Certain events have shaped and molded the very core of our dear country, the United States of America. Some more than others, of course. The heavy-hitters always get the headlines. But I am often fascinated by the events that mostly go unnoticed, the ones that have made the real difference.
Today is the anniversary of several of those occasions. I don’t have room for all of them here, so I’ll whittle it down to three.
First, on this August 8th in 1786, the US Congress unanimously choose the dollar as the monetary unit for the United States of America. Yes, the good old dollar. The oner, the single.
You see, once the American Revolutionary War began in 1775, the Continental Congress knew the people were going to need money. So, they began issuing paper money known as Continental currency. They were called Continentals for short. It was an odd bunch of money. Continental currency was denominated in dollars from $1 ⁄ 6 to $80, including many odd denominations in between. But, over time the value of the money went down to zip. Blinkity. Kaputzky.
So that new Congress, the now 1786 U.S. Congress, made some changes in the way the currency was going to be handled. And that is when they declared the dollar be the dollar. And those dollars came in the way of coins. We didn’t get the paper dollar bill until much later. The first $1 bill was issued in 1862 as a Legal Tender Note with a portrait of Salmon P. Chase smacked on it, the Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln.
And that is the start of the buck stopping here. At least, when Harry Truman came around, sometime later.
The next event in history is even more telling. This was the day, in 1898, when a couple of good fellows named John and Will Kellogg invented the Corn Flake. Yes, the amazing Corn Flake. Just add milk. It has been on breakfast tables all across America ever since. Well. Not all tables. As kids, we didn’t really get cereal. Eggs and fried bologna for us. But we knew what corn flakes were. Every once in a while, Mom would make a breakfast casserole with lots of eggs. She would crunch up corn flakes on top. That is as close as we came.
But those flakes started in 1898 in Battle Creek, Michigan, where the Kellogg brothers operated a sanitarium. It happened by accident, sort of.
The brothers left some cooked wheat to sit while they attended to some “pressing matters” at the sanitarium. When they got back to that cooked wheat, they found it had gone stale. Those Kelloggs, always pinching pennies, not dollars (see above). So they decided to continue to process the mixture. They forced it through rollers, hoping to obtain long sheets of the dough.
Instead, and cocka-doodle-do, they were surprised to find flakes. They toasted those flakes and served them to the patients. And apparently, this pleased the patients. This event occurred on August 8, 1894, and a patent for “Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same” was filed on May 31, 1895, and issued on April 14, 1896.
As an item of note, Will wanted to add sugar. John did not. They argued, both trying to get patents. Will is the one who started the Kellogg company and got the patent. With added sugar. You will still find it there today.
And the third and final event of note is this. In 1960 the song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” hit number one on the charts. Yes indeed. I think everyone has sung that song once. Well, everyone over 50. It was performed by Brian Hyland. And was Hyland’s only number one hit, although he made a boatload of other bubblegum-pop albums during his career. I never owned a yellow polkadot bikini and I bet I never will.
So there you have it. The Dollar. The Corn Flake. And the Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini. If that doesn’t get your flag flying high today, I don’t know what will.
God bless us, one and all.
=============
“We are what we believe we are!”
― C.S. Lewis
=============
“It’s amazing what you can see when you just sit quietly and look.”
― Jacqueline Kelly
============
“If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.”
— Noam Chomsky
=============
