“Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but…”

The Izaak Walton League is one of America's oldest conservation groups. It was founded in 1922 by sport fishermen who wanted to preserve fish and wildlife habitat for future generations.

The League took its name from the avid English angler Izaak Walton (1593-1683).

By profession, Walton was an “ironmonger” (a dealer in iron and hardware). During his time off, he loved to fish. He also enjoyed writing.

Walton’s best known work is The Compleat Angler, one of the earliest and most celebrated books ever written about recreational fishing.

It was first published on October 10, 1653 and has been in print ever since.

There’s a famous quotation The Compleat Angler that’s included in many books of quotations.

But it’s not about fishing. And, it wasn’t coined by Walton himself.

It’s an observation about strawberries and God that Walton credited to “Dr. Boteler,” who is generally believed to be the English physician, Dr. William Butler. (Variant spellings of names and words were common back then.)

The famed quote is in this passage comparing the pleasures of angling to those ruby fruits:

“No life, my honest scholar, no life so happy and so pleasant as the life of a well-governed angler; for when the lawyer is swallowed up with business, and the statesman is preventing or contriving plots, then we sit on cowslip-banks, hear the birds sing, and possess ourselves in as much quietness as these silent silver streams, which we now see glide so quietly by us. Indeed, my good scholar, we may say of angling, as Dr. Boteler said of strawberries, ‘Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did’; and so, if I might be judge, God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent recreation than angling.”

The strawberries referred to in The Compleat Angler were not the big ones modern consumers are familiar with.

Those weren’t developed until the early 1800s.

In Walton’s time, the strawberries eaten in Europe were either wild strawberries or cultivated varieties of wild strawberries that were smaller than today’s varieties.

The large strawberries we buy today were “made” by humans through the process of selective breeding.

Of course, if you’ve ever eaten wild strawberries when they are perfectly ripe, you know that man still hasn’t made a better berry.

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“The physician can bury his mistakes…”

Many books of quotations include a famous humorous quote by the eminent American architect Frank Lloyd Wright:

      “The physician can bury his mistakes, but the 
         architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”

This quote is usually given without any context, except to say that it comes from an article in the October 4, 1953 issue of The New York Times Magazine. (It’s sometimes simply cited as being from The New York Times, but was technically in the paper’s “magazine” section.)

I had once assumed that the quote was from an interview. However, when I looked it up in the online New York Times archive, I discovered that the article was written by Wright himself and that origin of the famous quote actually dates back to 1931.

When the NYT article was published in 1953, Wright was 86 years old. He was renowned as one of the greatest architects in the world. And, he was working on two of his final major projects: the Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma (his only skyscraper) and his amazing, spiral-shaped masterpiece, the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

Wright’s NYT article was essentially his own overview of his career, starting in 1893 when he left the firm of his mentor Louis Henry Sullivan and began designing his famed “Prairie Houses.”

He opened the article with this anecdote:

       Of course, I will never forget the sensations when the Winslow House was built in 1893 in Oak Park [Illinois], the year I left Adler & Sullivan and started my own practice. All Oak Park and River Forest began prowling around the place: I remember climbing up into an upper part of the building during construction to listen to comments. I pulled the ladder up and waited. In came a young fellow with a couple of young women and the fellow said, “Have you seen the man who built this? God, he looks as if he had a pain.” Another one said, “They say this cost $30,000, but I can’t see it.” So I learned my lesson: I never listened like that again.

Wright went on to mention many of his most famous buildings and innovations in the article, including his new projects, the Price Tower and the Guggenheim.

He ended the article by noting some advice he’d given to young architects in a 1931 lecture in Chicago.

In the NYT piece, Wright briefly summarized that advice and gave the following version of his view on the difference between doctors and architects:

“The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines — so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.”

The first part of that quote is what shows up in most books of quotations.

The second part that advises architects to build their first buildings far from home may reflect Wright’s unpleasant eavesdropping experience at the Winslow House back in 1893.

