> Sorry to hear the meeting with the musician wasn't much.
Naah, I wasn't trying to make it much. I suppose I could have walked over and started talking to him. As much as anything else I was trying to be funny. From that distance I couldn't be sure of his reaction but it looked to me like he got a kick out of it.
> The metro area of DC can be a pretty trippy place to live.
For a while I worked at a place within walking distance of the White House. Nothing to do with the federal government but I could have walked over and had lunch with GHW Bush, had he for some bizarre reason invited me to. Later, when Clinton was inaugurated, the Secret Service came by beforehand and inspected our offices. It was possible to look out of some of the rooms and see part of his motorcade route. They told us those rooms were off limits until the motorcade had passed, because they could be used by a sniper to take a shot at Clinton. We were able to go on the roof and watch the motorcade, though. There were Secret Service agents stationed up there, but they didn't object to us being there.
Once I had a different encounter with the Secret Service. I had gone on my lunch hour to do a personal errand. The address I had to go to was something like 1501 Pennsylvania Avenue, IIRC. The White House and grounds are fenced in and occupy an entire block, and I realized too late that I was on the wrong side of it. I saw an open gate and path across the lawn, leading to an open gate on the other side. Great, I thought, I can just cut across the lawn instead of having to walk all the way around the block.
I got maybe six steps along when I was confronted by two men. I never did figure out where they came from, they were just suddenly there. It was July, and you know what that means in DC ... and these men were both wearing suits and yet weren't sweating. That scared me! You've heard the term, "command presence?" Military and police officers strive for it. It's the way a person lets another know, I am in charge, through posture, tone of voice, et cetera. These guys had it. From the moment one said, "excuse me sir, where are you going," I knew I was in trouble.
I realized immediately what had happened, apologized, explained that I was trying to cut across to the bank, and asked if I was free to leave back the way I had come. They answered yes, still giving me hard looks. I thought about thanking them for not wrestling me to the ground; Chevy Chase's SNL bits were still in the collective memory and I'm sure they would have understood. I didn't dare though, for fear they might do it!
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joi2049 (5488)
3 years ago
Thanks for sharing your story about the encounter with the SS DUDES. Recently I found a story about the grandfather I never knew (who died before I was born) who's very first job was delivering milk to Teddy at 1600 Penn Ave.
And he was also NOT HAPPY about doing it because he also complained about how the kids weren't properly disciplined and rode the mini ponies (like the kind on ASSATEAGUE ISLAND) around inside of the place (who would also POOP all over the place).
😁
So apparently he also didn't like STEPPING in it or around it??? No mention is made of SS dudes though. Wonder how long they've been around for???
Found this:
President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation creating the Secret Service on April 14, 1865, the day of his assassination. It was commissioned on July 5, 1865, in Washington, D.C. as the "Secret Service Division" of the Department of the Treasury.
How did the Secret Service start?
The Secret Service got its beginnings in 1865, by the Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch. At that time they were created to suppress counterfeit currency. The first Chief of the Secret Service was William P. Wood who was sworn into office on July 5, 1865.
Perhaps Newton who sent men to the gallows for counterfeiting would probably also have run it if he'd lived at that time???
What's also funny is how the next post says GET OFF of my LAWN as if in response back to your message.
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BullSchmidt (3189)
3 years ago
> Recently I found a story about the grandfather I never knew (who died before I was born) who's very first job was delivering milk to Teddy at 1600 Penn Ave. And he was also NOT HAPPY about doing it because he also complained about how the kids weren't properly disciplined
He probably encountered this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quentin_Roosevelt
I've got an iPad app, WolframAlpha. It's a good calculator which also ties into a lot of reference data. For example, I put this query in, which it understood and answered:
(density of manure)*(((death of JFK)-(death of Marilyn Monroe))*(speed of sound))^3
In other words, if you fired a gun at the moment Marilyn Monroe died, measured the distance the sound had traveled by the time Lee Harvey Oswald did his work, used that distance to construct a cube of that length, height, and width, then filled that cube with shit, how much would it weigh? (Maybe the most useless question ever conceived. The answer = 549 solar masses.)
I found that it also gives historical popularity of names. If you type in "popularity of given name ___" it shows a graph of the popularity of that name for newborns since 1880, taken from US census data.
So, I was trying out different names and happened to try Quentin for some reason. I saw that the name's never been terribly popular, but it did have a sharp, brief spike in popularity around 1919. That sort of spike usually means someone with that name famously did something and got a lot of babies named after him. I Googled, et cetera, and found out about Quentin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's son, whom I had never heard of before.
Quentin was a preschooler when his father became president, and became a real terror at the White House. His antics included defacing presidential portraits and firing snowballs at people below from the White House roof, including Secret Service agents. Your grandfather probably got hit with a few of those.
Teddy, being a wild man himself, loved it. Word got out, and Quentin became the nation's favorite bad boy. Later, as a young man, he was killed in WW1 in 1918.
> What's also funny is how the next post says GET OFF of my LAWN as if in response back to your message.
Naah, that's a response to the OP.
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joi2049 (5488)
3 years ago
Thanks for the additional info about the brat named QUENTIN. But having to worry about stepping on PONY POOP was probably worse than getting hit by a snowball. And since the milk man usually also worked while the brats were still sleeping (delivering milk prior to the time when they would wake up to have breakfast), I suspect he probably also escaped having to deal with the snowball issue.
CNN also had a special on about LINCOLN and they said the behavior of his 2 young sons was just as bad as that of TEDDY's brat.
And LINCOLN and his wife also found the way that they behaved amusing and did nothing to put a stop to it.
My grandfather probably also didn't last long working as a milkman because he also retired from working for the railroad (where he also had a much better position that also left my grandma with a nice pension to live off of after he died).
I've just looked up what it says again and you might be right about the snowball issue:
His first city job was delivering milk, including to the White House when Theodore Roosevelt was in residence. He complained about the Roosevelt children, who ran ramshackle through the mansion, and had even been seen riding their pony in the halls.
So he must have also encountered them at some point in time???
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