More Pooh We've Been Taught

"Reprinted from "Contrary by Popular Belief" by Joey Green (Broadway Books), with permission. Copyright 2005 by Joey Green. For a copy of the book, go to this Amazon link.

"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, It's a wonder I can think at all ..."
-Paul Simon (Kodachrome)

This feature explores the myriad of untruths and the misinformation we were taught in our history and science classes. It would appear that our teachers were shoveling out a lot of POOH!

Maybe we should give our teachers a break because they were only passing on what had been taught them ...


{ Humphrey Bogart Was Not Model For Gerber Baby }
Although Humphrey Bogart's mother was a commercial artist, Gerber baby foods were introduced in 1928, twenty-nine years after Bogey's birth.

In 1928, the Gerber company invited a number of artists to submit illustrations for its first advertising campaign. Artist Dorothy Hope Smith submitted a small, unfinished charcoal sketch of Ann Turner, the baby of a neighbor. That sketch was adopted as Gerber's official trademark in 1931.

The original charcoal sketch of the Gerber Baby is kept under glass in the company vault.


{ Washington Never Threw Silver Dollar Across the Potomac }
As a boy, born in 1732, George Washington lived at Ferry Farm, Virginia, on the Rappahannock River (not the Potomac). At that time the U.S. dollar did not exist and the American colonists used British currency.

The dollar did not become the basic unit of money in the United States until 1792, and the first U.S. silver coin was minted two years later, five years before his death in 1799.

He may well have thrown a Spanish silver dollar across the Rappahannock River, which was only about three hundred feet wide. Had Washington actually attempted to throw a U.S. silver dollar across the Potomac River from his home at Mount Vernon, his toss would have come up short. At Mount Vernon, the Potomac River is more than a mile wide.


{ Nero Did Not Fiddle As Rome Burned }
The violin was not developed in Italy until 1,500 years after Nero's death.

When the fire started in Rome in 64 B.C., Nero was thirty-five miles away in his villa at Antium. Nero may have played the lyre, but he definitely did not fiddle.


{ Maine Not Easternmost State }
Alaska is not only the westernmost of the U.S. states, but it is also the easternmost.

Some of Alaska's Aleutian Islands (the Rat Islands and the New Islands) lie west of the 180th meridian. The 180th meridian is the recognized dividing line between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres.

(The above POOH was "borrowed" from the Random House publication "Contrary to Popular Belief" by Joey Green.)

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