Condensed Life Stories
Copyright 2011 by Davy Carren
Smashwords Edition
CLS #88
In 1878,
Osbourn Dorsey
invented the doorknob.
CLS #33
Miss Pickford was born a Smith in Canada.
Her dipso father died when she was three.
The Bishop of Broadway renamed her Mary,
and a bartender named a blood-red vodka drink after her.
In 1909 she was in 51 films,
but Talkies killed her career.
She died like her father did,
from tippling a bit more than a lot—
though she,
The Girl With The Golden Curls,
made it all the way to 87.
CLS #108
Spurning conformity,
On July 23, 1903,
Dr. Ernst Pfenning
of Chicago
became the first person
ever to own a Ford Model A
automobile.
He paid 750 bucks for it.
CLS #40
On July 3, 1883 the SS Daphne sank off the coast of Scotland,
killing almost 200 people onboard—
also, on that same day, Franz Kafka was born.
His dad yelled at him a lot,
and both his parents worked 12-hour days.
Young Franz preferred his governess.
At 23 he got his law degree,
did some clerking in the courts of Bohemia,
working some graveyard shifts,
and eventually tried his hand at running an asbestos company
with his brother-in-law.
He wrote some fiction on the side
with his buddies Max Brod and Felix Weltsch;
they called themselves the Little Prague Circle.
He courted a few girls,
but never tied the knot.
He caught TB in 1917.
To cure it he became a vegetarian
and drank gallons of unpasteurized milk.
It didn’t work.
He died of starvation in a sanatorium when he was 40,
with only a few stories published,
and all of his novels unfinished.
He had left his good friend Max
in charge of all of his writings,
and his last request before dying
was to have everything burned,
even his letters, sketches, and diaries.
Max didn’t follow his orders.
CLS #7
Dummy Hoy caught meningitis at age three,
and it left him deaf.
He once, from way out in deep centerfield,
threw out three runners at home
in the same game.
After retiring from The Bigs,
he settled down on a dairy farm in Mount Healthy, Ohio.
He died 99 years after he was born.
CLS #35
Eadweard Maybridge,
born Edward Muggeridge in England,
changed his name a lot.
He moved to The States in 1855,
settling in San Francisco,
where he killed a man
for porking his spouse,
saying,
“Here’s the answer to the letter you sent my wife,”
as he shot the guy.
Pleading insanity,
he was acquitted.
He took a lot of pictures,
and proved that all four of a horse’s hooves
did in fact leave the ground at once during a gallop.
He left SF to go take pictures of the Midwest,
put his son in foster care,
and, in 1879,
created the first movie projector:
the Zoopraxiscope.
Shortly afterwards,
he created the world’s first porno film.
At the age of 74,
after returning to his native England,
he died.
CLS #27
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born into a family of “swells”
on New York’s West 37th Street in 1884.
Her mom called her Granny,
and when she was 20
she got hitched to her fifth-cousin once removed,
who was already a Roosevelt,
so she never even had to change her name.
She lived in the White House for 12 years.
In 1945 her husband died of a cerebral hemorrhage,
and she had to move elsewhere,
settling in Hyde Park, NY.
Soon she became a delegate to the United Nations,
which she did for the next 8 years or so.
In 1961 she got hit by a car and was badly injured,
and died the next year.
A few years later Paul Simon wrote a song for her,
but changed Roosevelt to Robinson
because it was a better fit for the movie it was used in.
CLS #44
Sam Kinison’s dad was a Pentecostal preacher,
and young Sam tried his hand at it for a bit too.
Sam would shout and howl a lot while preaching.
Taking up stand-up,
because the church sent him packing after his divorce,
Sam’s meteoric rise was fueled by much liquor,
many illicit substances,
and a beret.
Sam died when,
six days after getting married again,
his Pontiac Turbo Trans Am
was hit by a pickup truck
driven by a drunk 17-year-old
just outside of Needles.
CLS #9
Without a teaching credential,
and with his doctorate still uncompleted,
the 24-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche
became a professor of philology at Basel.
He soon renounced his Prussian citizenship,
choosing to be stateless from then on out,
but fought in the Franco-Prussian war anyway,
where he probably got syphilis,
but certainly got a bad case of dysentery and PTSD.
He went back to Switzerland after that,
taught some classes, wrote some essays,
and became friends with Wagner.
But some nasty stomachaches and migraines,
plus the fact that he was going blind,
led to his forced resignation from the school.
In isolation, cutoff from his former friends,
living off a nice pension,
writing and moving around a lot,
his books not selling,
the 44-year-old suffered a nervous breakdown
after hugging a horse that was being whipped in the street.
