If you’ve wondered why we celebrate Veterans’ Day on November 11: it’s the anniversary of the end of the most traumatic war in human history… 100 years ago today.

The armistice ending World War One took effect at 11 AM on November 11, 1918, “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,” whether you prefer the U.S. or European date format. Hence the name of this new post series: 11:11/11+100.

The reason World War One was so traumatic was that our technology for killing each other had improved dramatically by 1918: World War One began with horses and ended with tanks. But our technology for curing hadn’t yet caught up. Anesthetics were available in hospitals but not in the field, so the saw-your-leg-off school of military medicine still ruled the day. Even aspirin was uncommon; an expensive drug patented by Bayer AG, a company in combatant Germany.

And so the war was fought in close quarters in muddy trenches, where you could watch your fellow soldiers die in agony in front of you – or die in agony yourself.

Not only was the war brutal, it was big. Remember what a horrible day 9/11 was? Imagine ten of them at once – on July 1, 1916, thirty thousand soldiers were killed across all sides. Let that sink in:

More people were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme than in the 9/11 terrorist attacks – TEN TIMES as many.

A hundred years is a short time in the grand scheme of human history, and the blink of an eye in the history of the Universe, but it’s long enough to begin to fade from human memory. The last surviving veteran of World War One was Florence Green, who served in the UK Royal Women’s Air Force, and died peacefully in 2012 age 110.

Unfortunately, World War One has faded from memory even faster than it might have otherwise, because it has been overshadowed by the outbreak of World War Two just twenty years later. Don’t let history be forgotten, and don’t ever forget the tragic death of so many people.

Let me remember their sacrifice in a way they could have never imagined back in 1918…. flag emojis?!?

🇺🇸🇬🇧🇫🇷🇷🇺🇨🇦🇮🇹🇯🇵🇧🇪🇷🇸🇲🇪🇸🇦🇵🇹🇷🇴🇵🇸🇬🇷🇨🇳🇹🇭🇧🇷🇦🇱🇦🇲

Those are the flags of the Allies (the side that my compatriots in the U.S. fought for), but let’s not forget those who died fighting for the Central Powers too. It’s not the soldiers’ fault they were born on the wrong side.
🇩🇪🇦🇹🇭🇺🇹🇷🇧🇬🇸🇴🇿🇦🇸🇩🇦🇿🇧🇾🇱🇻🇱🇹🇪🇪🇺🇦🇫🇮🇬🇪🇵🇱

(Flag nerd note: these are the flags of the combatant nations as they are today. I think that’s the right call, because today is today, but know that there have been many changes in both flags and borders. And let me know in the comments if I forgot any countries.)

I mean this remembrance respectfully, but I acknowledge it’s a bit of a mixed blessing too. They died for these countries, and their sacrifice should be remembered forever. But at the same time… these flags represent the imaginary borders that got them killed in the first place. 

World War One wasn’t the fight against absolute evil that World War Two was. Every 10th grade history student “learns” just one fact about World War One: it started because reasons. More on that on Wednesday.

Welcome to a new post series! Aloha `oe looks back on the lives of some people – famous to many or just to me – whom I have admired and who have had a real impact on my life. The name comes from one of my favorite expressions, learned in my brief stay in Hawaii in 1999. It means a final farewell.

Of course I heard it on a Saturday afternoon: Aloha `oe to Keith Jackson, voice of college football — and one of my childhood heroes.

Jackson (1928-2018) died this January at his home in Sherman Oaks, California. He was 89.

I’m a lifelong sports fan, and my favorite sport growing up was college (American) football. Keith Jackson was there every Saturday, calling the biggest game of the week on ABC, along with former Purdue quarterback Bob Griese.

I watched every Saturday I was near a TV. Jackson’s folksy style had a major influence on my journalism career, as public address announcer at Edgewater High School and commentator for college radio.

He called four World Series, ten Olympics, and ABC’s Wide World of Sports from ski jumping to arm wrestling – but he will be forever remembered for his true passion, as the Voice of College Football.

“The college football game, as such, doesn’t exhibit the skill that pro football does,” he said in a 2011 interview. “But it’s got spirit.”

