Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks

And the People Hit Worst Are the Poor

2010-01-15T08:12:00.003-05:00

As we keep the people of Haiti in our thoughts and prayers, it is perhaps an appropriate moment to give a shout out to the memory of the late Fred Cuny, who made these relevant observations about earlier disasters, and whose words may inspire us today:

Disasters hurt people. They injure and kill. They cause emotional distress and trauma. They destroy homes and businesses, cause economic hardships, and spell financial ruin for many. And the people hit worst are the poor. A natural disaster can happen anywhere, but for a combination of reasons -- political as well as geographic -- most large scale disasters occur in the region between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. This region encompasses most of the poorer developing nations, which we call the Third World.

For survivors of a natural disaster, a second disaster may also be looming, for the very aid that is intended to help them recover may be provided in such a way that it actually impedes recovery, causes further economic hardship, and renders society less able to cope with the next disaster.

... Recognizing poverty as the primary root of vulnerability and disaster in the Third World is the first step toward developing an understanding of the need for change in current disaster responses. For if the magnitude of disasters is an outgrowth of underdevelopment and poverty, how can we expect to reduce the impact with food, blankets, and tents, the traditional forms of assistance?

Emergency relief is an essential part of the response to a tragedy such as the one in Haiti. Give generously, give now:

Oxfam America

Yele Haiti

Episcopal Relief and Development

Hopital Albert Schweitzer

There are many worthy organizations to whom you can send your money. But, with Fred Cuny's observations as our guide, perhaps we can also establish another set of objectives in our aid to Haitian people: to upgrade the standard of housing; to provide increased job opportunities; to improve or diversify local skills; and to provide alternate income to people whose economic livelihood has been hurt by the disaster. Maybe this time we can help to prevent the "second disaster."

The Disappearance of Agnes Lowzier

2009-03-25T17:29:00.028-04:00

The last time I saw Agnes Lowzier, it was a misty night in L.A. She had just bargained a dowdy shamus out of a couple of Cs in exchange for some information on the whereabouts of the blonde wife of a mob boss. After performing her part of the bloodless exchange and asking the detective to wish her luck, she simply drove away into the night in her gray Plymouth, never to be seen again. Until now.

“Wish me luck,” she said, before she put her pointed toes down on the gas pedal. “I got a raw deal.”

“Your kind always does,” said the detective.

The detective was Philip Marlowe, played by Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel, The Big Sleep. The movie has grown in stature over the years. It was initially faulted by critics for the untidiness of its labyrinthine plot, but now it is seen as a classic example of film noir, in which story takes a backseat to process, mood and atmosphere. Another way of describing the film, which is one of my favorites after all, is that it is a canvas for a collection of cold-blooded murders and beatings, some fascinating character encounters, and a constant volley of wisecracks.

And who was Agnes? Agnes Lowzier was a slender, pretty “brunette with green eyes, kind of slanted” as Marlowe describes her (Chandler had her down as Agnes Lowzelle, a blonde), who cracked wise in her every scene. The first time we see her she is pretending to be a sales clerk at Geiger’s Rare Books, a shop that Marlowe supposes is actually a front for a bookie’s joint. Marlowe comes in to check things out, and poses as a collector. After establishing that Agnes doesn’t know too much about rare editions and anyway doesn’t seem to have any in stock, thus confirming his suspicions about the place, Marlowe asks, still in character as a collector, “You do sell books, hmm?” Agnes replies, gesturing carelessly at a random row of books: “What do those look like, grapefruit?”

Marlowe returns to the bookshop and reveals himself as he sees that the back of the store is being emptied. Agnes tells him to come back “tomorrow” if he wants to see Geiger. “Early, then?,” Marlowe asks with a note of sarcasm, letting her know that he knows the place will be empty tomorrow. “Yes, early,” she snarls, disgustedly acknowledging Marlowe’s cleverness.

Critic David Thomson calls what transpires between Marlowe and Agnes as a kind of “nagging marriage” – providing the film with one of its funniest subtexts. Marlowe sees Agnes’ shoes behind a curtain leading to another room in the apartment of a grasping, small-time hood named Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt). “Why don’t you ask your friend with the pointed toes to come out of there – she must get awful tired of holding her breath.” He calls her “Sugar” over and over again, because he knows it annoys her.

By the time Marlowe has disrupted Brody’s attempt to blackmail the Sternwoods and has generally humiliated everyone involved, Agnes almost seems willing to trade sides, registering her impatience with Brody’s incompetence. “Hm!,” she grunts. “What’s the matter, Sugar?,” Marlowe asks. Agnes replies: “He gives me a pain in my –“ and she is interrupted by Brody. “Where does he give you a pain?” Marlowe asks. “Right in my –“ and again, Agnes is interrupted by Brody. “That’s what I always draw,” Agnes says, “Never once a man who’s smart all the way around the course. Never once.” Referring to an earlier moment when he wrestled a gun away from her, Marlowe asks Agnes, who is rubbing her wrist, “Did I hurt you much, Sugar?” “You and every other man I’ve ever met,” she says.

Brody is killed by Geiger’s bodyguard a few seconds later, and Marlowe is on to other things, but Agnes comes back into the story when one of Brody’s associates, a dour little man named Harry Jones (Elisha Cook, Jr.), comes to Marlowe with a proposition. “So Agnes is on the loose again,” Marlowe cracks. “She’s a nice girl,” Jones says, “we’re thinking of getting married.” “She’s too big for you,” Marlowe says, but then thinks better of the remark and apologizes. He’s still wary of the way she insinuates herself into the schemes of one small-time grafter after another, hoping to make a quick buck, and when Mr. Jones suggests he’d be willing to stand up to a police grilling for Agnes’ sake, the still skeptical Marlowe remarks that “Agnes must have something I didn’t notice.”

Witnessing Harry’s murder at the hands of a mob brute named Canino (Bob Steele) while protecting Agnes’ whereabouts is Marlowe’s last straw where Agnes is concerned. “Your little man died to keep you out of trouble,” he tells her over the phone. He squints contemptuously and says, “I got your money for you. Do you want it?” When Marlowe meets her near the corner of Rampart and Oakland to give her the two Cs, she asks him, “What happened to Harry?” “There’s no use going into that – you don’t really care anyway. Just put it down your little man deserved something better.” At the moment that Marlowe seems to hate her the most, Agnes has never looked lovelier.

There are a small bevy of both credited and uncredited actresses who make splendid little impressions in the movie, but Thomson and numerous others single out the work of Sonia Darrin as Agnes. Thomson writes:

There is Agnes Lozelle [sic], in Geiger’s shop, dumb on books but hip with grapefruit, and later the dreamgirl for Joe Brody and Harry Jones, both of whom (if you’ll pardon the remark) are too small for her. Indeed, Marlowe has sized her up and knows how to whip her with words – he understands the b*tch, and she looks at him with the bruised gratitude of someone who knows she’s been understood. What ever happened to Sonia Darrin, who played Agnes?

Darrin is officially uncredited in her role. As Hawks’ biographer, Todd McCarthy, tells the story, Darrin was originally a contender to appear in the film as Carmen Sternwood, the nymphomaniacal sister of Lauren Bacall’s character, Mrs. Rutledge. Ultimately, however, the mercurial Hawks settled on a former model, Martha Vickers, for the Carmen role, relegating Darrin to the supposedly smaller role of Agnes. Although Carmen is pivotal within the film, some of Vickers’ work ended up on the cutting room floor due to censorship concerns and other reconfiguring. As a result, perhaps, Agnes becomes a much more memorable character, especially as she is played by Darrin.

Roger Ebert writes:

One of the best-known of all Hollywood anecdotes involves the movie's confusing plot, based on the equally confusing novel by Raymond Chandler. Lauren Bacall recalls in her autobiography, “One day Bogie came on the set and said to Howard, ‘Who pushed [Owen] Taylor off the pier?’ Everything stopped.” As A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax write in Bogart, “Hawks sent Chandler a telegram asking whether the Sternwood's chauffeur, Owen Taylor, was murdered or a suicide. ‘Dammit I didn't know either,’” Chandler recalled.

It is refreshingly consistent with the on-screen persona of Agnes that, as told by McCarthy, Sonia Darrin also had a wry sense of humor:

A sarcastic young woman herself, Darrin was on the set when it was asked who killed Owen Taylor, and she burst out, “It must have been Hawks.”

Thomson’s curiosity about Darrin is echoed by other fans of The Big Sleep. On the IMDB message board for Sonia Darrin, for example, one fan writes: “This is one of the big Hollywood mysteries, considering the importance of The Big Sleep. Note also that she did not receive any credit in the movie, despite the fact that her role was infinitely more important than e.g. Dorothy Malone's, and despite the fact that only Bogart and Bacall (I think) got more screen time than her!! Something really smells here...” Others chime in with similar sentiments, and there are other websites that raise the same question: what happened to Sonia Darrin?

The annals of film history – carelessly curated by the Hollywood studios and pressed piecemeal into tawdry scrapbooks by adoring fans like me – have left us few clues to the identity of Sonia Darrin. She appeared in minor roles in a few more films, but after 1950, she is gone. For awhile one of the only clues was a reference I found to her being involved as a “guest artist” at the Los Angeles Labor Zionists' 4th annual Bikkurim Festival in Griffith Park, held June 10, 1945, in support of a free and democratic Jewish state in Palestine. Other guest artists at the event included Bette Davis, Ernst Deutsch and Joseph Szigeti. I dutifully entered the reference into the Internet Movie Database, hoping that some other Sunday researcher would be able to make something out of it. They never did. Another clue came up in a bit of syndicated gossip from the summer of 1946, in which it was reported that Sonia Darrin, “Warner fledgling,” was seen in the company of press agent Arthur Pine and was “coming East to see him soon.”

I could write my own Big Sleep about how I found Sonia Darrin, but it lacks mood and atmosphere. There’s no misty L.A. in it. There are no unsolved murders and no bookies; I don’t get beat up in it; and frankly, I don’t look so hot in a fedora.

Rock critic Gail Worley writes in her blog in 2007:

If you were, say, over age ten in the early to mid '70s and living in the United States, you will remember [Mason Reese] as the adorably precocious 7 year old spokesperson for Underwood Deviled Ham in the commercial that swept the nation by storm and had everyone mispronouncing the word ‘Smorgasbord.’

Our scene switches from “EXT. MISTY LOS ANGELES STREET - NIGHT” to “INT. ON THE SET OF A DAYTIME TALK SHOW. It is Halloween, October 31, 1973. Mason Reese, a red-headed 3’-8” gnome who talks like he’s a 32-year old trapped in a little boy’s body – using big words and the attitude of a seasoned commentator – is co-hosting for the fourth time with the reigning king of daytime variety/talk, Mike Douglas. Today’s guests are Leonard Nimoy, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, game expert John Scarne, and the beatnik poet/gadfly Tuli Kupferberg and his partner in pop/countercultural crime, Sylvia Topp. Before the week is over, Mason will have the opportunity to quiz the likes of Art Buchwald, Ralph Nader and Theodore H. White, author of The Making of the President 1972.

Mason Reese became a bit of a TV phenomenon in the early to mid-1970s, doing commercials not only for Underwood Deviled Ham (through which “Borgasmord” became a household word), but for Dunkin’ Donuts, Ralston Purina, Ivory Snow, Birdseye Frozen French Fries and Thick and Frosty, winning seven Clio awards for his work. Mike Douglas took him on, first as a one-time guest, and later as a temporary co-host, finding his appeal irresistible. He became a children’s reporter for WNBC-TV, worked on a prime-time show with Howard Cosell, and even did a pilot for his own TV series.

Also on hand for some of the Mike Douglas appearances was Mason’s mother, Sonia (see photo below). As Mason writes in his “autobiography,” published at the height of his fame in 1974:

Mommy has red hair, too. When she was a little girl, she lived in Hollywood and became a beautiful actress. She doesn’t act any more, but she’s still beautiful.

Somewhere along the line, Sonia Darrin left Hollywood and did, in fact, go East, meeting and marrying Bill Reese, a one-time theater set designer who eventually ran his own marketing services company, specializing in 3-D design work. She and Bill raised at least 4 children in a stylish place on West End Avenue in Manhattan – Mason, the youngest; daughter Suky; and two older sons, Lanny and Mark.

Mason’s fame faded as he grew older, and eventually he and his family settled into a less visible existence. Mason eventually went into the restaurant business, owning and co-owning a number of places around lower Manhattan, including Nowbar on Seventh Avenue South, Mason’s on Amsterdam Avenue, and Paladar on Ludlow Street.

Hollywood bad-boy director Brett Ratner briefly brought both Mason and Sonia out of retirement in 1990. When Ratner was a film student at NYU, he had a chance meeting with the instantly recognizable Mason Reese on the street. This led to the creation of a bizarre 12-minute film Ratner made as a student project, Whatever Happened to Mason Reese (1990) in which Reese appears as an ex-child star who hangs around with models in limousines and eventually gets gored by a fan whom Reese has humiliated. Reese hurt his leg during the filming, got into some kind of fight with Ratner, and allegedly threatened to tie up the film in litigation; Reese’s voice was later dubbed in by Anthony Michael Hall when the film was finally finished, apparently with dollars begged from Steven Spielberg. It can now be seen as an “extra” on the DVD of Ratner’s hit Hollywood movie, Rush Hour. And Sonia Darrin even got a film credit out of it – “Thanks … Sonia Reese.”

While all of that gives us an inkling of what Sonia Darrin has been up to since The Big Sleep, we’re still left to wonder – where did she come from?

“EXT. – A SAN DIEGO BEACH – THE 1930s.” Sonia Paskowitz sits in the sand and watches as her eldest brother Dorian, a lifeguard, looking like Charles Atlas, chats up a few adoring female sunbathers. “You know, the girls would be drowning,” says Sonia. “They wanted to be rescued by him.”

Louis and Rose Paskowitz landed at Galveston, Texas in the early years of the 20^th century, when Galveston was a common port of entry for Russian Jews. They married and had three children: two sons, Dorian and Adrian, and a daughter, Sonia. Louis opened a dry goods store, but it didn’t survive. Dorian claims that he convinced his parents to move to San Diego after seeing a postcard of some San Diego surfers. In any event, the family moved there in 1934, and Louis found work as a shoe salesman.

Dorian went to Stanford and became a doctor. Adrian studied music, and became a respected music teacher and violinist. Sonia drifted toward Hollywood, and acting.

The realization that Sonia Darrin has been hiding in plain sight all these years, even a couple of years after I managed to draw the connection between Sonia and her son Mason Reese, really hit me with the release of Doug Pray’s documentary Surfwise (2007), in which the unorthodox life of Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz, his wife Juliette and their 9 children is chronicled. In it, we learn that Doc Paskowitz led his family on a relentless quest for freedom and health, moving from beach to beach in their 24-foot camper and eventually opening a surf camp in Southern California. We watch as Doc, Juliette and each of the 9 children tell us, from their own individual perspectives, about their nomadic, bohemian lifestyle, their strict “health food” diet (no fat, no sugar, no exceptions), and the requirement that each and every one of them surf, as often as possible.

Also on hand, providing her outsider’s view of Dorian Paskowitz and his family, is Sonia Darrin, Dorian’s little sister. Sonia talks about her brother’s stubbornness and the harsh conditions his family sometimes suffered, and explains how she took in two of Dorian’s sons in New York when they decided to rebel against their father’s iron regime.

She has red hair now – just like her son Mason wrote in his autobiography. Her green eyes light up with that sly intelligence when she smiles, and the years cannot hide that melodic quality in her voice, the one that you can hear in each line she delivered in The Big Sleep, over 60 years ago. Sonia Darrin – truly hiding in plain sight -- appearing on The Mike Douglas Show in the 1970s and in a documentary film about her brother in 2007, risking detection but somehow escaping it.

The word on the street is that Sonia Paskowitz Reese, better known as Sonia Darrin, is around 80 years old (which would’ve meant she was around 17 when she was making The Big Sleep) and that she is now living in New York. I’m sure she has even better stories about her life than the ones we can glean through public sources.

It is kind of tempting to think of Agnes Lowzier speeding off into the desert on that misty night in L.A., meeting up with a traveling theater troupe as the clouds parted somewhere outside of Barstow, sidling up to a tall, handsome stage carpenter and eventually settling down and having a child who would be known for his expressive wisecracks … ah, but that is conflating fiction with reality -- and really, do we need to do that here? Sonia Darrin’s reality has enough twists and turns and notes of interest that there is probably no need for it.

Categories: Classic-Cinema, Heroic-Tales-of-Research, Sonia-Darrin, TV

Ted Stevens' Harvard Law School Yearbook Photo

2008-11-13T12:03:00.002-05:00

Apropos of nothing ...

Categories: American-Politicians, Old-Photos

Oz

2008-05-15T09:09:00.003-04:00

L. Frank Baum was born on this day in 1856 in Chittenango, New York.

A failed theater owner, dry goods seller and magazine editor, and a some-time breeder of fancy poultry, Frank Baum began writing books for children in 1899, publishing the modestly successful Father Goose. The following year he wrote the book which would make his name in pop culture, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), a fantasy tale with decidedly Nietzschean undertones about a Kansas girl and her adventures with a scarecrow, a tin woodsman and a lion in a magical other-world. Baum took the name for his other-world from the letters on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet: "O-Z."

Wildly popular, the book was almost instantaneously turned into a musical, but the most familiar musical version, preserved in MGM’s classic film, The Wizard of Oz (1939; directed by Victor Fleming, with Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Bert Lahr), did not take shape until shortly before that movie was made, when Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg collaborated on such songs as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and "If I Were King of the Forest."

Following the book’s success, Baum wrote 13 more Oz books, none of which came close to matching the first in its irresistible, mythically pregnant plot or its lasting popularity. He unsuccessfully tried to promote his books with a traveling vaudeville slide show and toured in Europe for a time before filing bankruptcy in 1911 and settling in Hollywood on his wife's money in a home he called "Ozcot." He died there on May 6, 1919.

Categories: Literature, Pop-Culture

Moving Staircase

2008-05-14T08:12:00.003-04:00

Charles D. Seeberger, the "inventor" (sort of) of the escalator, was born on this day in 1857 in Oscaloosa, Iowa.

Seeberger was a Yale-trained engineer who obsessed over the prospect of a moving staircase while working in the family hardware store in Chicago. In 1895 he left the family firm and filed a patent for an "escalator," a name he coined; the Patent Office was a little mixed up by the time it granted Seeberger's patent under the title "elevator."

Seeberger wasn't satisfied with his own design, however, preferring George Wheeler's "flat-step" design. He acquired Wheeler's patent in 1898, meshed it together with bits and pieces of what he had designed himself and engaged the Otis Elevator Company (founded by Elisha Otis in the 1850s) to build the prototype. The Otis Company and Seeberger unveiled the escalator at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, where it competed for attention with Jesse Reno's "inclined elevator," a conveyor belt with step-like rows of iron cleats to support the feet of the passengers as they leaned forward precariously. Although Reno's design was a lot less comfortable than Seeberger's, it did have a comb of fingers at the landing which passed between the cleats and kept stray shoelaces and skirts from getting caught in the machine.

The Otis-Seeberger and the Reno moving-staircases competed against each other until 1910, when Otis purchased Reno's company. Even as late as 1911, however, the Otis Company had to go to extreme lengths to reassure customers of the safety of the escalator; when the first Seeberger escalator was installed in the London Underground, the Otis Company hired a man with a wooden leg, "Bumper" Harris, to ride the escalator all day to demonstrate its harmlessness.

Seeberger left Otis in 1915; and in 1920, the Otis Company combined Seeberger's modified flat-step escalator with Reno's combed landing, producing what was to become the most popular model of moving-staircase, selling more units in the 2 years that followed than it had ever sold of the either the Seeberger or Reno designs alone. None of them perfected a way of keeping people walking instead of standing in my way on escalators, however.

Seeberger passed away in September 1931 in Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts.

Categories: Inventions, Technology

Barack Obama at Greensburg Town Hall Meeting

2008-03-29T17:41:00.003-04:00

... on March 28, 2008, at the Hempfield Area High School gymnasium.

Categories: American-Politicians, Presidential-Campaigns, 2008-Presidential-Campaign, Old-Photos

Monopoly Sights: St. James Place, 2007

2008-02-28T13:20:00.006-05:00

Oh, yes ... I've spent one or two evenings in this generically named tavern on St. James Place in Atlantic City. Enough to know that everything in there seems to have been shellacked with 18 coats of old varnish. I must confess that I don't remember much else, when all is said and done. Our bar tab could've gotten us a couple of houses on this block, though, apparently.

Categories: Monopoly

Monopoly Sights: "Marvin Gardens," 2007

2008-01-24T18:55:00.000-05:00

"Marvin Gardens" was the name that Charles Darrow used in his original 1933 Atlantic City Monopoly game board, but it was in fact a misspelling of the name "Marven Gardens," a small residential neighborhood located near the boundary of Margate City and Ventnor City, just south of Atlantic City. Parker Bros. issued a formal apology to the residents of Marven Gardens for the misspelling in 1995. Some people around there are still sore about it, though.

Although a house in "Marvin Gardens" costs $150 in the classic version of Monopoly, today they seem to be going for upwards of $699,000.

Categories: Monopoly

Monopoly Sights: Vermont Avenue, 2007

2008-01-07T17:34:00.000-05:00

Categories: Monopoly

Local Notes #3

2008-01-01T09:11:00.000-05:00

On Friday, the 28th, we had an opportunity to see two entertaining bands on the "Downstairs Live" stage at the World Cafe in Philadelphia: Golem and Toubab Krewe. (Muchas gracias to Krewe kora-and-12-string-kamelengoni player Justin Perkins for the tickets!) The opening act, Golem, is an irrepressibly lively five-piece klezmer band, led by Annette Ezekiel on vocals and accordion. "This is not your father's klezmer band," according to a review in Jewish Weekly, posted on the band's website, "[u]nless, of course, your father was Sid Vicious." The band's repertoire is a spun-out and recoiled mélange of Jewish, Gypsy and Slavic folk songs, collected and reworked by Ezekiel and her cohorts somewhere between Lower East Side bagel shops and summers in Eastern Europe. Ezekiel and fiddler Alicia Jo Rabins (decked out in shimmering, bright red mini-tunics and long leather boots for Friday's performance), tromboing-boinger Curtis Hasselbring, drummer Tim Monaghan and upright bassist Taylor Bergren-Chrisman put some furious, crazy and intense musicianship on display, while muttering vocalist Aaron Diskin adds some Yiddish burlesque flavor to the whole affair. Toubab Krewe -- an Asheville, North Carolina-based fusion instrumental jam outfit, blending West African sounds (learned while studying with masters in Mali, Guinea and the Ivory Coast) with various facets of Southern-tinged rock 'n roll -- took the stage around 10pm, and they were worth the wait. On many of their tightly-meshed numbers, while Perkins bangs and plucks away on electrified West African gourd-harps (creating a sound that swings from steel-string axe-work to the effect of a light breeze on backporch chimes), percussionist Luke Quaranta, who plies a collection of traditional West African percussion instruments, and drummer Teal Brown, engage in some startling, fascinating cross-talk; and guitarist Drew Heller and bassist David Pransky (an ex-mandolinist) provide a supple, silky bed of electronic sound. Heller and Brown deserve special mention; Heller's guitar is surely accessible to uninitiated American rock audiences, but it straddles the soldered core of the group's sound by introducing us to the lightning, flat-pick sound of West African masters such as Zani Diabate, and Heller's own teacher Lamine Soumano. Brown may sit at the back of the group, but he is, in a sense, the Krewe's ringmaster, leading the band with a wide, white grin in some cliff-hanging tempo shifts while flashing in and out of straight-ahead rock drumming and West African rhythms. As the World Cafe's David Dye says, "Toubab Krewe are where Ali Farka Toure and Led Zeppelin meet." Check out their eponymous 2005 release when you get the chance -- regrettably, it is hard to find.

In sporting news ... the "Augustinian Shoot-Out" -- a four-day high school basketball tournament comprised of squads from nine elite North American Augustinian high schools -- came to a successful conclusion on Sunday the 30th. Participating in the tournament, which was held at St. Augustine College Preparatory School in Richland, New Jersey, were the hosts, the Prep Hermits; the Saints of St. Augustine High School in San Diego, California; the Friars of Malvern Prep in Malvern, Pennsylvania; the Wildcats of Villanova Prep in Ojai, California; the Mustangs of St. Rita of Cascia in Chicago, Illinois; the Celtics of Providence Catholic in New Lenox, Illinois; the Commandos of Cascia Hall in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and the Knights of St. Thomas of Villanova College in King City, Ontario, Canada. We were on hand to see the Prep Hermits' JV squad, featuring our own Ryan O., beat the Varsity squad from Ontario on Friday morning, 63-35. As St. Augustine himself sayeth, "The argument is at an end."

Categories: New-Music, Local-Notes, Sport

Monopoly Sights: Oriental Avenue, 2007

2007-12-31T04:31:00.000-05:00

Categories: Monopoly

Of Martinis, "Bradfords" and "Teslas"

2007-12-17T20:04:00.000-05:00

My apologies to regular readers who may have been showing up at this space every morning hoping for a new "parlour trick." It is has been a busy season, full of deals, machinations and pre-holiday chores -- but I hope to see my way clear to writing more when 2008 begins.

One thing, however, has inspired me to put pen to paper once again ... I was out with my wife, Kerstin, the other day, trailing behind her as she rummaged through the holiday sales at a local Sur la Table, when I stumbled upon a most disconcerting item: the Waring Pro WM007 Professional Electric Martini Maker.

