Franklin D. Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down from the time he was 39, so used a wheelchair in private settings. He felt his disability was a disadvantage for his political career, however, so trained himself to walk using a cane and iron braces. Only 3 pictures of him in a wheelchair exist.
For reasons that are lost in the dustbin of my memory, The Four-Year-Old became intensely interested in wheelchairs about a month or two ago. “When did they invent wheelchairs, Mommyo?”
This week’s reader question comes from Ben in San Antonio, who tweets via his father to ask “Why are letters in alphabetical order?” My husband’s reasoned, if not helpful, response to this is “For the same reason numbers are in numerical order.” There must be a better answer, I thought. So I dug around until I found one.
As you know, a random question by The Four-Year-Old has sent Caterpickles Central into a tizzy over very old cars this week. Turns out I can’t…
Yesterday, we learned that in the early days of the automobile industry steam and electric cars were quieter, cleaner, faster, and more popular than cars that ran primarily on gas. So why did the internal combustion engine win?
That depends on what you mean by car. If, like Wikipedia, you define a car simply as “a wheeled motor vehicle used for transporting passengers, which…
Last weekend, while the citizens of Caterpickles Central were driving around Massachusetts in yet another attempt to find good Mexican food, we passed through a little town called Walpole. The Four-Year-Old, thought that was a pretty weird thing to call a town. “Why do they call it Walpole?”
In honor of Orville Wright’s 140th birthday, Caterpickles takes a quick look at today in aviation history.
The Art for Children Series, now sadly out of print, includes 16 books on major artists across the spectrum, including Rembrandt, Remington, Van Gogh, da Vinci, Gauguin, Chagall, and Picasso.
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