God Conquered
No Accolades
Sportscaster
Bear Bryant
Famous Poem
Farmer and the Preacher
Topic : Credit
Anesthetic
Although he wasn’t the first to use ether as an anesthetic, Boston dentist William Morton was credited with this discovery after using ether for a tooth extraction in the mid-1840s. But Morton had done so at the recommendation of Boston chemist Charles Jackson, who also claimed part of the credit. When the Massachusetts Historical Society decided to pay tribute to the discoverer of anesthesia, a monument was commissioned. But there was some dispute as to whether Morton’s or Jackson’s bust should adorn the statue. Realizing that the controversy would never be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., suggested that they use busts of both men with this inscription: “To Ether”!
God Conquered
John III Sobieski, king of Poland in the late 17th century, is best remembered as the man who saved central Europe from invading armies of Turks in 1683. With the Turks at the walls of Vienna, Sobieski led a charge that broke the siege. His rescue of Vienna is considered one of the decisive battles in European history.
In announcing his great victory the king paraphrased the famous words of Caesar by saying simply, “I came; I saw; God conquered.”
No Accolades
There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go, if he doesn’t care who gets the credit.
Sportscaster
A local sportscaster, doing radio coverage of an Indiana high-school football game from the stands, used a chart listing the names, numbers, and positions of the players to help him describe the action. Then it began to rain; the ink on the chart ran, and the numbers on the backs of the players were covered with mud. Identifying the home-team players was easy, but the only familiar name on the lineup of the visiting Chicago team was that of Blansky, a linebacker who was up for all-state. As local listeners didn’t know the Chicago players, and his station wasn’t powerful enough to reach Chicago, the sportscaster made up the names of every Chicago player but Blansky. And since Blansky was the only legitimate name, he did his play-by-play with Blansky making most of the tackles.
The next day, the Chicago coach called him to say he had done a really nice job of covering the game—except for one thing. Blansky had broken his leg in the first half and spent the second half in the hospital, listening to himself playing one heck of a game.
Bear Bryant
I’m just a plowhand from Arkansas, but I have learned how to hold a team together. How to lift some men up, how to calm down others, until finally they’ve got one heartbeat together, a team.
There’s just three things I’d ever say:
If anything goes bad, I did it.
If anything goes semi-good, then we did it.
If anything goes real good, then you did it.
That’s all it takes to get people to win football games for you.
Famous Poem
Laugh and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
These lines first appeared in Solitude, a poem printed in the February 25, 1883 issue of the New York Sun. The author was Ella Wheeler, a Wisconsin-born journalist and poet, who received $5 for her work. The poem was published again in May of that year in a collection of Miss Wheeler’s called Poems of Passion.
The collection was a great financial success. To her dismay, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, (now married) found the poem, word for word, in a book by John A. Joyce, published in 1885. The poem had a different title, Laugh and the World Laughs With You, but Joyce claimed it as his own.
Mrs. Wheeler offered $5,000 for any printed version of the poem dated earlier than her own. Neither Joyce nor anyone else ever produced one, but he continued to reprint the poem as his own until he died in 1915. As a final irony, he had the two famous lines chiseled on his tombstone in Oak Hill Cemetery, Washington, DC. Since that time, however, publishers have given credit where credit seems to be due—to Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Farmer and the Preacher
A farmer took a piece of bad earth and made things flourish thereon. Proud of his accomplishments, he asked his minister to come by and see what he had done. The minister was impressed. “That’s the tallest corn I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anything as big as those melons. Praise the Lord!” He went on that way about every crop, praising the Lord for it all.
Finally the farmer couldn’t take it anymore. “Reverend,” he said, “I wish you could have seen this place when the Lord was doing it by himself.”