First of all, we all know about Waring and his blender, and also about his Pennsylvanians. More power to the fellow, I guess, for the laser-like focus of his life and imagination upon things that rotate (phonograph turntables, blending blades, etc.). I know that, after soda fountains, taverns and bars were among Waring's first customers, but Waring was no doubt hawking his blender to poor fellows who were forced, by the preferences of their clientele, to make frozen cocktails of one type or another, such as a Frozen Daquiri or a Margarita. The venerable David Embury says as much. "Frozen cocktails require the use of a Waring Blendor or similar electric mixer of the type used at soda fountains," Embury writes in deadpan manner in his book The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks. "The egg-beater type of electric mixer cannot be used." Implicit in his observation that a "Waring Blendor" is something that is normally seen at a soda fountain is the opinion, no doubt, that frozen cocktails are for grown-ups who still have adolescent tastes. In his chapter on "Glassware, Gimmicks, and Gadgets," Embury remains pointedly silent on the necessity of keeping a "Waring Blendor" around a well-equipped bar.

Now the people who own Waring's name have unleashed this strange little device on the American consumer market, the Electric Martini Maker -- an appliance whose essential mechanism is not simply rotation (as in the machine's "Stir" mode), but also vigorous shaking (as in its "Shake" mode). Yes, that's right, the Waring 007 can give you a Martini that's either "shaken" or "stirred" at your command.

Notwithstanding James Bond's request for a "shaken, not stirred" Martini, first uttered by Sean Connery in Goldfinger and used ad infinitum ever since, David Embury is very clear on the matter. Martinis are, strictly speaking, always stirred. "If you shake the Martini," Embury maintains, "it becomes a Bradford."

Embury continues: "The real distinction between the two methods is simple. Shaking produces a colder cocktail quicker than stirring. Therefore, since frigidity is highly desirable in all cocktails, shaking is normally the preferable method. However, with some cocktails another consideration enters into the picture, and that is 'eye appeal.' A substantial part of the charm of certain cocktails such as the Martini and the Manhattan is their clear, almost scintillating translucence. A stirred cocktail will remain clear; a shaken cocktail will be cloudy or even muddy in appearance. This result is particularly noticeable where vermouth or any other wine is an ingredient. Therefore, you should never shake a cocktail containing wine unless you want a muddy looking drink. This cloudiness will clear somewhat as the drink stands, but it will never have quite the limpid appeal of the drink that is stirred. ... Incidentally, there are very few cocktails that can be made with the beautiful translucence of the Martini and the Manhattan. This is because more cocktails are made with citrus juices than with vermouths, and the citrus juices themselves are not translucent."

(Why a Bradford? I have no idea, although it does call to mind one hopelessly foggy, early morning airplane flight I took from the airfield at Bradford, Pennsylvania that forced me to admit to myself, then and there, that I was taking the worst calculated risk of my life. I'd be willing to bet, though, that Embury himself never experienced such a thing.)

Embury's distinctions seem quaint and almost archaic now, in a world of filled with muddy Mocha Fudge Latte Martinis and Apple Cinnamon Vanilla Martinis. It does, however, prompt me to wonder what the appropriate name should be for a Martini that is neither shaken nor stirred by human hands, but rather, jerked around by a Waring Pro WM007 Professional Electric Martini Maker. One is tempted to call it a "Waring," but I refuse to cast aspersions on Fred Waring without more evidence of his posthumous complicity. Perhaps we can call it a "Tesla," in honor of the unfairly maligned inventor of the AC current transmission system. Then again, I wouldn't want to further sully his memory, either.

Call it what you like -- the Waring Electric Martini Maker will not be under my Christmas tree this year or any other. I'm not a Luddite, even if I do prefer to chop my own vegetables, when making Salsa, instead of using an electric food processor. It's all about aesthetics. Give me the manually crafted beauty of a dry, translucent Martini (made with Gin, as all Martini aficionados agree), and keep the electricity out of my aperitif.

And if that isn't reason enough not to be experimenting with electricity and cocktails, try this review of the Waring Electric Martini Maker by Dave Wells:

Let's recap. You pay $99.95 (plus tax/shipping) for the machine. You measure the ingredients. You pour the ingredients. You add the ice. The machine wiggles the shaker - either up and down ('shaken') or in a circular motion ('stirred') probably for much longer than necessary. You pour the martini. You wash the jigger and the shaker. You find a place to store the bulky unitasking device. Wow, aren't modern conveniences wonderful?

Indeed.

Categories: David-Embury, Cocktails, Technology

Local Notes #2

2007-10-17T10:42:00.001-04:00

Cleveland, by the numbers, last night:

Rating of the martinis at downtown eatery One Walnut: 10 out of 10
Home Runs witnessed at Jacobs Field last night: 5
Series Game Count: Cleveland 3, Boston 1.
Time on the clock when my head hit the pillow: 3:38 a.m.

Categories: Local-Notes, Baseball, Cocktails

Today I Draw, Tomorrow I Jig

2007-10-03T07:59:00.000-04:00

"I do not really consider myself a drawer, or an artist . . . I would say, well yes, I draw and I sculpt, and I do applique, embroidery and needlepoint . . . Tomorrow I want to go out and go jigging [ice-fishing] . . . Being able to do embroidery and being able to go out on the land and all those other things are not secondary to being an artist." -- Kenojuak Ashevak, 1980.

Inuit artist Kenojuak Ashevak was born on this day in 1927 at Ikkerask, Baffin Island, Canada.

When she was 19, Kenojuak's parents arranged for her to marry Johnniebeo, an Inuit hunter. She initially resisted the marriage, throwing rocks at him whenever he came near; but eventually, the couple worked out their differences, and Johnniebeo became an artist in his own right, occasionally assisted Kenojuak on her larger pieces. Together they had two daughters and a son.

Kenojuak began her career as an artist while recuperating from tuberculosis in a hospital in Quebec during the 1950s. She was the first woman of the Cape Dorset area to be recognized for her drawing and painting, which mainly centered on boldly stylized graphic depictions of wildlife, emphasizing formal experimentation rather than any strict documentation of Inuit culture. She was among the first to be honored with the Order of Canada (1967) and was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy (1974). In 1999, the Royal Canadian Mint issued a twenty-five cent piece that featured Kenojuak's "Red Owl" on one side, with her initials in Inuktitut; it marked the first time that the language had ever appeared on Canadian currency.

Categories: Painting-&-Sculpture

Will Write Poetry for Shoes

2007-09-11T09:46:00.000-04:00

Poet James Thomson was born on this day in 1700 in Ednam, Roxburghshire, Scotland.

Thomson was best known for his collection of nature poems, The Seasons (1730; revised 1744) and for the lyrics of "Rule, Britannia" (set to music by Thomas Arne).

After he left Scotland on foot for his new chosen home in London in 1725, he was mugged and lost all his possessions. Finding himself in London without a shilling, he sold a portion of what would become "Winter," the first part of The Seasons, for a pair of shoes. He died on August 27, 1748, after catching a chill during a boat trip from Hammersmith to Kew.

"He possesses a facility, almost amounting to a genius, for holding together in loose, artificial suspension all the characteristic elements of the popular culture of his day: Augustan patriotism, classicism in diction and tone, gothic excess, sentimentalism." -- M. Wynn-Davies.

Categories: Literature

Phone Boxes, Broad Court, London, May 2006

2007-09-10T08:14:00.000-04:00

Categories: Old-Photos

I Can't Get There From Here

2007-09-09T00:40:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I know where it is.
You wanna go three blocks down and make a right,
Make a U-turn when you pass the Fireworks Kiosk,
Make a hard left at McClintock’s Taco-Rama,
Go sixty-three miles east on the 501,
Get off at Exit 22 and head west on the 6-2-&-Even,
Get out of your car at Hormone Avenue and take the #5 bus going South,
When you get off at the Post Office, veer right,
You’ll see a fork,
Take it.
Can't miss it.

Categories: Huh?

1066 and All That

2007-09-08T09:57:00.000-04:00

William I, king and conqueror of England, died on this day in Rouen in 1087 at the age of about 59.

William was the bastard son of Robert, Duke of Normandy, by the daughter of a tanner whom Robert met and fell in love with at a dance. When William was 8 his father died, leaving William as a young duke in the hands of stewards and tutors. While many of his protectors lost their lives to treachery, William survived to adulthood in part with the help of Henry I of France, yet he gained considerable skill as a combatant while he was growing up. When he was 18, the Normans revolted against his rule, and with Henry's help he managed not only to put down the rebellion but to expand his territory.

In 1051 he began to cast his eye across the English Channel, where his elderly distant cousin Edward the Confessor ruled without an heir. Meeting with Edward, William secured (or at least thought he secured) Edward's promise that William should be the King of England after Edward's death. To shore up his chances, William captured Harold Godwinson, the powerful Earl of Wessex, and extracted a similar promise from him. Nevertheless, Harold considered himself under polite duress, and privately believed that the Normans were no match for his superior Anglo-Saxon forces, should the question ever come up in battle.

Edward died on January 5, 1066, and within 24 hours Harold had himself proclaimed King of England, despite his promise to William. Infuriated by Harold's lack of chivalry, William gathered an army and with the support of Pope Alexander II (who was impressed with William's commitment to monastic reform), William landed on the beach at Pevensey, wearing around his neck the relics upon which Harold had sworn his allegiance to William as a stern reminder.

Harold's Anglo-Saxon army were initially busy in the North fighting Danes, but marched to meet William at the Battle of Hastings. The Anglo-Saxons were well positioned and initially did some damage to William's army, unseating William from his own horse three times. Concerned that his soldiers would think he had been killed, William fought much of the battle bare-headed. He countered Harold's initial success by drawing the Anglo-Saxons into a valley and instructing his archers to change from a flat trajectory to a high angle for maximum penetration. As the battle approached a stalemate, one of the Norman arrows mortally wounded Harold (some say in the eye), and the English retreated.

From Hastings William tried to enter London, and was initially repulsed. After some thought, however, the people of London gave in (due to a lack of credible candidates to fill Harold's void), and crowned him King of England on Christmas Day, 1066 at Westminster Abbey.

For the next five years, William ruthlessly and stubbornly put down a series of minor rebellions in England, and gradually turned to governing. Although the Norman culture was somewhat backward compared to that of the Anglo-Saxons, the inquisitive, imitative Normans adopted much of what they had conquered, even as William installed his own Norman noblemen in English earldoms and his own church leaders in positions of authority. In 1086, William showed his sense of statesmanship by commissioning the Domesday Book, a leviathan survey of people, lands and property throughout England which became a veritable handbook for generations of his descendants who ruled there.

William, who grew stout and bald in middle age, died as a result of an injury he suffered while skirmishing with the army of Philip I at Rouen. He was succeeded in England by his boorish son William Rufus.

Judging by the persistence of William the Conqueror's popularity over the years, it is as if one might imagine that all English history is traceable to William's conquest at Hastings in 1066, and everything occurring before it lies in the obscurity of the Dark Ages.

Categories: Kings-and-Queens, Anglo-Saxon-England

Faster Calculating

2007-08-30T08:37:00.000-04:00

Computer pioneer John W. Mauchly was born on this day in 1907 in Cleveland, Ohio.

John Mauchly was an obscure professor of physics --in fact, he was the whole physics department at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania -- who was best known locally for his entertaining "Christmas lectures" on basic physical principles, illustrating Newton's laws with skateboards and bringing spectroscopic principles to bear on finding out the contents of Christmas gifts wrapped in colored cellophane.

His avocation, however, was weather prediction, and when he wasn't teaching Physics 101 to pre-med students he was writing papers on the effect of solar activity on rainfall patterns. His sticking point, however, was that the mathematical analysis required to support his theories required a better, faster calculating machine than he had ever encountered.

Believing electronics to be the answer after a visit to Iowa to see the pioneering work of John Atanasoff, in 1941 Mauchly enrolled in a U.S. War Department- sponsored "defense training in electronics" course at Penn, where he met Pres Eckert, a recent graduate from the Penn electronics department. Together they discussed the possibility of designing an electronic calculating machine, which culminated in Mauchly's proposal for defense funding, "The Use of High-Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculation." The government bit on the concept, needing faster calculators to calculate ballistic missile trajectories, and in 1943 Mauchly and Eckert began work on the ENIAC -- the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

As they built the 30-ton behemoth, they had to figure out not only how to coordinate the activities of 18,000 vacuum tubes, but they had to find wire that rats would not eat. Ultimately ENIAC was used for 8 years on hydrogen bomb problems and calculation of Russian weather patterns.

Next, Mauchly and Eckert began to work on the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Computer), a stored-program machine, but mathematician John von Neumann grabbed the reins of the project and Mauchly and Eckert got into a dispute with Penn over the ownership of their designs; so in 1948 Mauchly and Eckert formed their own company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, to commercialize computers. They built the UNIVAC I, which they sold to such firms as Prudential and A.C. Nielsen (as well as the U.S. Census Bureau) for a price of $150,000 each, but they were cash poor and sold out to Remington Rand, the typewriting company, in 1950, which in turn sold out to Sperry in 1955.

Having demonstrated that there was a market for large-frame computers, their much better financed competitor, IBM, began to pour its resources into the opportunity, eclipsing the success of Mauchly and Eckert's UNIVAC. Mauchly and Eckert, however, had shown the world that electricity could be used to solve mathematical problems and produced the first commercial electronic digital computer.

Mauchly died on January 8, 1980.

Categories: Information-Theory, Technology, Inventions

Exile in France

2007-08-27T08:14:00.000-04:00

Childeric III, known as "Childeric the Lazy," King of the Franks (743-deposed 751), the last of the Merovingian kings of France, died on this day in 755 in a monastery near St. Omer, France.

In modern times France has been generous to deposed rulers of other countries, giving shelter to such characters as the Shah of Iran and Bebe Doc Duvalier, among others, after their ignominious defeats, in varying degrees of faroukian splendor. Such generosity has not generally been given to France's own, however, as the French Revolution amply proves.

Even before that, Childeric III learned this lesson first-hand. Childeric III became king of the Franks in 743, during the end of a period marked by the relative weakness of the kings' authority as compared to the power wielded by mayor of the palace in Paris. While the exact political reasons are obscured by history (although Childeric's sobriquet may provide at least a germ of an answer), mayor Pepin the Short asked Pope Zacharias for permission to sack Childeric III and take over the Frankish throne. Permission was granted, and Pepin confined Childeric to a monastery in the south, where one assumes he did not stroll around jauntily in caviar-stained silk shirts.

Categories: Kings-and-Queens, France

A Fly Went By

2007-08-21T12:48:00.000-04:00

Marshall "Mike" McClintock, author of one of my favorite childhood-era books, A Fly Went By (first published in 1958), was born on this day in 1906 in Topeka, Kansas. He was also known for a few other minor children's classics, including Stop That Ball! (1951) and What Have I Got (1961).

As an editor, McClintock secured the publication of the first in a long series of children's books by an old Dartmouth classmate of his, Theodore Geisel -- better known as Dr. Seuss. The book was Mulberry Street (1938).

McClintock also wrote patriotic pulp novels during World War II under the pseudonyms of William Starret (the Nurse Blake series, 1942-44) and Gregory Duncan (the Fighters for Freedom series, 1944). He died in 1967.

Categories: Books

Local Notes, #1

2007-08-08T07:36:00.000-04:00

On the evening of August 2, Jeremy Messersmith, on something of an extended national tour, opened for The Donuts and Alyssa Jean and the Gypsy Blue Band at The Fire on Girard Street in Philadelphia. The gnome-like one-man AV club spent most of his set crawling around on stage pulling cables, kicking footpedals and pushing buttons, but the ultimate effect was presumably as intended by Messersmith -- small lyrical gestures and the voice of a bunny rabbit over a raft of electronica that single-handedly calls to mind the stuff of Matt Hales (Aqualung). The Donuts, meanwhile, were on fire at The Fire; lead singer J. Bearclaw apparently had a bad day at his day job, which led him to snarl his way through a Wallenda-tight set that included songs from The Donuts' latest CD (Jet Ear), concluding by throwing his guitar and storming off the stage without so much as a valedictory.

In Can-Am League play last night, the Atlantic City Surf faced Les Capitales de Quebec, and the stylish minor league girlfriend corps was out at Bernie Robbins Stadium in full force. Amid cries of "Sacre bleu!" and "Viva le frommage!" (I made up that second one), Les Capitales bested the struggling Surfites, 7-4. Despite six innings of shaky pitching by AC's Monte Mansfield, I did not have to come out of Section 216 and pitch the 7th inning myself.

Thanks to a service call by yours truly yesterday, Grandpere now enjoys all cable channels between 27 and 55 as well as audio. His on-screen menus, however, are still in Spanish. Score that one Grandpere, 2, his JVC remote, 1.

Categories: Local-Notes, New-Music, Baseball

Barry Bonds at Three Rivers Stadium, circa 1988

2007-08-08T07:32:00.000-04:00

Could this lean young man be the same fellow who just broke Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record?

Other questions occur to me. Am I the same fellow I was when I snapped this shot? Is my head as small as it was back then? Am I still a good guy when I take an Extra Strength Excedrin? Am I funnier after I’ve had a couple of beers? Am I smarter after getting a good night’s sleep? Am I any skinnier after I skip a few meals? Am I absolutely certain that I am still comprised of the same molecular structure, still fundamentally defined by a string of pointed messages written long ago in trails of deoxyribonucleic acid, after I get off a five-hour plane flight, after emerging from a dip in the ocean, or after an episode of quiet soul-searching and insomnia at 4 in the morning?

I don’t know any of the answers to the questions people pose about Barry Bonds. I humbly admit, however, that I don’t know the precise answers to the questions I am posing about myself. I am merely guessing at this point.

I do know that I would not be capable of hitting a single home run in the majors -- straight, sober, on Excedrin, on beer, or otherwise.

Categories: Old-Photos, Baseball

The Adventures of Jane Adams

2007-08-07T12:08:00.000-04:00

In 1980, I was doing some research on the horror film actor Rondo Hatton and was going through the motions of figuring out whether any of his co-stars were still alive, so that I could interview them about their recollections of him. Not many of them were around, but I did manage to find Arthur Lubin (director of Rondo’s The Spider Woman Strikes Back, 1946, but better known as the director of a few Abbott and Costello films and some episodes of Mr. Ed), who was very kind but had little to say about Mr. Hatton.

Research projects tend to beget research projects. One of Hatton’s co-stars, a pretty, blue-eyed, auburn-haired actress named Jane Adams, was listed in David Ragan’s Who’s Who in Hollywood as a “lost player,” someone who had completely disappeared after her film career ended. Ragan was possibly among the more qualified people to have made that assessment, as Who’s Who in Hollywood was probably the definitive source, at the time, of information about the then-current activities and residences of actors and actresses from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

To me, however, it was a challenge. I started by making an appointment to read files at the Margaret Herrick Library, the research archive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. Its biographical files contain photos, clippings, press releases and studio materials for thousands of film people – from bit players to stars to studio heads. Unfortunately, the Jane Adams files were pretty sparse. They contained a couple of stills of Adams from the film The Egg and I (which is a film that is not among Ms. Adams' official credits) and two versions of a Universal Studios official bio.

According to the bio, Jane Adams was born Betty Jane Bierce on this day in 1921 in San Antonio, Texas. She moved to California with her parents, and, it said, following testing at age 4, she was revealed to have the second highest I.Q. in California. She apparently later went on to become an accomplished violinist, a student at the Pasadena Playhouse and ultimately a model in New York City before going under contract with Universal Studios, appearing as "Poni Adams" in a number of routine horse operas. At last her name was changed "Jane Adams" -- with the idea that it might lead to more dignified roles. Instead she was cast memorably as the beautiful hunchbacked nurse in the Universal monster-fest, House of Dracula (1944; with John Carradine and Lon Chaney, Jr.) and the blind piano teacher in The Brute Man (1946, with the aforementioned Rondo Hatton).

After a brief hiatus during the late 1940s, Adams returned to do a few more Westerns, and appeared on some episodes of Kit Carson, The Cisco Kid and The Adventures of Superman on TV. She retired from the business in 1953. The only clue to her later life was a single line from her studio bio that stated that she had “married Lt. Thomas K. Turnage, U.S. Army” in 1945. Before the Internet, of course, a clue such as this was little more than an invitation to hours of tedious phone book hunting. I spent a day at a local library picking through old phone books from across the country, looking for Turnages. It seemed like a dead end, and I put the file away.

The next part of the story is an illustration of the occasional serendipity of historical research, the awesome poltergeistian power of coincidence in the service of solving minor mysteries.

A few months after my phone book binge, I was sitting in the kitchen of my parents’ house in Southern California, with my Hatton files spread out in front of me on the breakfast table. Across from me was a little black and white TV set, and on it was the 11 o’clock news, to which I had tuned in anticipation of Johnny Carson’s monologue at 11:30. I ran across the Jane Adams subfile and opened it. There again I saw the line about Miss Adams’ marriage to Lt. Turnage. Then, as if the clouds in my kitchen had parted and let loose a bolt of white sunlight, the news anchor on the TV led into a taped clip by saying, “President Reagan’s executive assistant on military manpower, General Thomas K. Turnage, explained that …” I looked up to see General Turnage talking to reporters about some pressing issue concerning military conscription and the U.S. Selective Service.

My parents wondered what the commotion in the kitchen was all about. The next morning, I started to do some newspaper research on General Turnage, and by the end of the day, I had found an entry on him in a Who’s Who publication that listed his wife’s name as “Betty Jane Smith,” and an address (200 N. Pickett Street, Alexandria, Virginia). A phone number was only a step away.

I was 17 years old. I was eligible for Selective Service registration the next year. I was dealing with the wife of an advisor to the president. So, naturally, I chickened out. I never made any effort to contact the former Jane Adams.

I did, however, dutifully return to the Margaret Herrick Library with a neatly penned anonymous message on an index card, which read more or less as follows:

Jane Adams is married to General Thomas Turnage, President Reagan’s executive assistant for military manpower. Her address is 200 N. Pickett Street, Alexandria, Virginia.

I placed the card in the Jane Adams file in the Library, and then forgot about the whole thing.

Years later, while in a book shop in Southern California, I found a quickie reference work on B horror movies or westerns in which the author had tracked down Jane Adams, now retired with General Turnage in Rancho Mirage, California, and interviewed her. I like to assume that my anonymous message helped. In her interview, Ms. Adams recalls:

On July 14, 1945, I married Tom Turnage. We recently celebrated our golden wedding anniversary. [A brief marriage to an Annapolis cadet ended tragically as he was killed in action on his first mission during WWII.] I wanted to be with Tom, whose career kept us traveling constantly. It was only when he was sent to Korea that I came back and did those TV shows. I wanted to be a housewife, mother and travel. That’s something I couldn’t do as an actress … I’m very happy in Palm Springs … I loved working in serials and westerns – it was very exciting. My life has been a great adventure.

I felt a pang of regret that I never contacted her.

General Turnage passed away in 2000, and was given a burial with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Under President Reagan, he was not only an executive on the President’s military manpower task force, but he served as the director of the Selective Service, and finally as the last administrator of the U.S. Veterans Administration, from 1986 to 1989 – prior to the job’s elevation to a cabinet-level post as the Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs.

Categories: Classic-Cinema, Heroic-Tales-of-Research

Walking Home from School. Kathmandu, Nepal, 1997

2007-08-04T08:22:00.001-04:00

Categories: Old-Photos, Nepal

The Man Who Almost Made It

2007-08-01T08:47:00.000-04:00

Mountaineer Eric Shipton, the man who almost made it, was born on this day in 1907 in Ceylon.

Eric Shipton was one of the world's most respected climbers in the two decades before Mt. Everest was finally conquered by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953, and was scheduled to lead the 1953 expedition himself. Shipton, however, was more interested in climbing than in summiting, and was perhaps a victim of British ambitions regarding Everest.

The son of a colonial tea planter who died when Shipton was 3, Shipton grew up with dyslexia and without any discernible prospects. After ambling around the Alps during his 20s, he went to work on a coffee plantation in Kenya, where he made his mark as an amateur mountaineer on some previously unclimbed mountains in East Africa.

A scant 7 years after the disappearance of George Mallory on Everest, Shipton was in the Himalayas. In 1931 he summited Kamet (25,263 ft.), and participated in or led small mapping and reconnaissance expeditions (the kind of climbing he enjoyed most) on the Tibetan side of Everest in 1933, 1935, 1936 and 1938 - bagging 26 20,000-ft. peaks during the 1935 expedition alone, and establishing a camp at 27,200 ft. on Everest in 1938. In 1938 he received the Patron's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, but he was still dirt-poor, and with World War II beginning, Everest seemed out of the question for awhile; so highly-placed friends saw to it that Shipton would be appointed as consul-general in some of the greater Indian territories where he could continue map-climbing in uncharted areas. Chinese border hostilities limited his efforts, however, and in 1951 he was expelled from Yunnan.

Later that year, however, he led another reconnaissance mission on Everest, this time from the Nepal side. The British offered Shipton the chance to lead the 1953 group which eventually got to the top of Everest, but they made it clear to Shipton that his casual style of exploration was not at all what was expected, and basically forced him to resign from the job, leaving John Hunt in charge.

Afterwards, Shipton's reputation was never quite the same. He never made it to the top of Everest, although during the 1960s he made important reconnaissance missions in Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, and armed with his knowledge of the terrain was an adviser to Chile in their border dispute with Argentina. Shipton died on March 28, 1977 in Anstey, Wiltshsire.

