The Old Farmer's Almanac 2015 (31 page)

A couple of weeks later, we went back with my brother. We usually catch and release, but my brother’s friend had asked him to keep a few for him. As he was cleaning the fish for his buddy, my brother cut open one of the bass—and there inside it was that distinctive black and silver worm.

–
Amy Jo Wilson, Paris, Ohio

HONORABLE MENTIONS

When my son was 18 years old, he and several friends went to our summer home on a lake in Maine.

On the first day, they went waterskiing and, as the boat left the dock, my son felt his class ring fly off his finger. The boys searched for the ring but never found it.

When friends visited 27 years later, one of the children called out that he had found a ring. It was my son’s class ring! When it was lost, my husband was 45 years old. When it was found, my son was 45 years old, and it was my husband’s birthday. He had passed away several years earlier.

–
Janice Daring, Shapleigh, Maine

My grandfather’s family was from Three Rivers, Massachusetts. In 1917, my grandfather moved to Cohoes, New York, where I was born and raised. In 2001, I relocated to Enfield, Connecticut. In May 2006, in an antique shop in Somers, Connecticut, I noticed some vintage postcards. I picked up one that had a picture of mountains and a lake, turned it over, and let out a yell: The postcard was addressed to my great aunt in Three Rivers and postmarked May 2, 1906—100 years to the day that I had it in my hand! I purchased the card and keep it on my bulletin board.

–
Kim Hebert, Enfield, Connecticut

Announcing the 2015 Essay Contest Topic:
My Best Car Story

By Alice Cary

Historic Proportions

On September 21, 1915, an Englishman named Cecil Chubb (1876–1934) happened upon an auction in Salisbury, England. On a whim and, some say, as a gift for his wife, he bid 6,600 pounds on Lot 15, 30 acres of land and a prehistoric monument that had been in private hands since the Middle Ages. Chubb’s bid won.

Eventually, Chubb decided that the property should remain in local hands, so 3 years later he turned it over to the English government, on condition that the entrance fee never be more than a shilling. An arrangement with the Parish Council ensured that an adjacent road would be moved and area residents would be granted free access to the site—Stonehenge.

A Meager Harvest

Ephraim Wales Bull (1806–95) worked in Boston, Massachusetts, as a gold beater, producing gold leaf. The constant dust of his trade irritated his lungs, and his passion was growing grapes. So, in 1836, he moved to nearby Concord, to pursue this love.

By chance, one of Bull’s grape strains cross-pollinated with a wild grape growing on his hillside. The result was a robust variety, and he spent 6 years cultivating the seedlings. In 1853, he presented his new “Concord grape” to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, which proclaimed it bigger and better than any grown before. The next year, Bull began to sell Concord grape seedlings and cuttings for $5 each, earning $3,200.

Nurseries that had purchased Bull’s plants cultivated and freely sold the seedlings. People loved the fruit. In 1869, Thomas Bramwell Welch, a communion steward at a Methodist church in Vineland, New Jersey, with his son Charles, began experimenting on grape juice-making processes so that they could use the juice, instead of wine, at church services. By some 28 years later, Charles had perfected pasteurization of Concord grape juice, built a factory, and changed the name of the beverage to Welch’s Grape Juice.

Forgotten through it all was Ephraim Bull. When Bull was selling his original seedlings, plants had no patent protection. In 1891, he fell from a ladder while pruning a grapevine. Four years later, he died a poor, embittered man. His tombstone reads: “He Sowed; Others Reaped.”

A Net Profit

In 1974, brothers Daniel and Ozzie Silna were owners of a successful New Jersey knitting company. Daniel’s passion was basketball, yet he knew that the only position he could ever hold on a team would be “owner.” So, with Ozzie, he bought the Carolina Cougars, an American Basketball Association (ABA) team, for $1 million. Hoping to profit in the largest U.S. television market without a professional basketball team, the brothers moved the team to St. Louis and changed the name to the Spirits of St. Louis.

Two years later, the National Basketball Association (NBA) merged with some teams in the fledgling ABA, but the Spirits were left out of the deal. The brothers turned down $3 million in compensation, choosing instead an ongoing share of the television revenue from all of the ABA teams included in the merger. As a business deal, this was a slam dunk. In the years since, the Silnas (and their lawyer) have earned an estimated $300 million in TV profits, causing some to call theirs the “greatest sports deal of all time.”

