496 - Fall of the Roman Empire. A Germanic prince, Odovacar, deposed the last Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Odovacar seized control of the Roman army in Italy and after centuries of rule the Empire ceased to exist. Instead of one centralized ruler, there were dozens of kings and princes leading the various tribes of Anglo-Saxons, Gauls and Vandals. There wasn’t one massive invasion, rather barbarian tribes had been encroaching on Roman territory for a long time and setting up their own domains. Rome’s policy had been to conquer a part of the world, then turn the inhabitants into subjected versions of Roman citizens and soldiers. These subjects would then form a large part of the mercenary army. Corruption within the Roman government which was led by political amateurs, the acceptance of slavery, and a reliance on a mercenary army that would eventually turn on its employer, all contributed to its fall. The end of the Empire also signaled the start of the Dark Ages. Literacy, education, architecture all fell out of favor, as well as the rule of written law.

As much as people justifiably complain about government and political hacks, turning over the reins to an amateur seldom turns out well.

1618 - Rodi Avalanche. Plurs was a village on the Swiss-Italy border that was wiped out by a landslide, technically it was not an avalanche because no snow was involved. The mountain above Plurs had been extensively mined and provided the town with a modest wealth. However the mining had been carelessly and haphazardly done, weakening the mountain’s structure. For years before the landslide sounds emanated from the mountain but caused no alarm among the local population. In the weeks leading up to the disaster the mountain trembled, swarms of bees fled from surrounding forests, cows behaved erratically in pastures and there was a sulphur smell in the air. On September 4th the mountain came down, wiping out Plurs and killing somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500 people. At the time the disaster was not viewed as a geological event but rather a religious one. The inhabitants of Plurs were described as being corrupted by their wealth.

From blogs.scientificamerican.com: “The clergyman Franc’e tells the story ‘of an earthly paradise with all sorts of lusts’, and the disaster is ‘an example of the fury of god above sins’, then “peaks of the mountains, who raised behind Plus, felt down and the entire place... with all people became buried in night and terror.”

Mother Earth has a not so subtle way of responding to insults against its well being.

1781 - Los Angeles founded. Eleven families from Mexico comprising forty-four people settled on a river and the Governor of Spanish California named the settlement El Pueblo Sobre el Rio de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles del Rio de Porciucula.

Thank goodness the name was shortened to Los Angeles.

Birthdays:

1802 - Marcus Whitman. Physician and missionary. In 1836 Whitman, his wife, and others founded a mission in what is now Walla Walla, Washington. They unsuccessfully attempted to convert the local Indians to Christianity. In 1842 Whitman temporarily returned east and upon his return helped form the first large wagon train to proceed across the Oregon Trail. This was the beginning of a large migration of white settlers who encroached upon the land of the Cayuse Indians. The settlers also brought with them measles. The Indian tribes, having no natural immunity to the disease, were ravaged by it. Some tribes lost half of their people. The young were especially hard hit and the Cayuse lost nearly all of their children. Even though Whitman treated both whites and Indians, it did not go unnoticed by the Cayuse that many fewer whites died from measles. The anguish felt from losing their children caused the Cayuse to blame Whitman. They believed he was a shaman who was poisoning them to clear the way for more whites. On November 29th, 1847, the Cayuse killed the Whitmans, twelve other settlers and burned the town to the ground. This was the beginning of the Cayuse War which lasted until 1885. Today there is a college in Walla Walla named after Whitman, and the U.S Army has a helicopter named the Cayuse Warrior helicopter.

Given these honorary names based on tragic events, I recognize the strange irony at play, but I’m stymied at how to comment on it.

1825 - Dadabhai Naoroji. Politician. Naoroji was knows as the Grand Old Man of India. He was the first Asian to be a MP in the United Kingdom House of Commons. He was also one of the founding members of the Indian National Congress. While living in England, he helped establish the East India Association. The goal of the organization was to combat the existing views that Asians were inferior as well as presenting the Indian point of view before the British public. Naoroji wrote a book detailing the drain of wealth from India to Britain. Among other things, he documented how India had to burden the cost of being governed by a foreign power and pay for an occupying army. Also Englishmen took high-paying jobs in India and sent some of their income back to Britain. Naoroji was part of the Indian movement seeking independence from England. Mahatma Gandhi noted in a letter to him in 1894, “The Indians look up to you as children to their father.”