Categories: Mountaineering, Nepal, India

Little Hurler, Big Name, Weak Heart

2007-07-31T07:00:00.000-04:00

“Pembroke Finlayson” was surely a mouthful of a name for a 5’-6,” 140-pound lad. Known as the “Midget Twirler,” young Mr. Finlayson made two very brief appearances in major league baseball, pitching for the Brooklyn club, before reaching the age of 22. He might have worked his way back to the bigs if he’d only made it to age 23.

Pembroke Finlayson was born in Cheraw, South Carolina on this day in 1888, the son of Henry Wright Finlayson and his wife Charity. Among Pembroke’s siblings were brothers Richmond Tooks Finlayson, Henry Angus Finlayson and Jennings Finlayson, and sisters Daisy, Sallie, Mammie Lou, Carrie Isabel and Winnie Kennedy Finlayson. The Finlaysons had a penchant for colorful monikers.

South Carolina was hardly a bastion of big league baseball talent in those days; there weren’t many South Carolinians who had played in the big leagues. The first was Charleston native John Bass, who started at shortstop (batting ninth, three spots behind the pitcher) for the Cleveland Forest Citys against the Fort Wayne Keokuks in the very first game of the National Association on May 4, 1871 – said by some to be the very first professional ballgame ever.

After that, there were very few other Palmetto Staters in the majors during the early days of baseball. Charleston briefly had a ball club in the Southern League during the 1890s, the Seagulls; and from out of that city came Tom Colcolough, who had a winning record (8-5) despite an ERA of 7.08 for the 1894 Pittsburgh Pirates, and Pat Luby, who pitched over a 100 games during the 1890s with the Chicago Colts and the Louisville club. Luby equalled a record in 1890 for most hit batsmen in an inning (3). Doc McJames from Williamsburg County, a graduate of the South Carolina Medical College in Charleston, was in and out of the majors for a few years before dying in 1901 from injuries suffered in a horse buggy accident at the age of 28.

Later, of course, there was a promising rookie breaking into the majors in 1908, a contemporary of Finlayson’s from Pickens County, who went by the name of Shoeless Joe Jackson. But baseball around the turn of the 20th century was still a game dominated by Northeastern city boys, and Pembroke Finlayson might not have commanded much attention as a ballplayer had his father not moved the family to Brooklyn in 1901, where Henry Finlayson plied his trade as a dry goods wholesaler.

In Brooklyn, young Pembroke was surrounded by baseball. You could hardly swing a bat without hitting an industrial or commercial team -- collections of laborers who toiled at their labor during weekdays but put on company colors on summer evenings and Saturdays to play for bragging rights – or some other “diamond nine” sponsored by a church or a gentlemen’s lodge. As a teenager, Finlayson showed enough prowess on the mound to be tapped to pitch for a club called the Marquettes, sponsored by the Church of Thomas Aquinas, who played their home games at the Marquette Oval at 4th Avenue and 8th Street in South Brooklyn. He also caught on with the Missouri-Pacific ballclub, a commercial team sponsored by the colorful railroad magnate George Jay Gould, though it is unclear whether Finlayson ever actually worked for the line; he may have been a ringer, which would have been consistent with Gould’s business practices.

Finlayson apparently commanded enough attention as a local phenom to be signed, at the tender age of 19, by the Lynn Shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts. Despite sounding like another industrial team, the Lynn Shoemakers were a franchise of the New England League, a Class B rookie circuit whose president was Tim Murnane, an old hand who had been a regular on Harry Wright’s champion Boston clubs during the 1870s. The league had some bona fide stars, including owner/manager Jesse Burkett of the Worcester Busters and player/manager Sliding Billy Hamilton of the Haverhill Hustlers – aging heavyweights who settled in New England to play out the final days of their Hall of Fame careers. Finlayson’s club dragged in at the end of the 1907 season in a distant second place to Burkett’s Busters for the New England championship.

It must have been a heady atmosphere for young Finlayson, who acquitted himself well enough to be noticed by the scouts of Brooklyn owner Charley Ebbets, who signed him along with a former Brown University second-sacker named Harry Partee, on February 22, 1908.

Unfortunately, the Brooklyn ballclub of the National League in 1907 was not the heralded Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1940s and 50s, the ballclub of Duke Snider, Don Newcombe, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson. The Brooklyn Superbas of 1907, as they were then known, had been on a slow and steady slide since Ned Hanlon led them to the National League pennant in 1899 and 1900. Under the guidance of a new manager, Patsy Donovan, they went from finishing 5th in 1906, to 5th again in 1907.

1908 wasn’t looking much better. After a 13-22 start, Ebbets reassured reporters on May 30: “[Outfielder Harry] Lumley and [First Baseman Tim] Jordan will get to hitting, and then Brooklyn will begin to crawl up.” Staff aces Irvin “Kaiser” Wilhelm and Nap Rucker, a 34-year old spitball specialist and his 23-year old knuckleballing protégé, were pitching well enough, but none of Brooklyn’s starting batsmen were showing much promise at that point. The fact that you’ve never heard of Harry Lumley or Tim Jordan should be a clue to the outcome of Ebbets’ prediction …

At any rate, a little over a week later, Pembroke Finlayson made his major league debut before a hometown crowd of about 5,000 patrons. Cincinnati, holding second place in the National League in a close race with the Cubs, had already beaten the Superbas in the first two outings of the series at Brooklyn’s home field, Washington Park – located a mere five blocks north of where Finlayson used to pitch for the Marquettes. On June 6, the third game in the series, Brooklyn scored first, in the second inning; but Nap Rucker gave up two runs to the Reds as he struggled through the third inning. At the start of the fourth inning, Donovan sent Finlayson to the mound.

It was a bit of a disaster, unfortunately. In 1/3 of an inning, Finlayson walked four straight Reds, leaving the score at 3-1 when Donovan pulled him and replaced him with George Bell. Bell would do no better; by the end of the 4th inning, Bell had given up 5 more runs. The final score was 8-2, and soon Finlayson was sent packing, back to the minors for the remainder of the season.

That was June. Brooklyn finished the season in 7th place with a dismal record of 53-101, only a handful of games ahead of the basement-dwelling St. Louis club. The Superbas pitchers had three 20-game losers among them (Wilhelm, 16-22; Jim Pastorius, 4-20; and Harry McIntire, 11-20), and were a mere six more losses away from having five 20-game losers (Rucker lost 19, and Bell lost 15). The team batting average for the 1908 season was an appalling .213.

In some ways, Finlayson’s return to the minors was the best thing that could have happened to him. Ultimately, during the 1908 season, Finlayson apparently managed to get innings and good practice with the Rochester Bronchos in the Eastern League, the Nashville Volunteers of the Southern Association, and the Brockton Tigers in the New England League, where Brooklyn kept an option on his contract.

While Burkett and his Busters coasted to another New England championship that year, the Tigers finished in 4th place under the management of Steve Flanagan. Finlayson could perhaps be forgiven for not focusing on his game as the 1908 season drew to a close, for in February of 1909 it was reported that Finlayson had eloped with his hometown sweetheart, Catherine Hoff, daughter of a Brooklyn merchant, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a month ahead of their planned March 6 wedding. “Call it off, we are married,” they are alleged to have wired home. The couple leased an apartment in Brockton, where Finlayson would be playing in the Spring.

The Superbas had done little in the off-season to improve their lineup. Jordan, Lumley, Rucker and Wilhelm were all on hand for what promised to be a veritable repeat of the 1908 season. By September, the Superbas were a joke, in 7th place again with a 41-75 record through the end of August. Finlayson was brought into Washington Park again on September 1, just in time for a whopper of a loss against pitcher Orval Overall and the 2nd place Chicago Cubs. As the Chicago Tribune whimsically reported it:

The Cubs crossed the great divide which separates Manhattan from Martini, and whaled the life out of Charley Ebbet’s pets, 12 to 0, by way of trying to keep from freezing in the ocean blasts, which felt as if they were Dr. Cook’s advance agents from the north.

[Player-manager Frank] Chance’s men kept up their vengeful record on this trip by beating Mr. Bell, who was responsible for ringing down the curtain on their winning streak during the last series with the eastern clubs in Chicago. What the Cubs did to Bell is plainly to be seen in the score by innings, which show eight large tallies in the first two rounds, which were Bell’s limit. In that time we slaughtered his delivery for nine clean hard swats, of which [leftfielder Joe] Stanley and Chance got two apiece, and were helped out by some bush league work behind the belfry.

Finlayson, one of thirty odd stars gathered by Brooklyn’s dragnet from the minors this year, was asked to finish Bell’s job, and, without having much in the way of pitching wares, he was a lot better than Bell.

Finlayson gave up a double to Chance in the 4th inning, who scored on third baseman Harry Steinfeldt’s bunt. He then pitched four spotless innings, before giving up three runs in the 9th. Overall gave up only two hits on the day.

Finlayson saw no further action in Brooklyn for the season. The Superbas managed to pull ahead of the Cardinals in the last two games of the season to eke out a 6th place finish. Charley Ebbets took no consolation from the Superbas relatively strong finish; in December of 1909, he put a score of his stable of players on the market – and among them was Pembroke Finlayson. It is unclear whether Ebbets had any firm bites for the little man, however. During the 1910 season, Finlayson pitched for the Lawrence Colts in the New England League, and the Providence Grays (managed by future Hall of Famer Jimmy Collins) and the Rochester Bronchos in the Eastern League.

At the end of the 1910 season, Brooklyn, again holding Finlayson’s contract, sold him outright to the Memphis Turtles in the Southern Association. There he again came under the tutelage of Strawberry Bill Bernhard, who managed Finlayson briefly while the boy made a stop in Nashville during 1908. Bernhard was a star pitcher with the Phillies around the turn of the century; in fact, he is credited with having earned the first major league save of the 20th century, in a 10-inning, 19-17 nail-biter between the Phillies and the Boston Beaneaters. He was a minor star with the Phillies until he joined Nap Lajoie and several others in a controversial jump in 1901 to the Athletics, the Philadelphia franchise of the new, renegade American League. Banned from playing in Philadelphia for his contract jump, he signed with Cleveland and became the first Cleveland pitcher to lead the league in win percentage, with .783 (18-5) in 1902. He retired from pitching in 1907, and earned a winning record as a manager for Nashville for three years (221-187) before moving to Memphis.

The Turtles, so-named for the shell-shaped infield at Memphis' Russwood Park, were in dire straits when Bernhard arrived, having suffered 8th and 7th place finishes for the prior two years. In his rebuilding effort, Bernhard apparently liked what he saw of Finlayson a few years before, and secured him as a key member of his pitching staff.

Finlayson, too, seemed to like playing for Bernhard. He earned a record of 11-4 with the Turtles until, in mid-summer, he was diagnosed with a serious heart ailment. After doctors’ consultations, it was decided that Finlayson required surgery, and on August 1, the Turtles put Finlayson on waivers, due to the uncertainty of his return to the lineup.

Finlayson went under the knife and began his recuperation. Anxious to return to baseball, however – especially in light of his happy situation in Memphis -- Finlayson jumped the gun on his recovery and began throwing pitches in the winter of 1912. The strain proved to be too much. Finlayson died of general peritonitis and myocardial adenitis at the Norwegian Hospital in Brooklyn on March 6, 1912 – what would have been his third wedding anniversary had he and Catherine not eloped. He left his wife with a son and a daughter. He was just 22.

Categories: Baseball, Cups-of-Coffee

Pope Paul VI at Castello Gandolfo, 1977

2007-07-24T06:37:00.000-04:00

Categories: Old-Photos, Christian-History

The Death of Floyd Collins

2007-07-20T06:09:00.000-04:00

"Young people, all take warning from Floyd Collin's fate,/ And get right with your maker before it is too late./ It may not be a Sand Cave in which we find our tomb,/ But on that day of judgment, we too must meet our doom." -- Vernon Dalhart, "The Death of Floyd Collins."

Floyd Collins, spelunker, was born on this day in 1887 in Flint Ridge, Kentucky.

The Collins family made their living farming in Kentucky, but a good living it was not, for the Southern sinkhole geology of the region was not ideal for agriculture. It was, however, ideal for underground caves with remarkable mineral formations, and many farming families supplemented their meager incomes by opening the caves to tourists.

Floyd Collins was particularly adept at finding and navigating underground caves, and discovered the Crystal Cave in 1917, opening it for tours shortly thereafter -- although because it was off the beaten path, it was not too lucrative. Collins continued exploring, caught up in the commercial "cave wars," hoping to find an underground connection between his own caves and the popular Mammoth Caves nearby.

While navigating through a new cave he had discovered, the Sand Cave, Floyd became trapped when a 27-pound stone pinned his leg against the cold wet cave wall 70 feet below the surface. A day later he was discovered by his brother Homer, who attempted to dig him out without success. As more help was required, crowds of onlookers and newspaper reporters began to form outside the cave, causing a traffic mess for 12 miles from the cave entrance. Soon, Collins’ rescue became front page news around the country, with diminutive Louisville Courier-Journal reporter Skeets Miller squeezing through the passageways to deliver Floyd food and keep his spirits up (Miller would ultimately win a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the story).

Rescue efforts went awry when the cave pathways began to collapse as miners attempted to dig a vertical shaft to reach Floyd. On the 18th day of digging, the rescuers finally got to Floyd, but he had died just 24 hours before they reached him, on February 17, 1925. The Collins family had a glass coffin encased around his body and placed it in Crystal Cave, where cavers paid their respects to Floyd for years afterward until his eventual burial in a nearby rural cemetery.

Campers at Mammoth Cave National Park occasionally report seeing the ghost of Floyd Collins there.

Categories: Geology, Spelunking, Pop-Culture

Parley Christensen

2007-07-19T07:28:00.000-04:00

Parley P. Christensen was born on this day in 1869 in Weston, Idaho.

A Cornell law graduate, Christensen became the youngest ever county attorney for Salt Lake County, Utah, and was a prominent Republican organizer until 1912, when he defected to Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive or "Bull Moose" Party. In the aftermath of Roosevelt's defeat that year, Christensen found himself aligned with pro-labor independents, and as a founder of the Utah Labor Party became a staunch defender of members of the International Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies) against politically-motivated criminal charges brought against them during the period.

At the first convention of the Farmer-Labor Party in 1920, Christensen was nominated for president, and he campaigned largely on the platform of establishing the 8-hour work day, disarming the U.S. and nationalizing basic industries, but also prominently supported the release of political prisoners such as his rival, Socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who had been imprisoned for sedition after giving a speech criticizing U.S. government crackdowns against political dissenters. More leftists saw fit to vote for Debs himself as the "real deal" rather than for Christensen; Christensen polled 265,411 votes (mainly in Montana, South Dakota and Washington) to Debs' 919,799 as Warren Harding easily won the election.

After a tour of Europe which included a meeting with V.I. Lenin, Christensen settled briefly in Chicago, where he ran for U.S. Senate as the candidate of the Illinois Progressive Party in 1926. Shortly thereafter he moved to California where he became involved in Upton Sinclair's campaign for governor in 1934, and eventually served as the most liberal member of the Los Angeles City Council (1935-37 and 1939-49), until he was defeated from the left by Edward Roybal, the first hispanic to be elected to Council since the 1880s. Christensen died on February 10, 1954 in Los Angeles.

Categories: American-Politicians, Presidential-Campaigns, Southern-California

Twist Slowly, Slowly in the Wind

2007-07-18T07:16:00.000-04:00

L. Patrick Gray, III, acting director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (1972-3), was born on this day in 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri.

A Navy submarine captain and lawyer, Pat Gray served briefly as military assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before working on Richard Nixon's 1960 presidential campaign. In 1970, Nixon pulled Gray away from his quiet Connecticut law practice and appointed him assistant U.S. attorney general. After the death of the seemingly indestructible FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover in 1972, Nixon seized the opportunity to try and re-make the FBI as an instrument of the White House by installing his loyal friend Pat Gray as acting director pending confirmation by the Senate.

Faced with the resentment of Hoover loyalists such as Associate Director Mark Felt, Gray nonetheless relied heavily upon the old guard to help him chart his course, even during the FBI's investigation of the Watergate break-in in 1972 that would ultimately be linked to the White House. When leaks about the investigation began showing up in the Washington Post, Nixon asked Gray to fire Mark Felt or at least submit him to a lie-detector test, but Gray refused to do so, failing to believe that Felt would be capable of destroying the FBI's credibility.

At Gray's Senate confirmation hearings, which were the first opportunity the Senate had to question an administration official about Watergate, Gray was candid; he revealed that he had disclosed information about the Watergate investigation to White House counsel John Dean after consulting with the FBI's general counsel, and that in turn Dean had provided him with files from Howard Hunt's White House safe (mainly relating to Hunt's covert investigations on the activities of the Kennedy family) that, in Dean's words, "should never see the light of day," with the request that Gray take charge of destroying them. The White House had denied for months that it had been attempting to interfere with the investigation, but Gray's revelations called the denials into question, escalating the Senate's interest in Watergate; the White House was so angry about Gray's admissions that John Ehrlichman famously remarked, in a taped conversation with Nixon that would be revealed later, that Gray ought to be left to "twist slowly, slowly in the wind." Shortly thereafter, Gray withdrew his name from consideration for the FBI directorate and resigned from the FBI, returning to private practice and maintaining his silence about Nixon and Watergate for more than 30 years.

In 1980, Gray was indicted for having approved illegal break-ins while serving in the Nixon administration, but the charges were dropped and he was given a full pardon by President Reagan (only after Gray had to sell his house to pay for his legal bills); it was brief moment of renewed notoriety for a man who wanted to be left alone.

When Mark Felt revealed that he was "Deep Throat," the source of FBI leaks in the Washington Post's coverage of Watergate, in a 2005 Vanity Fair article, however, Gray decided he could not remain silent any longer. Appearing in an ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos that aired only 12 days before his death, Gray -- terminally ill with pancreatic cancer -- said he felt betrayed by Mark Felt ("I could not be more shocked and disappointed in a man whom I trusted," he said), and that he had no reason at the time to feel that the White House was trying to sandbag him. All told, he said, "the gravest mistake of my 88 years" was getting involved with Nixon at all, and that for years afterward Gray refused all contact with him. Gray said: "If you could have known what was in my heart and mind then, you would have thought I was a vigilante. I was so hurt and so angry at this man, who had not only junked his own presidency, but junked the career of so many other people, many of whom had to go to jail."

Gray died on July 6, 2005 in Miami, Florida.

Categories: Juris-History, Watergate

Edward the Elder

2007-07-17T08:19:00.000-04:00

Edward the Elder, king of England (899-925), died on this day in 925 at Farndon-on-Dee, Mercia at the age of about 53.

The second and eldest surviving son of Alfred the Great, Edward grew up watching his father fight the Danes, and had developed a strong sense of mission as guardian of England's future by the time succeeded his father in October 899. Although the Witan (the Anglo-Saxon council of elders) moved quickly to proclaim him king, his cousin Athelwold (son of the late King Ethelred I, Alfred's brother and predecessor), upset about Alfred's last will and testament, had himself proclaimed king by the Danes and Angles in York and began to lead a revolt in East Anglia. Two years later, Athelwold died in battle, and Edward was able to broker an uneasy peace with the Danes in the East, but he would spend the next eight years shooing the pesky Danes out of the North. By 915, Edward had completed a chain of fortified towns from Chester to Witham, after which he pursued the equivocating Eastern Danes, finally getting them to submit to his rule in 920.

His success against the Danes attracted the attention of the kings of Scotland and Strathclyde, who declared their submission to Edward in exchange for his help with the Norse who were attacking them -- ultimately resulting in Edward having achieved overlord status over all of Britain (except for the Norse settlements in York, Orkney and the Western Isles) by 922. His sons Athelstan, Edmund and Edred would all succeed him.

Categories: Kings-and-Queens, Anglo-Saxon-England

The Archdruid

2007-07-01T08:02:00.000-04:00

"David Brower was the greatest environmentalist and conservationist of the 20th century." -- Ralph Nader.

David Brower was born on this day in 1912 in Berkeley, California.

Dubbed the "Archdruid" by environmental writer John McPhee, Brower was an iconoclast who started out as a shy kid who liked hiking and was transformed by his experiences into an evangelistic, single-minded campaigner on behalf of Earth conservation, the kind of fellow who could get kicked out of organizations he himself had activated for his sometimes maddening inflexibility.

During the 1930s, Brower made a number of first ascents of Western mountains, including Shiprock in New Mexico (1939), leading Camel Cigarettes to consider signing him as a handsome young athlete endorser. He drifted, however, into volunteering for a small organization of outdoor enthusiasts and day-trippers called the Sierra Club, guiding knapsack tours of the Sierra Nevadas. In 1941, he secured a job as an editor with the University of California Press as well as a seat on the board of directors of the Sierra Club.

The Club would never be the same. Using the Club as his pulpit, Brower launched an all-out assault against roads, bridges, tourist development, power lines and dams which threatened precious wilderness land. Funding the organization by producing and selling expensive coffee table books with his friend Ansel Adams' photos of Yosemite, as executive director of the Sierra Club (from 1952) Brower turned the Club into an environmental activism organization with a membership swelling from 2,000 to 77,000, fighting successfully against the damming of the Colorado at Dinosaur National Monument and at the Grand Canyon; getting the Wilderness Act of 1964 passed; and saving Point Reyes National Seashore.

In 1963, he bargained for the cancellation of dam projects at Echo Park and Split Mountain in Utah in exchange for agreeing not to oppose a project at Glen Canyon, but it was a loss for which he never forgave himself; "Glen Canyon died in 1963," he wrote in The Place No One Knew, his subsequent guilty documentation of the disappearing habitat there, "and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you." Meanwhile, the Sierra Club was stripped of its tax-exempt status for its political activities, and with financial losses mounting, Brower was fired by the Club in 1969.

He immediately formed Friends of the Earth (FOE) and broadened his efforts, taking on nuclear weapons and advocating solar energy and population control within a more media-directed format. Here, as before, Brower shined as a speaker: with his incantatory phrasing, lyrical evocations and sometimes biting humor, he appeared to college students and before fundraisers as a wild-eyed visionary-poet of the vanishing wilderness.

Although FOE raised lots of money and eventually took root in 68 countries, Brower's plans were always larger than his budgets, and in 1986, at the age of 74, he was fired by the FOE board. Within months, he was busy getting the Earth Island Institute off the ground, an umbrella organization for smaller self-funded projects concerning peace, environmental and social justice. He returned to the board of directors of the Sierra Club during the 1980s and 90s (by then possessed of a membership of 600,000), carping at hypocrisies and distractions as a relentless outsider. He was still busy at his work when he died at 88, on November 5, 2000.

Categories: Conservation, Mountaineering

Captain Boyton and His Rubber Suit

2007-06-29T05:00:00.000-04:00

Adventurer and amusement park owner Paul Boyton was born on this day in 1848 in either Dublin, Ireland or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Boyton gained world-wide renown for his ocean exploits performed while wearing a floating, air-tight rubber suit, designed with the help of C.S. Merriman. In 1874, notably, he jumped overboard into heavy seas from a transatlantic ship wearing the suit, a day's sail away from Ireland, and paddled himself -- feet first, kayak style -- back to Cork. His navigation of the Mississippi River in a similar fashion made headlines in the U.S.

As a paid mercenary, he swam in the service of the Peruvian government in 1885, attaching explosives to a Chilean man-of-war in the dead of night; the grateful Peruvians awarded him the rank of "Captain." Upon his return to the U.S., he helped to organize the United States Life-Saving Service, a precursor to the Coast Guard, and briefly served as captain of the Atlantic City ocean life-savers. In 1892, he published a popular memoir of his exploits in the water, The Story of Paul Boyton.

After his arrival in New York City in 1895, he bought 16 acres behind the Elephant Hotel in Coney Island, and opened Sea Lion Park, the first outdoor amusement park in the world. The park was best known for its Shoot-the-Chutes ride, in which flat-bottomed toboggan boats slid down a steep slide into a broad lagoon. Boyton also entertained guests with his 40 trained sea lions, a la Sea World, and with demonstrations of his famous rubber suit. The park enjoyed a modest success for a few years, overshadowed by George Tilyou's gigantic Steeplechase Park.

After a dismal rainy summer season left him financially hobbled in 1902, he sold the business and lived the rest of his years quietly (and mostly on dry land), and died April 19, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York.

Categories: Exploration, Navigation, Pop-Culture

Cerfing the Net

2007-06-23T08:57:00.000-04:00

As every schoolchild knows, the Internet began, oddly enough, as a U.S. national security imperative: RAND Corporation staffers, faced with the hypothetical problem of a communications paralysis in the U.S. following a nuclear attack, developed a proposal for a completely decentralized communications network, connected by "nodes"of equal status that could toss a "packet" of information from one node to another until the information could reach its intended destination.

A few years of noodling and testing followed, until the Pentagon asked the computer science department at UCLA to assist in building a computer network that encompassed the RAND concept of "packet switching."

While the Pentagon had national security in mind, Vinton Cerf, a grad student in computer science at UCLA in 1968, had a personal stake in this alternative method of communication. Cerf (who was born prematurely on this date in 1943) was hearing-impaired and could not differentiate between telephone voices; "electronic mail" would eventually prove to be a more friendly form of communication. Cerf worked on the first relatively crude system of computer protocols that would allow different computers speaking different languages to communicate with each other over telephone lines in service of "packet switching."

