Adele Ferguson

MAYBE something’s been done that I haven’t heard about yet, but somebody missed or is missing a chance to make a bundle in San Diego.

That’s where the collection of fireworks for the big Independence Day show all went off at one time in one gigantic explosion. It was all over TV the next day.

I have yet to read what went wrong, just the disappointment of the crowd, which expected to see a half hour at least of timed fireworks and music to enjoy them with. My thought was boy what an opportunity for a tee shirt that has a picture on it of the explosion with July 4, 2012, on it and the message, “I Was There.”

Can’t you see it? People could wear the tee shirt and I’ll bet any number of non-viewers would ask about it. You know, were you scared? What did you think happened? It’s not too late yet.

AS LONG AS we’re reviewing the news, something else I didn’t see or read was what wasn’t in the lengthy obituaries of actor Ernest Borgnine, who died July 8 at the age of 95.

He got a pretty good sendoff in the press, which included the fact that he had been married five times, including once to Broadway star Ethel Merman. One obit said his marriage to her in 1964 lasted less than six weeks. The Washington Post, in the Seattle Times, pinned it down to 32 days.

What nobody mentioned was something that has stuck in my memory for a lot of years. The Borgnine-Merman wedlock was such a mismatch of egos and tempers that when Merman wrote her autobiography she never even mentioned Borgnine in it. She wrote of her other husbands and lovers but just left him totally out of it as if he didn’t exist. Borgnine was reported at the time to be infuriated at the humiliation of being left on the slag heap as unworthy of mention.

A PREVIOUS obituary I remember that left out a detail that stuck to me through the years was that of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.

She was a favorite of President and Mrs. Roosevelt and for a time during World War II was invited to live in the White House as a guest. I don’t remember which historic bedroom she occupied although I do remember that the generosity of the hosts was strained by the cost of keeping her.

She required silk sheets to sleep on. She provided her own sheets and she also required having them changed any time she had gotten up for any lengthy reason and she was in and out of bed all day. Now changing the sheets wouldn’t seem like a problem but all those sheets had to be cleaned after each use no matter how little time she had spent on them. And the cost of the cleaning came out of the White House allowance for the usual household expenses.

The Roosevelts didn’t complain but word had it that they were stuck with enormous cleaning bills for their noted guest.

With the Olympics summer games upon us, you might like to know what swimmer Michael Phelps eats in order to be the greatest Olympic medal winner of all time, courtesy of the Weekly Standard: For breakfast, he eats three fried egg sandwiches with cheese and mayonnaise, three pancakes, a five-egg omelet, three slices of French toast and a bowl of grits. For lunch, it’s a pound of pasta and two ham and cheese sandwiches. For dinner, it’s another pound of pasta and a large pizza, daily total, 12,000 calories. He has endorsed Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes which I note is not on the list.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)