The Pride of Louisville

This is taken from my newsletter, but thought I'd share with y'all. Puff out your chest!

In January 1999, a paramedic from New Jersey named Matthew Scott flew to Louisville because he’d lost his left hand to an M-80 firework fourteen years earlier. Seventeen surgeons at Jewish Hospital worked for fourteen and a half hours and gave him a new one. The first successful hand transplant in the history of the world. They told him five years of function would be amazing.

That hand still works. He’s thrown out a first pitch with it. He’s pushed the button that starts Thunder Over Louisville with it.

That happened here. Down the street from where you’re reading this.

I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it — the more you know about something, the more value you put on it. That’s true of a house, a stock, a person, a city. And I think most of us walk around Louisville with no idea what this place has handed the world. So today I went looking. Reddit threads, old Courier-Journal archives, Wikipedia rabbit holes, the Filson, university pages, YouTube. I want you to finish this email and puff your chest out a little.

Louisville has had a hand in more than you know (pun intended).

Two years after the hand, the same hospital put the first self-contained artificial heart in a man’s chest. Robert Tools lived 151 days with it. Muhammad Ali came to visit him and called him “Number One Champ.” Kleinert Kutz, the hand-surgery group behind the transplant, has since trained 1,163 hand surgeons from 55 countries. One of the most famous hand surgeons in New York once said that if he ever cut a flexor tendon, he’d get on a plane to Louisville. And the married couple credited as co-inventors of the technology behind the HPV vaccine — a vaccine that prevents most HPV-caused cancers — did their work at UofL’s Brown Cancer Center.

Now the stuff you use without knowing it’s ours.

The song. In 1893 two Louisville kindergarten teachers, sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, wrote a little tune for their students called “Good Morning to All.” You know it as “Happy Birthday to You.” A record label collected roughly two million dollars a year in royalties on it until 2016, when a court finally sent it to the public domain. Two teachers. A classroom song. Every birthday on earth.

The robot. George Devol was born in Louisville in 1912. In 1954 he filed the patent for the first industrial robot, the Unimate, and by 1961 it was working a General Motors line. Every factory arm you’ve ever seen traces back to a kid from here. He also invented an automatic microwave hot-dog vending machine for Grand Central Station, which I mention because it’s funnier than the robot. Great opportunity to highlight: 8 out of 10 people with colon cancer say they regularly have hot dogs in their diet.

The spy plane. James Gilbert Baker co-founded the Louisville Astronomical Society at seventeen, studied math at UofL, and went on to design the cameras for the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird, plus the folding optics in the Polaroid SX-70. He’s considered the first person to design a lens with a computer.

The ballot. On February 24, 1888, Louisville became the first city in the United States to vote by secret ballot — names listed alphabetically, no party labels, nobody watching you mark it. Every private vote you’ve cast, you can trace to a Louisville election.

The library. In 1905 the Western Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library opened as the first public library in the country for and run by Black Americans. For nearly twenty years it ran the only formal training program for Black librarians in the nation. The American Printing House for the Blind has been in Louisville since 1858 and has been, by federal law, the official source of textbooks for blind students nationwide since 1879.

The bottle. In 1870 a pharmaceutical salesman named George Garvin Brown got fed up with adulterated whiskey and started sealing his in glass bottles so nobody could tamper with it. That was Old Forester, the first bourbon sold only in sealed bottles, and the company he started still owns Jack Daniel’s.

The computer. In 1954 GE Appliance Park became the first private business in America to install a UNIVAC, a thirty-ton computer bought to run payroll. The first business computer in the country did its work off Buechel Bank Road.

The light bulb. Thomas Edison lived in Louisville at nineteen as a Western Union telegraph operator and got fired for spilling acid on the floor while experimenting at work. He came back in 1883 and lit the Southern Exposition — where St. James Court is now — with 4,600 incandescent bulbs, more than existed in all of New York City at the time. The guy who couldn’t hold a job in Butchertown turned the lights on in Old Louisville.

The disco ball. At its peak, Omega National Products in the Highlands made about ninety percent of the disco balls in America. Studio 54, Soul Train, Beyoncé. Twenty-five workers, twenty-five balls a day.

The riverboat. Mary Millicent Miller of Portland became the first woman in America licensed as a steamboat master in 1884 — because her husband was colorblind and couldn’t pass the test, so she did. Fun fact, my great grandfather and the grandson of Robert Fulton invented this together for the cold war: Fulton Surface-to-Air Recovery System (STARS / Skyhook).

