Old entries will stay archived at this page: http://www.rickbeyer.net/astonish

The year was 1988, and I was a producer for a Boston TV station. The wise elders there generally kept me inside the newsroom, chained to a desk, where I could provide brilliant direction for those poor souls out in the field. My job was to offer reporters guidance in their never ending search for Truth, or if Truth was in short supply, at least something to fill a minute and a half on the 11 o'clock News.

But as the 1988 primary season began, the powers that be deemed it important for me to expand my horizons. So I was sent up into the great rolling stretch of suburbia that constitutes southern New Hampshire to help cover the first in the nation New Hampshire Primary. Here was my chance to put all my years of education and accumulated political acumen to work.

My first assignment was to field produce a live interview with Bob Dole. I poured him a glass of water, fixed his tie, and reminded him what state he was in. A real test of my skills!

On my second day I interviewed Mike Dukakis. He told me he was not a technocrat. For some reason my bosses weren't interested in this piece of exclusive news. So instead we showed a picture of Mike Dukakis whistling. I didn't know what he was whistling, which suggested to me the need to beef up my investigative reporting skills.

On Day three I was assigned to cover Vice-President Bush on his whistle-stop bus tour through Southern new Hampshire. Up until then I wasn't even aware that busses had whistles. The first event was at a truck stop where I was able to observe the vaunted national media in action. They all crowded into the gift stories like a gang of drunken Hells Angels, and bought hats with four letter words on them. Hats that said: “S___ happens.” The vice president thought the hats were funny, and couldn't stop giggling at them. That of course was not news. Then he climbed into an 18 wheeler and drove it around the parking lot, with Secret Service men hanging off the side. That of course was news. I complimented myself that I could tell the difference.

After three days of generating this hard-hitting political coverage, the station suddenly decided to send me back to Boston. I was too valuable inside, they said, to waste my considerable talents outside. What a shame. I was just getting the hang of it.

Now I watch from the sidelines. Never again will I adjust Bob Dole's tie, or chase the Vice President around a truck-stop. But I remain proud of my unique contributions to the American political dialogue.

This sequel intersects my own life in so many places I began to think it had been made just for me. There was a painful book signing—a unique form of self-torture I have engaged in numerous times. There’s a sequence shot at Mount Vernon—a place where I just recently shot a short film, which will shown there as part of a new exhibit starting on President’s day. An important scene takes place during the White House Easter Egg Hunt—I just finished a piece for The History Channel on said event. It is followed by a scene in the Oval Office—I’ve been there. (Okay, I’ve stood in the doorway and looked in, but that is still pretty damn cool.)

There is also an extended sequence inside the Library of Congress, a place with which I am very familiar, having visited numerous times for research purposes. I found a terrific article about the shooting of the film, in which I learned that they used a helium balloon to lift a lighting set-up to the top of the 160 foot dome in the reading room to light it during the all-night shooting there.

The move is, of course, preposterous in countless ways. But it also is chock full of real, little known history stories, such as the tale of the Resolute Desks, which play a major role in the plot. Critics may moan and groan, but I think it is fantastic that one of the most popular movies of the Christmas season puts history and historians on a pedestal. Hoorah!

Now I am using words like "supposedly" and "allegedly" because a quick search of the net turned up a Wikipedia entry which suggested that there is a lack of solid evidence backing up this claim. The book cites several sources, and everybody seems to agree that there have indeed been restaurants open in this time since the Sung Dynasty (A.D. 960-1279) so it seems very possible.

Check out my op-ed piece “Granite doesn’t last forever” on today’s Ideas page of the new online publication The Politico.

BTW, The Politico is a multi-media publication launched in January, 2007 with the mission of covering the politics of Capitol Hill and of the presidential campaign, and the business of Washington lobbying. It has proven fabulously successful at drawing online readers and making a name for itself.

