sort of “hair-loom.” Washington’s dentist, John Greenwood, managed to acquire another collectible that the president shed from his person—the last of his natural teeth. Washington mailed the tooth to Greenwood to use as a model in making a new set of dentures. The dentist kept the tooth as a souvenir, and it remained in the Greenwood family for generations. ST. BONAVENTURE’S HEAD This great Catholic theologian and philosopher is one person who definitely did not rest in peace. Almost 300 years after his death in 1274, his remains were caught in the middle of a French religious war that pitted the Roman Catholic Church against the Protestant Huguenots. In 1562, Bonaventure’s tomb at Lyons was plundered. While his body was publicly burned, the head—said to be perfectly preserved—was saved and hidden by one of the faithful. It disappeared, however, during the French Revolution and has not been seen since. DAN SICKLES’S LEG Sickles was a colorful New York congressman who organized and led a brigade of volunteers at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was involved in some of the bloodiest fighting at Gettysburg, losing his own right leg in the battle. That trauma, however, didn’t diminish Sickles’s personal flair. He had the leg preserved and sent to Washington, where it was exhibited in a little wooden coffin at the Medical Museum of the Library of Congress. Sickles frequently visited it himself. MAJ. JOHN W. POWELL’S BRAIN Geologist Powell donated his brain to the Smithsonian Institution, of which he was an official, in order to settle a bet with an associate over whose brain was larger. Although Powell’s gray matter is still in the museum’s collection, that of his associate is nowhere to be found, which makes Powell the winner by default. LAZZARO SPALLANZANI’S BLADDER When Italian biologist Spallanzani died in 1799, his diseased bladder was excised for study by his colleagues. Afterward, it was placed on public display in a museum in Pavia, Italy, where it remains today, a monument to the inquisitive mind. BARON PIERRE DE COUBERTIN’S HEART Lausanne, Switzerland, and Olympia, Greece, are the two most revered sites of the modern Olympic movement. Coubertin, the founder of that movement, left a part of himself in each place. His will requested that his body be buried at Lausanne, the site of International Olympic Committee headquarters. But first his heart was to be removed and placed in a marble column at Olympia, where the ancient games were held.