Shagging Ginger Rogers' Mother

Short Version:
We visit the Hoover Dam.

Long Version:
The Hoover Dam is named for a bloke named Herbert Hoover, who was President between 1929 and 1933. He was a Quaker, a charter student at Harvard, and an engineer who once translated the Latin text De re Metallica (On the Nature of Metals) into English. His personal physician, recognising the sedentary, stressful lifestyle associated with the Presidency, devised a sport designed to keep Herbert physically fit. Known as Hooverball, it's very much akin to a game of catch-and-release volleyball played with a medicine ball, was played pretty much daily on the south lawn of the White House* during Hoover's term in office. It's still played today; primarily in Iowa, Hoover's home state.

Having read James Ellroy's excellent novels, we'd always assumed the dam was named for J. Edgar Hoover, long-time Director of the FBI, and the only human Hoover of whom we'd heard. It did seem somewhat paradoxical that an edifice that sizeable and overt should be named for someone who dealt in shadows and insinuation, and it turns out that the dam was completed and named at around the time that John Edgar commenced his lengthy FBI Directorship, which lasted from 1935 to 1972 (and followed on the heels of the eleven years he spent running the FBI predecessor; the non-Federal Bureau of Investigation). Subsequent FBI Directors' terms have been limited to ten years maximum in order to forestall their gaining as much power as was achieved by John Edgar, who was a committed Freemason and whose unorthodox personal life lead to persistent rumours of homosexuality, including orgy participation, as well as allegations of cross-dressing. It is now believed that these rumours sprang largely from discreditation campaigns carried out by both Amerikan and foreign interests, especially in light of the substantial evidence linking Hoover romantically with the divorced mother of dancer Ginger Rogers.

The Hoover Dam was constructed between 1931 and 1936, at great cost to the USA, both monetarily and in terms of human life: 112 people died to bring the dam to completion, assuming you exclude the 42 workers who died of either pneumonia or carbon monoxide poisoning. The 112 does include J. G. Tierney, who is generally counted as the first man to die in the construction of Hoover Dam. He was a surveyor who was looking for an ideal spot for the dam when he drowned on December 20, 1922. His son, Patrick W. Tierney, was the last man to die working on the dam's construction, 13 years to the day later.

The heavily-used US Highway 93, which links the tri-state nexus where Arizona, Nevada and Utah meet with Sin City ran across the top of the Hoover Dam until October this year, when a new bypass bridge was opened. The dam parapet is still open to non-through traffic, though, so we took the Reaper across. No harvest on the top, as far as we know, although we got close to some of the many jay-walking waddlers; the annual visitor numbers have been pushing a million for a few years now, and are expected to have exceeded that number this year.

We ogled the dam for a while, impressed by its immensity, then joined the westbound traffic, which was a trickle on the way in to Las Vegas, and a flood out the other side; Sunday afternoon, and people who'd been living large for the weekend were heading home to Kalifornia.








* = The Amerikan Presidential home office, not the strip club / knock shop on Auckland's Queen Street