BoingBoing this week linked to a story in the
New York Times about "Leather Man" - a vagabond who walked the roads of western Connecticut in the late 19th century. That reminded me of a link I've saved from last year, in the
Housatonic Times, recounting his story:
From 1856 to about 1882, he roamed the countryside until he began a now-famous clockwise circuit of 365 miles every 34 days, a route he followed for about seven years until his death in 1889...
“What we do know is that as people got to know him, they feared him less and less and opened their homes to the Leatherman. It became an honor to feed him. People would miss church socials if they knew he was going to come through town, and these weren’t just ordinary townsfolk. Pretty prominent people helped him as well.”
Ms. Sutton said tanneries often left good scrap leather out for the Leatherman to use in repairing his suit, while townspeople left out food, tobacco and even money...
He was referred to as old, Ms. Sutton speculates, due to his grimy appearance and depressed demeanor. His clothing was pieced together out of small pieces of leather, stitched with wider strips of leather, which was worn over woolen underclothes...
The modern controversy centers around whether his body should be exhumed from its current mislabeled pauper's grave, subjected to forensic testing, and relocated to a different site. You can read about that at the NYT or BoingBoing.
"That reminded me of a link I've saved from last year"
ReplyDeleteThat is certainly not the first time I've read something like that on here. It sounds like you have a very large bookmark collection AND still manage to find something back. Magical!
I would really like to know what kind of software or web services you use for your bookmarks :).
Right now I have probably 1100 bookmarks of potentially-bloggable material saved. I have no doubt many of those have undergone linkrot over the years, especially the ones to news sites.
ReplyDeleteI just use the regular Firefox browser for bookmarkin and storing (into lots of folders within folders), and I keep all the blog bookmarks separate from my personal bookmarks. For retrieval I just do a regular keyword search, so when I store them I sometimes throw in some extra words to remind myself re content, rather than relying on default bookmark names.
The exhumation of his remains is part of the controversy, but the subsequent forensic testing of his remains to answer some of the questions he would not answer during his life, including possibly determining his identity, is what has many people questioning the merits of this project. The man managed to walk the equivalent of several times the circumference of the earth(25,000 miles) for over thirty years and slept outside in the woods each night. He was not willing to share information about himself or his past while he was alive, and the people of his time came to respect that, and left him alone. So should we.
ReplyDeleteDon
"Leave the Leatherman Alone.com"
It became an honor to feed him....
ReplyDeleteReminds me of the "Holy Fool" tradition found in many cultures. From The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions:
"Holy fools. Figures who subvert prevailing orthodoxy and orthopraxis in order to point to the truth which lies beyond immediate conformity. The holy fool endeavours to express the insistence of all religions that detachment from the standards of the world is the sine qua non of advance into truth."
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O101-Holyfools.html
The Leather Man doesn't seem to have had a conscious religious purpose, but it appears that folks assumed he was special in some spiritual sense.
--Swift Loris
Don, I've amended the post to include a clarification re the proposed forensic tests.
ReplyDeleteCool - Thanks for linking to the story
ReplyDeleteI remember first reading about the Leatherman in Weird U.S. some years ago. Great book if you're into the strange quirky side of America. They have a few on the states as well, I'm trying to get the one on California.
ReplyDelete