He had a few strokes,
gave his sister the rights to his works,
which she didn’t really understand,
caught pneumonia,
which ended his life at 55,
the same year the 20th century began.
CLS #29
Ellen Naomi Cohen
1941: Born in Baltimore.
1957: Started going by the sobriquet Cass in high school
1965: After seeing the Hell’s Angels on a talk show, added a Mama to it.
1968: Got hit in the head with a pipe, which added 3 notes to her vocal range.
1970: Sang in Vegas for $40,000 a week.
1971: Married a Bavarian Baron for a few months.
1974: In a London apartment, after performing for two sold-out crowds at The Palladium, she died in her sleep.
CLS #17
The inventor of Life Savers,
Hart Crane’s dad,
sold the rights to the patent
right before they became the next big thing.
Although raised on a steady diet of Christian Science by his mom,
Hart turned out to be gay,
and he soon fell in love with a Danish merchant mariner.
Always bickering, his parents finally divorced when he was 18.
His big poem about the Brooklyn Bridge
was published when he was 31.
Nobody liked it, and he stayed drunk most of the time after that.
A few months before turning 33,
he jumped from a steamship into the Gulf of Mexico,
after getting beat up for picking up on a man,
screaming as he leapt, “Goodbye everybody!”
His body was never found.
CLS #14
With his real father dead, a bit of an oedipal urge for his mom, and a militant martinet for a stepfather, Charles Baudelaire fled to the Paris brothels, caught syphilis and gonorrhea, and went about reciting his poems and getting into fights in the taverns, then upon turning 21 he inherited a fortune and some land, but it only lasted him a couple of years, and he was soon eating on credit and promptly tried to kill himself, but was unsuccessful, so kept having to borrow money from his mom, and at 36, the same year his stepfather died, he published his first book of poems, but a few years later, after his publisher went bankrupt, Charles, who was doing a lot of laudanum, hitting the opium pipe pretty hard, and drinking just about everyone under the table, had a stroke that pretty much left him paralyzed for the last two years of his life.
CLS #10
Baruch Spinoza’s mother died when he was six,
and a little later his dad was killed in a war.
The Jews kicked him out of the fold when he was 24.
After that,
he started calling himself Benedictus.
He moved around some,
and made eyeglass lenses for a living.
At 44 he died from a lung disease
brought on by breathing in glass dust,
never having married,
nor had and kids;
and having published only two books—
one anonymously—
which nobody at the time
liked very much.
CLS #5
Five
words
are
enough,
Hemingway.
CLS #20
Carrie Nation was a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus.
Her mom thought herself to be Queen Victoria from time to time.
The first man she married was a drunk, and died from it.
The 2nd one lent her that famous surname.
God spoke to her one morning,
telling her to smash up a saloon
and break all the bottles with rocks.
Later, she used a hatchet to do the job,
while singing hymns.
She called it “hatchetation.”
When she died they threw her body in an unmarked grave.
Nine years later prohibition went into effect.
CLS #22
When he was a kid
Marcel Proust had asthma.
He spent a lot of time at his great-uncle’s house.
The army got him for a year,
and then he moved back in with his mom.
He never got a job.
Later on his mother died.
He spent the last three years of his life in a cork-lined room
writing a book
about his memories.
CLS #11
Leo Czolgosz was bullied as a kid.
In 1901 he asked Emma Goldman for some reading recommendations,
in Cleveland,
where he’d voted Republican the year before.
The anarchists there abhorred him and thought him a spy.
With a .32 revolver and a photo of Bresci in his pocket
he moved to Buffalo.
William McKinley tried to shake his hand,
But Leo refused,
shooting Old Major in the gut twice instead.
The crowd almost killed him before the cops showed up
To drag him away.
They electrocuted him 53 days later
and dumped sulfuric acid in his coffin.
His last words were,
“I am sorry I could not see my father.”
CLS #43
Never one to skirt his duty to God or to country
Asa Dunbar started the Great Butter Rebellion in 1766
by leaping on a chair in the Harvard dining hall
and screaming,
“Behold, our butter stinketh!— give us therefore butter that stinketh not!”
51 years later his grandson
Henry David Thoreau
was born.
CLS #12
At 21, Nellie Bly spent 10 days in a madhouse
after faking insanity for a story.
Four years later
she wended her way around the world
in less than 80 days.
When she was 32
she got hitched to a 72-year-old millionaire.
Finally,
in her 52nd year,
she died of pneumonia.