By 1971, UCLA had built a 15-host system, known as the ARPANET, which was used by Pentagon scientists and their counterparts in the university sector to communicate with each other and post information of mutual interest. In 1972, Cerf joined the faculty at Stanford, and with the help of Robert Kahn and several others, conceptualized and refined the more sophisticated TCP/IP protocols for computer communication. The Transmission Control Protocols, or TCP, convert messages into streams of packets at the source and reassemble them back into messages at the destination; the Internet Protocols, or IP, handle the addressing of packets being routed across multiple nodes.

In the mid-1970s, Cerf joined the Pentagon to implement TCP/IP as the prevailing standard for computer communication. By the mid-1980s, the Internet had become one of the most influential scientific instruments of the century, enabling the free exchange of research and even the sharing of computing facilities on a global basis at low cost and high speed; but even Galileo's refracting telescope, another influential scientific instrument, could be used for other things than its intended scientific purpose -- as a window to the beauty of the firmament, as a club to beat people over the head with, or, one supposes, if you take the lenses out of a hand-held one, an imperfect funnel.

As the Internet expanded past the original ARPANET sites to 30 million hosts by the beginning of 1998 (due in part to the creation of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, among others, which began to give the Internet its user-friendly media and navigation characteristics), users found a myriad of decidedly non-scientific uses for the Internet, the most significant being perhaps the transaction of consumer commerce (see funnel, above) for everything from mechanical parts to flowers to real estate to pornography. Cerf later served as a vice president at MCI Communications, where he continued to develop Internet-based services and tools, and now holds the title of "vice president and chief internet evangelist" at Google.

Categories: Inventions, Technology, Webphemera

Something My Wife Whipped Up, #1

2007-06-23T08:22:00.000-04:00

Kerstin's always good at whipping up something out of nothing.

Impromptu Toasted Crab

Squirt a little Dijon mustard and drizzle a little olive oil into a salad bowl, and whisk until combined. Toss in one whole Cucumber, chunked; then add a little bit of Feta cheese, a can of Lump Crab Meat, a generous handful each of Fresh Spinach and Fresh chopped Broccolini, some chopped Cilantro, and a few tablespoons of Black Beans. Add ground red and black pepper. Toss with red-headed élan.

Melt a slice of Manchego Cheese onto both halves of four toasted English muffins. Scoop out Crab Salad mixture onto English muffin halves, for four tasty little sandwiches. Enjoy with a glass of Artesa Sauvignon Blanc, or another dry, citrusy California white.

Categories: Kerstin, Cuisine

The USAF Thunderbirds

2007-06-22T21:09:00.001-04:00

... during practice flights on the day before the Wings Over Pittsburgh Air Show, on June 15, 2007 ...

... and immediately afterwards, on the tarmac at the 911th Airlift Wing U.S. Air Force Reserve Base in Moon Township, Pennsylvania ...

Categories: Old-Photos, Air-&-Space

What Santa Looks Like

2007-06-22T19:52:00.000-04:00

Haddon Sundblom was born on this day in 1899 in Muskegon, Michigan.

Sundblom was a commercial illustrator for Chicago's Stevens-Gross Agency. He was best known for his 35 years of illustrations of Santa Claus for Coca-Cola ads (beginning in 1931) that fundamentally sealed the American pop culture image of jolly old St. Nick as a big plump man -- rather than as an elf as depicted by Robert Walter Weir (c. 1837), Thomas Nast (c. 1862) and others. Sundblom is also allegedly responsible for the creation of the Quaker Oats Quaker and Aunt Jemima.

Sundblom died on March 10, 1976 in Chicago, Illinois.

Categories: Pop-Culture

Pride of the Yankees

2007-06-19T18:03:00.000-04:00

Baseball legend Lou Gehrig was born on this day in 1903 in New York City.

A high school sports star, Henry Louis Gehrig was declared ineligible for athletics at Columbia University because he had signed a professional contract with the Hartford minor league team. He played for 2 years with Hartford before joining the Yankees as their starting first baseman in 1925.

In 17 seasons with the Yankees, he knocked in over 100 runs 13 times, leading the league 5 times, and he hit 493 home runs, second at that time only to his friend and fellow Yankee slugger, Babe Ruth. The 1927 Yankees were considered the greatest baseball squad of all time, and the Yankees themselves considered Gehrig, who hit .373 with 47 home runs and 175 runs batted in (a record at the time), to be their most valuable player. In 1931, he set another record for RBIs (184), and in 1934, Gehrig won the Triple Crown, leading the American League in batting (.363), home runs (49) and RBIs (165) -- all the while playing in every single game of every single season -- beating the previous record of 1,307 consecutive games, set by Everett Scott in 1925, during the 1933 season.

In contrast to his pal the Babe, the gentlemanly Gehrig didn't smoke, drink, gamble or carouse, and was singularly devoted to his mother (legend has it she had to scold him into leaving her bedside to play in the 1927 World Series after she had undergone surgery). In 1933, when he married debutante Eleanor Twitchell, he became a singularly devoted (and teachable) husband, bending to Eleanor's tastes in art and literature and taking her advice on opening up to the fans.

With life going as well as anyone could imagine, during the 1938 season Gehrig felt he had not played up to his own standards (although he still hit 29 homers, including his record 23rd career grand slam, and batted in 114 runs), so in the spring of 1939 he put himself through an exhausting physical regimen to get into better shape; but as the season began, it became clear that something was wrong. On May 2, he told manager Joe McCarthy to put in his backup, Babe Dahlgren, because, as Gehrig said, "I'm not doing the club any good out there." With that, Gehrig ended a remarkable streak, playing a record 2,130 consecutive games (a mark that would only be broken 56 years later by Cal Ripken).

Soon afterward, Gehrig discovered that he was suffering from the early stages of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative muscle disease that would come to be known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease." On July 4, 1939, the Yankees held a farewell testimonial day for Gehrig, during which he addressed the crowd in a moment considered by many to be among the most emotionally intense in the history of sports, telling the world: "Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

(Proving that the moment has entered our pop culture consciousness indelibly enough to be trodden upon, Norm MacDonald provided a theoretical follow-up to Gehrig's moment at the microphone on an episode of Saturday Night Live: "I was being sarcastic! I am the unluckiest man in the world! I have a disease so rare they named it after me!").

After Gehrig's retirement, New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia appointed Gehrig to be a New York City parole commissioner, a job at which he worked conscientiously while lending his time to youth groups. He died on June 2, 1941 in Riverdale, New York at the age of 38, two years after entering baseball's Hall of Fame in a special election. Lou and Eleanor were played by Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright in the classic film The Pride of the Yankees (1942), which both lovingly drew upon and fortified the Gehrig legend.

Categories: Baseball, Classic-Cinema

Stanley

2007-06-16T09:34:00.000-04:00

Stan Laurel was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, England on this day in 1890.

The "thin" half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy, Stan Jefferson was born into a family of British stage performers, and sought a stage career from an early age. Stan earned his first stage appearance on his own comic merits at 16; and when his father witnessed his son's talents, he arranged for young Stan to join a traveling pantomime company. By 1910, he was working with Fred Karno's Troupe, one of the best companies in England, clowning alongside (and sometimes as understudy to) Charlie Chaplin. When Chaplin left the Troupe during a tour of the U.S. to join Mack Sennett's Keystone movie studio in 1912, Stan decided to stay on in the U.S. to try American vaudeville, shortly thereafter adopting the name "Laurel" to avoid the bad luck of using the 13-lettered "Jefferson."

In 1917, Laurel began starring in short comedy films, often writing and assisting with direction; but in about 9 years he failed to make much of a mark, jumping from studio to studio. He joined the Hal Roach studio in 1926 as a gag writer, but was eventually persuaded to team with Roach contract player Oliver "Babe" Hardy in a series of short silent comedies, many directed by Leo McCarey. Together, Laurel and Hardy made more than 100 films (27 of them full-length features), bridging the gap between silent and talking pictures and becoming the most enduring comedy team in screen history.

Always a craftsman, Laurel took a special interest in writing the scenarios and was known to spend hours in the cutting room, painstakingly pacing the team's sequences. By contrast, Babe Hardy loved to play and eat and drink (and he was probably a gambling addict). In a role reversal of sorts, on-screen Hardy was the putative leader of the two derby'd man-children known as Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. Sputtering with frustration, the on-screen Laurel could barely transfer a clue from one hand to the other, and would inevitably dig them into a precarious mess, registering his fear through blinking sobs and head-scratching. The really distinctive aspect of the team, however, was their giant hearts. There was little meanness in them on screen, either to each other or to any bystander. When things went wrong, they frequently knew it was their own fault, and when things went well, they received it as good fortune, linked arms, and frequently broke out into song. Contrasts aside, Laurel and Hardy were great friends off-screen, frequently vacationing together.

Laurel's only professional separation from Hardy from 1924 until Hardy's death in 1957 was during Laurel's contract dispute with Roach, during which Hardy starred with veteran comic Harry Langdon in Zenobia (1939). In tribute to his friend, Laurel retired from performing upon Hardy's death, but continued to ply the art of comedy as a writer. He died on February 23, 1965 in Santa Monica, California.

Categories: Silent-Film, Classic-Cinema

Helicoptering

2007-06-15T08:04:00.000-04:00

Paul Cornu was born on this day in 1881 in Glos-la-Ferriere, France.

An engineer living at Lisieux, Cornu designed a 28-pound working model of a vertical flying machine (or helicopter) which he had flown successfully in 1906. He decided to build a life-sized version of his helicopter for a try at the Deutsch-Archdeacon Prize, a bounty of 50,000 francs offered by a pair of wealthy Parisians to the first to achieve manned, mechanically-powered flight over a specified 1-kilometer course. Cornu raised 100 francs from about 125 friends, built a 573-pound version of his flying machine, and after several unmanned tests with a 110-pound sand bag on board, on November 13, 1907, Cornu piloted his awkward copter to one foot above the ground and hovered for about 20 seconds -- the first manned helicopter flight ever.

On later flights, Cornu managed to ascend to five feet and accidentally achieved a record for two-person flight when his brother grabbed the frame of the machine to keep it from tipping and was briefly swept aloft. In 300 flight attempts, Cornu gingerly guided his craft forward and backward at a maximum speed of 6 miles per hour, but could not achieve the Deutsch-Archdeacon objective; the prize was won by Henri Farman in an airplane in 1908. Cornu gave up his experiments in 1909, lacking necessary funding.

It took another 31 years before Igor Sikorsky would design a practical, stable and navigable helicopter. Cornu died in 1944.

Categories: Air-&-Space

Tether-Plane

2007-06-14T07:59:00.000-04:00

Jacon Christian Ellehammer, motorcycle manufacturer and aviation pioneer, was born on this day in 1871 in Bakkeboll, Denmark.

Ellehammer made tests on a craft of his own design, a tractor biplane, on the small private island of Lindholm. Because Lindholm wasn't large enough to accommodate a straight runway, Ellehammer tethered his plane to a pole and tested his plane by lifting off and flying around the pole in a circle, without worrying about steering or control issues. In this strange little "lab," Ellehammer managed to fly for 42 meters on September 12, 1906 (almost 3 years after Orville Wright's first successful flight), but he would not make a sustained, untethered flight until 1908; nonetheless, some Danes make the case that Ellehammer was the first to fly. He died May 20, 1946.

Categories: Air-&-Space

Wind vs. Petroleum. Near Delft, Netherlands, 1977.

2007-06-12T19:50:00.000-04:00

Categories: Old-Photos, Petroleum

Ever Try to Win an Earthquake?

2007-06-11T11:23:00.000-04:00

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." -- Jeannette Rankin.

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress, was born on this day in 1880 near Missoula, Montana.

A graduate of the University of Montana with a B.S. in biology, Rankin taught briefly in Montana before settling in New York and attending the School of Philanthropy studying social work. She worked briefly at a children's home in Spokane, Washington, studied at the University of Washington and joined the women's suffrage movement, returning to Montana in 1910 to lobby for the passage of the suffrage bill introduced there as the first woman to speak before the all-male Montana legislature.

Rankin drew a forceful connection between conditions of poverty and the inability of women to affect the democratic process, as well as arguing that women were being taxed without representation. While she was unsuccessful in Montana, she attracted the attention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which appointed her as a field secretary. She successfully directed the effort for suffrage in North Dakota, then quit NAWSA and returned to Montana to continue the suffrage fight.

In November 1914, Montana granted women the right to vote. Running as a Republican for one of Montana's 2 at-large congressional seats, Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress in 1916. Young and attractive, she became an object of media curiosity, but she also bore the responsibility, somewhat unfairly, of being the voice of American women in Congress. Thus, her position on the most important issue before the 65th Congress, American entry into World War I, became a hotly debated topic among leaders of the suffrage movement. NAWSA president Carrie Chapman Catt cautioned that a vote against the war would make women seem unpatriotic (and many had not yet received the right to vote which would be guaranteed by the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1920); meanwhile, the more radical Alice Paul thought that women should stand together for peace.

With the first vote on the issue of war ever cast by a female parliamentarian in the history of the Western world, Rankin voted with 49 other congressmen against Wilson's declaration of war in 1917 -- a position that cost Rankin her seat in the following congressional election. In one term, however, Rankin served as the ranking minority member of the special committee which drafted the women's suffrage amendment; sponsored a women's health education bill which later passed as the Sheppard-Towner Act (1921); presented the demands of the Industrial Workers of the World to the federal government during the Anaconda Copper Company strike in Butte, Montana; and enjoyed immense popularity throughout the country.

After leaving Congress, Rankin joined the pacifist cause with all her energies, helping to found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, repeatedly testifying before Congress against military budget increases, and lobbying for women's and children's legislation around the U.S.

As World War II loomed on the horizon, Rankin ran for Congress again in 1940, and with the help of well-known pacifists such as Bruce Barton, she won. Although Speaker Sam Rayburn would not permit her to speak against the War, she nonetheless voted against it -- this time as the only representative to do so -- and was jeered on the House floor. Failing to win reelection, in later years Rankin traveled to India to study nonviolent resistance with Mahatma Gandhi and organized an anti-Vietnam War march on Washington at the age of 88.

Categories: Trailblazing-Women, American-Politicians, Peace-Activism

Household Sounds

2007-06-09T10:01:00.000-04:00

Fred Waring was born on this day in 1900 in Tyrone, Pennsylvania. He died on July 29, 1983 in State College, Pennsylvania.

Waring was a violinist and banjo player, best known as the leader of a 70-man white-bread swing band, "Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians," from 1923 up until his death. An expert marketeer and wheeler-dealer, Waring managed to build his rickety college jazz quartet into a diversified corporate venture, operated from his headquarters on Broadway in Manhattan, spawning radio and TV shows, recordings, world tours, summer choral workshops, music publishing, real estate ventures ... and a blender.

Waring's name is indeed associated with the first popular non-commercial electric blender, known as the "Waring blender." In the 1930s, an inventor named Frederick Osius asked Waring (a one-time Penn State engineering student and an incorrigible gear-head) for financing to develop his patent for an electric blender. Waring invested $25,000, but Osius developed technical difficulties with his design, so Waring fired Osius and had the machine redesigned. The new "Miracle Mixer" was introduced at the 1937 National Restaurant Show in Chicago. The following year, Waring changed the name of the product to the "Waring blender" and marketed the machine while touring the country with the Pennsylvanians. The Waring blender became a must-have item, whirring away in every American kitchen (over a million of them were sold by 1954), and commercial versions of the blender became standard laboratory equipment -- apparently even Jonas Salk used a Waring blender while developing the polio vaccine.

Waring's other distinct claim to fame was his direct effect on the nature of music played on the radio. While during the 1920s, it was fairly common for radio stations to hire bands to perform live on the air, the effects of the Depression had forced radio stations to cut back on such gigs, resorting instead to spinning records, despite the fact that records were generally sold with a stamp that prohibited them from being played on the air. Waring and his band were popular recording artists in the 1920s on the Victor label, but by 1932, Waring decided to stop recording, fearing that his records were cutting in to his more lucrative live gigs. He was also well aware of the fact that as a performer, he did not receive a penny when one of his records was played on the radio -- despite the fact that ASCAP, the American Society of Composers and Publishers, had already begun to establish rights on behalf of songwriters to be paid each time their work was broadcast. (The rival rights organization, BMI, was actually established by the National Association of Broadcasters in 1940 to break the grip of ASCAP, but expanded protection for songwriters by signing African-American songwriters who had been barred from participating in ASCAP.)

While Waring was still under contract with Victor, a bootlegging sound engineer made a transcription of one of Waring's live radio performances and sold a copy of it to a radio station. Waring successfully sued both the bootlegger and the radio station, WDAS in Philadelphia, and then he his sights on something bigger -- securing a piece of the action for performers whenever an authorized recording was played on the radio. Waring founded a new organization, the National Association of Performing Artists, and took aim at radio stations. In a case in Pennsylvania court in 1937, Waring successfully enforced a restrictive legend placed on one of his records that stated that the record was "Not Licensed for Broadcast" -- thus, in theory, giving Waring the ability to negotiate a fee for permitting a station to play the record.

In 1940, however, in the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Learned Hand virtually ignored the Waring case and articulated what became settled law in the matter in a case between bandleader Paul Whiteman and RCA (on the one hand) and WBO Broadcasting (owner of radio station WNEW), stating that RCA, Whiteman's label, had no power "to impose ... pretended servitude on the records; and WBO Broadcasting Corporation is free to buy and use them in entire disregard of any attempt to do so." In reading the opinion, one senses the usually redoubtable Hand's reticence to elevate the work of performers to the same status enjoyed by writers, viewing performers' work as somehow inherently ephemeral. (Maybe yes, maybe no; but what, pray tell, would Judge Hand, if he were alive today, be listening to on his iPod?)

The upshot was that, as a result of Whiteman's defeat, radio stations were emboldened to play records without worrying about claims for compensation from the performers. The record companies were quick to see the angles following the Waring and Whiteman cases; they switched their strategy from attempting to collect licensing fees from radio stations to buddying up with radio stations, enticing them to play their records in order to promote their sale. While record companies were trying to increase the free airplay of records, musicians like Fred Waring began receiving fewer invitations to perform live on the radio. Singer-songwriters, slowly and steadily, began to assert themselves as the prime movers in the pop music medium, since at least they'd get paid through ASCAP or BMI for radio airplay.

After heaving a professional sigh, Waring went back to recording after World War II.

Categories: Classic-Pop-Music, Inventions, Juris-History

Frank Lloyd Wright

2007-06-08T05:52:00.000-04:00

Frank Lloyd Wright was born on this day in 1867 in Richland Center, Wisconsin.

Wright's earliest influences were his doting mother, who had decided he would be a great builder before he was born, and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who sought to define for America a wholly American aesthetic and a wholly American way of life; it would be Emerson's exhortations which would subconsciously play through most of what Wright tried to achieve in his work during his enormously productive 92-year life.

He found his passion for architecture early, preparing for it by studying engineering at the University of Wisconsin. After working as a draughtsman and later as chief assistant to Louis Sullivan, he opened his own firm and was immediately successful. His first commission, a dramatic house for W. H. Winslow, launched a period of critical acclaim, and among his earliest champions was Charles R. Ashbee, the well-known Arts-and-Crafts designer.

During this early period he sought in each design to develop a style which was distinctively Midwestern, and soon became the leading interpreter of the architectural movement known as the "Prairie School." For Wright -- stimulated by the writings of Ruskin, the aforementioned Arts-and-Crafts movement and Japanese architecture -- this style developed into "organic architecture," in which buildings were integrated into and inspired by the landscape rather than imposed on it. His credo: "No house should ever be on any hill or on anything. It should be of the hill, belonging to it, so hill and house could live together and each the happier for it." His interiors replaced the traditional compartmentalization of a home with one in which large, open living spaces predominated and interior rooms flowed into external balconies and terraces, and into which nature was invited through the use of expansive windows.

While most of his commissions were for private residences (such as the Kaufmann House, known as "Fallingwater," in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, 1935-48, his masterpiece), he also designed many public buildings, including schools, churches (notably the Unity Temple in Chicago, 1905-08), corporate headquarters (such as the Johnson Wax Building, 1936-39), and hotels (including the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, 1913-22, which survived the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake only to be torn down during civic modernization in 1967), as well as the astonishing geometric exercise that became the Guggenheim Museum (New York City, completed 1960).

In all, Wright designed about 800 buildings, 380 of which were built. His designs were known for their originality, spaciousness even in small structures, and, unfortunately, for their chronically leaky roofs -- but, as one client quipped, "this is what happens when you leave a work of art out in the rain."

Wright's personal life was scandal-ridden, a fact that decreased his popularity for a time: he and his first wife separated soon after their sixth child was born, and Wright lived for a time with a mistress until she was brutally murdered with her children in his home by a deranged servant; he married a second time to a morphine-addicted sculptor before running away at age 58 with 26-year old Olgivanna Hinzenburg, with whom he had a child before taking her as his 3rd and last wife in 1928. His primary home in the Wisconsin countryside, Taliesin, burned during the murder episode, was rebuilt twice and temporarily seized by the bank when Wright's finances were at a low ebb.

When it looked as though his career was over in his 60s, Wright outflanked the International Modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier with his own new revolutionary style, and began to extend his evangelical efforts when he built Taliesin West (1937, Scottsdale, Arizona) as a studio and retreat for his student disciples. He had a colossal ego and did not collaborate willingly; for the sake of his architectural vision, clients sometimes found that his designs did not always accommodate their personal objects, or they might bump their heads on his stubbornly low doorways. In fact, Wright had a talent for making even the most progressive thinkers appear to be philistines: when modern abstract artists Willem deKooning, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell publicly denounced his design for the Guggenheim Museum, he ended up making them look like reactionaries after enlisting the aid of Robert Moses (of all people, a man who preferred to build expressways than anything remotely like human-scaled shelter) to make sure the Guggenheim would be completed.

Up until his death on April 9, 1959 in Phoenix, Arizona, Wright collected promising young architects around him in his Taliesin Fellowship -- incidentally leaving them, according to disciple Edgar Tafel, with a shared lack of a solid grounding engineering principles, but exhorting them nonetheless to explore new technologies, to maintain consistency in device, and to use a minimum of "design" to achieve maximum aesthetic effect.

Categories: Architecture, Frank-Lloyd-Wright

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

2007-06-07T08:49:00.000-04:00

Charles Rennie Mackintosh -- architect, designer and painter -- was born on this day in 1868 in Glasgow, Scotland.

Mackintosh studied at the Glasgow School of Art and in Italy (obtaining a solid grounding in the Arts-and-Crafts style) before joining with his soon-to-be-wife Margaret, her sister Frances and friend Herbert McNair (known collectively as "The Four," "The Mac Group," the "Glasgow School" or the "Spook School") to produce posters and decorative pieces, marked by an Art Nouveau-inspired calligraphic style but without the exaggerated floral motifs.

His architectural work, beginning in the 1890s (Glasgow Herald tower, 1893; Queen Margaret's Medical College, 1894-6; Martyr's Public School, 1895; Glasgow School of Art, 1897-1909; Hill House, Helensburgh, 1902-3), is a departure from out-and-out Art Nouveau, seeming to be more of a class with Louis Sullivan's view that "form follows function"; in Mackintosh's own words, architecture needed to be more than "a mere envelope without contents." In search of functional sturdiness, Mackintosh drew upon Scottish vernacular architecture (forts, Medieval towers) to produce an austere overall effect, but accented it with curved metalwork, deployed like calligraphy.

The designs by Mackintosh and his wife for the interior of Kate Cranston's Tea Rooms (1897-9) -- white high-backed enamel chairs, leaded glass accents, everything down to the teaspoons and waitress' uniforms -- were a comprehensive statement of Mackintosh's personal vision of combining the rational (function) and the expressive (realized through Art Nouveau decoration) with graceful elegance. Through their participation in the Sezession Exhibition in Vienna in 1901, Mackintosh and MacDonald enjoyed greater influence in Germany and Austria than in Scotland and England where, after Mackintosh became a partner in the architectural firm of Honeyman, Keppie & Mackintosh, his buildings fell out of favor, attacked by hardcore Arts-and-Crafts critics as being infected by corrupt Art Nouveau influences. In his later years, most of his designs were for residential interiors, fabrics and book covers. He died on December 10, 1928 in London, England.

Categories: Architecture

Little Girl on a Dark Street. Bhaktapur, Nepal, 1997.

2007-05-31T08:01:00.001-04:00

Categories: Old-Photos, Nepal

What Cheer, Iowa. 1987.

2007-05-29T11:32:00.000-04:00

Categories: Old-Photos

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night ...

2007-05-25T07:55:00.000-04:00

"He never wrote an invitation to dinner without an eye on posterity." -- Benjamin Disraeli.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a prolific novelist with a reputation for ornate wretchedness (Pelham, 1828; The Last Days of Pompeii, 1834; Eugene Aram, 1832), and a Liberal-turned-Tory member of Parliament, was born on this day in 1803 in London.

Although the gods of literature might have been content to leave Bulwer-Lytton to obscurity, Charles Schulz brought him into the 20th century pop culture fold, appropriating the first lines of Bulwer-Lytton's ponderous novel Paul Clifford (1830) ("It was a dark and stormy night . . .") for the beagle Snoopy's various attempts at novel-writing. The English Department of San Jose State University sponsors an annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for bad opening lines, and Tim Burton chose Bulwer-Lytton's estate at Knebworth as the setting for "stately Wayne manor" in Batman. Whatever you may aspire to in your own writing, just hope they don't remember you better for your house than for your written works.

