Fascinated by the sight, Zemurray sets out to involve himself in the trade. His real break comes when a banana peddler arrives in town. The book’s first glimpse of Zemurray shows him working hard in his uncle’s Alabama grocery store, sweeping and cleaning, stacking and shelving, and always looking for an opportunity to succeed. In the first couple pages, Cohen introduces his readers to his compelling protagonist, Samuel Zemurray, a poor Jewish immigrant to the United States who later came to embody the American Dream. All I know is that he holds story in the same esteem in his The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King.
I would like to think Rich Cohen had a similar experience in his fifth grade classroom, one where he too learned how to defeat the evil metric system, but I cannot be sure. It was a wonderful lesson on the power of a story, one that has stuck with me to this day. My teacher’s little jingle changed everything: King Henry made that infernal metric system memorable. And so it went, until our fifth grade teacher introduced us to the magical phrase, King Henry died by drinking chocolate milk. All I ever wanted was to go back to feet and inches. And I could never get it right! It always went something like this: Kilo…Hecto…something else…pass…deci…I forget…umm. When I was in elementary school, I had to memorize the prefixes of the metric system: kilo-, hecto-, deca-, base, deci-, centi-, milli.
The best way to illustrate this, of course, is with a story. The best stories teach us without our knowing.
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