I’d never heard of him before but he sounds like a great man.

1964 - Anthony Weiner. Politician. Weiner, a Democrat, represented the 9th Congressional District in New York from 1999 to 2011 in the U.S. House of Representatives. A sex scandal forced him to resign and a subsequent incident landed him in prison. In May of 2019 he moved into the custody of a halfway house.

There’s the noble politicians of the world like the Naoroji’s, and then there’s the Weiner’s.

Sources:

onthisday.com

blogs.scientificamerican.com

bbb.co.uk

discoverlosangeles.com

en.wikipedia.org

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1791 - HMS Pandora sinks. A British warship, the Pandora was sent in search of the HMS Bounty and its mutineers. By the time the Pandora reached Tahiti, Fletcher Christian, some of his mutineers and their Polynesian followers, had taken the Bounty and established a colony on the uncharted island of Pitcairn. Fourteen of the mutineers were still living on Tahiti however and they either surrendered or were hunted down and captured. The captured men were then confined in a cage on the ship’s deck that became known as Pandora’s Box. The ship then conducted a futile search for the Bounty which had been burned and scuttled. Off the Great Barrier Reef the Pandora ran aground and then sunk. Thirty-one crewman and four prisoners drown. One survivor reported the prisoners died because their hands were still manacled so they couldn’t swim. Sailing in four lifeboats across treacherous seas they finally arrived in Indonesia. Upon arriving back in England only 78 of the original 134 man Pandora crew survived.

Everything about the Bounty makes a great story - the mutiny itself, the mutineers interaction with the Polynesian people, the Bounty’s escape to Pitcairn, the Pandora’s search and sinking, and some descendants of the Bounty escapees still living on Pitcairn Island.

1888 - Lord Walsingham shoots 1,070 grouse in one day. Walsingham, a member of the British gentry, lived in northeastern England where the Red Grouse was abundant. The name of the small village where he lived was Blubberhouse Moor. On this particular day Walsingham was set up in a blind and he had beaters driving the grouse toward him. He also had assistants who were constantly handing him a succession of loaded shotguns. This “sport” continued for 12 hours before he was finished. The birds were either given away or sold in a market. Despite this attempted annihilation the Red Grouse is still plentiful and sought after in England today.

About the best part of this story is that there is a town called Blubberhouse Moor.

1918 - Assassination attempt on Lenin. Fanya Kaplan, an ardent socialist, fired three shots from a pistol at Lenin from close range because she believed he was a traitor to the revolution. Kaplan had earlier spent eleven years in a Siberian labor camp for a terrorist conspiracy against the Tsar. The assassination attempt was done in retaliation to the Bolsheviks establishing the one party rule and banning the party to which she belonged. A bomb she and her lover had been building exploded prematurely and left her almost blind. She was captured after the shooting and executed. Here is part of the statement she made to the police. “My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution.” Despite being seriously wounded Lenin survived. The shooting did result in a deterioration of his health however and it is believed to have contributed to the stroke that killed him in 1924.

Kaplan was from Ukraine. Maybe that’s what Russia’s invasion is all about. Putin is still trying to get back at them for what happened to his idol.

Birthdays:

1887 - Adam Kuchoff. Writer, member of German resistance. Kuchoff published a left-wing political magazine in the 1920s and wrote an anti-war novel. Once the war broke out he and his wife, Greta, joined an underground operation the Gestapo labeled the Red Orchestra. Also in this group were Arvid and Mildred Harnack. Mildred was an American writer married to a German. The Gestapo broke this ring in September, 1942 and along with the others, Kuchoff was arrested. They were all eventually executed, Kuchoff in August, 1943. Mildred Harnack was the only American woman to be executed by the Germans in WWII.

Given their backgrounds having published anti-fascist writings, they certainly had to have known they weren’t flying under the radar. Astounding courage.

