O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!:
DID YOU KNOW. . . ?

In 1962, Quaker Oats Company, attempting to cash in on this poem’s popularity, created a cereal called “Captain O’s.” The first cases were loaded on trucks to ship to market when someone at the company actually read the poem, particularly the line “my Captain lies/ Fallen cold and dead.”  At a cost of hundreds of dollars (millions in today’s currency) the product was renamed “Cap’n Crunch,” another of Abraham Lincoln’s nicknames.

A famous poet is asked to write an original poem for every Presidential inauguration, to help wash the stink of “money-gathering campaigner” off of the winning candidate. So far, not one of these inauguration poems has pictured the new President lying dead and bloody.

After he was a rail splitter but before he was a simple country lawyer, Abraham Lincoln actually was a ship’s captain for one brief voyage, until the crew discovered that he knew nothing about boating and actually had the ship drifting sideways for three days.

Best known for his poetry, Walt Whitman was the inventor of the “Whitman Sampler” in its distinctive yellow box. As originally conceived, the “samples” were lanky just strands of beard hair; the concept did not take off, from a marketing standpoint, until a chocolate company bought the idea and started filling the boxes with something not gross.

Until 1950, when literary historians found evidence that Whitman was, in his words, “just kidding,” the picture of Abraham Lincoln used on the five dollar bill showed the president lying dead on a ship’s deck, surrounded by horrified onlookers.