Johnny Unitas was a ninth-round pick out of UofL, cut by the Steelers because the coach didn’t think he was smart enough, and played semi-pro ball for six dollars a game before he became Johnny Unitas. Paul Hornung, Flaget High, won the Heisman on a Notre Dame team that went 2–8 — the only winner from a losing team, ever. Lamar Jackson won it here as the youngest winner ever. Wes Unseld out of Seneca won Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same season; only Wilt Chamberlain had done that before. Mary T. Meagher of Sacred Heart set butterfly world records in 1981 that stood for eighteen and nineteen years. Tori Murden McClure’s first attempt to row across the Atlantic alone ended in a hurricane. She went back out and became the first woman to do it — 81 days — and then ran Spalding University for fourteen years.

A twelve-year-old named Cassius Clay had his red Schwinn stolen in 1954 and told the police officer he was going to whup whoever took it. The officer ran a boxing gym. Louis Brandeis graduated from Male High at fourteen and became the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. Diane Sawyer’s first job was the weather girl at WLKY (she grew up in my neighborhood!). Jennifer Lawrence went from Kammerer Middle School to a Best Actress Oscar at twenty-two. Hunter S. Thompson did thirty-one days in the Jefferson County jail, missed his high school graduation, and then wrote the Derby piece that gave the world the word “gonzo” — without ever actually watching the race.

Bryson Tiller recorded “Don’t” while working shifts at UPS and Papa John’s. Jack Harlow played varsity soccer at Atherton and has three number-one songs. Slint made a record in 1991 that critics still call the start of an entire genre; Will Oldham shot the cover and later had Johnny Cash cover one of his songs. Jim James went to St. X and My Morning Jacket recorded an album in a grain silo. Marsha Norman won the Pulitzer. Sue Grafton went from Atherton to twenty-five alphabet mysteries in twenty-eight languages. The Louisville Orchestra was the first orchestra in the world to start its own record label, and Actors Theatre premiered three plays that went on to win the Pulitzer. That’s not a big-city résumé. That’s ours.

Cross the bridge and it keeps going.

In October 1803, Meriwether Lewis floated down the Ohio and met William Clark at Clarksville. Stephen Ambrose wrote that when they shook hands, the expedition began. The Falls of the Ohio right beside them are the largest exposed Devonian fossil beds on the planet — 390 million years old, and you can walk on them. Don’t act like we don’t have things to do around town! WE ARE FLUSH! New Albany was the biggest city in Indiana at the 1850 census, and its shipyards built the Robert E. Lee, which beat the Natchez from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870 — 1,154 miles in three days, eighteen hours. Edwin Hubble taught Spanish and coached basketball at New Albany High School in 1913, wore a cape to class, and then went off and discovered the universe was expanding. We surely can expand too!

John Schnatter knocked out a broom closet in his dad’s tavern in Jeffersonville, sold his 1971 Camaro for $1,600 in used pizza equipment, and that was Papa John’s. He bought the Camaro back in 2009 for $250,000. Kent Taylor got told no by more than eighty investors before three doctors from Elizabethtown backed the restaurant he’d sketched on a napkin. The first Texas Roadhouse opened in a former car dealership at Green Tree Mall in Clarksville in 1993. Last year it passed Olive Garden as the largest casual-dining chain in America. Two Louisville lawyers started a nursing-home company in 1961 that became Humana; it’s now the highest-ranked company in Kentucky on the Fortune 500. Bummer note, they are totally leaving Louisville, writing is on the wall. And this summer our airport officially passed Memphis to become the fourth-busiest cargo airport on Earth.

The cheeseburger and the Old Fashioned both have Louisville plaques, and both have historians with receipts from somewhere else. The Hot Brown is undisputed, turns one hundred this year, and the Brown Hotel still serves forty thousand of them annually.

Here’s what I want you to focus on. Really take it in my friends.

Nobody on that list was special when they started. Two kindergarten teachers. A telegraph operator who got fired. A kid whose bike got stolen. A guy making pizzas in a broom closet. A woman whose husband was colorblind. A paramedic who’d been told five years of function would be a miracle. Fellow people. Regular Louisvillians who got a little curious, dug a little deeper, and followed the pull of the thing that lit them up until it turned into something the whole world uses.

Puff out your chest!