1901 - Roy Wilkins. Civil rights activist. Born in St. Louis, Wilkins moved to Minnesota when he was four years old after his mother died of TB. He was raised in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul by an aunt and uncle. Although he received a degree in Sociology from the University of Minnesota, he also worked as a journalist at the student newspaper. Wilkins continued in that role for a Black newspaper in Kansas City where he began challenging Jim Crow Laws. In 1931 he became assistant NCAAP secretary in New York City. Continuing to fight for the right of Black Americans he was named Executive Director of that organization in 1955. Wilkins had a role in organizing the March on Washington in 1963 and also the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965. The NAACP was instrumental in landmark civil rights issues such as Brown vs Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. (Fear not White Supremacists, the Roberts’ Supreme Court is bound to overrule all these sometime soon.) Wilkins continued in his role as head of the NAACP until 1977. Due to his firm belief in a non-violent movement he was challenged by those advocating a more militant Black approach. Nevertheless his name and legacy lives on while theirs have faded into the background.

The civic auditorium in St. Paul is named the Roy Wilkins Auditorium.

1912 - Nancy Wake. Journalist, resistance fighter. Born in New Zealand, Wake grew up in Sydney, Australia. She ran away from home at age 16 and worked as a nurse. At age 20 she moved to Paris and began working as a journalist. In 1939, now living in Marseilles, she married a wealthy businessman, Henri Fiocca. She had written critical articles about the rise of Fascism and when Germany invaded France, Wake and Henri joined the Resistance. They helped downed Allied airman escape from the Nazis. Henri continued this work but Wake left for England where she joined the French SOE, the French counterpart to America’s OSS. There she helped organize parachute drops of arms, ammunition and other supplies to the Resistance. She returned to France after the D-Day invasion and was involved in combat against the Germans. After the war Wake learned her husband had been captured and killed by the Gestapo. Trying to adjust in the postwar years, she moved between Australia and England a number of times, unsuccessfully tried to enter politics, remarried and eventually retired in Australia. Wake was decorated for her war efforts by France, England and America. After her second husband died she returned to England where she lived in a hotel near Piccadilly. It was said she would start her mornings with a gin and tonic in the hotel bar and tell war stories. Wake lived to age 98, dying in 2011.

If you’ve read this blog enough you know I have a fascination with the underground and resistance during WWII. Nancy Wake is just another one. Both a movie and a TV mini-series have been produced about her.

Sources:

onthisday.com

en.wikipedia.org

naacp.org

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1937 - Battle of Santander. Future dictator Francisco Franco, leading 90,000 men including 30,000 Italian troops on loan from Mussolini, took the northern Spanish town of Santander. The Republican forces, loyal to the democratically elected government, were overmatched and had only about 40 old and slow airplanes while Franco had the use of Germany’s Condor Legion air force. 60,000 troops were captured, severely hampering the Republican cause. Mutinous Basque soldiers, hoping for mercy, surrendered. To no avail for many of those captured were summarily executed.

The Spanish Civil War is a passion of mine and this isn’t the first time it has appeared as an entry in This Day in History. In writing this piece I came to a realization. It’s history, I’m well versed in the history of the Spanish Civil War, yet... whenever I read about a battle I think I’m half expecting, or maybe hoping, for a different result. If alive at the time I like to believe I would have been a volunteer, standing against fascism and Franco. So every time I read about a Loyalist defeat, even though it is known history, I feel newly defeated and disheartened.

1985 - Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. The Rainbow Warrior was a ship operated by the environmentalist organization, Greenpeace. The ship was anchored in Auckland, New Zealand as it prepared for its journey to French Polynesia to protest nuclear testing by France. Two agents of the French foreign intelligence service swam underwater and attached two mines to the hull of the Rainbow Warrior. The mines detonated shortly before midnight. Ten crew members survived and one, Portuguese photographer Fernando Pereira, was below decks and drowned. Two French agents, not the ones who attached the bombs, were captured and put on trial for murder. However they were only found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. The UN became involved and through a negotiated settlement, instead of prison, they were sent to a French military base on a Polynesian island. They served less than two years before being released by the French government. The frogmen who acted on orders of the French foreign intelligence agency have never been found.

