The hills are alive. This is true, even without the music. But Maria Franziska von Trapp was there to see it, most likely filling those hills with singing.
Today is her birthday, born September 28, 1914, in a little place called “Zell am See,” Salzburg. Back then, it was part of Austria-Hungary.
We all know the story, thanks to the 1959 Broadway musical and the 1965 Academy Award-winning Best Picture The Sound of Music.
Maria Agatha Franziska Gobertina von Trapp was the second-oldest daughter of Georg von Trapp and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp. Who can ever forget those Trapp Family Singers, pitching out do-re-me? In their matching curtain outfits.
In the movie, she was portrayed by Heather Menzies as the character “Louisa.”
In real life, she died at age 99. Maria was the last surviving sibling portrayed in the film. She had settled in Stowe, Vermont, and passed just seven months before her 100th birthday.
They were among the millions of people affected by Hitler’s insanity. The family fled Austria after the German annexation of Austria. They feared for their lives because they declined to sing at Hitler’s birthday party. Not only that, their father, Georg von Trapp, refused to accept a commission in Nazi Germany’s Kriegsmarine. So. With a little help from their friends, they got the heck out of dodge.
They emigrated to the United States in 1938, settled in Vermont in 1942. And they kept on singing and performing throughout the new country. It is a good thing they discovered their voices and kept on singing.
The movie was one of my favorites when I was a kid. We had the album, and I would sing with all my might. Me, a name, I call myself. Fa, a long, long way to run. At any rate, the hills came to the city, thanks to the Von Trapps.
That’s not all that came to the city. Trapp rhymes with Crapp. And thanks to Thomas Crapper, we had the gift of modern plumbing in our home. This is his birthday, too, born September 28, 1836.
Thomas was an English businessman, a plumber, and of course, an inventor. He founded Thomas Crapper & Co in London. It was known as a sanitary equipment company. Toilets.
More than anything, Crapper held nine patents, three of them for water closet improvements such as the floating ballcock.
Yes, folks, the good old floating ballcock. We all know it. That’s the thing that tells the toilet tank how high the water should be. The flusher ball. Without it, we’d all be lost. It is also what always comes unhooked when you have to reach in the tank and grab the little chain, putting it back on the ballcock arm. I’m deathly afraid the Tidy Bowl man will be inside each time I do this.
But I digress. Crapper’s company owned the world’s first bath, toilet, and sink showroom in King’s Road. Crapper was noted for the quality of his products and received several royal warrants. I am thankful he discovered what he did.
It would appear I covered both ends of things with today’s post. We have the Von Trapp’s singing from their little oval mouths. And then, we have Thomas Crapper, making sure we have a fitting place for the other direction.
These are a few of my favorite things.
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The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
— Arthur C. Clarke
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All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
— Galileo Galilei
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When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.
— William Arthur Ward
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Not a big load of crap.