In Wright’s 1931 lecture (published later that year in his book Two Lectures on Architecture), the two parts of the famed “plant vines” quotation are reversed. They appear as the 11th of 14 key recommendations Wright gave to young architects. Here are all 14…

     1. Forget the Architectures of the world except as something good in their way and time.
     2. Do none of you go into Architecture to get a living unless you love architecture as a principle at work, for its own sake — prepared to be as true to it as to your mother, your comrade, or yourself.
     3. Beware of the Architectural school except as the exponent of engineering.
     4. Go into the field where you can see the machines and methods at work that make the modern buildings, or stay in construction direct and simple until you can work naturally into building-design from the nature of construction.
     5. Immediately begin to form the habit of thinking “why” concerning any effects that please or displease you.
     6. Take nothing for granted as beautiful or ugly, but take every building to pieces, and challenge every feature.  Learn to distinguish the curious from the beautiful.
     7. Get the habit of analysis—analysis will in time enable synthesis to become your habit of mind.
     8. “Think in Simples” as my old master used to say—meaning to reduce the whole to its parts in simplest terms, getting back to first principles.  Do this in order to proceed from generals to particulars and never confuse or confound them or yourself be confounded by them.
     9. Abandon as poison the American idea of the “quick turnover.” To get into practice “half-baked” is to sell out your birthright as an Architect for a mess of pottage, or to die pretending to be an Architect.
     10. Take time to prepare. Ten years’ preparation for preliminaries to Architectural practice is little enough for any Architect who would rise “above the belt” in true Architectural appreciation or practice.
     11. Then go as far away as possible from home to build your first buildings. The physician can bury his mistakes—but the Architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
     12. Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken-house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in Art, beyond the money-matter. It is the quality of character that really counts. Character may be large in the little or little in the large.
     13. Enter no Architectural competition under any circumstances except as a novice.  No competition ever gave to the world anything worth having in Architecture. The jury itself is a picked average. The first thing done by the jury is to go through all the designs and throw out the best and the worst ones so as an average, it can average upon an average. The net result of any competition is an average by the average of averages.
     14. Beware of the shopper for plans. The man who will not grubstake you in prospecting for ideas in his behalf will prove a faithless client.

I think some of Wright’s advice has application far beyond the realm of architecture. My favorite is the last part of #12: “It is the quality of character that really counts. Character may be large in the little or little in the large.”

Frank Lloyd Wright, who died in 1959 (the year the Guggenheim Museum was completed), clearly brought a huge amount of character to everything he did.

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“The forgotten middle class…”

On October 3, 1991, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, held a press conference in Little Rock to announce that he was officially running as a candidate to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. 

It became become closely associated with him after he won the Democratic nomination and used it in subsequent stump speeches during the 1992 presidential election.

In his speech on October 3, 1991, Clinton spoke of “the forgotten middle class” three times.

At the beginning, after thanking his wife Hillary, his daughter Chelsea and his friends and supporters, he said:

“All of you, in different ways, have brought me here today, to step beyond a life and a job I love, to make a commitment to a larger cause: preserving the American Dream; restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class; reclaiming the future for our children.”

In the middle of the speech, Clinton said:

“Together I believe we can provide leadership that will restore the American dream — that will fight for the forgotten middle class.”

Finally, he closed by saying:

“This is not just a campaign for the Presidency – it is a campaign for the future, for the forgotten hard-working middle class families of America who deserve a government that fights for them.”

After that, Clinton used and reused the term “the forgotten middle class” many times in his stump speeches on the way to winning the Democratic nomination and then the presidential election of November 1992.

So, it’s no wonder that his use of the phrase is the most famous.

But he didn’t coin it.

Republican politician Alfonse D’Amato used the slogan, “A Fighter for the Forgotten Middle Class” in his successful 1980 campaign to win a New York Senate seat.

Before that, in 1977, “the forgotten middle class” was used in newspaper interviews by Pat Caddell, the pollster and political strategist for then Democratic Presidential Candidate Jimmy Carter.

Before that, it was used by a number of other politicians and candidates in the 1960s.

And, of course, “the forgotten middle class” was inspired by a similar rhetorical phrase made famous in the early 1930s by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

But we’re not quite at the bottom of the quote pyramid yet.

Roosevelt’s famed phrase was inspired by the “the forgotten man,” a term coined by Yale social scientist William Graham Sumner.

He used it as the title of a scholarly essay that was published in his 1883 book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.

Sumner may have been inspired by some earlier phrase but, if so, it has apparently been forgotten.

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“Too cheap to meter” – the infamous nuclear power misquote…

In the annals of the long, still-ongoing debate over nuclear power, the most infamous words are undoubtedly “too cheap to meter.”

The origin of this phrase is a speech given on September 16, 1954 by Lewis L. Strauss, a former Navy officer who was appointed Chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in 1953 by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Ever since Strauss gave that speech, many anti-nuclear activists have assumed and claimed that he literally said electricity from nuclear plants would be too cheap to meter.