His calls became the source for some of the modern language of college football. Some of the phrases he invented or popularized (with parenthetical explanation in case you’re not familiar with the sport):

• FUMBLE!!!!! (When an offensive player dropped the ball and the defense picked it up or fell on it)
• Hold the phone! (When a penalty was called on a big play, potentially negating the outcome)
• The Big Uglies (referring to offensive linemen)
• The Big House (his nickname for Michigan Stadium, home of the University of Michigan Wolverines)
• The Granddaddy of Them All (his nickname for the Rose Bowl, the first and highest-profile of college football’s postseason games)

Perhaps his most famous moment came in 1991, in a game between arch-rivals the University of Michigan and The Ohio State University. Listen to Jackson describe this play by Michigan punt returner Desmond Howard, virtually guaranteeing that Howard would win college football’s highest award, the Heisman Trophy:

Goodbye! Hello, Heisman!

Jackson was born in small-town Georgia, but fell in love with the West Coast, first as a student at Washington State University and then as a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.

But he never lost his Southern drawl: three generations of college football fans can repeat from memory his folksy pronunciation of certain words: mah-AM-ee, al-uh-BAM-uh, and the word line stretched into two or three syllable. But he never shied away from correctly pronouncing a name like Tshimanga Biakabutuka or Marques Tuiasosospo. I wish he had lived and worked long enough to pronounce the name of current Alabama quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.

But he’ll always be remembered for most famous turn of phrase:

Whoa, Nellie!

Everyone assumed it was his wife’s name – it was actually a phrase of his great-grandfather, used to express frustration. And speaking of marriage, I’ll never forget his retirement tribute in 1998, where he gave his reason for stepping down – “I’ll be serving as personal chauffeur to Miss Turi Ann Jackson,” his wife of 65 years, with whom he raised three children.

He retired in 1998, and I still remember the reason he gave for retiring – “I’ll be serving as personal chauffeur to Miss Turi Ann Jackson,” his wife of 65 years.

But his retirement felt premature, and he came back at the personal invitation of president of ABC sports – on the condition that he only call games on the west coast to limit his travel. When he retired for good (January 4, 2006), his last game was the Granddaddy of Them All frequently cited as the greatest game in college football history: Texas upset USC 41-38 on Vince Young’s 9-yard touchdown run with just 26 seconds left. And it felt right. Jackson and Griese with the call:

Aloha `oe, Keith. I hope I can bring the same excitement to astronomy that Keith Jackson always did to college football.

This post previously appeared on August 10, 2018 as Grandpa vs. Nazis, but it fits so perfectly into my Aloha `Oe series that I’m slightly editing and posting it here.

I recently learned a cool story about my grandfather, Michael Raddick, Sr. (1917-2005).

In late 1941, like many young men of his generation, he volunteered for the U.S. Army. At age 24 and married, he had never left the American Midwest, and suddenly he was on a train to Camp Beauregard in Louisiana for Basic training. The cool story comes at the end of Basic.

The Sergeant addressed the company and asked who could operate construction equipment. Grandpa raised his hand. Sure, he’d never actually operated construction equipment, but he’d driven cars, and it couldn’t be that different. Right?

Thus he became a member of the Army Corps of Engineers. Suddenly the young man who had never left the Midwest was shipped off to Iran, where he worked on the Trans-Iranian Railway (still in use today) to supply the Soviet Union in its fight against the Nazis. He worked there for three years, met the Shah, and was honorably discharged at the end of the war as a Technician fifth grade (TEC 5), at the time the Engineers’ equivalent of a Corporal. You can read about the operation here at the National Museum of the U.S. Army and at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers websites.

He returned home and settled in Neville Township, PA, where he became a principal and community leader, and had two children – Aunt Elaine and my Dad. He died in 2005 at age 88, and is buried in Salem, Ohio next to his beloved wife (my grandmother), who died 12 years later.

This story illustrates what has become something of a trademark strategy in the Raddick family: volunteer for something you are not technically “qualified” for because it sounds cool, then learn fast.

That was how my Dad became a salesman in the lumber industry, and went on to start a successful cabinet supply business.

It’s also how I became a writer/educator/data scientist.

Last Friday, I introduced you to Count Victor Lustig, the greatest con artist who ever lived. I talked about his early career selling “money boxes” to unsuspecting rich n00bs – for as much as $46,000 (equivalent to $500,000 today). This of course made Lustig fabulously rich, and his wealth only enhanced his charm.