Categories: Literature, Pop-Culture

The Fastest Game

2007-05-23T20:10:00.000-04:00

Recently I’ve had the chance to see some old major league pitchers at work. And by old, I mean guys who are just about my age. On a visit to Fenway two weekends ago, I saw Bosoxer Curt Schilling pitch 5 and a third innings against the Orioles. He gave up 4 runs and left a tie game, but looked pretty good for a 39-year-old throwing 95 pitches. Last weekend, I also caught the Mets’ Tom Glavine, on TV and on XM, facing the Yankees and hurling his 295th victory at age 41; and I went to PNC Park on Sunday to see Randy Johnson, age 43, throw 10 strikeouts in 5.2 innings to beat the Pirates 5-2.

It’s a cliché that advanced age is associated with slowness – old preachers give slow sermons, old film directors make slow movies, old grannies drive slowly down the right lane of the parkway -- but watching these pitchers work belies this. Glavine kept the game moving along quickly, pitching 101 pitches before the late-inning rain started to slow the game down; after some sloppy relief pitching, the game finally finished up in about 3-1/2 hours. The Big Unit was even faster in dispatching the Bucs in a game that wound up lasting only 2-1/2 hours. Even Schilling worked pretty quickly; it was only after he left the mound that the 7th and 8th innings of the Red Sox-Orioles game seemed almost like the second independent half of a double header all by themselves.

Johnson’s victory occurred in a game that was faster than the average major league game, but back in 1916, a few fans in Asheville, North Carolina were on hand to see what is now considered to be the fastest game in the history of professional baseball.

The Asheville Tourists played in the inaugural season of the Class D North Carolina State League as the Asheville Mountaineers in 1913. After suffering a last place finish in 1914, the club changed its name to the Tourists for the 1915 season and battled their way to first place under the helm of a popular slick-fielding infielder-manager, John P. “Jack” Corbett, finishing 5-1/2 games ahead of the Durham Bulls. That year, a 15-year-old future novelist named Thomas Wolfe caught Tourist fever, and spent the season serving as Corbett’s bat boy, shagging pre-game pop flies and disappearing into the bleachers once the game would begin.

Recalling his days at Asheville’s Oates Park (pictured above), Wolfe later wrote to baseball writer Arthur Mann: “… [I]n the memory of almost every one of us, is there anything that can evoke spring – the first fine days of April – better than the sound of the ball smacking into the pocket of the big mitt, the sound of the bat as it hits the horse hide; for me, at any rate, and I am being literal and not rhetorical – almost everything I know about spring is in it – the first leaf, the jonquil, the maple tree, the smell of grass upon your hands and knees, the coming into flower of April. And is there anything that can tell can tell more about an American summer than, say, the wooden bleachers in a small-town baseball park, that resinous, sultry and exciting smell of old dry wood.”

But Wolfe well understood the inherent bittersweetness of minor league baseball. Nebraska Crane, a character in Wolfe’s The Web and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again, was apparently based on Corbett, an Ohio-born minor league journeyman who never ultimately made it to the bigs. Wolfe wrote about Corbett more directly in Look Homeward, Angel: “Pearl juggled carefully the proposals of several young men during this period. She had the warmest affection for a ball player, the second baseman and manager of the Altamont [i.e. Asheville] team. He was a tough, handsome young animal, forever hurling his glove down in despair during the course of the game, and rushing belligerently at the umpire. She liked his hard assurance, his rapid twang, his tanned, lean body …”

The Tourists won the first half of the 1916 season, and looked poised to repeat their 1915 triumph; but the elation of Thomas Wolfe's boyhood hero Jack Corbett turned to resignation as the club pulled into August. Despite leftfielder Jim Hickman’s league-leading .350 batting average, the Tourists were in 4th place, hovering just above .500 ball on August 30, the last day of the season. The Winston-Salem Twins were in town for the final game, but the Charlotte Hornets had already clinched the league title, so the Twins were definitively in second place for the year.

The game was scheduled for 2 p.m., but apparently the Twins were anxious to call it quits for the season; they wanted to catch a 3 p.m. train back to Winston-Salem. So Corbett and Twins skipper Charlie Jones apparently entered into a gentlemen’s agreement to start the game a half hour early and to keep it as short as possible. After all, they reasoned, it was a meaningless game as far as the standings were concerned. Other teams playing meaningless games at the end of the season in those days were wont to run onto the field wearing clown suits or ladies’ bloomers, so the idea of a fast game was a pretty tame shenanigan by comparison.

Two hundred fans showed up at Oates Park for the game – not many for a ballpark that could hold 1,200, but then again, most of the town’s baseball fans probably hadn’t gotten the message that the game was going to start early. According to Sporting News writer Bob Terrell, Thomas Wolfe was allegedly among those present.

The Asheville Citizen summed up the ensuing game as a “farcical contest.” The paper described the manner of play: “Nobody let a baseball get past. Everyone hit the first ball pitched … Nobody was left on the bases. If a man hit and didn’t come home, he contrived to get tagged out by overrunning the bag. Before the last man in an inning had been called out the players were on the run changing sides in the field. Along about one of the innings, some Twin player rushed to bat and [Tourists’ pitcher Doc] Lowe pitched the ball with no one in to catch. It was hit to center field, a fair single, but Nesser [one of the Twins’ outfielders] grabbed it on the bounce on the way into the bench and threw his team mate out at second.”

Lowe gave up two runs in the first inning; umpire Red Rowe showed up to officiate the game in the 4th inning. In the 7th, the Tourists managed to score one off the Twins’ ace, Whitey Glazner; and after 2 more innings, the two sides mercifully put the game out of its misery. Glazner (who later pitched adequately for 5 seasons, 3-1/2 with Pittsburgh and 1-1/2 with the Phillies) got the win, helping him to attain a league-leading .750 winning percentage for the season. The game was finished in a mere 31 minutes – two minutes before it was actually scheduled to start.

Perhaps the operative base running phrase of the day, with all due deference to Mr. Wolfe, was “You can go home again, but we’d prefer that you don’t, ‘cause we’re trying to wrap this up early.” Imagine your dismay, though, if you showed up at the ballpark looking forward to the last game of the season, only to find the players heading to the showers.

No one was particularly pleased about the day’s display, and Tourists president L.L. Jenkins jumped to his feet after the game and shouted a valedictory, promising that every paying customer would be refunded his or her money. The Citizen noted that women, in particular, were almost unanimous in calling the entire spectacle “perfectly horrid.”

Jack Corbett left Asheville after the 1916 season, and it turned out to be none too soon. While Corbett was busy managing the Columbia Comers to the South Atlantic League pennant in 1917, the Asheville club folded on May 17, 1917. The North Carolina State League itself shuttered two weeks later, a domestic casualty of World War I. Baseball would not return to Asheville for another seven years.

Although Corbett never made it to the big leagues, his name lives on in baseball. As early as 1939, Major League Baseball adopted Corbett’s patented design for the bases used on the field; now all 30 major league teams use “Jack Corbett Hollywood Base Sets,” with a tapered lip on the bottom of each base to grip the infield dirt, and a six-inch stanchion to anchor it. Corbett passed away in Van Nuys, California in 1973, at the age of 85.

Bill James says that baseball games have gotten too long, observing that “the wasted time inside baseball games dissipates tension, and thus makes the game less interesting, less exciting, and less fun to watch.” In an age in which everyone wants everything yesterday, baseball’s slowness is one of the things I appreciate most about the game. Certainly the fans present at Oates Park on August 30, 1916 were not treated to baseball that was interesting, exciting or particularly fun to watch. I do enjoy watching the studied efficiency of a veteran pitcher like Schilling, Glavine or Johnson, but give me a wild rookie pitcher and some guys who can foul off almost every strike, and that will suit me fine. My enjoyment of baseball is not measured by how exciting any particular game is; it is measured by being within the milieu of those sounds, sights and smells that Thomas Wolfe celebrated – to sit back, without any concern for the clock, and to take a break and enjoy an American rite of spring.

Categories: Baseball, Literature

Never, Never Believe It

2007-05-21T08:04:00.000-04:00

"If you are lucky enough to be a success, by all means enjoy the applause and the adulation of the public. But never, never believe it." -- Robert Montgomery.

Robert Montgomery was born Henry Montgomery, Jr. on this day in 1904 in Fishkill Landing, New York, the son of a rubber company executive.

Montgomery is remembered today, if at all, as the father of Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery, but his film and TV career is notable in its own right, for his contributions both on and off the screen.

After a few years acting on Broadway, Montgomery arrived in Hollywood for the beginning of the Sound Era, and as a prep-school educated boy with patrician good looks, he fell easily into the role of the devil-may-care, tuxedo-wearing playboy. He managed to rise above the bluntness of his typecasting in a few films here and there, including The Big House (1930), Private Lives (1931), Hitchcock's comedy Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) and They Were Expendable (1945), and was nominated for best actor Oscars for his performances as a psychotic murderer in Night Must Fall (1937) and as the boxer in a playboy's body in Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) --the inspiration for Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978).

He served four terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, beginning in 1935, during a time when Hollywood producers weren't interested in letting actors unionize under any circumstances. The fate of the fledgling organization was uncertain, but under Montgomery's leadership, the Screen Actors Guild boycotted the 1936 Academy Awards and voted to strike on May 10, 1937, causing the major studios to sign the first SAG minimum wage contract, one that applied equally to stunt men and extras under Montgomery's insistence.

Montgomery also managed to stare down a threat from the Capone mob. Capone had his hooks into the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which had managed to extract tribute money from Hollywood producers around the time that SAG was being born. Seeing SAG as a threat to his neat little arrangement, Capone tried to intimidate Montgomery by sending thugs around to slash his tires. Montgomery stood firm, however, invited the FBI into the mix, and ultimately cooperated with the Feds to get Capone's lieutenant Willie Bioff sent to prison.

The same sense of public duty that inspired him in his role with SAG was aroused by the conflict in Europe, and in 1940, Montgomery secretly went to France for several weeks to drive an ambulance. Shortly after he returned, he and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve, and Montgomery was placed in the Intelligence Section in London. Later, he served as an operations officer on a destroyer during the D-Day invasion, saw action at Guadalcanal, and commanded a PT boat in the South Pacific. He retired from the Navy with the rank of commander in 1944.

While continuing to act, he made his mark as an actor-director in Lady in the Lake (1947), the first Hollywood film to employ the subjective camera point of view of its protagonist for an entire feature. Montgomery starred as detective Philip Marlowe, but was seen on screen only at the odd moment when he might catch his own reflection in a mirror. "YOU do get into the story and see things pretty much the way the protagonist, Phillip Marlowe, does, but YOU don't have to suffer the bruises he does," noted the New York Times. "Of course, YOU don't get a chance to put your arms around Audrey Totter either. After all, the movie makers, for all their ingenuity, can go just so far in the quest for realism." Overall, the film was received as a curiosity, an interesting failure as a Hollywood film, but one that certainly confirmed Montgomery's willingness to take an artistic risk.

In the 1950s, Montgomery became the first effective political media consultant of the television age as an adviser to President Eisenhower, helping the ex-general to harness the new medium. In a particularly spectacular coup during the run-up to the 1956 election, Montgomery managed to convince CBS to air a birthday tribute to the president's wife Mamie in March 1956 -- never mind that the first lady's birthday was actually in November. Seeing Nixon's disastrous performance in the 1960 presidential debates against John Kennedy, Eisenhower is reported to have remarked that "Montgomery would never have let him look like he did in that first television debate."

Montgomery died on September 27, 1981 in New York City.

Categories: Classic-Cinema, TV, Presidential-Campaigns, Labor-History

James Stewart

2007-05-20T09:34:00.000-04:00

One of several Hollywood actors of the 1930s to emerge as "common man heroes" (Fonda, Cooper and Wayne were among the others), Jimmy Stewart always seemed to be a few shades closer to "common man" than "hero." Tall and gangly, shy, with a rural drawl and a nervous stutter, Stewart's persona was essentially that of a nice guy -- an earnest, well-meaning, perhaps easily distracted young man who was typically thrust into extraordinary circumstances, but who could tear his way through such circumstances with guts and an unshakeable sense of right.

Stewart, who was born on this day in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, was a small-town boy who studied architecture at Princeton. His appearance in a Princeton revue led classmate Josh Logan to convince Stewart to join the University Players in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where he met Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. Stewart and roommate Fonda earned their keep on Broadway for a few years, and went to Hollywood in 1935.

Fonda's success was slightly earlier, as Stewart floundered through boy-ingénue roles, but Frank Capra snagged Stewart in 1938 for You Can't Take it With You, which turned out to be a mere tryout for Stewart's first tour-de-force, Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939, with Jean Arthur), the story of a boy scout leader tapped to be a U.S. senator, only to be framed on corruption charges. After winning an Oscar for performing slightly against type as a wise-cracking writer in The Philadelphia Story (1941, with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant), Stewart became the first Hollywood star to enlist in the military for what would become World War II -- before the attack on Pearl Harbor -- rising to the rank of Air Force colonel, flying over 1,000 combat missions and winning the Distinguished Flying Cross (he would ultimately earn the rank of brigadier general in the Air Force Reserves).

America had grown up after the war, and with it, so did Stewart's persona. His first film after the war, the classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946, again by Capra), the story of a common man driven to the mortal brink of desperation only to brought back through a spiritual epiphany, a whimsical but ultimately terrifying encounter with an angel, was like a diary of the transformation of Stewart's film identity; with rare exception after the war (notably Harvey, 1950), the quirky, bumbling Stewart gave way to Stewart the tough guy -- still a small town guy with small town values, clever and charming at times, but a man of action, not above being ruthless.

Hitchcock played upon the contrast between the young Stewart and the prickly Stewart of middle-age in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1958); but films such as Anatomy of a Murder (1959, his fourth Oscar nomination), the Westerns Winchester '73 (1950), Broken Arrow (1950) and John Ford's Two Rode Together (1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), showed an almost irretrievably hard-bitten side of his persona, a side that knew through personal experience that war is hell.

Among the first stars to negotiate a portion of the profits from his productions, he eased slowly into retirement with a couple of TV series (The Jimmy Stewart Show, 1971-2; Hawkins, 1973-4) and occasional talk show appearances, having attained the status of one of the best loved actors from the golden age of Hollywood. He died July 2, 1997 in Los Angeles, California.

Categories: Classic-Cinema

Cigars, Munich, 1977

2007-05-19T21:12:00.000-04:00

Categories: Old-Photos

Seward and His Folly

2007-05-16T08:32:00.000-04:00

William Seward was born on this day in 1801 in Florida, New York.

A skilled criminal lawyer, Seward became active in New York state politics by supporting the Anti-Masonic Party, and later entered the state senate in 1830 as an anti-slavery Whig. Beginning in 1838, he served two terms as governor of New York, returned briefly to his lucrative law practice, and was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York in 1849.

Serving in his second term in the Senate as one of the more eloquent anti-slavery partisans, as the 1860 presidential election approached Seward was also one of the more high-profile members of the new Republican Party, and with New York's delegation representing about 1/3 of the votes needed for the Republican nomination, Seward seemed to be the likely nominee of the Party. However, at the convention in Chicago, Abe Lincoln's backyard, Seward and his campaign manager Thurlow Weed found themselves stymied by the momentum forming around the rough-hewn railsplitter from Illinois, and on the third ballot, Lincoln carried the nomination.

Seward, while not confident of Lincoln's abilities, campaigned energetically for him and was rewarded by being appointed Secretary of State. Seward believed his personality and experience would come to dominate Lincoln's cabinet (and he surely was an able leader during the Civil War, shrewdly negotiating with Great Britain, through U.S. minister Charles Francis Adams, to keep the British from recognizing the Confederacy); but Lincoln ignored Seward's naive strategy to unite the South behind a Monroe Doctrine-inspired, manufactured war with France and Spain, later causing Seward to admit that Lincoln was the better man for taking the fight directly to the South.

As the Civil War drew to a close in April 1865, John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators planned the assassinations of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Seward in order to throw the country into electoral chaos; and on the night that Booth fatally shot Lincoln at Ford's Theatre, Booth's compatriot Lewis Payne pistol-whipped Seward's son Frederick and stabbed Seward in his right cheek as he lay in his home recuperating from a recent carriage accident.

Although the stabbing permanently disfigured him, Seward recovered and continued to serve most loyally as Secretary of State to President Johnson, and was the nation's most respected supporter of Johnson's lenient Reconstruction policies. Seward negotiated the annexation of the Midway Islands, as well as the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million (known for many years before the discovery of valuable mineral reserves there as "Seward's Folly"), and retired from politics at the end of Johnson's term in 1869. He died on October 10, 1872 in Auburn, New York.

Categories: American-Politicians, Presidential-Campaigns

The Lone Wolf and his Instrument

2007-05-14T07:35:00.000-04:00

"Bechet was an individualist, a lone wolf, the sharp who blows into town, cleans out the locals, and disappears again." -- J.L. Collier.

One of the great traditional New Orleans jazz artists, Bechet's style was nevertheless wholly his own, as singular in some ways as his nomadic, solitary career. Born on this day in 1897 to African-American Creole parents (although his mother was light-skinned enough to occasionally passeblanc), Bechet learned to play clarinet by practicing on his older brother's instrument when no one was looking. At 13, he was already playing professionally, and the following year, he began his life of wandering.

In 1918 he was in Chicago, then in New York, and in 1919 he was in Paris with Will Marion Cook's band, where he caught the attention of conductor Ernest Ansermet, who gushed: "There is in the Southern Syncopated Orchestra an extraordinary clarinet virtuoso who is, so it seems, the first of his race to have composed perfectly formed blues on the clarinet . . . I wish to set down the name of this artist of genius, as for myself, I shall never forget it -- it is Sidney Bechet . . . who is glad one likes what he does, but who can say nothing of his art save that he follows 'his own way' . . . perhaps the highway the whole world will swing along tomorrow."

Ansermet proved perceptive at least about Bechet's personality: he was a loner who went his own way, symbolized neatly by his 1941 overdubbed novelty recording of "The Sheik of Araby" in which he played all of the instruments by himself, including bass, drums and piano. Bechet became the most important jazz artist in Europe, playing with astonishing inventiveness, verve and his signature shimmering vibrato style in various groups in Paris and London, where he also took up the soprano saxophone, still a novelty in 1920. He was the first saxophonist of any consequence in the history of jazz.

At the same time, he was demanding and hot-headed, making him difficult to work with, and he occasionally ran afoul of the law: he was deported from London following a fight with a prostitute and imprisoned in France for 11 months following a gunfight with another musician outside a Paris cabaret. Back in the U.S., Bechet began his recording career, soloing with Clarence Williams Blue Five and the Red Onion Jazz Babies (featuring Louis Armstrong). Despite Armstrong's own virtuosity, Bechet dominated their recording of "Cake Walkin' Babies" (1924), showing a mature command of the still-developing rhythmic "swing" of jazz.

After spending the early 1920s back in the U.S. (where he also worked stints with Duke Ellington and James P. Johnson, had a brief affair with Bessie Smith and launched the career of Johnny Hodges), Bechet sneaked back into Paris with La Revue Negre (with Josephine Baker) in 1925. He promptly left the show, however, to tour Russia and Germany, and slowly slipped into obscurity, buried in Noble Sissle's orchestra.

During the late 1930s, as small-band jazz was in collapse, Bechet enjoyed a comeback with a hit recording of Gershwin's "Summertime" (1938), followed by "Wild Man Blues" (1940), a traditional New Orleans piece which he elevated with his own timeless invention; a transcendent masterpiece of slow jazz variations, "Blue Horizon" (1944); and "Les Oignons" (1949), a million-seller in Europe. Bechet had by this time returned to Paris (with some trepidation, given his history there), but he was welcomed as a hero, and lived there until his death, on this same day in 1959. He posthumously published a frank autobiography, Treat it Gentle, in 1960.

Categories: Jazz, Paris

Success at Plymouth

2007-05-09T10:08:00.000-04:00

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, died on this day in 1657 in Plymouth, Massachusetts at the age of about 67.

William Bradford's record of building a permanent settlement out of the virgin lands of the Massachusetts coast almost makes Walter Raleigh, John White and John Smith look like Moe, Larry and Curly. Raleigh and White misplaced a couple of groups of colonists at Roanoke between 1588 and 1590; Smith's Jamestown colony was an unmitigated disaster of Indian wars, internal mistrust and starvation which limped along until James I took it over from the brink of bankrupcty after 17 years; but within 6 short years, Bradford led the Plymouth colony in the repayment of all of its debts and the successful buy-out of its original investors amid relative peace and prosperity.

The difference may have been in their aims: while Moe, Larry and Curly came to North America in search of a quick score of gold nuggets lying on the shore, Bradford came to honor God. When he was 12 he became a member of the Separatist Church in Yorkshire, an offshoot of the Puritans, and at 19 he moved to Holland with a group of like-minded "nonconformists" in search of religious freedom. Not finding it there, he helped to organize the Mayflower voyage in which about 100 "pilgrims" sailed to the New World in 1620.

Upon arriving, he was one of the framers of the "Mayflower Compact," an agreement for voluntary civic cooperation, and as governor during almost every year from 1621 to 1656, he maintained peace treaties with Massasoit and the Wampanoag Indians; initiated such democratic institutions as town meetings and elections; helped to avoid starvation by directing the cultivation of corn; and maintained an environment of toleration for all nonconformists. He also left behind a valuable, well-written account of the colony, History of Plymouth Plantation (1620-47).

Categories: Colonial-America, Christian-History

The Revolutionary Priest

2007-05-08T09:54:00.000-04:00

Miguel Hidalgo y Castilla was born on this day in 1753 in Corralejo, New Spain (Mexico).

An ethnic Spaniard, the son of a hacienda manager in Guanajuato, Hidalgo entered the Jesuit College of San Francisco Javier in Valladolid, but barely received two years of schooling when King Charles III of Spain banished the Jesuits from New Spain and confiscated all of their property. Switching to the diocesan College of San Nicolas Obispo in Valladolid, Hidalgo studied rhetoric, Latin and theology as well as Indian languages, and was finally ordained as a priest in 1778. He stayed to teach at the College, becoming its rector, but he earned a reputation for freethinking and unorthodoxy, and was brought before the Holy Office of the Inquisition in 1800 on charges that he read banned books and kept a mistress. The charges were never proven.

In 1803, Hidalgo left Valladolid to accept the small parish of Dolores, where he began to busy himself with improving economic conditions among his parishioners, introducing new industries (tile making, tanning, beekeeping) and debating local ethnic Spaniards about questions of social philosophy, largely influenced by the writings of Francisco Suarez. His debating activities grew into the formation of the Queretaro Literary Society, among whose members were Ignacio Allende, a 35 year-old cavalry captain; Juan de Aldama Gonzalez, another soldier; Miguel Dominguez, a former government official; and Miguel's wife Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez.

Together the Literary Club, bristling at Spanish rule under Joseph Bonaparte, hatched a plot for separating New Spain from Spanish rule, to be executed on December 8, 1810 with a stow of arms and ammunition they horded at the house of Epigmenio Gonzalez. The plot was leaked to the authorities in Mexico City, and on September 13 the arms were seized, and warrants were put out for the arrest of Hidalgo, Allende and Aldama. Hidalgo rang the church bells to bring his parishioners to mass early on September 16, and when they assembled at the church in Dolores, Hidalgo sermonized on revolution, urging them to join him in armed struggle against Spain.

With an enthusiastic but rag-tag band of poorly armed mestizos and Indians, Hidalgo traveled to San Miguel, picking up recruits along the way. At Atotonilco, Hidalgo seized the banner of the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadelupe and adopted it as the emblem of his crusade, and it became an important recruiting tool as he combed the countryside. Hidalgo's army seized a number of towns without much effort, but Hidalgo's inability to control his army meant that every battle was followed in victory by Hidalgo's Indians violently pillaging the houses of the local ethnic Spaniards.

Within a month they had captured Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi and Valladolid, and planned a march on Mexico City. Outside of Mexico City, Hidalgo won a decisive victory over the smaller army of government soldiers at Monte de las Cruces, and Mexico City seemed to be ready for the taking. Hidalgo worried, however, that his uncontrollable army would destroy the City, and ordered a retreat over the objections of Allende. Many of his rebels, sensing that the opportunity had been lost, deserted; and while Hidalgo traveled North, the government regrouped and defeated Hidalgo's forces at Puente de Calderon.

Fleeing to Texas, Hidalgo and Allende were captured by the Spanish in March 1811. Allende was immediately executed, but Hidalgo was returned to the Inquisition, which found him guilty of treason and heresy, defrocked him and turned him over to the government for execution by firing squad on July 31, 1811. His corpse was decapitated and Hidalgo's head was stuck on a pole and displayed as a warning to the Indians.

Although Hidalgo's rebellion was unsuccessful in turning out the Spanish, he did manage to undo 300 years of stability and complacency among the Spanish in Mexico in 120 days. He failed due to bad military judgment, but he is nonetheless worshipped as the patron saint of the birth of the Mexican nation, something which was not to come until 11 years after his death. No one else played as much of a role in inspiring people with the credibility of Mexican independence. The day Hidalgo rang the church bells, September 16, is now celebrated as Independence Day in Mexico.

Categories: Mexico

Robespierre

2007-05-06T09:27:00.000-04:00

Maximillian de Robespierre was born on this day in 1758 in Arras, France.

A lawyer known for his advocacy on behalf of the poor, Robespierre entered politics with his election to the States General in 1789, and shortly thereafter he became a leader of the Jacobins on the Left. He called for the trial of Louis XVI after Louis revealed his disapproval of the subordination of Catholic administration to the civil government and attempted to flee France by way of Varennes in July 1791, and Robespierre advocated the outright overthrow of the monarchy a year later.

After the king was deposed in August 1792, Robespierre was among the most bitter enemies of compromise, encouraging the mobs to attack the moderate Girondins and calling for Louis' execution; as the tide turned toward the radicals, he became a member of the ruling Committee of Public Safety (CPS) in July 1793.

There he showed himself to be a ruthless tactician, less for the benefit of his own position than for his guiding principles -- stamping out excessive wealth and advocating state provision of resources for the citizens. When his rivals (such as Hebert and Danton) threatened to compromise these principles or his methods of achieving them, he skillfully maneuvered them to the guillotine in the belief that humane policies encouraged revived conspiracies, asserting that "Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe and inflexible [and] it is therefore an emanation of virtue."

His Law of Prairial (June 1794) dispensed with even the appearance of fair trials, leading to the execution of 1,376 people in just 47 days. Feeling indestructible, Robespierre publicly lashed out against the more moderate members of the CPS the following month; they responded by having him arrested. He was quickly released by his supporters, and although a popular uprising from among the local Parisian government came to Robespierre's aid, at the eleventh hour of the military standoff against the National Guard, Robespierre lost his nerve, admitting that he did not have any confidence that he would succeed. He submitted to arrest again, and was summarily guillotined on July 28, 1794, along with 21 of his supporters. With Robespierre out of the way, the worst excesses of the Great Terror soon subsided.

Categories: France

Nauscopy

2007-05-04T07:34:00.000-04:00

Etienne Bottineau (born on this day in 1738 in Champtoceaux, France) was a career-seaman -- first in the merchant marine, then briefly in the service of Louis XV's Royal Navy. Passing his time shipboard by making observations of navigation techniques, he began to develop a question which became the catalyst for his mysterious life's work: shouldn't a vessel approaching land produce a visible effect on the atmosphere which could be seen by the practiced eye and used to predict the arrival of a ship before it would be visible on the horizon?

His shipmates all thought the question itself was far-fetched and that Bottineau was nuts, but he left the Navy to stay in Mauritius (then I'le de France) and to work on his crazy hypothesis. With a clear sky and few vessels coming to visit (making for fewer possibilities for error), in 6 months Bottineau succeeded in developing a technique for "seeing beyond the horizon" -- watching the atmosphere on the horizon and predicting the arrival of ships three days before they could become visible on the horizon.

At first, he used his new technique, which he called nauscopy, to win bets around the docks. Between 1778 and 1782 he correctly predicted the arrival of 575 ships to Mauritius, many as much as 4 days before they could be sighted, and the local government took notice. In 1782, the governor of Mauritius began to record Bottineau's predictions, and at the end of 2 years, Bottineau had such an outlandish record of accuracy (from land and at sea) that the local French government offered Bottineau a lump sum of 10,000 livres and an annual pension of 1,200 livres if he would reveal his secret to the government. He declined the offer; he was convinced that he had made an important scientific discovery, and instead he wanted to go to France to bestow this gift on the nation of his birth and be the great teacher of the new science of nauscopy.

In Paris, however, Bottineau's offers met with indifference in the royal bureaucracy of Louis XVI, and opinion-leader Abbe Fontenay, the editor of the Mercure de France, sneered at Bottineau's offer without studying it. Humiliated and disgusted, Bottineau disappeared without revealing his secret technique. A Scottish journal reported his death in Pondicherry, India just before the French Revolution (1789), and Jean-Paul Marat, the occasional scientist himself, considered Bottineau notable enough to mention his death in a letter to a friend.

Several people later claimed to have mastered nauscopy, but Bottineau's technique has never been documented. The invention of practical radar by Robert Watson-Watt in 1935 no doubt rendered Bottineau's science of nauscopy a mysterious irreproducible result of the quaint and distant nautical past, or perhaps a good seacoast sun-parlor trick.

Categories: Navigation

Fight Like Hell for the Living

2007-05-01T08:29:00.000-04:00

"Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living." -- Mother Jones.

Mother Jones, the labor agitator known as the "Miners' Angel," is thought to have been born Mary Harris on this day in 1830 in Cork, Ireland (although some recent research suggests she may have been born on August 1, 1837).

Mary Harris emigrated from Ireland to Toronto with her mother and siblings as a youngster, joining her father there, who had allegedly fled prosecution in Ireland for his revolutionary activities. Following her own grammar school education, she taught for awhile in public and convent schools before settling in Chicago as a seamstress. Before the Civil War she moved to Memphis, where she met and married George Jones, an iron molder and union member. They enjoyed a happy marriage and had 4 children together, until a plague of yellow fever swept through Memphis' Irish-American "Pinch" ghetto; within a week, 38-year old Mary had lost her husband and all 4 children to the disease. She returned to Chicago to resume dressmaking, but there fell victim to the great Chicago fire of 1871, in which her home and all of her possessions were destroyed.

Wandering through victim's shelters after the fire, she stumbled upon an underground meeting of the Knights of Labor. She was befriended by Terence Powderly, and thereafter she decided to devote her life to the labor movement. From the 1870s to the turn of the century, she became a somewhat unlikely "Forrest Gump" of the blossoming union cause. With her deceptively fragile and demure looks, trademark bonnet and long lace-trimmed dresses, she criss-crossed the country, appearing (by her own account) at nearly every major happening -- from the violent 1877 railroad strike in Pittsburgh, to the 1886 Haymarket riot in Chicago, to the 1884 march of Coxey's Army on Washington, to the 1899 establishment of Eugene Debs' Social Democratic Party -- gathering intelligence and working behind the scenes.

By the 1890s, she was known as "Mother Jones" to the initiated, but was nothing like the stereotype of motherly meekness and mildness; her embodiment of motherhood was as a tireless, fighting mother who stood up straight-backed to thuggery and brutal authority on behalf of her working "sons" and "daughters." Her experiences in Alabama textile mills in the late 1890s, where 30% of textile workers were underage, led her to take on child labor as a cause, writing articles for Socialist rags, giving speeches and, in 1903, leading a "Children's Crusade" from a textile mill in Pennsylvania to Theodore Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, to demand a federal child labor law.

In 1899, she gave aid to anthracite miners in Pennsylvania by organizing their wives into a broom and mop militia against strikebreakers -- "raising hell up in the mountains with a bunch of wild women," as one reporter put it. She was unabashed about the aura of violent resistance she inspired: "I'm not a humanitarian," she would say, "I'm a hellraiser." For the next two decades, sometimes as an agent of the United Mine Workers (with whom she often disagreed on policy matters), she concentrated much of her efforts in the coalfields of West Virginia and Colorado. In West Virginia she participated in 5 major strikes, and in 1912, faced with martial law, Mother Jones was arrested during a march on Charleston to see Gov. Glasscock (on the rumor that she had planned to assassinate him). A military court convicted her of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced her to 20 years in prison, but a state commission settled the strike and the new governor, Henry Hatfield, commuted her sentence. Meanwhile, by the end of World War I, about half of West Virginia's miners would become union members.

Arriving in Colorado in 1913, she recommended a strike against John D. Rockefeller's Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. The authorities physically escorted Jones out of the state 3 times; when she re-entered, she was subjected to a bogus smallpox quarantine on one occasion and locked for a month in the rat-infested basement of the Walsenburg courthouse on another. Pancho Villa, who had benefited from her call for an inquiry into the treatment of Mexican revolutionaries jailed in the U.S., wrote to President Wilson to appeal for her release. In April 1914, the Colorado authorities overplayed their hand, massacring 20 women and children during a raid on a union camp at Ludlow. Ludlow became Mother Jones' touchstone as she testified before Congress, and by December, federal mediators descended on Colorado and exacted an uneasy peace. The following month, Rockefeller invited Jones to his office in New York, and they apparently enjoyed some version of a meeting of the minds: Rockefeller permitted a company union to be formed and dropped some criminal charges against the strikers, and Jones publicly announced (to the outrage of fellow travelers such as Upton Sinclair) that she didn't "hold the boy [Rockefeller] responsible."

Ideologically, she has been accused of being inconsistent: she chided the United Mine Workers for selling out to cooperation with management, but, even as a founder of the IWW in 1905, she broke with the Wobblies, seeing them as too radical for her taste. Often without an official home for her activities, she frequently freelanced, joining William Z. Foster in a post-World War I steel walkout, and traveling as a delegate to the 1921 Pan-American Labor Congress in Mexico, where her train was stopped by striking jewelry workers and she was showered with carnations and violets.

She died a few months after a grand 100th birthday party, on November 30, 1930 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was buried with the victims of the Virden mine massacre at Mt. Olive, Illinois. Her power as an icon of the movement, representing the native strength of the archetypically weak, dissipated somewhat as the union movement settled into respectability in the years after her death, but in the 1960s her image was resurrected as her name became the title of a leftist magazine, and she has become something of a patron saint of radicalism.

Categories: Labor-History, Trailblazing-Women, American-Socialists

U.S. Grant

2007-04-27T06:40:00.000-04:00

"Grant was manipulated by the managers and operators of a post-Civil War spoils system that subordinated every facet of the federal government to their own devious ends. Grant merely presided at the White House during the height of the Gilded Age while the spoilsmen and big-business moguls not only ran the country, but ran off with most of the gilt." -- Nathan Miller.

The man who became the toughest Union general of the Civil War was a shy, sensitive and somewhat squeamish child who showed little promise in anything except taking care of horses. Little more could be said of U.S. Grant through his career at West Point Military Academy (from which he graduated 21 of 39 cadets), his Mexican War service under General Zachary Taylor (other than that he was cast as "Desdemona" in fellow soldier James Longstreet's production of Shakespeare's Othello while awaiting battle), or his subsequent military service and attempt to establish a farm in St. Louis, all of which culminated in his having to accept a job as a clerk in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois at the age of 38 in order to provide for his family.

Although Ulysses S. Grant was born on this day in 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio, it was the Civil War that gave birth to U.S. Grant as a historical protagonist, though perhaps his leviathan patience (which he cultivated while breaking horses in his youth) was the key to his fortunes as a general. His successes in the recapture of Fort Donelson in Tennessee and at the Battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg earned him Lincoln's admiration and the nickname "(U)nconditional (S)urrender Grant." The essence of his strategy was to keep hitting General Lee's Confederate Army and to simply outlast him, which he ultimately did as Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865.

In the turmoil that followed Lincoln's assassination, the Republicans and the country not surprisingly looked to the non-ideological war hero for comfort. Grant served two terms as president (from 1869 to 1877) and was considered for an unprecedented third term in 1880, though his administration was scandal-ridden and he exercised little control over the rampant activities of the Northern industrialists who elected him or the efforts of Reconstruction politicians to limit the scope of freedom for the African-Americans who were freed during the War. Grant's own conduct was beyond reproach ethically speaking, and in the final analysis he seems to have been the victim of most of the scenarios in which he was involved following the War.

After retiring from politics, Grant lost his fortune when his son Buck's brokerage firm went bankrupt, and braved cancer while writing his Memoirs in order to provide an income for his family. He died of throat cancer on July 23, 1885 at Mt. McGregor, New York.

Categories: US-Presidents

The Pope Joan Myth

2007-04-25T07:46:00.000-04:00

From the 13th to the 17th centuries, there was a persistent legend, told both within the Roman Catholic Church and by the Church's enemies, that a woman had once served as pope. In the most common version of the tale, a young woman from Mainz who had studied in Athens, dressed as a man, settled in Rome as a cleric and was elected pope as "John Anglicus," styled as John VIII, after the death of Leo IV in 855. Her real gender was exposed two years later, however, as she rode in a procession from St. Peter's to the Lateran, giving birth to a child (from a secret liaison with a secretary-deacon) on a narrow street between the Colosseum and S. Clemente. Enraged, Roman onlookers are said to have tied her to her horse's tale, dragged her around the city in disgrace and stoned her to death, to be succeeded by Benedict III.

Her first "biographer" was a 13th century senior scholar within the Church and later the archbishop of Gneisen, Martin Polonus, who acknowledged her existence in his otherwise dispassionate chronicle of popes, but observed that because of her fraud she was not included in the official papal registry. Subsequent writers, including Petrarch and Boccaccio, embellished the tale, but the basic facts seem to have been accepted as truth by the Church and its partisans for a few centuries -- a bust of Pope Joan had stood among the gallery of pontiffs in Siena Cathedral until 1601, and allegedly John XXI had accounted for Joan in numbering himself as the XXIst John in the papal list.

Catholic writers began to bristle at the notion of a female pope in the 16th century, but the legend was considered "demolished" by a Protestant writer, David Blondel in the 1650s. Nonetheless, modern proponents of the "Pope Joan" myth point to some unusual traditions which seem to have grown up within the Church as evidence of her existence -- including the curious pontifical election ritual practiced from the 10th to the 16th centuries in which the selected candidate was required sit in a birth-chair with a hole underneath at the time of investiture, allegedly so that a representative cardinal could inspect the candidate's gender, and the tradition that subsequent popes allegedly avoided the narrow street on which Joan supposedly gave birth. Subsequent soundings of the "Pope Joan" story include Emmanuel Royidis' novel Pope Joan (1954), a film starring Liv Ullmann (1972) and a popular Victorian card game.

Categories: Christian-History, Pop-Culture

Whorf

2007-04-24T06:55:00.000-04:00

Fire inspector and linguistic philosopher Benjamin Lee Whorf was born on this day in 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

An intellectually curious but nonetheless average student of chemical engineering at MIT, following his graduation Whorf became a fire prevention engineer and inspector for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. While working for the insurance company in 1924, Whorf became interested in linguistics, exploring philosophical conflicts between science and religion through the work of a long-forgotten linguist, early 19th century dramatist and mystic Antoine Fabre d'Olivet.

Whorf began to study the Aztec language in 1926, and by 1928 was publishing Aztec translations in academic publications. Although he did not posses a doctoral degree in linguistics, Whorf's writings and visionary approach to problems of language sufficiently impressed the Social Science Research Council that it granted him a research fellowship to study manuscripts in Mexico in 1930. With the arrival of famed linguist Edward Sapir at Yale in 1931, Whorf's remarkable accomplishments in the field of linguistics were allowed to flower: Whorf wasted no time in enrolling in Sapir's courses at Yale, and Sapir encouraged Whorf to expand his inquiries and assisted in providing Whorf a background in classical linguistic thinking.

By 1937, Whorf was a part-time lecturer in linguistics at Yale. His Language, Mind and Reality (published in 1941) became a highly influential work among linguists, anthropologists and structuralist literary critics such as Roland Barthes; although it was an attempt by Whorf to popularize linguistics for the lay reader, it also advanced the revolutionary notion (which he co-formulated with Sapir) that the "shape" of a culture's language imprints itself firmly on that culture's experience of the world, containing the ideas about what a culture's environment or universe consisted of -- and therefore that objective reality is not really something that is "out there" but rather that our experiences are manufactured by us within and through our linguistic system.

Like composer Charles Ives, Whorf continued to work full-time in the insurance business while he produced the works by which he would be remembered in another field; just a year before his death on July 26, 1941, Whorf was promoted to Assistant Secretary of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, even as he became in high demand for articles and lectures on linguistics.

Benjamin's younger brother Richard Whorf was a Hollywood film actor and director, noted for his biopic of songwriter Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By (1946). Apropos of nothing, critic James Agee wrote that Till the Clouds Roll By was "a little like sitting down to a soda fountain de luxe atomic special of maple walnut on vanilla on burnt almond on strawberry on butter pecan on coffee on raspberry sherbert on tutti frutti with hot fudge, butterscotch, marshmallow, filberts, pistachios, shredded pineapple, and rainbow sprills on top, go double on the whipped cream" -- although it does lead me to wonder whether you can translate that into Aztec.

Categories: Philosophy

Unready

2007-04-23T09:45:00.000-04:00

King Ethelred II, known as "the Unready," died on this day in 1016 in London.

Ethelred's life did not begin auspiciously. At his baptism (around 968), he "made water in the font" (i.e. urinated), which St. Dunstan interpreted to mean that the English people would be slaughtered in his lifetime.

The half-brother of King Edward the Martyr, Ethelred assumed the English throne as a youngster following his half-brother's murder in 978 -- although there was widespread speculation that Ethelred was complicit in the crime. This fact made it more difficult for him to raise an adequate defense against the encroachment of the Danes in 980. He rashly ordered a general massacre of Danes in England on St. Brice's Day, 1002, resulting in the murder of the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, the King of Denmark, who eventually conquered the island and forced Ethelred to flee in 1013.

Following Sweyn's death, Ethelred was reinstated to the throne, only to face a decisive onslaught by Sweyn's son Canute, resulting in the installment of Ethelred's son Edmund to the throne, and Canute's virtually certain accession, shortly before Ethelred's death.

Ethelred's well-suited nickname, "Unready," was derived from a play on his name: "Ethelraed" meant "noble counsel," to which was added "Unraed" meaning "no counsel" or "ill counsel." The epithet was later mistranslated as "Unready."

Categories: Kings-and-Queens, Anglo-Saxon-England

The History of Mr. Henry Fielding

2007-04-22T08:05:00.000-04:00

Henry Fielding was born on this day in 1707 in Sharpham Park, Somerset, England.

The son of an army general, Henry Fielding studied Greek and Roman classical literature at Eton and was subsequently encouraged by his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, to go to London and make his career as a writer. He had a quick success with the play Love in Several Masques (1728) before a brief stint at the University of Leiden, after which he returned to devote himself to writing for the London stage. In 1730, he had another huge popular success, The Tragedy of Tom Thumb, which according to legend made Jonathan Swift laugh for the second time in his life.

Since writing was a hand-to-mouth existence, Fielding assumed the management of the New Theatre, and wrote over a dozen plays that debuted there, including the political satire Pasquin (1737). His period of relative financial success came to an abrupt end when Sir Robert Walpole caught wind of Pasquin's anti-Whig message and passed the Theatrical Licensing Act with the express intention of kicking Fielding off the London stage.

In search of financial stability, Fielding became editor of an opposition journal, Champion, while studying at the Middle Temple. He entered the bar in 1740, but after briefly serving as a circuit judge, due to gout and asthma he failed to pursue active practice. Instead, he found his way into a new literary medium. With the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), the "epistolary novel" was all the rage, although Fielding was fairly disgusted by Richardson's cloying sentimentality and rigid conventional moralizing. In response, Fielding wrote an published a parody of Pamela, known as Shamela (1741), amounting to a lusty 70-page abridgement, exposing all the pretensions and moral ludicrousness of Pamela through a comically twisted point of view of Richardson's original plot. Despite his exasperation with Richardson's book, Fielding was captivated by the possibilities of its form.

The following year, Fielding published his own novel (liberating it from Richardson's epistolary format), The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742; about a virtuous young footman who is fired by his lady for resisting her advances). He described it in his preface as a "comic epic poem in prose," attempting to dignify the status of the novel while exhorting future novelists to use the form as a mirror held up to the prevailing society, revealing truth and exposing hypocrisy. The following year he published The History of Mr. Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743), an ironically admiring narrative based on the career of a well-known criminal, which recent critics have claimed was actually a veiled attack on Walpole.

In 1744, his wife Charlotte died, and 3 years later Fielding caused a scandal by marrying his wife's maid, Mary Daniel, who was pregnant with his child. During this period of social exile, Fielding penned his best-known novel, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), by which he said he intended "to promote the cause of virtue and to expose some of the most glaring evils, as well public as private, which at present infect the country" -- although Samuel Johnson called the book "vicious" and "corrupt." Like Joseph Andrews, the often bawdy Tom Jones is a comic tale about the pretensions of rank, but it is also an object lesson on the nature of happiness and goodness, showing Fielding at the height of his powers as a storyteller and social observer.

Meanwhile, his political exile having ended with the Walpole's fall in 1742, Fielding was appointed justice of the peace for the City of Westminster, London, in 1748. Taking his new position with the utmost seriousness, he worked strenuously to rid Bow Street (the magistracy headquarters) of corruption and made effective crime-fighting his mission, launching his reform of the police force with "An Enquiry into the Causes of the Latest Increase of Robbers" (1751). In 1753, Fielding obtained a small grant from the crown to establish London's first professional police force, known as the "Bow Street Runners" -- 12 men whose first task was to investigate a series of London murders. He resigned his post due to ill health and was succeeded by his half-brother, Sir John Fielding.

Fielding's last novel, Amelia (1751), was not as spry as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, its relative sobriety informed by his close-up view of criminal society. In 1754, seeking a better climate for his asthma, Fielding journeyed to Portugal, but died there shortly thereafter. His last book, The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, was published posthumously the following year.

Categories: Literature

Pat Brown

2007-04-21T08:39:00.000-04:00

Pat Brown, Democratic governor of California, father of Jerry Brown, was born Edmund G. Brown on this day in 1905 in San Francisco, California.

Nicknamed for American patriot Patrick Henry (whom Brown is said to have quoted often as a boy), Pat Brown worked his way through evening law school and entered the bar in 1927. He entered the political arena almost immediately, running unsuccessfully for a California state assembly seat as a Republican from the San Francisco area in 1929. Switching to the Democratic Party, he was elected district attorney of San Francisco on his second try in 1942, was elected attorney general of California in 1950, and in 1958 became only the second Democratic governor of California since the 19th century.

A folksy, gregarious Catholic liberal who enjoyed the benefits of a Democratic majority in the state legislature, Brown's policies led to the expansion of the California school and highway systems, and to the irrigation of portions of the California desert. Although he was morally opposed to the death penalty, he enforced it on several occasions as governor -- including with respect to robber/rapist/autobiographer Caryl Chessman.

In 1960 he was briefly considered to be a "favorite son" candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, and he angered John F. Kennedy partisans by being too slow to support Kennedy for the nomination; once he did throw his support to Kennedy, many of his California delegates ended up voting for Adlai Stevenson for the nomination. Brown was re-elected in 1962 in a heated battle against ex-Vice President and former presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon by about 300,000 votes. In both 1960 and 1964 he was mentioned as a possible vice-presidential nominee, but publicly took his name out of contention, explaining that "Being Governor of California is more important than sitting and waiting for a President to die."

Brown's second term saw an increase in public unrest, including anti-Vietnam War protests and the violent Watts riots in 1965, and by 1966 when he faced Ronald Reagan in his bid for a third term, his popularity had gone into sharp decline. Brown's impolitic mocking of Reagan during the campaign certainly didn't help, as he rather notoriously quipped, "I'm running against an actor, and you know who shot Lincoln, don't cha?" Brown lost to Reagan, 58% to 42%.

Pat Brown died on February 16, 1996.

Categories: American-Politicians, Presidential-Campaigns

Patty Griffin, with Scott Miller, at the Byham

2007-04-17T20:00:00.000-04:00

Admit it – you have music running through your head, too. And half the time, you can’t even say what it is, or where it came from, while it is happening. Later, however, there are times when an old piece of music comes along that brings back a flood of familiar emotions – not just a memory, but a chance to re-experience some significant series of events. This happens to me a lot when I’m listening to Patty Griffin. Her songs -- with their splendid character studies, still lives and tableaux -- figure prominently in my re-experience of the time around which my wife and I started to date. Perhaps it was fitting, then, that, on a week when my wife is out of town, I decided to take myself to the Byham Theater to see Patty Griffin in concert.

Before I get into that, however … it was my pleasure last night to “discover” Scott Miller, who opened for Patty Griffin. With a voice like a street-smart choir tenor, Miller plies an effervescent variety of country-blues Americana -- layering in bittersweetness and laugh-out-loud humor, with a penchant for sardonic confessions and self-deprecation that calls his Sugar Hill label-mate Rodney Crowell to mind. His heart-on-yer-sleeve guitar work is rockin’ nimble, too. There are times when it appears that he’s just playing music to break up his monologue, which is surely part of the charm of his act. After saluting Western Pennsylvania with a brief, grinning discourse on the Whiskey Rebellion (a subject near and dear to my heart, as I am finishing a first draft of a documentary script on it for Inecom Productions), he breaks out into a ditty entitled “Drunk All Around This Town,” which bears quoting:

Well I been drunk all around this town
The downside-up to the upside-down
Y’set ‘em up, boys, I’ll knock ‘em down
Well I been drunk all around this town

I drank shooters with the college boys
The girls are cuter where they card the door
Daddy’s money makes a lot of noise
Well, I drank shooters with the college boys

I drank bourbon with the lawyers, too
Their power ties and their wing-tip shoes
‘Cause even Republicans get the blues
So I drank bourbon with the lawyers, too …

… and there Miller’s humor and his skills as a writer and performer all seem to converge. It’s always a great thrill to encounter a doggone real live human being in the opening act of a concert.

Of course, it was Patty Griffin’s night. Every time I see her in concert, I am always struck at how such a tiny, delicately beautiful woman can emit such a big voice. True, the timbre of her voice is pint-sized, deceptively so – and she uses this pint-sizedness to great nostalgic, atmospheric effect on an old French hymn she sings at the beginning of the concert, as a tribute to her late grandmother who passed away last fall at age 99, sounding like a Northern Appalachian version of Edith Piaf. It is a voice of great capacity, though, and at times it fills the nooks of this old vaudeville palace, and all of the crannies, too.

At the same time, Griffin’s voice always has a fine point on it, and one revels in its searching detail. Like the experience of watching blue jays dart around among the trees outside my home, I marvel at the way she gracefully swoops and soars and glides her way through the last incantations of a tune like “No Bad News” from her most recent album Children Running Through, never smacking face-first into a tree trunk, always finding a perch. And, the exquisite intensity of it, as she reaches an emotional crescendo – that patented Patty Griffin moment in numbers like “Crying Over” or “Trapeze” -- can absolutely scalp you.

