Back in Action IIc: The Best of mental_floss…
With lots of help from the future Mrs. Josh Evans (library scientist and freelance researcher Meg McGinn), I put together a list of fourteen stories you might not know about Bobby Kennedy. The article doesn’t go up until Friday mid-morning (though I don’t expect I have any pre-sunrise readers). But here’s a taste:
3. He wasn’t above a bar fight.
“Shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Kennedy celebrated by buying his first beer. Soon he was buying rounds for everyone in the bar. Some of the patrons began singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to someone else, and Kennedy, inebriated for the first time in his life, became enraged at their ingratitude. He smashed a beer bottle over one man’s head and refused entreaties by [Kenneth] O’Donnell to apologize.” [Source]
8. His house was a zoo.
In August of 1962, The New York Times wrote about Attorney General Kennedy’s dog Brumus (not sure if that’s him in the photo), who was a regular visitor to the Justice Department. “He usually stays at home with the children,” Kennedy explained. “But the children are away on vacation and he gets very lonely. So I bring him down here and get pretty girls to take him for walks.” The article ended by listing the rest of Kennedy’s animal friends: “two other dogs, ponies, horses, geese, a burro, a sea lion (!?), Hungarian pigeons, twenty goldfish, rabbits, turtles and a salamander.”
Read the other twelve stories — including a 1967 debate with Ronald Reagan and some ballsy mountain climbing — at mental_floss.