Those aboard the Rainbow Warrior put the environment ahead of the development of a nuclear weapon and were punished. I’m sure members of the French foreign service continue to raise glasses in triumph, knowing their actions were totally justified.

2013 - 25,000 candidates fail entrance exam. All 25,000 students who applied to the University of Liberia failed, not one single applicant passed the test. The government admitted, that after years of civil war their education system was a mess, but the nation’s education minister doubted the veracity of the results. The university relented and admitted over a thousand new students.

Not one applicant passed? I’d like to see that test.

Birthdays:

1901 - Maxwell Taylor. U.S. General and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff. Taylor graduated 4th in his class at West Point and rose through the ranks until he was a general in the early years of WWII. He served with distinction in the war, including a behind enemy lines parachute drop in Italy to coordinate an air assault, and as commander of the 101st Airborne Division, he parachuted into Normandy on D-Day. He was superintendent at West Point, commander of allied forces in West Berlin, and in 1957, under orders from President Eisenhower, deployed 1,000 soldiers from the 101st to Little Rock, Arkansas to help integrate public schools. During Kennedy’s administration Taylor was a proponent of America’s involvement in South Vietnam and recommended 8,000 combat troops be sent there. Here is Taylor’s recollection of that meeting with JFK. “I don’t recall anyone who was strongly against, except one man, and that was the President. The President just didn’t want to be convinced that this was the right thing to do.... It was really the President’s personal conviction that U.S. ground troops shouldn’t go in.”

As history has well documented, JFK was right on this one.

1918 - Katherine Johnson. Mathematician. Johnson was one of the first Black students in the graduate program at West Virginia State College. She later was a teacher, married with three children when, in 1952, the family moved to Newport News, Virginia where she got a job with the all-Black computing section in the organization that eventually became NASA. Johnson was part of the staff when the U.S. began its exploration of space travel. She did the trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s Mission Seven flight, America’s first foray into space. When John Glenn was preparing for America’s first orbital mission, he was wary of basing his trust solely on numbers coming out of machines. So he specifically asked for Johnson to compute them. Glenn said, “If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.” Johnson spent 33 years with the program and retired in 1986. She received the Medal of Freedom in 2015 and passed away at the age of 101 in 2019.

There’s a nice movie, “Hidden Figures,” portraying the all-Black computing section, including Katherine Johnson, and their role in America’s space quest.

1921 - Ben Bradlee. Newspaper editor. Bradlee was the best known and most prominent newspaper editor of his time. He was at the helm of the Washington Post when it broke and pursued the Watergate story and forced a president to resign. Just as importantly the Post published the Pentagon Papers, written by the Defense Department, which exposed the military’s failures in Vietnam. Under his leadership the Post won 17 Pulitzer Prizes. Although they had to return one because they were hoodwinked into publishing a false story, much to Bradlee’s embarrassment. Bradlee was a naval officer in WWII and fought at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, among other battles in the South Pacific. As such he was a patriot and withheld publishing stories for reasons of national security. But he also objected to politicians using national security as an excuse to avoid exposure or embarrassment. Bradlee retired from the Post in 1991 and died at age 93 in 2014. President Obama said of him after his passing: “For Benjamin Bradlee, journalism was more than a profession — it was a public good vital to our democracy.”

Under current ownership and fearful leadership the Post has abandoned its position as one of the most respected newspapers in the nation.

Sources:

onthisday.com

en.wikipedia.org

theguardian.com

washingtonpost.com

nasa.gov

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565 - St. Columba confronts the Loch Ness Monster. While out spreading the gospel, Columba stood at the banks of the River Ness, which flowed out of Loch Ness. He saw a boat on the other side and ordered one of his monks to swim across and get it for him. Halfway across the monk was confronted by a huge monster roaring toward him. On the shore, Columba made the sign of the cross and speaking in a commanding voice to the monster, ordered “You will go no further! Do not touch that man! Leave at once!” Thereby chastised, the monster dove to the depths of the loch and the monk was saved. The act typifies St. Columba. This is from the National Catholic Register. “Among his lengthy miracle résumé, Columba prophesied regularly and cured the sick, disabled and lame. Once, when he didn’t have wine for Mass, he miraculously changed water into wine. The monk also produced water from a rock, calmed storms at sea, conversed liberally with angels, subdued savage beasts (like boars and serpents), provided several fishermen with a bounteous catch of fish and brought peace to warring factions. He also multiplied a herd of cattle to the joy of the herd’s owner and exorcised demons without batting an eye. In addition, a divine light seemed to follow him wherever he went.”