Griffin’s great gift as a live performer emerges directly from her love of what she does. She giggles, confessing “I love my job,” while the Pittsburgh crowd roars its approval. On a rockin’ number, “Getting Ready,” she forms a jamming circle with her superb band, led by guitarist Daniel Lancio, her pony tail bouncing as she stomps her feet and thrashes away at her acoustic guitar, doing her business with infectious glee. The theme carries through to her quieter live moments as well; while “Up on the Mountain,” a gospel-infused song inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final sermon, is a fine song on Children Running Through, Griffin’s live performance of the song outshines the recorded version, and you can just see it in her flushed face that, in part, it’s her gratitude to a warmly appreciative audience that inspires her to such heights.

You may like what you’ve heard of Patty Griffin’s work, if you’ve been paying attention the last several years, but like me, you haven’t heard her properly until you’ve heard her live.

[Even so, you might want to try her album, Children Running Through, at your earliest convenience.]

Categories: New-Music

Wilbur

2007-04-16T03:24:00.000-04:00

"An unfailing intellect, imperturable temper, great self-reliance and as great modesty, seeing the right clearly, pursuing it steadfastly, he lived and died." -- Bishop Milton Wright, in a eulogy to his son, 1912.

History lumps Wilbur and Orville Wright together, but they were very different characters, both essential to the breakthrough at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903 that launched the phenomenon of aviation.

Born on this day in 1867 near Millville, Indiana, the elder of the two brothers, Wilbur was a handsome, serious, dedicated student who hoped to follow in his father's footsteps (who was a progressive bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ) by going to Yale and becoming a minister. Just before he was to graduate from high school, however, Wilbur was playing street hockey and got hit in the mouth with a hockey stick, losing all of his front top teeth. Ashamed of the way he looked, he developed heart palpitations that overlayed his depression and self-doubt, and shortly thereafter he abandoned all hope of pursuing the life plan he had mapped for himself. Instead he consigned himself to the inside of the Wright home for three years, reading and caring for his mother who was dying of tuberculosis.

Avid young Orville pestered his brother out of his melancholy, inviting him to join Orville's fledgling printing and newspaper business and later, as a partner in the brothers' hand-crafted bicycle shop. His attention to engineering issues at the bicycle shop and the ongoing press accounts of the developmental failures of would-be aviators Otto Lilienthal and Samuel Langley (among others) encouraged Wilbur to begin to think about the possibilities of machine-powered flight.

He and Orville began to think of the aviation riddle as three separate problems: (1) building wings that would lift the weight of the pilot and the motor off of the ground (something Lilienthal had already done with his gliders), (2) having a power plant to propel the craft through the air, and (3) the most difficult problem, having a way to control the craft once it was airborne. Wilbur thought that being able to twist the wings, a mechanism later to be known as "wing warping," would give the pilot control over his craft, and began to experiment with a biplane box kite he and Orville built, with wings braced with wires which could be twisted to make the kite bank and turn. They reported their success with wing-warping to Octave Chanute, then considered the country's expert on aeronautics, who immediately recognized that they were ahead of most of the people who were working on flight.

In 1900 the brothers began to test their glider designs at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, an isolated stretch of dunes on the Atlantic coast which offered them privacy and by reputation the steadiest winds in the U.S. The first year they learned that their initial wingspan did not create enough lift to raise a human being off the ground, but that the control mechanisms seemed to work when the craft was flown as a kite; the following year, amid torrential rains and mosquitoes, they learned that a larger wingspan permitted the glider to carry Wilbur on short hops, but that the controls, theoretically based on Lilienthal's calculations of lift tables, couldn't keep Wilbur from smacking into the ground and splitting open his forehead.

After developing a revised set of lift tables back in Dayton, they returned to Kitty Hawk in 1902 with a new glider design, and following intense discussion and debate, fitted the back of the glider with a hinged tail rudder which was linked to the wing-warping mechanism. The moment Wilbur launched from the top of West Hill, he knew that the control mechanism finally worked. In 1903, they reappeared in Kitty Hawk with a new glider, the Flyer, fitted with an engine and propellers built by their bicycle shop mechanic Charley Taylor. Without press coverage or government observers, at 10:35 a.m. on December 17, Orville lifted off in the Flyer for the first sustained powered and controlled flight in history, a mere 12-second voyage. Taking turns at the helm, the brothers made three more flights that day, Wilbur's being the longest at 59 seconds and 852 feet.

When they tried to inform the press, the U.S. government and the Europeans (who, within the next 5 years, were to make strides through the work of Alberto Santos-Dumont), all quarters refused to believe that the little bicycle shop mechanics had actually achieved flight. The Wrights secured their patents and went underground for awhile, hoping to find financial backing for their technology. After Santos-Dumont claimed the title of "father of aviation" with his wobbly 200-foot hop in 1906, Professor Chanute pleaded with the Wrights to put on a show.

Wilbur went to LeMans, France, and on August 8, 1908 effortlessly took off before a wide-eyed crowd, turning and banking with ease. The French conceded defeat, and Wilbur became the toast of Europe. After a successful test for the U.S. government, a crash and a recovery, Orville joined Wilbur on the grand tour of the continent, with "princes and millionaires . . . as thick as fleas," flying demonstrations before delighted onlookers. By the end of the tour, the world's first barnstorming pilot had grown tired of barnstorming, and Wilbur dragged Orville back to Dayton in 1909 to continue to work on airplane designs and defend their patents against infringements in a series of lawsuits.

Wilbur died of typhoid fever at the age of 45 on May 30, 1912, only catching a glimpse of what his work would do to transform the lives of human beings forever.

Categories: Air-&-Space

Brunelleschi's Dome

2007-04-15T07:59:00.000-04:00

"In the taut curves of its profile, the force of its volume, and the dynamism of its upward leap, the shape of Brunelleschi's dome suggests the new absolute of the Early Renaissance, the idea of the indomitable individual will . . ." -- F. Hartt.

Filippo Brunelleschi, known to his contemporaries as Pippo, died in 1446 in Florence at the age of 69.

While his early rival, Lorenzo Ghiberti, would be known principally for just two works, the bronze doors on the north and east portals of the Baptistery of Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi is best known today for just one unconventional and breathtaking accomplishment, the design of the cupola for the Duomo, the Cathedral of Florence, which he worked on intrepidly with eyebrows gleefully raised high for 20 years.

Pippo's father was a member of the Cathedral design committee when Pippo was a child, so he had grown up with models and drawings of the early designs for the Cathedral. By the age of 21, however, Brunelleschi has entered the goldsmith trade, and in 1402 he was optimistic about his chances of winning the public competition being held to select a sculptor to create new bronze doors for the north portal of the Baptistery outside the Cathedral. His competition effort was well received, but in the end he placed second to Ghiberti -- and he never forgave him. After his disappointment Brunelleschi found it easy to give up sculpture for architecture, and served along with Ghiberti on the Opera del Duomo committee of 1404, doing his best to make the young sculptor look silly by exposing Ghiberti's lack of engineering expertise at every opportunity.

It is possible that the beginnings of Brunelleschi's vision began to take hold when the committee asked then-current Cathedral architect Giovanni d'Ambrogio to lower his three semi-domes. In 1407, as Vasari records, the Opera del Duomo adopted Brunelleschi's suggestion that a drum be inserted between d'Ambrogio's semi-domes and the center, thus preparing to "lift the weight off the shoulders" of the semi-domes to accommodate a massive central dome. Brunelleschi's influence on the evolution of the Cathedral's design increased in the years that followed until the Cathedral was finally declared his own project in 1420. Thereafter, the Cathedral ultimately took on the characteristics of what is often called Brunelleschi's "paper architecture," his conception of proportional architectural shapes as if on paper, elegantly partitioned and measured across the eye's plane with a geometric simplicity and order unseen in Gothic architecture.

The gigantic central dome itself, visible for miles around Florence, was literally the crown of Brunelleschi's career as a designer, a triumph of engineering as well as a stylistic statement which in some ways set the optimistic tone for the century of Renaissance artistic expression to follow. Brunelleschi solved the engineering problem of building such a large, tall dome -- the largest, tallest dome ever made until that time -- by erecting an internal dome with an exceptionally strong herringbone masonry pattern, surrounded by oak reinforcing beams held together with iron chains and fixed to stone buttresses which connected the inner shell with the outer shell.

While working on his lifetime project, Brunelleschi also managed to work on other projects, such as the Ospedale degli Innocenti (begun 1419) and the Chapter House for Santa Croce (1433), and he revolutionized the plan of church interiors with his designs for San Lorenzo (1425) and Santo Spirito (1434).

Categories: Architecture

Speaker Bankhead

2007-04-12T07:39:00.000-04:00

William B. Bankhead, Democratic U.S. Congressman from Alabama (1917-40), speaker of the House (1936-40) and father of actress Tallulah Bankhead, was born on this day in 1874 in Moscow, Alabama.

In return for all of the assistance Bankhead had provided Franklin Roosevelt in getting his "New Deal" legislation through Congress, Roosevelt had allegedly promised Bankhead the vice presidency for the 1940 election, but instead threw the post to Henry Wallace. Bankhead complained privately, "The Convention was an ordeal that will not be soon forgotten. I venture to say that it was the most un-American and dictatorial meeting ever held by the great Democratic party . . . President Roosevelt has double-crossed me for the last time. I shall never forgive him for the way he acted."

Within two months of his complaint, on September 15, 1940, Bankhead died; good soldier Sam Rayburn succeeded him as speaker, and Roosevelt's "New Deal" lived to see another day.

Categories: American-Politicians, Presidential-Campaigns

Baudelaire

2007-04-09T06:33:00.000-04:00

Charles Baudelaire was born on this day in 1821 in Paris.

Rebelling against his stepfather, Baudelaire briefly lived the luxurious life of a dandy on the money left to him by his father, but soon found himself overwhelmed by debt. He began his freelance writing career at age 24, and while his earliest writing showed enthusiasm for revolutionary principles, it soon came to expose his disillusionment. He achieved fame as a critic, taking as his causes the music of Wagner and the painting of Delacroix.

In 1844, he withdrew from Paris society, exiling himself to a somewhat tragic relationship with the treacherous Jeanne Duval, a mulatto, for 14 years. In his apartment-outpost on the Ile St-Louis, he experimented with drugs (the experiences with which he described in Les Paradis Artificels, 1861), shunned the literary fraternity, considering authors like Victor Hugo to be second-rate, and refused all attempts at help or sponsorship. By 1857, he was already a notorious character in Paris artistic circles, suspected of all sorts of personal depravity, when the French government took him to court over his verse collection, Les Fleurs du Mal, which the government called immoral. He was ultimately convicted of obscenity and blasphemy, was fined, and had six of his poems banned in France until 1949.

While he produced a large and accomplished body of prose, he is remembered for his poems, the small sum total of which appeared in Les Fleurs du Mal. When the collection first appeared, the typical subject matter of his poems -- ranging from erotic love poems to Duval, his "Black Venus," and to Mme Sabatier, his "White Venus," to lesbianism, revolt and decay -- was considered to be lurid; by way of contrast, his style in the treatment of such themes was cool and balanced. After his death, in the 1880s, Symbolist poets such as Stephen Mallarme identified Baudelaire as their ancestor.

From 1856 to 1865, Baudelaire translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French (he had spoken English since he was a child, his mother having been born in England), launching Poe's great popularity in France during the 1870s and 1880s. Shortly before his death from a paralytic stroke at age 47, Baudelaire was engaged in a prolonged diatribe against all things Belgian, having recently returned from an unsuccessful lecture engagement there.

Categories: Literature

Ice Queen

2007-04-08T08:13:00.000-04:00

Sonja Henie was born on this day in 1912 in Kristiana, Norway.

The blonde, blue-eyed ingénue who dominated and changed the style of international figure skating competition also turned out to be a cunning marketeer, a trait she may have inherited from her father, a leading Norwegian furrier who owned the first automobile in Oslo. Sonja Henie learned to ski almost as soon as she could walk, but by 5 she was immersed in studying dance with Love Krohn, teacher of the great ballerina Anna Pavlova. With Pavlova as her role model-by-proxy, she began to skate at age 6, taking her first Norwegian championship at age 10.

As a tiny 12 year old, Henie competed in her first Olympics in 1924 at Chamonix, placing 8th; but 2 years later she was challenging the 1924 gold medallist, Herma Planck-Szabo of Austria, placing a close 2nd to her in the 1926 world championships. On her way up the international rankings, she also drew raves for her short skirts, which better emphasized her graceful leg work, as opposed to the long skirts worn by her competitors. In 1927, Henie unseated Planck-Szabo in a controversial competition in which 3 out of 5 judges were Norwegian. Her breakthrough world championship in 1927 would, however, prove to be the first of an entire decade of uninterrupted major victories.

That year she also tentatively began her film career, appearing in a Norwegian film, Seven Days for Elizabeth. In 1928, she stretched the confines of figure skating as a sport by introducing dance routines into freeskating, and won her first of 3 Olympic gold medals at St. Moritz. By the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, her international competitors, British pre-teen Cecilia Colledge notable among them, were imitating her costumes, dance style and spinning repertoire, but Henie was still the unanimous choice for the gold medal.

In 1936, Henie announced that she would retire from amateur skating following the Olympics and the subsequent world championship to be held the following week, and although she succeeded in winning the gold and the world championship, this time she received stiff competition from Colledge. She obviously knew when to quit (ending her career with 14 national championships, 8 European championships and 10 world championships in addition to the Olympic gold medals), and how to proceed on her next career choice: within a year, Henie was in Hollywood with a contract from 20th Century-Fox, and her first American musical, One in a Million, became a huge hit.

Henie was not much of an actress (and "her accent was as thick as her ankles," as Schickel observed), but her skating numbers and her sunny persona served her well in a number of light musicals, including Thin Ice (1937), Happy Landing (1938) and Sun Valley Serenade (1941, with Glenn Miller); in 1938, she was ranked as the 3rd most popular box office attraction, after Clark Gable and Shirley Temple.

By the mid-1940s, however, fans were growing tired of her movies, so she took the big dollars she earned in Hollywood and poured them into her Hollywood Ice Revue traveling show (of which she was the star), exhibiting her typical combination of drive and perfectionism in assuring the quality of her productions. After two American marriages, she married her Norwegian childhood sweetheart, a shipowner, at 44. When she died of leukemia at 57 (in an airplane en route from Paris to Oslo), she was worth over $47 million.

Categories: Sport, Classic-Cinema

Governor Moonbeam

2007-04-07T12:16:00.000-04:00

The son of Democratic California governor Pat Brown, Jerry Brown (born on this day in 1938 in San Francisco) was certainly one of the most durable yet unorthodox political personalities of the latter half of the 20th century -- the one nationally recognizable American politician who could credibly be called a "maverick" for over 30 years. His ability to remake and renew himself demonstrates resourcefulness on many levels: he travels light, like David Carradine in Kung Fu, sleeps very little, and draws upon a deep well of religious and philosophical inspirations untapped by other politicians. He is the only politician, it seems, who can quote from Noam Chomsky, Martin Buber, Mother Teresa or Gregory Bateson, to name just a few of his heroes, with a pilgrim's zeal.

He originally studied for the Catholic priesthood, but graduated from Yale law school 4 years before being elected secretary of state of California in 1970. In 1974, after 6 years with Ronald Reagan in the statehouse, Brown was elected as the youngest governor of California (at age 34), cultivating an ascetic lifestyle which appealed to California populists: unmarried, he refused to take residence in the new governor's mansion recently completed by the Reagans, instead sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a rented apartment and driving a used car from the state fleet.

Just two years later, he was a late entry in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, running 3rd behind Jimmy Carter and Morris Udall at the convention. Warming up with an African safari with some-time girlfriend Linda Ronstadt in 1979 (his token foreign relations tour), he tried again in 1980, this time running against incumbent President Carter and Ted Kennedy. By this time, his credibility had been damaged by columnists around the country who referred to him as "Governor Moonbeam" for his suggestion that California might develop its own space program (not wholly implausible given today's commercial space industry) and other unfamiliar and seemingly impractical ideals.

He left the statehouse in 1982, having built a modest record of radical change in environmental protection, education reform and affirmative action in California, but his political career seemed to be over when he was beaten by Pete Wilson in a bid for U.S. Senate. Brown used the defeat as an opportunity to get back in touch with his spiritual roots, studying meditation with a Zen master in Japan and then working with Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta before returning to head the California Democratic Party in 1989.

In 1992, he launched an angry and entertaining yet quixotic 3rd campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, snarling at the role of lobbying dollars in the political process and barking out his "800" number at every public appearance, claiming the unqualified right to say "I told you so" to Democrats who became disillusioned with Bill Clinton's willingness to sacrifice judgment to the whims of his campaign contributors.

In 1998, Brown resigned from the Democratic Party and surprised pundits by waging a successful campaign for mayor of Oakland, California (getting 74% of the vote), a reflection of his shifting interest from the empty gamesmanship of national politics broadcast to a disconnected electorate, to nurturing, community-based mechanisms for meaningful change. He later re-registered as a Democrat, and was re-elected as mayor with over 60% of the vote in 2002. Proving his staying power, at the age of 68 he was elected attorney general of California just last year, defeating LA city attorney Rocky Delgadillo 63% to 37%.

Categories: American-Politicians, Presidential-Campaigns

The Double Helix

2007-04-06T06:59:00.000-04:00

Biologist James Dewey Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA (with Francis Crick) and co-winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, was born on this day in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois.

Watson grew up in an intellectually curious household and was enough of a brainpower show-off as a youngster to be featured on the Quiz Kids NBC radio show. He studied zoology at Chicago but formed an obsession with genetics, overcoming his fear of organic chemistry long enough to get his doctorate at Indiana University in 1950 under Hermann Muller studying bacteriophages -- viruses which multiply inside bacteria. He went to Copenhagen on a fellowship, and in 1951 attended a lecture in Naples by Maurice Wilkins in which Wilkins described his use of X-ray crystallography in studying DNA.

Armed with his insights on bacteriophages and, from Wilkins, the revelation that genes could crystallize, Watson joined the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge, where he met physicist Francis Crick. Watson was just 23 and Crick was 35, but Watson quickly earned Crick's respect as an uncompromising investigator with skills which complemented his own. Working together, they anonymously entered the feverish international race to discover the structure of DNA which captivated famous scientists such as Linus Pauling. As Crick and Watson built cardboard models of the DNA molecule, it was Watson who first articulated the similarity between the structure of two base pairs of nucleotides within DNA -- the adenine-thymine pair which was held together by two hydrogen bonds, and the guanine-cytosine pair also held together by hydrogen bonds.

Building upon that insight, Crick and Watson developed a model of the structure of DNA which suggested the means of replication which would be an essential process within chromosomal heredity, and they published their model in Nature (Apr. 1953).

Shortly thereafter, Watson left Cambridge for the California Institute of Technology, and later Harvard. In 1965 he published what became the standard work on molecular biology, The Molecular Biology of the Gene, and 3 years later wrote a best-selling memoir of his role in discovering the structure of DNA, The Double Helix. (The story was the basis for a TV movie, in which Jeff Goldblum starred as Watson.)

After running the Cold Spring Harbor Lab on Long Island, where his group discovered ras, the "oncogene" that causes cancer, Watson became the head of the Office of Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health, leading the effort to chart all 50-100,000 genes within the human genome. After a stormy tenure there, he resigned in 1992 and was succeeded by Francis Collins.

Categories: Biologists-&-Physiologists

Nasty, Brutish and Short

2007-04-05T07:34:00.000-04:00

The pessimism of Thomas Hobbes' political philosophy is perennially summed up in a single "soundbite" from Hobbes' groundbreaking justification for the existence of sovereignty, Leviathan (1651): he argues that the natural human condition is a state of perpetual war in which "the life of people [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." In the 21st century, his words are altogether too compelling in the light of modern Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Iraq, or any number of other brutal battlegrounds. His more generic point, however, was that in a civilized world, the fear of violent death causes people to create a state by contracting to surrender individual rights to the authority of an absolute sovereign.

In his own day, Hobbes was accused of concocting a secular excuse for the absolute authority of any successful strong man (i.e. Cromwell, contemporarily), as contrasted with the religious excuse of the "divine right of kings" advanced by Robert Filmer, but what is better remembered about Hobbes today is his glumly mechanistic view of human social behavior, in which beings are compelled by their nature to act selfishly in an atmosphere of fear, mistrust and appetite.

He self-consciously blamed his outlook on his mother's fears of the Spanish Armada while she was pregnant with him, but one can as easily see the brutality of the Puritan Revolt as a fitting backdrop for his philosophy. Born on this day in 1588 in Westport, Wiltshire, Hobbes grew up in financially secure surroundings (despite the fact that his father, a vicar, deserted the family after getting into a brawl with some of his parishioners) and studied at Magdalen Hall, Oxford before becoming attached to the Cavendish household as tutor and secretary in 1610. He made several trips to the Continent, meeting with Descartes, Gassendi and Galileo among others, and shortly thereafter published a treatise on motion. He also wrote and privately circulated Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640), a defense of the royal prerogative of Charles I, on the eve of Cromwell's rise, and as Cromwell took power, Hobbes (describing himself as a "man of feminine courage") fled to France. There he was appointed tutor to young Charles II (who called Hobbes "the bear"), and continued his philosophical writing, principally an anonymous critique of Descartes' mind/body duality in which Hobbes introduced his materialistic view that the soul dies with the body.

In 1642, he published De Cive, an inkling of his theory of government which he described in greater detail in Leviathan 9 years later. The publication of Leviathan, which emphasized naked human motivation to the exclusion of the hand of God in its analysis of social organizations, raised the suspicion of the French clergy as well as English royalists in exile, so Hobbes returned to England and tried to keep a low profile, busying himself with mathematics. Upon the accession of his ex-pupil Charles II in 1660, Hobbes was again in favor, but in 1666 the House of Commons ordered an investigation of Hobbes due to the apparent atheism of Leviathan. In some measure proving his own thesis, fear of persecution drove Hobbes to "repair" Leviathan by adding an appendix to bring it into line with church doctrine, and to write a logical analysis of the law of heresy by which he concluded that no earthly court could judge the crime.

At 84, he wrote an autobiography in Latin verse (!), and by 1675 had published translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey before retiring to the estate of the Cavendish family. Although the conclusions of his political philosophy resembled those of the empty-suited Filmer in that they recommend an absolute monarch, his practical analysis of what moves humans to form governments was a revelation in its time, an early explication of modern psychological principles which paved the way for John Locke's less bleak view of the social contract, and provided a basis for a secular ethical framework. The ever-fearful Hobbes managed to act to preserve his own life until the ripe age of 91, when not even a lifetime's worth of sheepish diplomacy could save him; he died on December 4, 1679 at Hardwick, England.

Categories: Philosophy

Takes a Licking, Keeps on Ticking

2007-04-04T07:04:00.000-04:00

Timex watch pitchman and pioneer TV news broadcaster John Cameron Swayze was born on this day in 1906 in Wichita, Kansas.

"It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" is what the affable announcer was remembered for, but early TV viewers were more accustomed to hearing him say, "Ladies and gentlemen, and a good evening to you" as host the first nightly news program, Camel News Caravan on NBC (1948-56). Swayze read the news during a 15-minute broadcast, sponsored by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, in what was little more than a TV picture of a radio news program. Lacking the technology to present film or taped segments, Swayze would simply narrate from notes on paper, with a lit cigarette in an ashtray visible on his desk at the instruction of the sponsor.

In 1956, NBC shed the cigarette company sponsorship (at least in name) and hired Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, recently successful as commentators on televised coverage of the 1956 Democratic and Republican conventions, to replace Swayze.

Giving a tobacco company the "naming rights" to a network news program seems preposterous by today's standards, but in the early days of television, the "news" was mainly concerned with highly visible affairs of state (TV had not yet learned how to rake muck, or wallow in it), and health concerns about cigarettes had not yet entered pop consciousness. The relationship between TV news and big tobacco has remained respectful, however, notably forcing 60 Minutes host Mike Wallace to kill, at least temporarily, the broadcast of an interview with former tobacco research exec Jeffrey Wigand about industry knowledge of the addictive properties of nicotine in 1994.

After being replaced on NBC, Swayze moved to ABC to anchor its evening news broadcast for a year in 1957 before becoming the on-air spokesman for Timex for 20 years. Swayze died on August 15, 1995 in Sarasota, Florida.

Categories: TV, Journalism, Pop-Culture

Stop Them Damned Pictures

2007-04-03T08:19:00.000-04:00

Boss Tweed, leader of the Democratic Tammany Hall political machine in New York City (c. 1863-1871), was born William Marcy Tweed on this day in 1823 in New York City.

A rough-housing dropout who became leader of the local volunteer fire company, Tweed entered politics as a defender of the immigrant poor, but was nipping at the till almost from the beginning, first as a grafting alderman of Manhattan, and then as a listless U.S. congressman (1853-55). Later as a member of the New York board of supervisors and state senator, he climbed to the top of the Tammany Hall machine and lined his pockets with millions of dollars (estimated at $30-200 million!) of city money from public works kickbacks and bribes, while controlling all Democratic Party nominations in New York. While Tweed got rich, New York got the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Bridge.

In the early 1870s, in the wake of city budget shortages, the New York Times began to run exposés on Tweed and his "Ring" of cronies, but even more damaging were Thomas Nast's stinging caricatures of Tweed as a gluttonous vulture in Harper's Weekly; as Tweed himself said, "Stop them damned pictures. I don't care so much what the papers say about me. My constituents can't read. But, damn it, they can see pictures!" In 1873, he was prosecuted by Samuel Tilden on corruption charges and sentenced to 12 years, but his sentence was reduced to one year. After he was released, the reform movement was in full swing, and he was arrested again on other charges.

