NPR and a free education nearly every day for this blogger

I'd rather listen to NPR than do anything else. And it's not just for the politics, I like the cultural programs as well. I learned from NPR that Johnny Appleseed existed, but he was not at all who they told us he was when we were kiddos. I learned that before 1900 apples were bitter and that the only use for apples was to make hard cider. In other words, Johnny Appleseed walked through the midwest with some crazy pot on his head spreading the gift of alcohol to the locals. Which may explain the headware. He was the Timothy Leary of his day, you might say.

In that same program I learned that General Foods offered a $50,000 award to anyone who could produce a sweet apple and get it before a panel of judges at the 1900 World's Fair in Chicago. Well a fellow did, and of course he was from Wisconsin and was already an apple grower. But he, like every other soul who had previously grown an apple on earth, or didn't, only had sour bitter apples too. But he had an orchard, there in the Badger State, and in this orchard was this little pain-in-the-ass tree which kept coming up between his orderly rows. He tried to kill it several times yet each spring it defeated both his and the winter's effort to make it conform.

So he gave up and just plowed around the sucker. Not surprisingly, once everything around the tree stopped trying to kill it, the tree decided to do what fruit trees do, and produced fruit. It was a sweet apple and off to Chicago and a big reward went the farmer. He won of course, having the only entry that didn't make the judges pucker. History does not record what he did with the money, but it does record what the new owners of that tree did. They spliced cuttings of it onto established trunks of those old, shriveled up bitter, alcoholic trees that one might still encounter at VFW and Elks lodges throughout this great nation of ours.

Did you know that of anyone alive today, who can read this blog, not one of you have never eaten an apple, or tasted applesause, or apple pie, or an apple fritter, or apple (okay I'll stop) that isn't a product of that first grafting from that one single tree?

Now where could a guy driving from Plain City, Utah  to Boise, Idaho for the purpose of talking into a microphone about 66 badly-bred horses for a  paycheck of $500 dollars learn a great story like that, all for free, and impressing  his passenger all the way? NPR that's where.

It's always way down at the left end of your dial, and when the signal starts to fuzz out on you between cities, just hang in there. Wherever there is a college, there is someone playing NPR, even on Sundays. Even in Idaho. Even in Kansas. It's never higher than 90.9 and it's never lower than 87.5. And it's always free and it's always grand.