A Hiccup of Memory
Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, where I entertain you and in return, you send me humiliating personal anecdotes on a subject of my choosing.
I often take note of the names of my many subscribers, particularly the ones who are unconventional or iconoclastic or unwise enough to actually pay for this aberrant product. The other day I noticed a subscriber named Charles Osborne, a man who frequently issues trenchant comments in the Comments section. Something about the name seemed familiar to me, journalistically.
When I Googled that name, I found no fitting confirmation, journalism-wise. I seem to have conflated Charles Osborne with two other men: Charles Osgood, the late, distinguished TV newsman and commentator, and Charles Kuralt, the other late, distinguished TV newsman and commentator. Neither was Charles Osborne, obviously.
Hang on with me here. This is going to get more interesting.
Mr. Osgood was a pretty normal, straitlaced news guy. Mr. Kuralt was not. His folksy, poetic, life-affirming musings on beguiling oddities of life made him something of a national treasure, a beloved figure in the American home and hearth.. But he was hiding something from the world. The world he was hiding it from included his wife of 35 years and their two grown daughters.
Charles Kuralt had another family, a different set of wife and kids. The secret wife — they weren’t actually married but were companions and lovers for more than 20 years —lived in San Francisco; Kuralt had rendezvoused with her on a log cabin they built in Montana. His regular family knew about the cabin, but not its occasional intent. Kuralt always referred to it as his “private place,” where he went to write in solitude.
Secret Wife’s kids thought of him as Dad, though they were from her first marriage. He paid for their support, and hers. His actual wife — with whom he lived in New York City — didn’t find out about this double life until 1997 after Kuralt died and Wife #2 showed up to contest the will, with a letter, written by Kuralt in his final days, giving the cabin to her. She won the lawsuit.
Interesting! But but not … satisfying, until I discovered there was indeed a famous Charles Osborne. Not a journalist, not my guy, but another Charles Osborne. He is the gritty, grizzled, Appalachian-looking fella whose photo is at the top of this column. That Charles Osborne holds the Guinness World Record for the longest attack of hiccups, which lasted for 68 years from 1922 to 1990. He died a year later, at 98.
That Charles Osborne became a hiccuping ack-ack gun one day, at 29, when he was hanging a 350-pound hog carcass for butchering. He felt dizzy from the strain, and collapsed on the ground. When he stood up he was hiccuping. A doctor would conclude that he ruptured a tiny blood vessel in his brainstem, next to the vagus and phrenic nerves, which control the diaphragm, which, when it twitches, causes hiccups.
So. Was my quest over? It was not. That is because I am a hound dog. I keep gnawing at bones in the quest for a morsel of meat.
See, I did have my Charles Osborne’s email address. So I used it. He responded.
He was a man of my era, born a Brit, but he had not heard about his hiccuping namesake until 20 years ago, or so.
And then he wrote this:
“However….
“Back in school I was often afflicted with hiccups. And I had no shortage of helpful dorm-mates trying to help. I had recently purchased the newly introduced Hewlett-Packard HP-55 handheld calculator — the one with the built-in timer.
“During a prolonged bout I came up with the idea — I am an engineer — to time the hiccups and run, on the calculator, a statistical analysis of the spacing. After a quick programming I was ready!
“I hic’d, and hit the ‘record’ key and watched the timer readout, counting seconds. And I watched. And watched. No more hics. After a minute or so I concluded that when the hiccups knew they would be useful, they got bored and left.
“Subsequent rounds were cured with the same procedure. I assume that the intense concentration on the timer, anticipating the next spasm interfered with… something.
“It still works on neighbors and friends alike to their — and my — amazement some half century later.”
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So there you have it, readers. My hiccup of memory resulted, in an ugly, roundabout bone-gnawing way, in what might, finally, be:
The cure for hiccups.
Today’s Weekend challenge:
Tell us something really interesting that you once stumbled into. Could be falling down an information rabbit hole, as I did, or getting lost but finding something remarkable because of it, or anything else that seems to generally fit “stumbled into.” I’ll be lenient if it’s a good, true tale.
As always, send ‘em here:
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Today’s extraneous Gene Pool Gene Poll:
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Good. We’re done here unless you want to become part of the unconventional, iconoclastic unwise coterie: