Big Red Ruckus

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8h

Kelley Franco

@threeinningfan

11h

Halloween candy power rankings

Big Red Ruckus

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13h

The History Feed

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17h

During World War I, one American helped feed more than nine million people a day in German-occupied territory. To make it happen, he had to negotiate with both Germany and Britain, two opposing sides of the war.

His name was Herbert Hoover, years before he became President of 1914, Germany invaded Belgium, leaving millions of civilians facing food shortages. Hoover, then an American mining engineer living in London, helped establish the Commission for Relief in Belgium to bring food into the occupied country.

Getting the supplies there was no ordinary task. Britain controlled the naval blockade, while Germany occupied the territory. Hoover helped negotiate an arrangement that allowed food shipments to reach civilians without being diverted to the armies.

The operation relied on thousands of Belgian volunteers, often estimated at around 40,000, who helped distribute the food. It eventually expanded into northern France and continued beyond the end of the war.

In 1918, Belgium's King Albert gave Hoover a unique title, "Ami de la nation belge," meaning "Friend of the Belgian Nation."

Long before he entered the White House, Hoover had already helped organize one of the greatest humanitarian relief efforts of his time.

Big Red Ruckus

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15h

Baseball In Pics

@baseballinpix

19h

Herman Munster tries out for the Dodgers. The Greatest Slugger of them all. #HappyHalloween

Big Red Ruckus

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Oct 31

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

Oct 30

Henry Ford called the cow the crudest machine in the world, and when he built his own model town in the Amazon he fed the workers brown rice and oatmeal until they rioted and threw his managers out.

In 1921 he told the papers his laboratories would take the cereals a cow eats ely superior to the dirty product of those discredited animals. He meant it. He spent years on the soybean. Soy milk, soy plastics, a car with soybean panels, a suit woven partly from soy fibre.

In 1928 he took a concession of about 10,000 square kilometres of the Brazilian Amazon to grow rubber for his tyres, and built a town from nothing. American bungalows, a hospital, a golf course, sprinklers on the lawns. He called it Fordlândia and ran it on his own ideas about how a man should live. No drink, no tobacco, managers inspecting the houses. And in the canteen, his food. Brown rice, wholewheat bread, oatmeal and tinned peaches, for men raised on river fish and manioc.

In December 1930 the canteen changed the way it served the stuff, and the workers had had enough. They smashed the place, cut the telegraph wires and drove the American managers out, and the Brazilian army had to come and end it. The locals called it the Quebra-Panelas, the breaking of the pans.

The rubber did no better. Ford's men planted the trees close together in rows, the way you plant a field, in a jungle where wild rubber trees grow far apart for good reason. Blight and insects ran down the rows and took the lot.

Ford never once visited. In 1945 his grandson handed the land back to Brazil at a loss of over $20 million, and not one drop of latex from Fordlândia ever went into a Ford car.

The man who called the cow the crudest machine in the world built a town on his own menu in the most fertile place on earth, and the first thing it produced was a riot.

Big Red Ruckus

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Oct 31

Mets News and Links

@JohnFromAlbany

Oct 30

Press Release: Museum Honors Veterans Day by Offering Free Admission to Veterans during November dlvr.​it/TW7Bnr #Mets #LGM #MetsTwitter

Big Red Ruckus

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Oct 30

Bass Magazine@BassMagOnline

Oct 30

A gorgeous selection of Rickenbacker 4003 basses

@rickenbackerfarm