In 1925, he moved to Paris, set up an office in the city’s most expensive hotel, and announced that the Eiffel Tower was being sold for scrap.

Except it wasn’t.

This of course sounds completely ridiculous today, but in 1925, it was just believable enough to work. The Eiffel Tower then  was not the beloved Paris institution that it is today. It had been built as a temporary exhibit for the 1889 World’s Fair, intended to be dismantled at the end of the event. They just never got around to tearing it down, and 36 years later it was starting to show its age. The French Government had no long-term plan, and rumors were swirling about what would happen to the ugly-but-not-yet-so-ugly-it’s-beautiful monument.

Count Victor Lustig read about some of those rumors in the newspaper, and came up with a CUNNING PLAN. He looked up the city’s most prominent scrap metal dealers and wrote them letters posing as Deputy Director of the Ministère de Postes et Télégraphes (a French government agency, now split into La Poste and France Télécom, now Orange S.A.). When dealers came to visit, he told them of the city’s plan (which existed only in his head). When one dealer was ready to sign up, Lustig casually mentioned that, hey, it’s tough to live on a civil servant salary.

That last part was a stroke of genius. The scrap dealer got the message and offered some extra cash as a bribe – both giving him some extra money and ensuring that the mark didn’t try to work with anyone else, like someone in the real ministry. As soon as he had the cash in hand, Lustig got the hell out of Paris.

The next week, the mark showed up at the Ministry to collect the Eiffel Tower scrap iron permit, and was laughed out of the office – and he was too embarrassed to go to the police.

And so, the next year, Count Victor Lustig returned to Paris and did it all again. 

Count Victor Lustig (1890-1947) was an Austro-Hungarian nobleman in the early 1900s. A brilliant businessman who was fluent in several languages, he lived a life of leisure on ocean liners, traveling back and forth between France and the United States. He made his fortune on these ships, selling his most famous invention: the money box. It was a device, the size of a large suitcase, that printed out a fresh new $100 bill each and every day – and Lustig was its proud inventor. 

Do I even need to say it this time? Except he wasn’t.

There is no such thing as a money box, and Lustig wasn’t even a real Count. He was born as Robert V. Miller in Hostinné, Austria-Hungary (now part of the Czech Republic). Lustig was just one of his many aliases, but it was his favorite, and is the name by which he has gone down in history – as the greatest con man who ever lived.

First class on a transatlantic ocean liner is the perfect place to run a confidence trick, or con. Fabulously wealthy complete strangers were thrown together for exactly one week, with nothing to do but try to impress each other with their fabulous wealth – and then they were almost sure to never see each other again.

And the money box was the perfect con to run in such a setting. It looked complicated, full of gears and levers and whirring noises, but its secret was its simplicity. In an unassuming unmarked box on the side of the machine, Lustig has pre-loaded around ten $100 bills, on top of a stack of bill-sized blank paper. Each day, on schedule, the money box printed out a $100 bill with great fanfare (corrected for inflation, that would be about $1,200 today).

Lustig would make small talk with marks (the con artist’s term for the person they are in the process of swindling) at the beginning of the voyage. He would gain their trust, then swear them to secrecy while showing his greatest invention.

When the mark inevitably asked where they could get their own money box, Lustig would initially refuse to disclose anything more. But as the week went on, he would relent, and say, well maybe I could sell this money box, if the price were right. Sometimes he would get two or more marks to engage in a bidding war, driving up the price.

Ultimately, he would sell the machine for $10,000 or more. He would wish a fond farewell to the mark, promising to write and to totally look them up next time he was in America. By the time the mark noticed that the money box was now a blank paper box, Lustig would be on the return voyage, running the same con on a new mark.

His record sale came in the 1920s, when he sold a money box to New York City gambling ring for $46,000. Subtracting the $1,000 in preloaded bills and corrected for inflation into 2018 dollars, he made a nice profit of half a million dollars.

But this is just part one of the story of Victor Lustig. We haven’t even gotten to the part where he vanished a jail cell on the third floor in Manhattan, in broad daylight. Or the time Al Capone called him the most honest man he ever met, while handing him a check for $5,000. Or his most famous con.

Coming on Monday: Count Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower. Twice.

Update: In the original version of this post, I had corrected for inflation using 1900 dollars, when Count Lustig was 10 years old. I’ve updated the estimates to use 1920 values.