The Ezra CodeDid you know that Ezra Cornell spent the last 25 years of his life trying to get his grubby hands on the Shroud of Turin? No, you probably didn't know that. You probably thought that he was tied up, creating a major aggie echool for gentlemen farmers and their scion on money stolen from the indigenous peoples of Wisconsin. That's right, the Morrill Land Grant bestowed on Ezra and his cabal of upstate fatcats thousands of acres full of prime wooded real estate in the cheese state. Ezra chopped the trees down, sold them to the railroads and his own companies for rail ties and telegraph poles, pocketed some of the money and donated the rest to Cornell U. Of course, you have to ask yourself where Congress got the land in the first place.
More than likely, you also didn't know that the Mr. Cornell sent his close friend, Andrew Dickson White,later first president of Cornell University, to Rome to dicker with the Pope. That was back in 1865. The first casino had opened in the capital city of Monaco the year before, and it is rumored that Pius had a healthy stake in the Seabath Company which owned the exclusive gambling rights in that tiny principality. Pope Pius IX,who, at the time, was feuding with Napoleon III of France and Victor Emmanuel, while attempting to hold on to his temporal possessions in Italy, spent a lot of his time in Monte Carlo and racked up huge gambling debts. Pius IX was actually known as the 'gambling Pope.' White offered the Pope the then impressive sum of $75,000 for the Shroud. A fortune in those days. The price of a fully equipped Cadillac these days. Can you imagine, choosing between the face of Jesu Christi and a Caddy? This Ez doesn't want to offend any Catholics out there - he was one himself, has the physical and psychic scars to prove it. But he thinks he would choose the car. You can reproduce your own Shroud of Turin with a black velvet art kit purchased at Wal-Mart. Anyway, Pius was mighty tempted by Cornell's offer. In the end, however, he passed on the deal and White came back empty-handed.
But Cornell didn't give up that easy. The next year, he secretly sent White to Venice to meet with the leader of a ring of notorious art thieves with possible link to the Sicilian mafia. Things got pretty hairy for the staid and respectable White. For one, he had a wild gondola ride, pursued by agents of the Italian government. He ended up, ducking into a boat house attached to a rundown, dilipidated pallazo owned by no other than the illegitimate daughter of Lola Montez and King Ludwig of Bavaria. If you didn't know, and who would expect you to know since almost no one knows anything about history these days except who won the World Series last year - Lola Montez was the Irish-born dancer who made a name for herself as world-class adventuress, ultimately capturing the affections of King Ludwig I, not the mad king Ludwig who later emptied the Bavarian state treasury to build Disneyworld-like fantasy palaces.
Anyway, to make a long story short, White, model Victorian that he was, quickly became besmitten by the fetching Lola II, a young temptress with a perfect hour glass figure so admired by the Victorian lecher class. White soon was checking out Lola's clockworks first hand in an upstairs bedroom of the pallazzo. White's personal diary, recounting their first and successive nights of unbridled and unexpurgated passion, is now safely hidden away in a secret vault somewhere on the Cornell campus. The same vault contains Ezra Cornell's manuscript copy of the Codex Hermaphroditus, a crumbly old document,supposedly written by an 11th Century member of the Cathar clergy somewhere in medieval France, that claims that you know who had a homosexual relationship with Judas Iscariot. According to the author, of which virtually nothing is known except that he was burned at the stake, the relationship went sour and Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver. Nothing would surprise Ez. It is well known that the Cathars were squeamish about sex, and, in fact refused to eat anything produced by sexual reproduction. The first vegans. Gay sex would certainly have been in a different category for folks who rejected the limitations of the brutish physical world.
Getting back to the steamy bedroom scenes between Cornell's future president and Lola 2, it is important to remember that Victorian gentlemen of White's ilk were notorious for their obsessive preoccupation with back room sex. The respectable mask of Victorian gentility was riddled with cracks. Read Frank Harris' My Secret Life for details. Ez is so happy that he has turned the corner from lambasting Ithaca and its institutions to providing educational content on the web.
After disengaging himself from his lust pot,White finally did rendezvous with the ring of art thieves. He offered them $75K to steal the shroud which was housed in the cathederal at Turin. The offer was glady accepted and the thieves went to work.All good Catholics, however, what they went to work on was creating a fake. In those days, with no internet and spotty news coverage, White had no way of verifying that the real shroud had left the posession of the archbishop of Turin. And, besides, he was busy, painstakingly exploring the rotundities of the ever ravishing Lola 2. With the fake shroud tucked in his valise, $75K lighter, White painfully separated himself from his Venetian paramour, and returned to the States.
That is the real story of how Ezra Cornell, self-made millionaire, philantropist,
Ithaca's eternal benefactor, came to own a fake copy of the Shroud of Turin.
Aint't that interesting?
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 11:11 PM