There you go. With that kind of credible and holy witness, how can any right-minded person deny the existence of the Loch Ness Monster. Now if only some Saint would personally see Bigfoot.

1962 - Assassination attempt on French President Charles de Gaulle. Twelve gunmen opened fire on a car carrying de Gaulle and his wife. Led by Jean Bastien-Thiry, an air force colonel, they were part of a nationalist movement that was upset because de Gaulle had granted independence to Algeria. The car was riddled with bullets and two bodyguards were killed but de Gaulle and his wife escaped unhurt. Bastien-Thiry was captured, tired and executed, the last man to be executed by a firing squad in France. An appeal for clemency was considered but denied by de Gaulle. During the trial Bastien-Thiry had mocked de Gaulle and while the French president could forgive an attempt on his life, ridiculing him went too far.

Patriotism, nationalism, and ego are all at play here, almost always a deadly mix.

1965 - Juan Marichal hits John Roseboro on the head with a bat. In the midst of a pennant race, there was an intense rivalry between the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Roseboro was a catcher for the Dodgers and Marichal a pitcher for the Giants. There had already been some knockdown pitches thrown when Marichal came to bat in the third inning. Throwing the ball back to Sandy Koufax, the Dodgers pitcher, Roseboro purposely threw it close to Marichal’s head. Marichal later claimed it clipped his ear. The two men confronted one another, angry words were exchanged, and Marichal swung down on Roseboro’s head with his bat. “All hell broke loose” is an appropriate cliche for what took place next, one of the ugliest brawls in baseball history. It could have even been worse but for the actions of Willie Mays. Although he was on the opposing team, he tended to Roseboro’s wound and helped calm everybody down.

Roseboro and Marichal, oddly enough, later in life, became close friends. Marichal was an honorary pallbearer and speaker at Roseboro’s funeral in 2002.

All’s well that ends well, I guess.

Birthdays:

1893 - Dorothy Parker. Writer. Parker was a critic for “The New Yorker” and also contributed poetry and short fiction to the magazine. She was a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, a literary gathering that included such notables of the time as Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Harpo Marx, Edna Ferber and others.

Though talented, Parker led a difficult life. As a child both her mother and then her stepmother died, an uncle went down on the Titanic, and her father died the same year. Her troubles continued into adulthood and she suffered from depression and alcoholism, leading her to attempt suicide several times. (Read her poem: “Resume”) Parker became a socialist as a young woman and later was a civil rights activist. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood for a while but her politics got her blacklisted.

Parker died of a heart attack in 1967. In her will she left her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. After his murder, that estate was turned over to the NAACP.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for one of those early gatherings of the Algonquin Round Table. I did go to the hotel bar there one time and had a beer.

1902 - Leni Riefenstahl. Film director, actress and photographer. Riefenstahl’s life, and art, was filled with controversy. Her groundbreaking techniques in “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” won her attention throughout the world. Unfortunately for her, “Triumph of the Will” was viewed as more of a propaganda film than an artistic achievement. The film was both praised for innovative style and condemned for subject matter. She was criticized for the rest of her life for promoting the Nazis. She remained unapologetic, claiming she was just a filmmaker, not a Nazi. Although jailed for a time after the war by both the Americans and the French, she was never charged with any crimes. However neither was she ever able to restart her career as a film director. She turned to still photography and made that her livelihood. Ray Müller, director of the documentary The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl, said “Her talent was her tragedy.” To the end of her life, she lived to be 101, she was unrepentant about being a “fellow traveler” with the Nazis, claiming she knew nothing about the death camps.

Fascinating woman, but really? Along with the rest of the German people, how could she not?

1908 - Henri Cartier-Bresson. Photographer and filmmaker. Cartier-Bresson was a Frenchman who traveled much of the world taking photographs. He is credited with pioneering what now is known as street photography. During the Spanish Civil War he co-directed an anti-fascist film and at the start of WWII he joined the French army. Captured as France fell, he spent thirty-five months in a German POW camp before escaping. He made his way back to France and participated in the underground resistance against the Nazi occupation. Cartier-Bresson was friends with two other famous photographers, Robert Capa and David Seymour, and together they formed Magnum, a cooperative for photographers. In the 1970s he began to retire from taking pictures and began painting instead, stating that he had said all he could through photography. He remained an artist until he died in 2004 at age 95.

A contemporary of Riefenstahl, but unlike her, he stood on the right side.

Sources:

onthisday.com

www.ncregister.com

en.wikipedi.org

www.espn.com

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1940 - “Hardest Day”. More aircraft were lost on this day than any other day during the Battle of Britain. Germany, in their plan to invade England, needed to destroy the Royal Air Force. The Germans underestimated the strength of the RAF, believing it had only 300 serviceable planes while the actual number was almost three times that. Both high and low level bombers swooped in on British airfields, intending to destroy the planes on the ground. They were partially successful before British pilots scrambled to meet them. By the end of the day England had lost sixty-eight aircraft and Germany sixty-nine. Although a numerical standoff, England prevented Germany from achieving its goal of destroying the airfields. The Battle of Britain continued into September but August 18th was the hardest day.

Hermann Goering had assured Hitler the Royal Air Force was no match for his Luftwaffe. Germany made any number of military blunders in WWII and this was one.

1976 - Korean Axe Murder Incident. There was no clear demarcation line between North and South Korea at the time. An eight-hundred meter wide zone where soldiers from both sides sometimes mingled. The mingling included taunting, spitting, shoving and games of chicken. The American were instructed not to show fear and restricted from drawing their weapons unless their lives were threatened.

The incident began over a poplar tree. Its branches impeded a clear military view from the south and by a pre-arranged agreement, a group of South Korean enlisted men, led by two American officers, went to trim it. A North Korean force appeared and ordered them to stop, saying the tree was untouchable because it had been planted by the Great Leader, Kim II Sung. The order was ignored. With axes and knives the North Korean group attacked and killed the two American officers, Capt. Arthur Bonifas and Lt. Mark Barrett. It is believed Kim II Sung himself ordered the attack and analysis suggest it was as if he wanted to provoke war. President Gerald Ford responded with Operation Paul Bunyan, a mighty show of combined military force by America and South Korea. It worked, North Korea backed down.

I fear they won’t ever back down again. As of this writing a war is raging in Ukraine. Even with Putin’s threats of using nuclear weapons, I believe the world is in greater danger of nuclear incineration from North Korea.

2000 - Federal jury rules in favor of Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo. The EPA was found guilty of violating her civil rights regarding sex and race and also creating a hostile work environment. She had earlier exposed a mining company that was harming the environment and was first ignored, and then retaliated against, by the agency. The No Fear Act of 2002, which protects employees, was a result of her actions.

While the protection of whistleblowers is a good thing, as is the No Fear Act, I doubt whistleblowers go forward with no fear.

Birthdays:

1930 - Liviu Librescu. Romanian-American scientist and engineer. As a child, along with his Jewish family, Librescu was deported to a concentration camp in Romania during WWII. A Holocaust survivor, he studied aerospace engineering under the communist system after the war. His career as a scientist stalled however because of his refusal to swear allegiance to the Communist Party. After years of delay his request to emigrate to Israel was finally allowed. He was a professor at a university in Israel from 1978 to 1986 before he came to the United States to teach at Virginia Tech. He was teaching there on April 16th, 2007, when a gunman opened fire. Thirty-two people were murdered, including Professor Librescu. He held the door to his classroom shut, allowing all of his students to escape except one, before he was killed.

What cruel irony. To escape the insanity of Hitler’s evil and Communist repression only to fall victim to America’s well-funded and insistent madness.