1) A pile of The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told on the under $20 table (a dozen of which have already sold at that store)

2) Eight copies of The Greatest War Stories Never Told on the octagon at the very front of the store (four of which have sold in the last week)

3) Six copies of The Greatest Stories Never Told also on the octagon at the very front of the store.

Knowing your books are out there for the public to buy a week before Christmas: Priceless

The Lexington Historical Society owned this weather vane for years. It used to sit upstairs at Buckman Tavern, leaning against an old bed, in the part of the house used for storage. No one paid a great deal of attention to it. I have been a part-time guide at the building for several years, and have walked by it on the way to the bathroom numberless times, usually without a second glance.

The Historical Society decided this year to “de-accession” the weathervane from it’s collection. In other words, to sell it. A very sensible decision, since it is not connected with the Society's main effort, to interpret the story of April 19,1775 through our historic houses. And the sale might generate some much need money to help fund upcoming restoration/renovation projects.

Auctioneers at the Skinner Auction House in Boston suggested that the weathervane might sell for as much as 30-50 thousand dollars.

They were wrong.

The weather vane sold at auction on November 4, 2007 for $941,000. Scuttlebut has it that the buyer was Ralph Lauren’s brother.

Wow.

(BTW, I apologize for not writing any blog entries lately, but I am back on the case and expect to be blogging a couple of times a week. Cheers!)

George W. Bush, for instance, is related to Franklin Roosevelt, Humphrey Bogart, and Alec Baldwin. (Who would the black sheep be in that family?) All are descended from John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley, who came across on the Mayflower in 1620. And none of them might have had a chance to be born except for a dramatic rescue at sea on the Mayflower that saved Howland from sleeping with the fishes.

Imagine the jokes if the first president of our country (not to mention the nation’s capital) were named Hertburn. It could easily have happened. Back in 1183, the King of England gave a knight named William De Hertburn the village of Wessyington in return for his services. De Hertburn showed his gratitude by changing his name to Wessyington. (It probably didn’t take a lot of convincing.) Over the years that became corrupted to...oh I think you can guess…Washington. And so we were saved from “Hertburn, D.C.” Although we still get heartburn over what happens there.

It isn’t only presidents’ pedigrees that hold such tasty pieces of history candy. There’s the things they did while they were working their way up to the top job. Grover Cleveland was a hangman. Abraham Lincoln took part in a duel—the broad sword was his weapon of choice. Lyndon Johnson effectively launched his political career in a bathroom—with no toe tapping. Richard Nixon engineered a break-in at law school. Jimmy Carter once filed a UFO report. And Jerry Ford was a glamorous NY model. (No, I’m not making that up. He was actually on the cover of Cosmo back in the day, and also had a spread in Life magazine.)

And let’s not overlook their behavior while they were in the White house. John Quincy Adams liked to swim naked every day in the Potomac. Sometimes people came out and hid behind the bushes to watch. (That would be quite a tourist draw today.) Thomas Jefferson wrote his own version of the gospel; apparently Mathew, Mark, Luke and John weren’t quite enough for him. Woodrow Wilson raised sheep on the White House lawn to demonstrate his support for the troops. (In case you’re wondering, the sheep meant that the Wilsons could reduce the size of the landscaping crew, and also sell the wool for charity.) No mention if there were any black sheep there.

What are the odds, you might ask, when looking at the cousinage of Obama and Cheney? But what are the odds that a president could have someone walk up to him, try to fire two pistols from eight feet away, and have both of them misfire? It happened to Andrew Jackson, and experts say the odds were 125,000 to one against it. About the same as the odds that Dick Cheney will someday appear on the Daily Show with John Stewart. What, for that matter, are the odds that one president could have had his life saved by a song, another by a speech, and another by a movie he made 42 years earlier? Yet each of those things happened.

It’s the same for the candidates as it is for the 43 men who have held the nation’s highest office. (50 men if you include the 7 presidents before Washington, but that’s another story.) We know what makes them famous. It’s what we don’t know that makes them endlessly fascinating.

For more interesting presidential tales, check out my new book The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told.