Jeff Wysaski
1895: Oscar Wilde is imprisoned for sodomy, which, if you think about it, is a lot like punishing a kid for stealing a candy bar by locking him up in a candy store.
1927: The last Ford Model T rolls of the lines. Henry Ford would keep this final production model and, in his will, betrothed it to the Smithsonian Institute. Also in Ford’s will? The request that, upon death, his bones would be stripped and disassembled via an efficient assembly line of Ford plant workers and then hidden in various parts of Detroit for citizens to seek out in a citywide treasure hunt. According to legend, whoever found Mr. Ford’s left femur would be given a lavish prize. To this day it has not been found.
1937: The Golden Gate Bridge opens up to pedestrian traffic. The bridge would have been finished months earlier, but workers were forced to disassemble and reassemble major portions of the bridge on two separate occasions when it was learned that some of the metal had been suspiciously shipped from Detroit. Contrary to speculation, Mr. Ford’s femur was nowhere to be found.
1941: In the march up to World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaims an “unlimited national emergency” to invest in and invent a wheelchair that could not only “roll on its own accord” but also “sprout enormous feathered wings so that cripples may experience the freedom and enjoyment of soaring among the stars and the grackles.” A year later, the “New Wheel” would be unveiled. Hundreds would die before the winged feature would be scrapped and replaced with a newer, even more impressive feature: reverse.
1995: Intent on making the New Wheel a reality, Christopher Reeve achieves flight thanks to a technologically advanced pair of feathered wings. Unfortunately, in mid-flight the wings snap off of his “Pegasus” (which was just a regular horse) and Mr. Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down. Once again, murmurings of the dreaded “New Wheel Curse” begin to surface.
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