The deal got even sweeter in January 2014, when the NBA agreed to pay the Silnas $500 million to end the arrangement for good. The brothers have collected $800 million from their initial $1 million investment.

Tag Sale Triumph

In Summer 2007, a family in New York bought a small white bowl for $3 at a yard sale. They liked it well enough to display it in their living room for several years and eventually decided to have it appraised. The resulting report brought shocking news: The bowl was a rare, 1,000-year-old specimen of Chinese Northern Song Dynasty pottery, estimated to be worth between $200,000 and $300,000.

At an auction in 2013, a London dealer purchased the bowl for $2.2 million.

A Truly Bad Call

In 1876, William Orton, president of the Western Union Telegraph Company, declined an offer from Gardiner Hubbard to buy, for $100,000, the patent for an invention by Hubbard’s son-in-law. Orton called the contraption an “interesting novelty [with] no commercial possibilities.”

Hubbard’s son-in-law was Alexander Graham Bell, and the patent was for the telephone.

Orton soon realized his error and hired Thomas Edison and Elisha Gray to create a rival phone system. Before long, they had one up and running, prompting the Bell Company to sue for patent infringement. Ultimately, the fight was abandoned by Western Union. In 1879, it agreed to get out of the telephone business. The price of Bell Telephone stock immediately shot through the roof.

A Fine Catch

One Sunday in 1799, 12-year-old Conrad Reed went fishing in Meadow Creek in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, instead of going to church. In the creek, he spotted a yellow rock, which he promptly lugged home.

Conrad’s father, John, used the 17-pound stone as a doorstop. Eventually, the elder Reed asked a local silversmith to identify the mass, but the man could not. In 1802, another jeweler informed Reed that the rock was gold and that he would like to buy it. They agreed on what Reed felt was a “big” price: $3.50.

In fact, it was worth about $3,600.

Reed soon smartened up, and, legend has it, returned to the jeweler and got about $1,000 more. Then he and his family returned to Meadow Creek, where John partnered with a wealthy landowner, a minister, and his brother-in-law. Before long, one of the landowner’s slaves found a 28-pound specimen worth more than $6,600.

Conrad Reed’s Sunday diversion, the first documented gold strike in the United States, made his family wealthy over the years. North Carolina led the nation in gold production until the California gold rush began in 1848. The Reed Gold Mine remains open for tours.

C’est la Vie

In 1965, French lawyer Andre-Frangois Raffray agreed to purchase an apartment in Arles, France, from a 90-year-old woman. Under the arrangement, he would pay her 2,500 francs (about $500) a month until she died. Upon her death, the apartment would become his. (Such arrangements are common in France.)

Thirty years later, Raffray died at age 77, having paid about $184,000 for an apartment that he had never used. His widow continued to pay the apartment’s owner, Jeanne Calment, until August 4, 1997, when Calment died at age 122, setting a world record for longevity.

Alice Cary, a longtime contributor, grew up watching Let’s Make a Deal.

Tired of weeding your garden? Then don’t! Change the way you think about weeds. Some weeds can help you to determine where to plant perennial flowers that don’t require rich soil or find the most fertile ground for vegetables. They also encourage beneficial bugs to visit your garden.

Weeds Tell a Lot About Your Soil

Weeds help you to assess current soil conditions. This is a long-held principle best explained by American botanist Frederic E. Clements (1874–1945), who wrote, “Each plant is an indicator ... the product of the conditions under which it grows, and is thereby a measure of these conditions.”

As you survey your soil, remember that you can learn a lot more from a variety of weeds growing together in one area than from a single species. For example...

Weeds Act Like Fertilizer

Many “weeds,” such as comfrey, wild mustard, and most clover, have deep roots that penetrate the subsoil, where they harvest valuable nutrients and trace minerals far beyond the reach of other garden plants. As the weeds gradually decompose, the nutrients are recycled back into the soil. For example...

That’s not all: As the annual weeds chickweed, common mallow, lamb’s-quarter, mayweed, and purslane die back, their decaying tissues contribute additional organic matter that, in turn, helps to aerate the soil and make it looser.

You can take advantage of this free fertilizer by growing these weeds as part of your rotation. Simply broadcast seeds onto the soil (an average of 1 1/2 cups to a 100-square-foot area should do just fine), work them in with a rake, and then cover with additional soil to a depth three times the diameter of a seed.