In December 1875, Tweed escaped from prison and fled to Cuba on a Spanish ship, then to Europe. There he was recognized, purportedly from one of Nast's cartoons, extradited to the U.S. and brought back to prison, where he died at age 55, on April 12, 1878.

Categories: American-Politicians, New-York-City

Just the Facts

2007-04-02T07:30:00.000-04:00

Jack Webb was born on this day in 1920 in Santa Monica, California.

Webb began his career as a radio announcer in San Francisco, but very shortly thereafter he was producing and starring in his own radio police-drama series, Dragnet (1949-52). Although he appeared in movies from time to time (in Dark City, 1950, he was a giddy, pencil-necked jazz fiend named "Augie"), Webb was a bona fide law enforcement groupie, and he made Dragnet his life's franchise, debuting it on television in 1952.

As the laconic "Sgt. Joe Friday" Webb wore gray suits with white shirts and narrow ties, trundling (almost marching) down the corridors of the L.A.P.D., his arms stiff at his sides. "Casual clothes" meant a white shirt with the top button open, revealing a white crewneck T-shirt underneath, and "being casual" meant listening to the hi-fi and grilling steaks at his spartan bachelor flat. Friday did not give the impression of being a master of detection or psychological gamesmanship, as Peter Falk would be as "Columbo"; rather, Joe Friday was an average Joe, pursuing "just the facts" without distraction, getting the job done. He's so square, he's cool.

During the first incarnation of the TV series, Ben Alexander played Friday's main partner, "Officer Frank Smith" (1953-59); after 8 years on hiatus, Webb revived the series in what became its better remembered version (1967-70), co-starring Harry Morgan as his quirky partner "Bill Gannon." Webb also produced Emergency (1972-77), a series about Los Angeles paramedics (co-starring his ex-wife Julie London and her husband Bobby Troup) and Adam-12 (1968-75), a show about L.A. patrol cops (with Martin Milner and Kent McCord).

Webb passed away on December 23, 1982 in West Hollywood.

Categories: TV, Classic-Cinema

Rachmaninoff

2007-04-01T09:01:00.000-04:00

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s fame could have rested upon his performances as a pianist and conductor alone, but he was driven to be a great composer from an early age.

Born on this day in 1873 in Semyonovo, Russia, by the time he was 19, he had finished a successful First Piano Concerto and a one-act opera, Aleko, but the critical failure of his First Symphony (1897) sent him into a debilitating depression, from which only hypnosis and a patient psychoanalyst were able to rescue him. During most of his career, however, Rachmaninoff battled against critics who saw his compositions as emotionally overwrought, technically exhibitionistic echoes of Late Romanticism which had been wholly replaced by the Modern explorations of rivals such as Igor Stravinsky. Worse than being told he was born into the wrong musical age, he was depicted by serious critics as being irrelevantly at the trailing edge of current music -- something like Pat Boone during the rise of Elvis Presley.

The fact that he fled Russia during the revolution of 1917 and settled in the U.S. probably also affected his critical reputation, branding him as a reactionary. While Stravinsky and Schoenberg were off turning concert halls into dens of "difficult listening," Rachmaninoff achieved great popularity with mass audiences. His Prelude in C# minor became so popular, in fact, that Rachmaninoff himself grew tired of playing it in public, and Van Cliburn’s recordings of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini were international mega-hits.

Without the critical baggage, Rachmaninoff’s works can be characterized as lush, personal pieces displaying a cosmopolitan, rather than nationalistic, vibe. The Soviets, in their inimitable way of turning harmlessness into courage, banned Rachmaninoff’s music as representing the "decadent attitude of the lower middle classes" and "especially dangerous on the musical front in the present class war." Ironically, at least one Christian journal used the hypnosis episode, along with Rachmaninoff’s choral symphony based on an Edgar Allan Poe poem, The Bells (1913), as evidence that Rachmaninoff and his music were tools of Satan. With Soviets and Fundamentalist Christians debating his value as an artist out on the critical fringes, Rachmaninoff died on March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California.

Categories: Classical-Music

Donne

2007-03-31T08:30:00.000-04:00

John Donne died on this day in 1631 in London at the age of about 59.

A young man known for his pursuit of female flesh who eventually became the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London in 1621, Donne is remembered today for his remarkable body of poetry, very little of which was published until after his death. Even after publication, it took 300 years for Donne to be taken seriously as a poet. Dr. Johnson regarded him as undecorous stylistically and a bit precious with his imagery, an influential opinion which relegated Donne to the cut-out bins -- to be resurrected only fitfully by Coleridge and Browning, and finally by Modernists such as T.S. Eliot, who prized him for his passionate intellect.

Born a Catholic, a descendant of Sir Thomas More and the grandson of saying-smith John Heywood through his mother's side, Donne was educated at Hart Hall, Oxford and studied law before joining a couple of sailing expeditions in 1596. Upon his return, he became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper of the great seal of England, through whom he met Egerton's niece, Ann More. In December 1601, Donne and More eloped secretly with the help of friends; and when Donne revealed this fact to Sir George More, Ann's father, More had Donne and his friends thrown in jail and attempted to annul the marriage. Eventually, Donne and More reconciled and the marriage was left to stand, but Donne lost his job with Egerton and was virtually unemployed for about 12 years.

Donne's earliest poems show the mind of the young lover. Taking ordinary natural phenomena as his point of departure, Donne seduces his lover in "The Flea" by arguing, in biological detail, how the mingling of his blood with hers in the belly of a flea is a kind of marriage upon which they might shut out the protests of parents. Yet the playful conceit of comparing love to biology leads to the observation of natural decay in other early poems, acknowledging the fleeting nature of erotic attraction and fidelity without spiritual love.

In his poetry during his years of unemployment, written in between hack-writing jobs and attempts to find work with the Virginia Company which sponsored the first English settlement in North America at Jamestown, Donne further explored further the nature of decay in several funeral and memorial poems, observing the decline of our state within a universe which is itself disintegrating ("mankind decays so soon/ we are scarce our fathers' shadows cast at noon . . ."); but as with love, he took refuge in the infinity of the spirit in his Divine Meditations. King James himself was sufficiently impressed with Donne's spiritual tendencies to suggest that he take Anglican holy orders, which Donne eventually, after some reluctance over his own abilities, completed in 1615.

Once he committed to the church, he devoted himself completely to it, especially after the death of wife (in childbirth, with their 12th child) in 1617, a circumstance which led him to seek comfort in spiritual pursuits by imagining a reunion with his dear wife in heaven. Thereafter, his poems merge with his penetrating sermons, becoming almost one body of work, a series of meditations on the nature of decay, death and rebirth, touching upon such matters as the spiritual significance inherent in so banal an act as the forced evacuation of one's bowels during an illness, to the universality of death -- as in the famous passage from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, No. 17: "No Man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main . . . Any Man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee."

Donne delivered his most famous sermon, Deaths Duell (1632), two weeks before he died, inviting the listener, and himself, to find coherence in death by remembering Christ's death.

Categories: Literature

Like Adding 20 Horsepower

2007-03-27T10:29:00.000-04:00

"Cale Yarborough is the best driver the sport has ever seen. When you strap Cale into the car, it's like adding 20 horsepower." -- Junior Johnson.

NASCAR champion Cale Yarborough was born William Caleb Yarborough on this day in 1939 in Sardis, South Carolina.

Yarborough stole his way into his first professional stock car race, at Darlington Raceway near his home town of Sardis, at the age of 18, slipping behind the wheel of a Pontiac slated to be driven by a friend and finishing near last after engine troubles. After that day in 1957, Yarborough struggled along unsuccessfully with turkey farming for awhile and later found work as a grease monkey at Holman-Moody in Charlotte, North Carolina, the shop where Ford racing cars were created.

Finally, in 1965, Yarborough got his chance behind the wheel, and began one of the most celebrated NASCAR careers ever -- one which would include three consecutive national championships (1976, 1977 and 1978), five Southern 500 wins at his hometown course of Darlington Raceway, and 83 victories in 559 starts. He is at the top of the all-time list for the percentage of time in which he led races during his career (16%), and attributes much of his success to his ability to adapt to even the roughest riding cars -- he criticizes drivers who need everything to be perfect in order to win. Yarborough viewed his pre-race qualifying runs as crucial to his success, and his competitive intensity in this area earned him 70 pole positions (3rd on the all-time list).

Outside of racing, the 5' 7", 170-lb. Yarborough has led a daredevil's lifestyle which reflected the spirit of his driving: riding alligators, grappling water moccasins, skydiving and bear wrestling, Yarborough once landed an airplane without any prior experience and has been struck by lightning twice. From 1986 to 2000, he was a racing team owner; he last took the wheel himself in 1988 and was inducted into the International Motorpsorts Hall of Fame in 1993.

Categories: Sport

Giliani the Prosector

2007-03-26T10:20:00.000-04:00

Alessandra Giliani died on this day in 1326 at the age of 19.

A student at the University of Bologna, Giliani became an assistant to Mondino dei Luzzi, a leading anatomist, serving as the first woman prosector, or preparer of dissections for anatomical study. She developed a method of draining blood from the corpse and replacing it with quick-hardening colored fluids, thus allowing scientists to see the smallest blood vessels with ease. She may be said to have been the lynchpin of Mondino's success, for he seems to have disappeared from the stage of history after her death.

When Alessandra died (her cause of death is not known), it is said that her boyfriend Otto Agenius (also one of Mondino's assistants) died a short time later from grief.

Categories: Trailblazing-Women, Biologists-&-Physiologists

Orgone, Or Not

2007-03-24T05:20:00.000-04:00

The controversial psychoanalyst (some say, mad man) Wilhelm Reich was born on this day in 1897 in Dobrzynica, Galicia.

While studying for his medical degree in Vienna in 1920, Wilhelm Reich became a disciple of Sigmund Freud, who theorized that neuroses were caused by sexual repression, during an era in which psychoanalysis was still developing its legitimacy. After graduation, Reich became a psychiatrist (initially, as an assistant in Wagner-Jauregg's clinic) and joined the Austrian Communist Party.

In 1934, he published a seminal work of orthodox psychoanalysis, Character Analysis, but by the early 1930s, his interests in politics, sexuality and the mind had become intertwined in ways which marginalized him. In 1929, his interest in social revolution as a prerequisite to sexual revolution led him to form the Socialist Society for Sexual Advice and Sexual Research, through which he organized industrial clinics to address workers' emotional problems while providing political education. Reactionary elements within the Communist Party questioned his emphasis on sex, and when he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), in which he denounced party-line communism as the psychological equivalent of fascism, the Party expelled him.

In 1934, he broke from the Freudians (and was expelled by the International Psychoanalytic Association) when he began to argue that neuroses were the destructive result not merely of sexual repression, but more specifically of undischarged sexual energy. His unorthodox views on sexuality got him into hot water in Scandinavia, so in 1939 he moved to the U.S. and taught at the New School for Social Research until 1941. In The Function of the Orgasm (1927; reprinted in the U.S., 1942), Reich had argued that only total orgasm (including brief unconsciousness) rids us of the excess energy that encourages unhealthy drives.

In isolation in his home in Maine, he began to focus on what he viewed as the physiological effects of socially-imposed sexual repression -- muscular rigidity adopted by children in response to the threat of punishment which inhibited total orgasm -- and began to identify the pent-up sexual energy as a "pre-atomic" cosmic force present throughout nature, a force which he called "orgone." When orgone energy is blocked, Reich argued, all kinds of disease are caused -- even cancer. To correct the blockages, Reich built and sold "orgone boxes" -- wooden, metal-lined compartments in which a patient could sit, which would stimulate sexuality and, potentially, cure cancer.

In 1954, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seized his boxes and some of his writings and had them destroyed; in 1956, Reich was sentenced to 2 years in prison for contempt. He died in prison on November 3, 1957 in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

In the 1960s, some of his early writings on sexual revolution were embraced as prophetic by the youthful Left; today, there continues to be a small cadre of die-hard Reichians who believe that there exists a scientific basis of orgone therapy, although no serious biologist has supported Reich's theories. A number of musicians have been captivated by Reich's legacy, notably Gil Evans ("Orgone," also covered by Miles Davis) and Kate Bush, whose song "Cloudbusting" was inspired by a book about Reich by his son Peter, The Book of Dreams.

Categories: Freud, Psychoanalysis, Pop-Culture

Fastest

2007-03-23T07:18:00.000-04:00

Craig Breedlove was born on this day in 1937 in Los Angeles.

After years of drag racing and building vehicles, on August 5, 1963 Breedlove set the "unlimited" land speed record in his Spirit of America, a jet-powered, 3-wheeled drag racer with a giant stabilizing tail of Breedlove's own design, at the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, with a speed of 407.447 mph. The previous record land speed was set by John Cobb in a non-jet-powered 4-wheel vehicle in 1947; Breedlove's record was classed in a different category by the Federation Internationale de L'Automobile, FIA, although the "unlimited" class became the dominant field of play after Breedlove's achievement.

After seeing 2 drivers beat his 1963 record (Tom Green and Art Arfons), Breedlove returned to Bonneville on October 13, 1964 to reclaim the land speed record with a speed of 468.719 mph, and raised the bar a few days later with a speed of 526.277 mph. He and Arfons traded the record back and forth throughout October and November 1965, culminating in Breedlove's 600.601 mph performance on November 15, 1965. His last land speed record stood for 5 years until it was beaten by Gary Gabelich in 1970.

Breedlove's achievement remains extraordinary, however: he managed to raise the land speed record by more than 200 mph in 2 years, and was the first driver to beat the 400, 500 and 600 mph marks on wheels.

Categories: Sport, Land-Speed-Record

The Pulse of the Universe

2007-03-22T07:33:00.000-04:00

Robert Millikan was born on this day in 1868 in Morrison, Illinois.

Robert Millikan was at the forefront of the awakening of U.S. physics around the turn of the 20th century, both as a researcher and educator. While a student at Oberlin College, with no previous experience he was pressed into service by his Greek professor to teach physics; when he protested that he didn't know anything about physics, his Greek professor simply insisted that anyone who could master Greek could master physics -- such was the American view of physics as a static, classical discipline at the end of the 19th century.

Nevertheless, the advice propelled Millikan into his life's work. He later studied at Columbia, graduating as the school's only physics Ph.D. in 1893, and went to Germany to study with Max Planck. He returned to the U.S. in 1896 to teach physics at the University of Chicago, where he devoted half of his time to research. In 1909, Millikan succeeded in measuring an electric charge by suspending a tiny oil drop in an electric field, then measuring the strength of the field. He discovered that an electric charge (e) can only be found in integer multiples of a fundamental "piece" of charge, thus demonstrating the atomic nature of electricity. For this work in 1923 Millikan became only the second American to win the Nobel Prize for Physics (the first being the chair of his department at Chicago, Albert A. Michelson).

Between 1912 and 1915, Millikan experimentally verified Albert Einstein's predictions about the photoelectric effect, providing a photoelectric determination of the value of Planck's constant (h) in the process. For the first time in the 20th century, through Millikan's work American physics was having an impact on the leading-edge crosscurrents of European physics. In the 1920s, he began to study the region of the spectrum between the ultraviolet and X-radiation, extending the knowledge of the ultraviolet spectrum downwards far below what was previously observed. He also discovered a law of motion regarding the falling of a particle towards the Earth after entering the Earth's atmosphere, which led to his study of radiation in the atmosphere, previously thought to have resulted from radioactive elements on Earth.

In 1927, Millikan appeared on the cover of Time as the man who had "detected the pulse of the universe" after he coined the phrase "cosmic rays" (to the delight of sci-fi writers everywhere) to describe radiation in the atmosphere which could only come from outer space, as his experiments demonstrated. Initially, Millikan believed that these rays were "birth cries" (i.e. energy) from infant atoms being formed in outer space, perhaps by the Creator who was "continually on his job," but he later retreated from the position as the scientific community failed to rally to the hypothesis. Nevertheless, Millikan was passionate about harmonizing science and religion, and was a frequent speaker on the subject; some critics joked that they couldn't tell the difference between the two by the time Millikan was through with them.

America's most popular scientist, he was particularly admired by the U.S. industrial community, much of which applauded the anti-New Deal, Herbert Spencer-style determinism which laced his speeches, a circumstance which served him well in raising funds for the California Institute of Technology as head of the physics department from 1921 to 1946. He died on December 19, 1953 in San Marino, California.

Categories: Physicists

Doc Holliday

2007-03-21T07:22:00.000-04:00

Dentist and gunfighter John H. "Doc" Holliday was baptized on this day in 1852 in Valdosta, Georgia.

Having received his D.D.S. degree from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1872, Holliday practiced dentistry in Atlanta for a year before discovering that he had contracted tuberculosis, whereupon he closed up shop and headed to the wild West. There he made his living principally by gambling, at which he excelled; but as a gambler in Texas in the 1870s, he found that being a crack shot with a pistol was also required, and he soon gained a reputation as a lightning gunfighter with a foul temper -- not the sort of fellow you'd want to cross. (One might suspect that the stress and strain of dentistry evident in the high rate of suicides among American dentists today manifested itself, in the 1870s in the American Southwest, in Doc Holliday's hair-trigger temper -- but that's surely a matter for further research and discussion.)

Frequently Holliday found himself being pursued by the law for his escapades, but in the famous gunfight at O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona in October 1881, he fought on the side of Wyatt Earp against the pesky Clanton boys. He was wounded in the battle, but later accompanied Earp in search of other outlaws.

Although he was arrested in 1882 for his part in Earp's unofficial police action at Tombstone, he was released by a Colorado judge. He died on November 8, 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.

Categories: Old-West

Sounding Presidential

2007-03-20T08:14:00.000-04:00

Vaughn Meader was born on this day in 1936 in Waterville, Maine.

Meader was a moderately successful if obscure cabaret performer who specialized in composing song parodies and delivering humorous political monologues when, during one evening's performance, he donned his native New England accent to mimic then President John F. Kennedy. Despite the fact that the idea of portraying a sitting president in humorous vignettes was at that time unheard of, the result was a raging local stage hit, leading to a recording contract and a wildly popular humor album, The First Family (1962) -- at one time the fastest-selling record of all time. Meader effectively poked at Kennedy's mannerisms (as well as those of his brother Bobby Kennedy) and very gently satirized such topics as White House economy measures, Jackie Kennedy's White House tour and the space program (Q. Mr. President, when will you send a man to the moon? A. As soon as Senator Goldwater would like to go.).

Meader's Kennedy-esque accent had a genuine source: he had attended Brookline High School about twenty years after President Kennedy had been there. Kennedy himself once stated at a presidential press conference that he'd heard Meader's album and that he "thought he sounded more like Teddy" Kennedy, the president's youngest brother. Bobby Kennedy once had to interrupt a scheduling phone call with someone when, as Bobby recalled, "That guy thinks I'm Vaughn Meader. He's going to call me back" to make sure it was really Bobby.

When President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Vaughn Meader's successful career as Kennedy's mimic came to a screeching halt, and he publicly vowed he would never do his Kennedy impression again. Comedian Lenny Bruce wryly noted: "They put two graves in Arlington -- one for John Kennedy and one for Vaughn Meader."

Meader released a critically-admired comedy album in 1971, The Second Coming, in which he played Jesus Christ returning to 20th century America; but for the most part, Meader sank further into obscurity as an entertainer. In the 1980s, Meader was managing a restaurant and occasionally performing bluegrass music. He died on October 29, 2004 in Auburn, Maine.

Categories: Pop-Culture

Plain Bill

2007-03-18T14:55:00.000-04:00

William Sulzer, the Democratic governor of New York from January to October of 1913, was born on this day in 1863 in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Known as "Plain Bill," Sulzer served as a member of Congress from 1895 to 1912, and was elected governor of New York in 1912 with the support of the New York City Tammany Hall political machine. Soon after he took office, however, he fell out of favor with Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy when he failed to appoint certain handpicked Tammany allies to key positions and advocated the use of primary elections rather than nominating conventions for the selection of candidates for office, thus taking the party banner out of the hands of the backroom pols; by the year's end, Sulzer was impeached for allegedly diverting campaign funds for personal use.

At the time, anti-Tammany forces cried foul, and almost immediately afterward, Sulzer was elected to a seat in the New York State Assembly. He ran for governor in 1914 as a candidate of the American Party, but did not receive the vindication he had hoped for, running third behind the Republican victor, Charles S. Whitman; Sulzer's Tammany-backed successor, Martin H. Glynn came in second in his losing bid for re-election. In 1916, Sulzer turned down the presidential nomination of the American Party, and practiced law in New York City for much of the rest of his life. He died there on November 6, 1941.

Sulzer also starred in a film about his impeachment (The Governor's Boss, 1915) in which, on celluloid if not in real life, he successfully fights Tammany Hall and keeps his office. Despite all the populist sentiment in his favor, Sulzer's name has never been officially rehabilitated, and he remains the one New York governor whose portrait does not hang in the Hall of Governors in the State Capitol in Albany.

Categories: American-Politicians, Silent-Film, New-York-City

More Things in Heaven and Earth ...

2007-03-16T06:58:00.000-04:00

Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov, the first person to die during a space mission, was born on this day in 1927.

The dashing air force pilot Komarov joined the Soviet cosmonaut group in August 1961. In October 1964, Komarov was the commander of the first Voskhod mission, in which he, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov became the first people to enter space in a multi-manned spacecraft. The three, who did not wear space suits because there wasn't any room in the hastily refurbished craft, remained in orbit around the Earth for just over a day.

The mission was reportedly to have lasted longer, but Soviet politics seems to have intervened: when Voskhod I was launched, Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union; when it returned, Leonid Brezhnev and Andrei Kosygin had succeeded him following a bloodless coup. The first public appearance of the two new leaders was at the ceremony celebrating the return of Komarov and the other cosmonauts to Moscow. Legend has it that Komarov protested when asked to return early from orbit, only to be told by ground control, quoting from Shakespeare in a veiled reference to Khrushchev's fall, that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Three years later, the Soviets abandoned the Voskhod project in favor of the Soyuz, a spacecraft designed for long-distance flight and possible use in a Soviet manned lunar program, and Komarov was chosen to fly solo in the first Soyuz mission. On April 23, 1967, after a brief test orbit, Komarov died after his spacecraft tangled in its parachute during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. One report revealed that the Soviets had experienced serious failures in the re-entry phase during the four unmanned Soyuz tests made before Komarov's flight. Given the track record, Komarov's last flight must be viewed as an extraordinarily courageous gamble.

Categories: Air-&-Space, Russia, Shakespeare

The Scourge of God

2007-03-15T08:05:00.000-04:00

Attila, king of the Huns, known as the "Scourge of God," died on this day in 453 around the age of 47.

For hundreds of years, the mysterious Huns, a nomadic tribe from the Asian steppes, had been chipping away at the fringes of the Roman Empire, and the terrible cavalry invasions of the Huns under the leadership of Ruga during the early 400s were so successful that Rome paid an annual tribute to the Huns to keep themselves safe from further attacks.

After the death of his uncle Ruga in 437, Attila and his brother Bleda jointly assumed the kingship of the Huns, Bleda handling the government administration and Attila leading the military through invasions of much of modern-day Hungary, Greece, Spain and Italy -- destroying Sofia and Belgrade and leaving their riverbanks covered with human bones.

Attila was much more aggressive and unpredictable than his uncle, and his looks and bearing alone inspired fear in both his enemies and his subordinates: he had a disproportionately large head, swarthy complexion and fierce eyes which his own generals could not look directly into without shuddering. In 445, Attila executed his pesky brother and ruled the Huns by himself under his iron fist. Initially, in order to avoid further incursions, the Byzantines and the Romans each sought to appease Attila in their own ways: the Romans named him as one of their own generals and gave him a stipend, and Byzantine emperor Theodosius II acceded to Attila’s frivolous requests for increases in the tribute payments from 350 pounds of gold to 700 to 2,100 pounds per year. With his earnings, Attila lived a luxurious, somewhat decadent lifestyle, drinking excessively, carousing with his multiple wives and even indulging in cannibalism (according to medieval tabloids).

Finally in 450, the Byzantines began to tire of paying homage to Attila, and Theodosius II plotted to assassinate Attila. Attila quickly discovered the plot, and prepared to attack the Byzantines; however, the sister of Roman emperor Valentinian III, Honoria, sought Attila’s protection after having being caught in an affair with her servant against her family’s wishes, sending her ring to Attila and promising him half the Roman Empire if he would come and rescue her from imprisonment. Attila changed his plans and turned to the Roman Empire to demand his bounty as a matter of right. Although he was repelled in Gaul by the Roman general Flavius Aetius at the Battle of Chalons (451), Attila regrouped somewhat and turned his attack directly on Italy in 452, ravaging Aquilea, Milan and Padua until he was met by Pope Leo I near Mantua. Leo I threatened Attila with the wrath of St. Peter if he were to approach Rome, and Attila -- perhaps short of supplies and fearing that the Byzantines were coming after him, perhaps realizing that Honoria probably wasn’t worth the trouble -- turned tail and returned to the Great Hungarian Plain to take another young wife, Ildico.

After a mighty wedding feast, Attila retired to the bridal chamber, dead drunk, and his nose began to bleed. By the next morning, he had either bled or choked to death. Within 20 years or so, Attila’s empire was in ruins, disintegrating without the personality of its ruthless leader to keep it intact.

Categories: Kings-and-Queens