Pat Bean's blog

            “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”  — Clay P. Bedford

Mount Lemmon from the Catalina Foothills. — Wikimedia photo

I Don’t Believe Curiosity Will Kill Me

Sara Plummer Lemmon — Wikimedia photo

  Did you know that Mount Lemmon, the awesome 9,157-foot-tall mountain that has been my backyard landscape here in Tucson for the past year, is named after a woman?

I didn’t until this past week when I came across a plague on the Geology Wall at Tohono Chul Park.

After I got home, I did a bit of research on the mountain’s namesake, Sara Plummer Lemmon (1836-1923), and discovered that she was a botanist with several plants named in her honor.

Mount Lemmon was named for her because she was the first white woman to climb to its top, and along the way she discovered several plant varieties unique to the mountain.

While it’s actually spelled a Spalding, it is called a Spaldeen because that’s how it is pronounced in the Bronx. Wikimedia photo

Do you know what a Spaldeen is? I didn’t until I came across the term in Annie Rachele Lanzillotto’s book, “L is for Lion: An Italian Bronx Butch Freedom Memoir,” which I’m currently reading. Great book, by the way.

A Spaldeen, I learned, is a pink rubber ball commonly used to play stickball in the Bronx.  How did I live to my age and not know that, I wondered?

Both these discoveries fulfilled my goal of learning something new each and every day. In my book, a day without learning something new lacks soul.

As Eartha Kitt once said, “I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.”

The Wondering-Wanderer’s blog pick of the day.

Bean’s Pat: The White Goose  http://tinyurl.com/ny5obkx Standing out in a crowd