RIP Patty Duke (aka Martha Washington)

Acclaimed actress Patty Duke passed away in the early hours of the morning on March 29, 2016. One of her representatives confirmed her passing at 1:20am. He said: "She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a friend, a mental health advocate and a cultural icon. She will be missed."

Patty Duke is known to this blog's readership for many things, but among them is her starring role in the George Washington miniseries from the mid-1980s. She played Martha Washington opposite star Barry Bostwick who played our nation's first general and President. 

She will be missed.

Old Letter From Martha Washington Turns Up....in Kansas

The people of Concordia, Kansas have something rather extraordinary to talk about. It seems a letter penned by the First Lady, as in the very first First Lady, has turned up in their small, little town of 5,700 people. The letter was written by Martha Washington in 1793, during her husband's presidency, and somehow made its way over the years to rural Kansas.

To read more about this very interesting story, click on the following link...

"Letter From Martha Washington Discovered in Small Kansas Town" 

George Liked Martha For More Than Just Her Money!

Many historians have long claimed that George Washington was primarily attracted to Martha Washington for her property and money, and that the two never really had a close, romantic relationship. This view is fully embraced by a script trapped in "Development Hell" about our first general and first President - one that I personally hope never sees the light of day. But I digress.

Anyway, it turns out that Martha Washington was not the plump, homely widow that Washington married simply for money. Scholars now say that she may very well have been...well...let me just turn it over to Brigid Schulte, writing for The Washington Post...

This just in: Martha Washington was hot. Or at least hotter than we thought.

Our image of the mother of our country, vague and insubstantial as it is, is drawn from portraits painted after her death showing a frumpy, dumpy, plump old lady, a fussy jumble of needlework in her lap, wearing what could pass for a shower cap with pink sponge rollers underneath.

But today, 250 years after Martha and George tied the knot, a handful of historians are seeking to revamp the former first lady’s fusty image, using the few surviving records of things she wrote, asking forensic anthropologists to do a computerized age-regression portrait of her in her mid-20s and, perhaps most importantly, displaying for the first time in decades the avant-garde deep purple silk high heels studded with silver sequins that she wore on her wedding day.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

It would appear that Martha Washington needn't have been that intimidated by neighbor Sally Fairfax.