Ultimate Wisdom(c) 17: A Brief Timeline of Lobsters in America

Fluff:

This blog won’t be all comedy, but it’s Wisdom Wednesday!

Also, if you were unfortunate enough to miss the premiere of TVs next best show, Pushing Daisies, you can watch it here: (ok, original link was deleted, new one to be added later)

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On a recent September afternoon, I was pleased to watch a fascinating documentary on the History Channel about the Eastern States Exposition in Springfield, Massachusetts. “The Big E,” as you perhaps know, is the great culmination of the county fair season in New England. Like many such fairs, it features the display of prize fowl and livestock, local handicrafts, ingeniously fried foods, and a full, mechanized carnival featuring various rides that have been hastily assembled by angry and careless men.

I saw a cow being milked by a robot. I watched recently hatched chicks in a great incubator as they lay, helpless and drenched in albumen, breathing heavily and attempting to stand. These chicks seemed to be trying to say something to the audience, but I could not hear them over the terrified sobbing of the children nearby. Then, the story turned to the lobster judging.

It is rare that you see a real lobster competition these days. As I watched the proud young farm children in their traditional dress whites and goggles leading their well-tended lobsters about on their leashes, I wondered if these youngsters knew that, not 120 years ago, this competition would have looked very different indeed. For their enlightenment and your own, I offer this brief time line of the lobster in America.

==1890: New York socialite Frederick Geen releases 100 European lobsters in Central Park. The “great scrambling,” as he called it, was part of his poetic effort to introduce America to every kind of animal ever mentioned in Shakespeare. (“[‘The King’] forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he lies asleep, and in his ear I’ll holler ‘Mortimer!’ Nay, I’ll have a lobster shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him to keep his anger still in motion.” Henry IV) The result, however: chaos.

==1892: Lobsters are seen everywhere throughout New York City. They especially thrive in garbage cans, occasionally grabbing dogs and small people and pulling them in to their doom.

==1895: When a lobster kidnaps three of the four Geen Quadruplets, Frederick Geen collapses in horrid grief and never rises. His brother, the influential Horace Geen, pressures the mayor to bring in a new police commissioner to put an end to the lobster problem once and for all. Theodore Roosevelt is called in.

==1896: Discovering that the lobster cannot easily be killed except by boiling, Roosevelt instead diverts the creatures to Maine via a secret canal.

==1900-1910: Along the Maine coast, the lobster again thrives, not just on land, but for the first time in the sea. The animal previously called the “lobster” there, a kind of sea otter, faces severe competition from the new crustacean neighbors.

==1920s: Wealthy Maine summer families regularly gather to watch the two species fight on the beach, sending servants out to egg them on with hot pokers. Pelts harvested from the “Old Lobsters” are used as very small carpets.

==1930: A law is passed that no servant shall receive more than forty new lobsters per day as food or pets.

==1932: Proving once again its old nickname, “The City That Will Not Learn from Its Errors,” New York City actually imports several lobsters for display in the Central Park Zoo. The lobsters, however, rarely leave their cave, and when they do, they pace relentlessly back and forth. Zoological analysts determine that the lobsters are depressed. The lobsters are given toys to play with, small staircases to leap up, and mice to chase. Several games are developed to relieve them of their melancholy, one of which eventually becomes the board game “Monopoly.” The lobsters are excellent players, and usually choose the top hat.

==1940s: Lobster-claw deformities emerge as a popular form of folk art. Some Kabbalists claim that the deformed claws form the shape of secret Hebrew letters—a cryptic message from the unclean to the chosen.

==1950s: Refrigerated zeppelins make the transcontinental shipping of live lobsters a reality. Eager to be rid of them, the state of Maine pays for their tickets (coach) and creates a now-famous ad campaign to introduce the nation to the idea of eating them: “Maine Lobster: The Giant Insect That Contains Within Its Carapace the Taste of Purest Silk!”

==1968: Red Lobster opens its first restaurant in Lakeland, Florida. At the time, their famous 45 Lobster Special costs only $2.95. As a publicity stunt, Frederick Geen, now 103, rises shakily from his bed for the first time in seventy-three years to personally kill the first 20,000 lobsters. He turns down the speed-boiler that Red Lobster has devised, preferring instead to strangle them one by one, weeping the entire time. The stunt is a huge success—especially among children. To this day, Red Lobster still offers diners the chance to choose their own lobster and have an old man kill it before their eyes.

==1980: The last Old Lobster finally perishes in the kitchen of the lesser-known rival chain restaurant, Furry Old Lobster. The restaurant chain swiftly closes. It will be another decade before it is discovered that the Furry Old Lobster chain was owned by an entity called “Excellent Restaurant Concepts, Inc.,” which itself is but one arm of HomarUSA. By now it will not surprise you to learn that HomarUSA is the largest lobster-owned company in the nation.

It is a sad story, true, but no sadder than much of history. And perhaps it will cheer you to know that the Blue Ribbon at the Big E went to young Amanda Dearborn and her handsome young crustacean, Brock.