Of course, nuclear power did not turn out to be “cheap” from a cost-per-kilowatt-hour perspective. At least, not compared to traditional energy sources like coal, oil and hydropower, which have been economically “cheap” but are arguably more “costly” in terms of their long term impacts on the environment (barring incidents like the Fukushima meltdown).

Anyway, putting aside that debate, it has long been clear that electricity from fission-powered nuclear plants is not and never will be “too cheap to meter.”

Thus, for decades, the phrase has been ridiculed and held up as the prime iconic example of absurd claims made by supporters of nuclear power.

Except that Strauss didn’t actually say what opponents of nuclear power think he said.

The focus of his speech to the National Association of Science Writers in New York City on September 16th, 1954 dealt with how modern scientific research, in general, would lead to better lives for future generations. And, his meter remark was about electric energy, in general, not nuclear power in particular.

As reported in the New York Times the next day, what Strauss really said was this:

“Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter...will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”

For an excellent in-depth look at the facts about Strauss’ speech and his “too cheap to meter” remark, read the page about it on the Canadian Nuclear Society website.

And, regardless of which side of the nuclear power debate you’re on, you might want to keep in mind an old saying that applies to any type of energy that is used to generate significant amounts of electricity — “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

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“Have Gun - Will Travel” lives on (as a linguistic “snowclone” and via modern digital media)

Today, the linguistic formula “Have X [some work tool] - Will Y [do something]” is firmly cemented into our language.

Prior to 1957, it wasn’t.

Then, on September 14, 1957, the great Western TV series Have Gun - Will Travel premiered on the CBS network. (The first episode was titled “Three Bells to Perdido.”)

Soon after that, variations of the show’s title became what linguists now call a “snowclone.”

This term, coined by economist Glen Whitman in 2004 in an exchange on the Language Log weblog, is applied to well-known clichés or “phrasal templates” that are recycled in multiple ways with varying words.

Examples are catchphrases like “We don’t need no stinking X,” or “I'm not an X, but I play one on TV” or advertising slogans like “Got X?”

The television show Have Gun – Will Travel starred Richard Boone as the main character, Paladin.

Yep, just Paladin. One name. Or you could call him Mister Paladin.

Paladin was what could be called a problem solving consultant, though most people thought of him as a professional gunfighter for hire.

He tried to make sure he only worked for people who were on the right side of some issue or problem. And, he tried to settle things without violence if he could.

But he could draw and fire a gun faster than, well, anyone he had to deal with in the show.

So, if you drew against Paladin, you were probably a bad guy or stupid. And, if you drew against Paladin, you’d probably end up dead.

In work mode, Paladin dressed in a black and wore a Colt .45 six-shooter in a distinctive holster embossed with a metal image of a chess knight, a piece associated with medieval knights in armor, once referred to as “paladins.”

When he wasn’t working, Paladin lived the life of a fancily-dressed dude in San Francisco.

That’s where people could contact him, as noted in his enigmatic business card, which also had the image of a chess knight, along with the memorable words:

       “Have Gun Will Travel.
              Wire Paladin
             San Francisco”

Any messages that came for Paladin would usually be delivered by the other regular character in the series, Hey Boy (played by actor Kam Tong).

Hey Boy was a Chinese bellhop at Paladin’s residence, the Carlton Hotel. He served as kind of an on-call gofer for Paladin.

Have Gun - Will Travel originally aired for six glorious seasons, from 1957 to 1963. It was so popular that it became one of the few TV shows that spawned a radio version. The radio series starred popular character actor John Dehner as Paladin and ran on the CBS Radio Network for two years, from 1958 to 1960.

I remember watching the TV series every week when I was a kid, on my family’s grainy black-and-white TV. And, I still know the words of the show’s theme song “The Ballad of Paladin,” sung by country music star Johnny Western at the end of each episode.

Nowadays, the show can be viewed streaming online on Youtube and elsewhere or on DVD. It can also sometimes be seen on some of the cable TV channels that feature “classic television” shows.

They don’t make many shows today that I like as much as Have Gun – Will Travel. But I will admit the technology for viewing is better than the TV set my family had in our living room in 1957.

Here are some of the other famous quotes and phrases linked to the date SEPTEMBER 14:

• “Life Is Just A Bowl Of Cherries.” - Hit song from the stage show George White’s Scandals of 1931, which opened at the Apollo Theatre in New York City on September 14, 1931.

• “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” - President Calvin Coolidge, in a famous telegram about the Boston police strike that he sent to Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, on September 14, 1919.

• “Say It loud: ‘I’m Black and I'm Proud’” - Hit song by James Brown, which entered Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart on September 14, 1968.

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