Not What You'd Expect

Oh, so here goes.

Tony Norman, award-winning columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, winner of a Knight-Wallace Fellowship, and (most importantly) best man at my wedding, made a few boo-boos in today's column.

Boo-boo numero uno:

I was a sucker for environmental propaganda. When I was a kid, I fell for all of the "Keep America Beautiful" public service announcements. The most memorable of those PSA's featured a Native American paddling a canoe across a lake to a trash-strewn shoreline.

As ads go, it was devastating. The Indian had nobility and empathy to spare. As he paddled past factories belching smoke, a narrator with the deep, biblical voice of Orson Welles intoned: "Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. Some people don't."

Here's the ad:

Sorry, Tony. It was William Conrad NOT Orson Welles who did the voice over for the ad. This post at the Britannica.com says so. Take a look:

This classic television commercial, from the “Keep America Beautiful” campaign of the early 1970s, debuted on the second Earth Day, in 1971, and was one of the most successful public service announcements ever produced, starring actor (actually, Italian-American actor) Iron Eyes Cody as the “crying Indian” with a voice-over by actor William Conrad. [emphasis added]

And there's Tony's boo-boo numero due. Did you see it? Here's what Tony wrote again:

I was a sucker for environmental propaganda. When I was a kid, I fell for all of the "Keep America Beautiful" public service announcements. The most memorable of those PSA's featured a Native American paddling a canoe across a lake to a trash-strewn shoreline.

But the Britannica says Iron Eyes Cody was an Italian-American.

So does Snopes.com:

That "crying Indian," as he would later sometimes be referred to, was Iron Eyes Cody, an actor who throughout his life claimed to be of Cherokee/Cree extraction. Yet his asserted ancestry was just as artificial as the tear that rolled down his cheek in that television spot — the tear was glycerine, and the "Indian" a second-generation Italian-American.

And:

Iron Eyes Cody was born Espera DeCorti on 3 April 1904 in the small town of Kaplan, Louisiana. He was the son of Francesca Salpietra and Antonio DeCorti, she an immigrant from Sicily who had arrived in the USA in 1902, and he another immigrant who had arrived in America not long before her.

AND the tear was glycerine? How else did they lie to us?

See? That proves it: GLOBAL WARMING IS A HOAX!