Charles King from Spring Branch, Texas ended up with some ten
thousand dollars in cash in his possession (briefly) because: “I robbed a bank”
Though the
22-year-old King didn’t realize he was committing larceny, this was not a
stunt. On April 24, he went into a
Houston-area bank with a money bag and a note prepared by his new employer,
believing he was simply acting as a messenger. Instead, the note said that the teller’s
young child was being held hostage and demanded that the bag be filled with
cash. The clueless King was arrested
immediately after leaving the bank and released later after the details were
sorted out. He was one of four unwitting
young men hired to pull off the same elaborate heist in four different banks on
the same day. Ultimately, none were
charged and their mysterious employer was found.
Robert Chollar from Dayton, Ohio has a two-inch square slide which
contains: “The complete text of The Bible – Old and New Testament (1245 pages)”
Chollar is VP
of research and development for the National Cash Register Company. NCR’s new information storage system reduces
a document in size nearly 50,000 times, compared to 400 times for traditional
microfilm. Computers would later render
this sort of information storage mostly unnecessary, but at the time, NCR’s
PCMI technique was a great leap forward in miniaturization. The tiny Bible is on display at the World’s
Fair. (Also see
E607
)
Special guest Lloyd Bridges brings
examples from the Postal Service’s Hard Letter Office, a department that tries
to decipher unusually written addresses, and presents them to the panel as
puzzles. Bridges, who had starred in the TV series Sea Hunt (1958-1961) and is still well-remembered for it, will be
appearing May 9 at the Sea Hunt Underwater Show at the World’s Fair
Transportation and Travel Pavilion.
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