Ernest Hemingway - Papa Was a Little Nuts

Ernie's life did not have a normal beginning.  His mother, not wanting a boy, put him in dresses, only gave him dolls to play with, often called him Ernestine, and told everyone he was his sister's twin (which is weird given she was a year older than him).  Ernie's father apparently just went with it, letting things continue as they were for five years.  For some strange reason, when Ernie grew up he became super hyper-masculine.  To prove just how manly he was, Ernie volunteered to be an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.  This went about as well as could be expected, with him getting wounded and hospitalized for six months, during which time he fell in love with a nurse seven years his senior.  The two were supposed to get married, but she changed her mind, calling him a little boy in the process, and leaving him with a healthy dose of relationship anxiety to go along with his gender anxiety.  Upon returning to the U.S., Ernie got a journalist job and married a woman eight years his senior named Hadley (who also happened to be his roommate’s sister).  The couple then moved to Paris.

 In Paris, Ernie became a Bohemian, writing short stories and novels (a good chunk of which Hadley lost at a train station), hanging out with the famous artists of the day, going to Spain to watch bullfights, and spending most of his time getting drunk and fighting.  Hadley for her part worked several jobs to support Ernie’s writing career, and since they were both so busy, they often left their baby son alone in the house to be babysat by their cat.  So, you know, all pretty hum-drum stuff.  It was during this time that Ernie gained literary success by writing a book about a dickless man and a slutty woman.  He then left his wife for a rich hot woman named Paulina (who he was introduced to by his wife) and moved back to the U.S.  Ernie then spent the next several years living in Key West, fishing, sailing around the Caribbean, getting drunk, and writing more books.  He also went to Africa and shot various large animals, because nothing says “macho man” quite like shooting an elephant.  In the late 1930's he worked as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War, where he pretty much became a communist.  It was at this time that he left his second wife and married a fellow war correspondent named Martha.

The new couple made their home in Cuba where Ernie wrote more books, got drunk, went fishing, and bred six toed cats.  It was also during this time that Ernie became a Soviet spy codenamed Argo, though apparently not a very good one, since he never supplied any information worth knowing.  Ernie spent the early years of World War II cruising around the Caribbean on his boat claiming he was looking for Nazi submarines, but most likely just getting tanked and hiding from his wife.  As American troops began to land in France, Ernie went with them as a war correspondent, even leading a small group of French militia for a time (which was against the Geneva Convention).  However, he spent most of the war sick in bed.  It was during this time that he left his third wife and married his fourth, a woman named Mary.  After the war, the new couple moved back to Cuba where Ernie got drunk, wrote books, and machine gunned sharks for fun.  Most of his books written at this time did not sell well, probably because they were all about old dudes getting it on with hot young broads.  However, it was also at this time that Ernie won the Nobel Prize for his book about a sad old man who can't catch a break.

Despite some near disasters, Mary and Ernie stayed together.  The pair went to Africa for a time where they got in a plane crash, then a second plane crash trying to get to the hospital, only to finally arrive to find they had been declared legally dead (which is probably why he won the Nobel Prize).  Still very much alive, Ernie then went on a fishing trip where a he was severely burned in a brushfire.  Ernie dealt with most of this by getting extremely drunk all the time, writing, and taking an African wife (which Mary seemed cool with).  Ernie then returned to Cuba, but soon after moved to Idaho, where again, he spent all his time writing, getting drunk, and becoming increasingly paranoid that the FBI was watching him (which they were).  The paranoia became so bad that Mary had Ernie go through electro-shock treatment in an attempt to cure him.  It did not work.  Not long after, Ernie blew his own brains out.  This was a bit of a family tradition given that his father, sister, and brother all did the same.  Mary dealt with Ernie's death by publishing the last of his books and becoming good friends with two of her three predecessors.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ernest_Hemingway_at_the_Finca_Vigia,_Cuba_-_NARA_-_192663.jpg

Boston Corbett - Enough Balls to Shoot John Wilkes Booth

We've all heard the term "mad hatter", but few men exemplified it quite like Thomas Corbett.  Tommy emigrated to the United States from England when he was still a child, and while living in New York, became an apprentice hat maker.  Now the hatters of the time used mercury nitrate to turn the fur of beavers and other animals into felt.  For the record, excessive exposure to mercury nitrate can lead to hallucinations, psychosis, and twitching (which people called the hatter's shakes).  This being the mid-nineteenth century, instead of wondering what might be making all the hatters go insane, people just assumed that it was an industry that attracted eccentric people.  Not to say that some people didn't suspect something, but let’s face it, changing things meant not having some pretty damn nice hats and nobody wanted that.  Tommy worked his whole life as a hatter, only taking a short break to become a homeless drunk in Boston when his wife and baby died in childbirth.  One night, after some seriously heavy drinking, a Methodist preacher found Tommy in the gutter and preached at him a while.  It must have been some mighty fine preaching because Tommy got religion, never drank again, and changed his name to Boston.

The newly christened Boston got his life back together, going to church every day, and getting a new hatter job to boot.  However, he didn't have many friends, probably because he spent all of his time preaching and praying, often stopping work to pray any time one of his co-workers cussed, which given he worked with a bunch of looney hatters, was quite often.  Boston also sermonized on street corners, bellowing about the joys of heaven and terrors of hell, earning himself a local reputation as a harmless eccentric.  To emulate Jesus, he grew his hair down past his shoulders.  Now some might say it would be unfair to call Boston a religious nut, but you can just be the judge of that after these next few sentences.  At age twenty-six, after a hard day of street sermonizing, Boston was propositioned by two prostitutes.  Deeply disturbed by what most of us would call a boner, but what Boston thought of as a one way ticket to Satan's penthouse, Boston fled to his boardinghouse, read a couple of bible verses, and then castrated himself with a pair of scissors.  Feeling holier, he ate a meal, went to church, and then finally went to see a doctor.

