FICTION
The Odditorium
/ Melissa Pritchard
11.21.09
The Human Fact Checker
FACT: In 1923, a wispy, unassuming man from Tarnow, Austria, educated in Krakow, master of 14 languages, was hired by Robert Ripley and the King (newspaper) Syndicate to research facts for Believe It or Not. For the next 52 years, Norbert Pearlroth toiled at the New York Public Library, 10 hours a day, six days a week. Eighty million readers demanded that Believe It or Not’s outlandish claims and hyperbolic statements be backed up by facts, making an odd duck like Pearlroth an indispensable appendage.
Norbert treated his wife, in fifty years of marriage, to one vacation in 1933, to the Chicago World’s Fair, the Century of Progress as it was billed, to attend the opening of Ripley’s first Odditorium, an occasion marked by 2 million visitors, hundreds of whom fainted dead away, hit the ground, stiff as planks, at the sight of the two-headed baby, the corkscrew man, and little Betty Lou Williams, a four year old with a parasitic sibling consisting of two legs, one tiny arm-like appendage, a more developed arm with three working fingers, and the head of her twin embedded deep in her abdomen. Mr. and Mrs. Pearlroth were also present when the FIJI ISLAND MERMAID, purchased by Ripley from P.T. Barnum, was publically declared a hoax, not a half woman half fish at all, but the blackened head of a one year old Rhesus monkey crudely sewn onto the preserved body of a swordfish.
If Robert Ripley was, as the Duke of Windsor unimaginatively dubbed him, a Modern Marco Polo, traveling over 24,000 miles and two continents, Norbert, who nobody knew, was the Marco Polo of the New York Public Library, circumnavigating 7,000 books per year, 364,000 books in 52 years, in his hunt for hard boiled, irrefutable facts. While Mr. Ripley trotted the globe by boat, plane, donkey, camel, train, elephant and rickshaw, visiting over 200 countries, the names of which most Americans had never heard of, hauling back souvenirs of the terrible, the thrilling and the bizarre, wearing his signature pith helmet and knee socks, complaining about his “bum dogs,” Mr. Pearlroth sat rabbinically at desk number 3, chair number 3, in the Rose Reading Room, beneath ceiling murals of azure skies and gold-limned clouds, a Maxfield Parrish heaven, with his wax-papered sandwich of liverwurst and lingonberry jelly on dark rye, sitting so long he received the same carbuncles, the same ass stigmata, as Karl Marx. Charting infinite stacks of reference books, bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes and monographs, rowing through oceans of milky white pages with his slim pencil-oar, wearing a boiled wool cardigan, rumpled shirt, limp dungarees and leather slippers the color of fossilized camel dung, he uncovered and confirmed such facts as Charles Dickens’ cat alerting Dickens to his bedtime by snuffing out the candle on his desk, or Rajah, the sacred ox from Katmandu, born with an arm, hand and fingers attached to its left shoulder. (This was how Pearlroth first conceived of himself as a similar appendage to the body of Ripley, an arm, hand and fingers paid to nail down facts. He called it Rip-Li.) The world’s most invisible man labored anonymously for the world’s greatest celebrity, a Believe It or Not character attracting absolutely nobody’s attention. Norbert Pearlroth rode on the subway from his home on Newkirk and 16th Ave., Brooklyn, to Manhattan every morning at the exact same hour, wore the same lumpen clothing, ate the same liverwurst and lingonberry jam sandwich, sat on his blazing rump at the same burnished oak table beneath the epiphanic light of the same bronze lamp, a biblio-badger, scarcely moving except to turn pages with whiskered, pursey sounds, jotting notes dry, dark and wizened as ferret droppings. Over decades, in true Ripley fashion, Norbert Pearlroth, Appendage, turned square, silent, deep-shelved: half man/half book.
FACT: In 1923, a wispy, unassuming man from Tarnow, Austria, educated in Krakow, master of 14 languages, was hired by Robert Ripley and the King (newspaper) Syndicate to research facts for Believe It or Not. For the next 52 years, Norbert Pearlroth toiled at the New York Public Library, 10 hours a day, six days a week. Eighty million readers demanded that Believe It or Not’s outlandish claims and hyperbolic statements be backed up by facts, making an odd duck like Pearlroth an indispensable appendage.
Norbert treated his wife, in fifty years of marriage, to one vacation in 1933, to the Chicago World’s Fair, the Century of Progress as it was billed, to attend the opening of Ripley’s first Odditorium, an occasion marked by 2 million visitors, hundreds of whom fainted dead away, hit the ground, stiff as planks, at the sight of the two-headed baby, the corkscrew man, and little Betty Lou Williams, a four year old with a parasitic sibling consisting of two legs, one tiny arm-like appendage, a more developed arm with three working fingers, and the head of her twin embedded deep in her abdomen. Mr. and Mrs. Pearlroth were also present when the FIJI ISLAND MERMAID, purchased by Ripley from P.T. Barnum, was publically declared a hoax, not a half woman half fish at all, but the blackened head of a one year old Rhesus monkey crudely sewn onto the preserved body of a swordfish.
If Robert Ripley was, as the Duke of Windsor unimaginatively dubbed him, a Modern Marco Polo, traveling over 24,000 miles and two continents, Norbert, who nobody knew, was the Marco Polo of the New York Public Library, circumnavigating 7,000 books per year, 364,000 books in 52 years, in his hunt for hard boiled, irrefutable facts. While Mr. Ripley trotted the globe by boat, plane, donkey, camel, train, elephant and rickshaw, visiting over 200 countries, the names of which most Americans had never heard of, hauling back souvenirs of the terrible, the thrilling and the bizarre, wearing his signature pith helmet and knee socks, complaining about his “bum dogs,” Mr. Pearlroth sat rabbinically at desk number 3, chair number 3, in the Rose Reading Room, beneath ceiling murals of azure skies and gold-limned clouds, a Maxfield Parrish heaven, with his wax-papered sandwich of liverwurst and lingonberry jelly on dark rye, sitting so long he received the same carbuncles, the same ass stigmata, as Karl Marx. Charting infinite stacks of reference books, bibliographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes and monographs, rowing through oceans of milky white pages with his slim pencil-oar, wearing a boiled wool cardigan, rumpled shirt, limp dungarees and leather slippers the color of fossilized camel dung, he uncovered and confirmed such facts as Charles Dickens’ cat alerting Dickens to his bedtime by snuffing out the candle on his desk, or Rajah, the sacred ox from Katmandu, born with an arm, hand and fingers attached to its left shoulder. (This was how Pearlroth first conceived of himself as a similar appendage to the body of Ripley, an arm, hand and fingers paid to nail down facts. He called it Rip-Li.) The world’s most invisible man labored anonymously for the world’s greatest celebrity, a Believe It or Not character attracting absolutely nobody’s attention. Norbert Pearlroth rode on the subway from his home on Newkirk and 16th Ave., Brooklyn, to Manhattan every morning at the exact same hour, wore the same lumpen clothing, ate the same liverwurst and lingonberry jam sandwich, sat on his blazing rump at the same burnished oak table beneath the epiphanic light of the same bronze lamp, a biblio-badger, scarcely moving except to turn pages with whiskered, pursey sounds, jotting notes dry, dark and wizened as ferret droppings. Over decades, in true Ripley fashion, Norbert Pearlroth, Appendage, turned square, silent, deep-shelved: half man/half book.