By Sam Wein
Until the late fifth century, an ancient Roman fertility rate held during February allowed young men to select the names of virgin girls from boxes who would become their “companions” for the year. In A.D. 497, Pope Galasius, anxious to replace the pagan rite of passage, decided to place names of male and female saints in the boxes. The spiritual “overseer” of this new lottery would be St. Valentine, who, while imprisoned some 200 years earlier, wrote his last love letter to his beloved and signed it, “from your Valentine.”
• The first toilet ever seen on television was on “Leave It to Beaver.”
• Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson grew “Cannabis sativa” (marijuana) on their plantations.
• In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City hung Matisse’s “Le Bateau” upside down for 47 days before an art student noticed the error.
• A law in Oblong, Ill., makes it a crime to make love while fishing on your wedding day.
• There is enough energy in 10 minutes of one hurricane to match all the nuclear stockpiles of the world.
• One hundred years ago, only 8 percent of homes in the United States had a telephone, and a three-minute call from Denver to New York cost $11.
• Double entry bookkeeping began among Northern Italian merchants around 1200 A.D.
• In his history, “A History of the Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire,” Edward Gibbon wrote: “As long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than on their benefactors, the thirst for military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.”
• The first graves in Arlington National Cemetery were dug by James Parks, a former Arlington Estate slave. Buried in Section 15, James Parks is the only person buried in the cemetery who was also born on the property.
• In 1475 A.D., the Vatican librarian Bartolemo Sacchi Platina published the first cookbook, “Concerning Honest Pleasure and Physical Well Being.”
• Suspenders were invented in 1799 by Orange Webb, a shipping merchant, to pay off debts.
Wein is a Los Altos resident.
