21 July: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born on this date in 1899. Here are 10 facts about him.

1. As a child, Hemingway was dressed as a girl by his mother until he was six, and called "Ernestine". She'd wanted a girl. This didn't stop the young Ernest from growing up into a macho man, however. She also wanted Ernest to be a cellist and kept him home from school to force him to play the cello. Ernest wasn't the least bit interested in playing the instrument.
2. He played an active part in both world wars, despite having poor eyesight. He talked the military into letting him be an ambulance driver in WWI. Despite being badly wounded by mortar fire, he helped some Italian soldiers reach safety and for that was awarded Italian Silver Medal of Valor. In WWII he got in on the action through being a war correspondent. As such, he wasn't supposed to play any active role in the fighting, but he did anyway. He removed the badges identifying him as a journalist, collected weapons in his hotel room and, posing as a colonel, led a band of Resistance fighters in the French town of Rambouillet on a mission to gather intelligence. He was charged for breaking the rules, but was eventually cleared and even got another medal, a Bronze Star.
3. He was big into hunting and fishing and also boxing. He had a boxing ring built in his garden so he could spar with guests. One person who refused to fight him was boxing legend Jack Dempsey, because he knew he could only win the fight by doing Hemingway some serious harm. Hemingway didn't only fight in the ring, either. His drinking buddy, James Joyce, would pick fights in bars and call on Hemingway to finish the job. Hemingway once got into a fight with actor Orson Welles in a theatre, but afterwards the two became great friends.
4. He was a cat lover, and in particular, Cats with six toes on each foot. In 1931, someone gave him a white cat with extra toes, which he named Snowball. In his hometown to this day there is a much larger than expected number of polydactyl cats of various breeds. Snowball, it seems, put herself about a bit. Hemingway even wrote about polydactyl cats, so such moggies are sometimes referred to as “Hemingway cats.”
5. Hemingway was married four times. His first three marriages, to Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer and Martha Gellhorn. Within a year of his divorces, he would marry again, but each wife got a book dedicated to her - The Sun Also Rises, Death in the Afternoon and For Whom the Bell Tolls respectively. His fourth wife, Mary Welsh, had a dedication in Across the River and Into the Trees.
6. He got to read his own obituaries. While on holiday in the Belgian Congo, he was involved in two plane crashes on consecutive days. After the second one, journalists mistakenly reported that he had been killed.
7. He liked his drink, too. When his favourite local bar was renovated, he bought one of the old urinals and installed it in his house as a fountain. He quipped that he'd poured enough Money down it that it was rightfully his.
8. Another toilet story - he once took fellow author F Scott Fitzgerald into a cafe bathroom to inspect the size of his penis. Fitzgerald's wife had been taunting him about being too small. Hemingway was able to reassure him that his stature was perfectly adequate, and if Fitzgerald didn't believe him, he should go and look at the naked sculptures in The Louvre for confirmation.
9. Having survived anthrax, malaria, skin cancer, pneumonia, diabetes, two plane crashes, a ruptured kidney, hepatitis, a ruptured spleen, a fractured Skull, a crushed vertebra, his eventual cause of death was himself. In later life he developed bi-polar disorder, which at that time was treated with shock therapy. The treatment made it impossible to write, and so he shot himself.
10. There is a Hemingway Look-alike Society in Key West, which runs an Ernest Hemingway Lookalike Contest every year on his birthday, at Sloppy Joe’s bar.