I Reek, Therefore I Am

I remember a guy on the Johnny Carson show who was a bus boy who cleaned Richard Nixon's spot while he had dinner with Nikita Kruschev during Kruschev's visit in the late 50's. Nixon had only taken one or two bites out of his sandwich (Nixon had been doing all the talking) and the bus boy felt it was so important he simply could not throw it away. He wrapped it and froze it, and it became the cornerstone of his uneaten sandwiches collection. The guy said he had 3,000 sandwiches from all kinds of famous people, I believe, and was hoping Johnny would let him have an unfinished Carson sandwich.

That story reminds me of how my cousin Gary got started with his baseball card business. It began with a lucky find as we were exiting the 1963 All Star Game. I kicked something with my foot, he bent down and retrieved a baseball that had been signed by all of the National League All Stars. Years later, while a fireman in Ponca City, Oklahoma, Gary Reed made this ball the centerpiece of his baseball cards and collectibles business.

In the same vein, Horace Waterman has the world's largest collection of discarded scraps of paper from the wastebaskets of famous writers. His family has been in the business of sifting through mountains of useless notes and discarded scraps for more than six generations. (His great great grandfather made a fortune in the blackmail business before having to flee England in the late 1800's.)

Here are some famous lines that were discarded before the memorable one's came into being. I pulled them from Waterman's eccentric Facebook pages. He even posted photos of some of them, though many were nearly illegible.

"I weep, therefore I am... in need of a tissue." ~ Rene Descartes

"Something's happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear.

There's a man with a pun over there

A-tellin' me that I'm a-kinda square." ~ Stephen Stills

"Dearest Pookie,

I'm pretty sure e = c x c x m.

What do you think?

Love, Albert" ~ Einstein

"I reek, therefore I am." ~ Rene Descartes

"In this world, nothing is sure but death and Texas." ~ W.

"When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. The one is a liberal and the other a conservative." ~ JFK

"Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life, I find. But when you try to stretch it to a triple, unless you are really fast, or lucky, they can usually peg you. It's best to let the next hitter try to knock you in." ~ JFK

"When I look at our beer bellies, I understand why women don't mistake us for gods." ~ Nietzsche

"What doesn't kill me makes me.... something, something something. FIND a Catchy something here." ~ Nietzsche

For the record, the first two stories are true. But if you believed any of these quotes were real, than P.T. Barnum's famous observation applies to you.

Have a wonderful day.