Patriotic Peeps, flying anvils and other oddities of the day

Founding Father John Adams called for the Fourth of July to be celebrated with “bells, bonfires and illuminations.” And Arkansas’ fireworks dealers stand ready to make it happen. Fireworks are so much a part of the Southern celebration that, as comedian Jeff Foxworthy says, “You may be a redneck if your lifetime goal is to own a fireworks stand.”
Founding Father John Adams called for the Fourth of July to be celebrated with “bells, bonfires and illuminations.” And Arkansas’ fireworks dealers stand ready to make it happen. Fireworks are so much a part of the Southern celebration that, as comedian Jeff Foxworthy says, “You may be a redneck if your lifetime goal is to own a fireworks stand.”

The Fourth of July comes loaded with the famous history of Paul Revere's ride, the Minutemen and the rockets' red glare. But some of the day's lesser-known details are apt to be lost like potato-chip crumbs through the cracks in a picnic table.


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Like John Hancock's penmanship, like Sam Adams' beer -- and like these pages from the history of the forgotten Fourth:

SIGN YOUR JOHN HANCOCK

The expression "John Hancock," to mean a person's signature, started with the Continental Congress of 1776, according to the Holidays, Festivals and Celebrations of the World Dictionary.

Merchant and American patriot Hancock was first to sign the Declaration in big, bold swirls of ink. Hancock's John Hancock is more than twice the size of Benjamin Franklin's, bigger than Thomas Jefferson's and outdoes all the rest of the document's 56 signatures.

Hancock is quoted as saying something like, "There! -- even King George can read that one."

CAN'T READ THE MENU?

TRY BEN FRANKLIN GLASSES

Nothing says independence like another year's flock of white Peeps, candy chickens with red and blue sprinkles. But celebrants didn't always fare so well.

Philadelphia's City Tavern claims to have been the site of the nation's first Fourth of July celebration, in 1777. The Founding Fathers quaffed a round or three at the landmark tavern other times as well.

History does not record the menu -- not like turkey for Thanksgiving. Dried venison, maybe, bread and cheese were the bar foods of the day, although today's City Tavern has upscaled to fried tofu, the way Franklin liked it ($17.95).

CAMPING TONIGHT

Food was bad and scarce on both sides during the Revolutionary War, according to Smithsonian.com.

World War I provided doughnuts, and World War II was synonymous with chipped beef on toast, a gloppy dish that survived the war to come back as Stouffer's frozen creamed chipped beef. But today's backyard cookout carries over practically nothing of the fare that freezing soldiers choked down 240 years ago.

Still, it's not too late to serve party guests an authentic taste of the American Revolution -- "firecakes," pasty splots of flour and water, burned over an open fire.

TROUBLE BREWING

IN BOSTON HARBOR

Samuel Adams beer's connection to the Founding Father is that both came from Boston. The Colonial Sam Adams never brewed beer, according to the magazine Mental Floss.

He did, though, try his hand at running his father's business, a malt house that sold the makings of beer. Like beer, the business tanked.

OLD TIMES, SOME FORGOTTEN

Parades and cookouts are Fourth of July traditions, but some of the day's once-common festivities have gone away like the last scrape of baked beans.

Old-time celebrants staged mock funerals for England's King George III, according to History.com. He spoiled the fun by actually dying in 1820.

And the town blacksmith traditionally stepped up for one of the day's big events, the frontier Fourth of July anvil shoot. The fun called for one anvil on top of another with a generous charge of black powder in the middle, set off with a fuse.

Wham! -- the detonation could blow a 100-pound anvil 100 or more feet in the air. Risks were those associated with falling anvils.

TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING

Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams fizzled out -- died on the same day, July 4, 1826 -- and James Monroe on July 4, 1831.

But President Calvin Coolidge was born July 4, 1872.

A person who is born on the Fourth of July is a real-life nephew of his Uncle Sam and most gloriously a Yankee Doodle Dandy, according to the early 20th-century song by George M. Cohan: "[I'm a] Yankee Doodle Dandy," not to be confused with "Yankee Doodle."

MIND THE MUSIC

AND THE STEP

"Yankee Doodle" is a Revolutionary War ditty that recounts how Yankee Doodle "stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni." But why -- what was he thinking?

The British sang and marched to "Yankee Doodle" on the first day of the Revolutionary War, according to the Library of Congress. The Brits made fun of the American Colonists, and Yankee Doodle was just the bumpkin they had in mind -- a yokel, or even more sneeringly said: a "doodle."

Dumber than the average doodle, in fact, he was a doodle dandy. So dumb, he thought a feather in his cap made him as dapper as an Englishman.

"Macaroni" meant more than pasta at the time. It referred to a certain class of English gentleman whose high-class travels had left him with a taste for such refined cuisine as Italian noodles.

But rather than take the insult, the Colonists took to "Yankee Doodle" as a catchy tune worth stealing. They made it their own with proud new lyrics:

There was Captain Washington/ Upon a slapping stallion/ Giving orders to his men,/ I guess there was a million.

And what became of Yankee Doodle Dandy after the war? He's still around.

The word "doodle" is the likely source of another word that once meant a doofus or a dandy -- a dude. But "dude" has duplicitous other meanings in current lingo.

The word "dude" implies a laid-back, no-hugging sort of young men's fellowship as defined in The Atlantic Monthly. And it goes with the image of a rumpled Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski.

The doodle abides.

Style on 07/03/2016

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