Friday / Weekend Open Lines


Friday, March 18th. This is National Peanut Month — celebrating one of the nation’s favorite foods, and absolutely America’s favorite snack nut. They are enjoyed in many ways — roasted in the shell, used in salads and stir-fry recipes, in cookies and, of course, ground into peanut butter. The idea of honoring the peanut has been a monthlong observance since 1974. Americans eat an average of more than six pounds of shelled peanuts a year, about half in the form of peanut butter. American peanuts have a global customer base. In 2014, about $450 million worth were exported. Over 22 percent of that went to Canada, and nearly 18 percent to Mexico. At the other end of the scale, Australia imported only $4,600 worth of American peanuts. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.

Saturday, March 19th. Banks had operated in America for about a half century before someone tried to make an unauthorized withdrawal. On this date in 1831, Edward Smith committed the first bank robbery in the U.S. — hitting the City Bank on New York’s Wall Street. He entered the bank after it closed, using a duplicate set of keys, and got away with $245,000 — a huge sum at the time. By various calculations, that would be worth from $5.5 million to $6.8 million today. But he was caught, convicted and spent five years in New York’s Sing-Sing Prison. Now, across the nation, there are over 96,000 commercial banking establishments. As one 20th century bank robber supposedly noted, that’s where the money is — bank deposits total nearly $12 trillion. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.

Sunday, March 20th. One of the most distinctive and near universal American colloquialisms — the affirmation “OK” — appeared in public for the first time this month in 1839. There have been claims that “OK” derives from languages as diverse as Greek and Choctaw, and that it appeared in earlier American documents. But it was first published in a Boston Morning Post story with a brief definition. While “OK” took off around the country, and eventually the world with variants in some two dozen languages, time KO’d the Boston Post. That paper folded in 1956 after 125 years of publication. Today in the U.S., there are nearly 7,500 daily, weekly or other newspaper publishers still doing OK in this digital age. You can find more facts about America’s people, places and economy, from the American Community Survey, at <www.census.gov>.