Hi again, y’all. I’ll admit, I’ve been a wee bit lazy lately. I’ve not posted in three weeks. But…there’s good reason for that. My sweet Anghel of a wifey gave me some time off during this hectic time of the year due to all the tasks facing me over the past weeks. It’s time for me to get in the groove again, so, here goes!

Having taken early retirement, I still had to take a part-time job. I’m not a big believer in just sitting around and doing nothing. It’s imperative that one keeps their mind and body busy as they age for the health benefits. I was fortunate to find a good job not far from home, and there, I’ve made many new acquaintances. One, however, I really clicked with. Over my time there, he and I have had many engaging conversations about history and books, two of my greatest loves which, so happen to be, a big part of his life. And that led to an interesting event.

Our manager always hosts a Christmas party the Sunday before Christmas and everyone draws names, doing the secret Santa, or Kris Kringle thingy. As things worked out, the person who drew my name quit and my new friend made it a point to get my name because he had a specific gift he wanted to give me. And, of course, it was a book.

In our talks, we discovered we were both Stephen King fans. And he told me of a book he’d read that reminded him of King except that it wasn’t fiction. So that’s the book he wanted to share with me which led him to give it to me as a gift. Said book was The Devil In The White City: Murder, Magic and Madness At The Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson.

White City refers to the huge complex built for the 1893 World’s Fair held in Chicago. The book details the building of this city after Chicago won the right to host the fair which the United States wanted to do in hopes of upstaging the one held in Paris in 1889. And Chicago won the right to hold it, beating out several cities, especially New York who felt that they were the #1 city in America and would best represent the country, as opposed to Chicago which was most well known for the stockyards that provided meat for much of the country. That story itself is fascinating, but behind it all was the man who used the fair to pursue his great love, murder, thus the comparison to Stephen King.

King actually wrote a fictional novella based on a true-life serial killer, A Good Marriage, as well as a fictional short story about a serial killer, Springhill Jack. But the man who haunted the 1893 World’s Fair truly was a devil, killing anywhere from 27 to 200 souls, a number up for debate, but still a horrendous number.

Dr. H. H. Holmes was the perpetrator of these crimes. He built a hotel near the fair, luring many victims to their fate simply by the hotel being in a close, convenient location near the fair. Most of them were young ladies, and he actually married a few of them, committing another crime, bigamy, because he’d never divorced his first wife. He’d went to great pains in building his hotel to fit his needs. It included a gas chamber, which he used to kill some of his victims, and a crematorium. After the discovery of what went on there it was later dubbed the “murder castle.” In the vein of Jack the Ripper, he hacked and cut many of his victims and sent many of the bodies to a man who cleaned them off, returning the skeletons to Holmes which he sold to doctors and universities for research. Truly a sick, disgusting and gruesome tale, but a true one which has led to many stories and legends. Surprisingly, I’d never heard of this tale in all my years of reading and historical research.

The fair itself was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival in the New World, thus being named World’s Fair: Columbian Exposition. White was chosen as the color theme to contrast the blue of Lake Michigan in the background. The landscaping was done by Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of Central Park, who also did the grounds work at George Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate, located here in my hometown of Asheville, NC. He was a finicky planner who believed in simple work as opposed to totally ostentatious presentations.

Another notable event took place at the fair, the use of AC current to power all the lighting, basically putting an end to the war between AC current and Thomas Edison’s DC current. The great electrical engineer Nicolas Tesla demonstrated some of his inventions. Also, one of the very first night football games was played at the fair. One more interesting note was the fact that the planners wanted to create something to rival the marvel of Paris’ World’s Fair, the Eiffel Tower. After making three offers to build such a piece, the planners finally accepted the vision of George Washington Gale Ferris, who, if you recognize his surname, proceeded to build the very first Ferris Wheel. But those are just a few of the many exciting and memorable events that took place at the fair, and in no way could I ever begin to tell it all here.

I gobbled the book up, reading it in just a couple of days, enjoying it immensely. And to return the favor to my new friend, later in the week after the party, I took him a book I told him of which he’d expressed an interest in reading, E=MC: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation. And though it does tell of Einstein and other famous physicists throughout the centuries, it ties together all the work they did which led Einstein to write his Theory of Relativity, doing so in such a way that the normal man can comprehend it. To top it all off, my sweet wife, Lynndee, also gave me Stephen King’s two latest novels (which I’ll surely share with you later) making my Christmas a very, merry one.

And so ends my year, writing again about history and books, my great loves. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and I wish all of you faithful followers a Happy New Year! See ya next year! 🙂