Let us today speak of the unspeakable. Or the unbelievable. Or at the very least, the single finest newspaper headline ever written in the history of newspaper writing.
To whit: “Duck eats yeast, quacks, explodes: man loses eye.”
The story appears to have originated around 1908-09 out of Des Moines. The fact that the blurb I paste below for your pleasure has been circulating around social media for a couple years is testament to the story, the writer and the headline.
I’d add that the duck’s name is Rhadamanthus, the Greek demi-God who was a son of Zeus and eventually went on to become one of the judges of the dead. See where this is going?
Wasn’t that wonderful?
It’s not real.
A variety of researchers, myself included, have tried over the years to track down the origin of the story, to no avail. Then how do we know it’s fake? Well, mainly because it appears the science behind a duck blowing up over yeast just isn’t there. In order to blow up from a yeast cake, the duck would have to be unable to burp. Or vomit. Or puke. Ducks can do those things, though the urban mythology says that they can’t.
Thus. Quack. BOOM!
Most research over this story has concluded that while that duck may indeed have died, and while it appears that Silas Perkins may indeed have lost an “optic,” the main lead - exploding duck - is at best unlikely. And if it DID somehow explode, it would most likely not go off like a hand grenade, spewing intestinal shrapnal this way and that. The explosion would be more like a BLURP, then the duck would just keel over.
Still… at the time, they did not care at all! Though it’s unclear whether the brief above is the original provenance of the exploding duck, what IS clear is that in the year or so that followed, newspapers around the country just plain started making stuff up about the story, exagerating it, writing whole back stories around the main characters.
And no newspaper came even close to the hilarious, exciting hyperbole of a November 1909 long feature in none other than the Washington Post.
I’ll post the whole article at the end of this story, just click on it and save a copy so you can expand it to read. I strongly urge you to pour yourself a tall one, sit back and enjoy. I hope the anonymous “journalist” won a prize for it because it’s a thing to behold.
Here’s a section: “There was Rhadamanthus floating in the air six feet above the ground, flapping his flippers pathetically and uttering wistful quacks. Rhadamanthus was five times his usual size and round as a balloon. His wings did not move and he floated gently wherever the wind wafted him.”
What does a wistful quack sound like? Utterly beautiful, poetic nonsense!
And don’t even try coming at me my friend about journalism, remember I was a reporter for years and certainly did use exaggeration and description as a tool. Exploding duck, though, not so much.
Anyway, what’s the moral here? There is none. Just a made up story so funny and strange and sad that it has scaled time and technology and made its way from a farm in Iowa to modern social media and beyond. I have a feeling Silas and Rhadamanthus will be with us for a long time and I’m kinda happy about that.
Well actually, Rhadamanthus will be with us… in the barn, in the pond, and pretty much everywhere you look…
As the White Mt. artists of the 19th century took poetic license with their depiction of the mountains...so apparently did journalists!!