Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 21, 1993 TAG: 9301210035
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
LINT: THE FIBER OF OUR BEING
Q: Why is dryer lint always gray, even though it comes from clothes of many different colors?A: Lint is not always gray. Check your bellybutton. Bellybutton lint hews to the hue of your shirt. (We believe the collection of bellybutton lint is exacerbated by stomach hair but have not confirmed this in the lab.)
But dryer lint is usually gray, because gray is what you get when you mix fibers that are red, yellow, blue, green, black, white, etc. If all your clothes were red, you'd have reddish lint, but since you probably have a multichromatic wardrobe the lint filter tends to be gray. "It's just the combination of bunches of color you see," says Eva Konopacki, supervisor of testing for International Fabric Care Institute.
You can check this by using a "lint roller" on various garments; your gray lint will reveal itself to be individual fibers of different colors.
By the way, we were planning to give up lint for Lent, because we thought it was such a funny concept, but our associates convinced us to give up jokes.
Q: Why did John Wilkes Booth shoot Lincoln?
A: Here we go again! The last time we wrote an assassination item we were almost run out of the country for making the goofy assertion that Oswald indeed probably shot Kennedy (this is now known as the "lone nut" hypothesis, because you have to be a nut, living alone, subsisting on canned food and hearing strange voices in your head, to believe that Oswald was even connected to the military coup that toppled JFK).
What makes the conspiracy theories about the Lincoln assassination unusual is that he was, in fact, killed in a conspiracy. John Wilkes Booth and his cohorts had plotted to kidnap Lincoln from his carriage and take him to Confederate territory. That plan was aborted (the carriage didn't show up where expected, and everyone got spooked), and Booth decided to try something nastier. At about the same time that Booth shot Lincoln at Ford's Theater, another conspirator knifed Secretary of State William Seward. (Trivia question: Who was sharing the presidential box that night with the Lincolns, and what were their fates? Answer below.)
So it wasn't an Oswald-type situation. But how far did the conspiracy go? The evidence indicates that Booth was the ringleader and financier of his band of conspirators and that Booth alone masterminded the events of April 14, 1865. But there are, naturally, some more interesting theories floating around, including the recurring contention that the assassination was ordered by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Oh for the days when people had honest titles!). The U.S. government itself tried to link the murder to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.
But these larger conspiracies are wispy things, no more solid than a hologram. The assassination of Lincoln made little military or political sense. Robert E. Lee had surrendered five days earlier at Appomattox. So why did Booth do it? Was he seeking vengeance? Did he have some die-hard belief that the war wasn't lost? Why did this actor, of all the many people who hated Lincoln, decide to pull the trigger?
Here's a thought: Actors, like all creative people, tend to be egomaniacs. Acclaim is like cocaine, you get a little bit and you want a lot. John Wilkes Booth was one of the most successful actors in the country. His father and brother were famous actors too. He was handsome, smart, friendly. Women loved him. Yet he craved something more: Fame and glory that would survive the ages.
The murder of Lincoln may have been nothing more than an act of Shakespearean drama, a bit of plagiarism of "Julius Caesar." Booth didn't just shoot and run; he first jumped onto the stage and shouted "sic semper tyrannis"-thus always to tyrants.
"John wrote for himself in a crazed moment a part in a play that no playwright could have improved upon. He did it in a theater. It's not a coincidence. He shoots Lincoln, he jumps down upon the stage," argues Gene Smith, author of "American Gothic," a biography of the Booth family.
"It was an actor's dream . . . a starring role such as no actor before had ever had and none has had since."
Booth's own writings show his dramatic and narcissistic nature. The day of the assassination he wrote in his journal: "April 14, Friday, the Ides: . . . something decisive and great must be done. . . . Our country owed all her troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment."
Note that he doesn't say that Davis or Stanton or anyone else made him the instrument of this dastardly crime. Indeed, Booth was shocked to find that even in the South, to where he had fled, he was seen as "a common cutthroat," as he wrote in his journal.
"With every man's hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was honored for."
Even his death - shot through the neck on the porch of a burning tobacco barn - was theatrical. He asked with his dying breath to see his paralyzed hands. "Useless, useless," he said, and died. His infamy will survive the ages.
(Trivia answer: Maj. Henry Rathbone and his fiancee, Clara Harris. Rathbone was knifed by Booth. Rathbone and Harris later married, but Rathbone, who always felt guilty for not saving the president, one day shot his wife to death and turned a knife on himself. He survived but lived out his years in a madhouse.) Washington Post Writers Group