Struggling to Get By

Between tax season and credit card predators, we've taken a few financial hits this month. It's comforting to be reminded of famous people who were plunged into a similar abyss. Examples:

* Samuel Johnson, the 18th-Century English man of letters, had to hastily pen a romance novel in order to pay for his mother’s funeral.

* Fanny Crosby, the blind 19th-Century poet and hymn writer, wrote more than 2,000 hymns. Many are famous to this day -- but she was paid only a pittance for them. During much of her life, she lived in an appalling New York tenement building, where she served those living in even worse conditions than herself. Her small gravestone bore the simple inscription: “Aunt Fanny. She hath done what she could.”

* Ulysses S. Grant was a chronic financial disaster both before and after his Civil War glory and his double term in the White House. While languishing as a junior officer at Pacific Coast Army posts during the 1850s, he was forced to farm, sell ice and chop wood to augment his meager lieutenant’s pay. Shortly before the war, while trying to farm in Missouri, he fared so poorly he literally had to “pawn his gold watch and chain” in order to buy Christmas gifts for his family. During his final years, he had no income until Congress voted, a few months before his death in 1885, to renew his standing as a paid general in the U.S. Army.

* Duke Kahanamoku won Olympic gold medals for swimming in 1912 and 1920, became a surfing legend and played minor roles in numerous early Hollywood films. But he was without a steady income during his celebrity years. When his flame of glamour flickered and died in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he was reduced to operating a gas station and working as the janitor at Honolulu’s city hall. Later in life he won the honorary position of sheriff of Honolulu.