Paul Campos has the story of Fred Bonine of Niles, Michigan. When I’d looked the guy up, I’d been properly suspicious of his athletic claims, but I hadn’t thought to think through that suspicious line about seeing a million patients.
The good news is that Ring Lardner’s stories still appear to hold up.
I hope Paul Campos will edit the wikipedia page …
The great thing about wikipedia is that you can go to the Talk pages and see any discussion about what needs to get done. The link to the blog post is already there and Campos himself said something in it.
There’s no real controversy in the Talk pages. I think the issue is that the original claim was made in a so-called reliable source, and Wikipedia’s policy is that a blog post can’t be used to justify its removal. That’s not in itself a bad policy, but here it obviously presents a problem.
Ethan:
Paul did all the hard work of writing that post! The least you could do is go in and clean up the wikipedia page…
Another amusing little story about fraudulent fame is that of Rice Miller, AKA Sonny Boy Williamson II.
As his name suggests, there was a Sonny Boy Williamson I. The original was a famous blues harmonica player in the 1930’s/40’s but his life was tragically cut short in a mugging incident. News didn’t travel so fast back in those days, so a lot of people wasn’t aware of his death. So, Rice Miller came along and just… told everyone *he* was Sonny Boy Williamson. He gave that name to his record label and put it on his albums, presumably as a quick way to garner fame. And it worked! I think even up until his death, a lot of people didn’t realise that he was a different person.
To be fair, the guy was an extremely talented musician in his own right, but still.
It seems that he took Sonny Boy Williamson’s name well before John Lee Williamson’s death. Or maybe “death” was an euphemism for “departure for Chicago” :-)
https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/sonny-boy-williamson-ii-1798/
“To be fair, the guy was an extremely talented musician in his own right, but still”
A talent that couldn’t rise on its own. What a view!
In the 1950s there were, occasionally, 110 Yard races. Similarly, indoor races were sometimes 55 yards and not 50.
I think this was related to the fact that outdoor tracks were 440 yards around, 220 yards indoors. 1 mile = 1,760 yards or 4 X 440, and 8 X 220.
In my opinion, we lost something when we went to 400 meter tracks, and then no one knows (easily) where the 1,500 meter races start and end. And, who knows what lap times mean, whereas it’s easy, relatively, with the “yard” tracks.
And, sadly the notion of a 4 minute mile may soon be gone.
The metric system makes thermodynamics much easier, but in other contexts there is a loss of intuition. (I still argue with my European colleagues about this … )_
— Mark