Lincoln's Beard
Found At HMV
by Dom
Macchiaroli
Shoppers at a
London area HMV store were quite startled today
when one of them discovered Abraham Lincoln’s
beard nestled amongst some old Joni Mitchell
albums.
As everyone
knows, Lincoln was a very forgettable and
ordinary American president who grew one of the
world's most amazingly famous beards.
While president, he was called the “Great
Emancipator” because he was always going
around emancipating things. Critics usually
blamed the beard.
But during the
campaign of 1860, Lincoln was clean shaven. He
grew the beard only after receiving a letter from
a child criticizing his really ugly face. Eleven
year old Grace Bedell wrote to Lincoln about
growing a beard to cover his putrid mug:
“(You)
would be much improved in appearance, provided
you would cultivate whiskers. All the ladies like
whiskers and they would tease their husband's to
vote for you and then you would be President.”
Grace wrote.
Lincoln
responded, “My dear little Miss….. as
to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you
not think people would call it a piece of silly
affection if I were to begin it now?” Grace
didn’t know what the hell he was talking
about.
Nevertheless,
Lincoln took her advice and stopped shaving.
Flattering posters of the man began to adorn the
bedroom walls of teenaged girls from Albany to
Cheyenne. Lincoln was elected in a landslide of
hirsute proportions.
On his way to
Washington for the inaugural, Lincoln saw Grace
briefly at a train station in Westfield, New York.
He thanked her for the beard suggestion and said,
“You see, I let these whiskers grow for you
Grace.” Seeing as to how Lincoln apparently
would do anything she asked, Grace then requested
that he bring her dead dog, Melancholy, back to
life. Lincoln told her to run along, and directed
Secret Service agents to wrestle her to the
ground.
Lincoln was
sadly shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s
Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865. Booth
committed the crime as he was incensed that
Lincoln wore a ‘Chin Curtain’ rather
than an ‘Imperial’ which was much more
fashionable at the time.
After his
death someone decided to emancipate Lincoln’s
beard. It was safely stored in a box, but thieves
kept trying to steal it. It was soon recovered.
Over the next thirty-six years the beard was
stolen, recovered, disappeared, stolen, and
recovered again. It was moved 17 times in that
same time period. By 1901, Robert Lincoln, the
president’s eldest son and a huge fan of
beards himself, decided he’d had enough. He
had the beard buried under ten feet of concrete
and steel at Lincoln’s Tomb in Springfield
Illinois.
Knowing this
history, HMV officials and company executives had
utterly no explanation for the beard’s
appearance last Friday at their store on Oxford
Street. At the very least, it might have been
discovered amongst some good music.
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