When the Civil War started Boston joined the Union Army, because while boners were impure, killing rebels was apparently still A-Okay.  Boston did not do well in the army.  He read out loud from his bible night and day, held unauthorized prayer meetings, refused to follow orders he thought unholy, and verbally reprimanded his superiors for using foul language.  Tiring of this shit, the army court-martialed him and were going to shoot him, but instead decided that a dishonorable discharge was probably the less crazy choice.  Boston then re-enlisted with a different army unit, because keeping accurate records hadn’t evolved past the “idea” stage back then, and promptly got himself captured and taken to Andersonville prison, a place so terrible that a quarter of the prison population died from shitting themselves to death.  As for the survivors, they though the dead were the lucky ones.  Boston was freed in a prisoner exchange five months later, after which, instead of being discharged, he was nursed back to health, promoted to sergeant, and sent off with the group responsible for hunting down John Wilkes Booth after he assassinated President Lincoln.  The army was ordered to capture Booth alive, so when they found him holed up in a barn they lit it on fire.  Boston then heroically shot him through a crack in the wall.

For not following orders, Boston was court martialed again, but then pardoned, because shooting Booth, instead of capturing him, just made things easier.  After being discharged from the army, Boston went back to being a hat maker, but was soon fired for his fanatical behavior and paranoia.  Convinced people were trying to murder him, he took to randomly pulling his pistol out and waving it around at the most inopportune moments.  Boston tried to make money by lecturing on how he killed Booth to Sunday schools and women's groups, but this failed, because nobody likes incoherent speeches and random pistol brandishings.  He then worked for the Kansas legislature as a doorman, but after pointing his pistol at several of the legislatures, was sent to an insane asylum.  A little over a year later he escaped to Minnesota, where he was presumed killed in the Great Hinckley Fire which consumed 250,000 acres and 420 people.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boston_Corbett_-_Brady-Handy.jpg

Cathay Williams - Penis Required

Cathay did not have an easy life.  First her name was Cathay, which was a really old-timey way of saying China, which is kind of weird given that she was not Chinese.  Second, she was black in pre-Civil War America, which pretty much most people agree was definitely not the cat's pajamas.  Cathay was born to a free black man and an enslaved woman, which according to the laws in Missouri at the time, made her a slave.  Cathay spent her childhood working as a house servant, seeing to the needs of the wealthy aristocratic family who owned her.  When Cathay was nineteen years old the Civil War broke out, and fearing that Missouri might at any moment break away to join the Confederacy, the Union Army occupied the state.  Now the casual observer of history might think that this would be a good thing for Cathay.  They would be wrong.  The Union Army considered captured slaves contraband, and so instead of slaving away for some rich assholes, Cathay instead was forced to slave away for a bunch of military assholes.

Over the next four years Cathay, though declared a free woman, was forced to do whatever the Union Army told her to do.  Luckily for her this was mostly just cooking and laundry.  Cathay marched with the army wherever they went, covering a good chunk of the country in doing so.  The army couldn't seem to decide whether the slaves they freed were people or property.  On one hand they did pay a wage, though a meager one, but on the other they really didn't give people like Cathay much of a choice, often transferring them to other units as though they were enlisted soldiers.  This confusion ended with the Civil War.  No, the army didn't decide that the former slaves were people, they just decided it wasn't their damn problem to figure it out.  Cathay was left free to do whatever the hell she wanted, which unfortunately, without a job, mostly looked like starving to death.

Cathay was not the kind of person to just lay down and quit.  Instead she dressed up in man clothes, changed her name to William Cathay, went to an army recruiting office, and joined one of the black only regiments that was being sent to the frontier to fight Native Americans.  Being taller than many men of the era (she was five foot nine), the recruiter didn't bat an eye when he signed her up.  Things were helped by the fact that the army's medical examination at the time mostly consisted of a drunk doctor giving you a cursory glance to make sure you probably wouldn't die within the next few days.  With her unit Cathay traveled westward through Kansas to New Mexico to guard prospectors from the Apache.  She didn't have much luck in the army.  Cathay was almost immediately hospitalized for small pox and throughout her career would be hospitalized five more times for various ailments.  Not one of these times did the doctors discover she was missing a penis, which really speaks to the hands off approach of 1860's medicine.  

After two years in the army, mostly performing garrison duty, Cathay got sick again.  The doctor, believing in new-fangled medical techniques like actually examining and touching patients, quickly discovered her secret and reported it.  Cathay was soon after discharged for her definite lack of a penis, which her commanding officer reported by stating that she had always been both physically and mentally feeble.  Cathay spent the next two years working as a cook for the army again, followed by twenty-one years of working as a laundress in Colorado.  When her health began to fail to she applied for a military pension.  The military sent out an examiner who, despite the fact all of her toes had been amputated and that she needed a crutch to get around, declared her the picture of health.  Then, to be a total jerk, he casually added that it didn't matter, since only people with penises were allowed to get military pensions.  Cathay died not long after.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cathay_Williams.gif