1935 - Rafer Johnson. Olympic gold medal winner. Johnson competed in the decathlon and had won the silver medal in the 1956 Olympics. He was the co-favorite in the 1960 Olympics, along with C.K. Yang of Taiwan. They both went to UCLA, trained together, and were friends. They went into the final event, the 1,500 meter run, nearly tied. Yang was a stronger distance runner but that day Johnson ran the best 1,500 of his life and garnered enough points to win the gold. At the end of the race both men were so exhausted they could barely stand and hung onto one another for support. There was more to Johnson than just being an athlete. He was active in Robert Kennedy’s campaign for president, he promoted the Special Olympics in Southern California, and he was also friends with Kirk Douglas who got him a role in the movie “Spartacus.” He had to turn it down however because it jeopardized his amateur standings for the Olympics. That role eventually went to Woody Strode.

When I was a kid weekly magazines ruled the print media. Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post and more. Great photographs and great stories. I remember one of them, Life or Look, featured a story about Rafer Johnson. It included photos of him and Yang training together for the Olympics. An African-American man and an Asian man were friends. The article and photos had a profound effect on me at the time. If a magazine like that existed in today’s world it would probably be banned in Floria and Texas.

1943 - Martin Mull. Actor and musician. As a musician Mull performed satirical songs and opened for such acts as Randy Newman, Frank Zappa and Billy Joel. His first and most notable acting rolls were in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and its spinoff, “Fernwood Tonight.” Mull was also a painter and had solo exhibits.

I don’t know if they would hold up if I saw “Fernwood Tonight” again, but at the time I thought they were hilarious.

Sources:

onthisday.com

www.rafmuseum.org

www.politico.com

en.wikipedia.org

www.blackpast.org

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We had spent the summer hitchhiking across Europe. Rick and I had managed to hitch a ride through East Germany and were in West Berlin. Months on the road had left us short of money and we could no longer afford the luxury of a room. However we got lucky, or at the time thought we had, and found very inexpensive accommodations for the night. We had spent the evening visiting some distant relatives of mine, Erika, Otto and great-aunt Agnes. (That visit was the topic of the February 2nd post.) While the family was welcoming, we found the scene too suffocating. They offered us a place to stay for the night but we, unwisely, turned it down.

Otto drove us to the Bahnhof station, where our bags were stored. The place we had rented for a few marks was next door. Otto was still suggesting we should stay with them for the night. It wasn’t too much later when we realized we should have taken him up on the offer. After taking leave of Otto, we retrieved our bags from the locker and walked across the street to, well, what was in reality, a mission, a flophouse. We immediately realized our mistake. Erika’s warm and clean apartment, albeit suffocating, suddenly looked much better. This place was one step up from the street, a last refuge for the desperate. Rick was obviously thinking along the same lines. “Your relatives were nice, but... I just felt like I needed to get out.” His voice had the tone of someone who was trying to explain a mistake.

We were issued a stained pillowcase, a musty blanket, and entered a room where the castoffs of German society took up nightly residence. The room was large, open, and crammed with cots. It smelled of sweat, urine, vomit and disinfectant. Rick and I found empty cots side by side and claimed them by sitting down. The men surrounding us were beaten, degraded, and moved with a slump-shoulder shuffle. They ranged from middle-aged to elderly, Rick and I were by far the youngest. Nobody acknowledged another’s presence, yet everybody seemed acutely aware of everybody else. There was no talking, an oppressed silence dominated the room. Overhead fluorescent lighting did little to soften the harsh setting. Many of the men wore suits that were old and threadbare, but still a link to a more dignified past. There were no long drab coats or wild, bushy beards and hair. Although gray stubble coarsened the features of some, most of the men somehow managed clean-shaven faces. The German downtrodden were making an attempt at keeping up appearances.

There seemed to be equal elements of danger and vulnerability in the room. There were a few men who, at some point in the past, had obviously vacated the restrictive confines of rational thought.

“Ah, I think we got some crazies,” I whispered to Rick.

Rick nodded. “Got an idea,” he said as he dug into his suitcase. “I brought some extra shoelaces along.”

Extra shoelaces! I was amazed. I hadn’t even thought to bring a jacket for the summer. Rick handed me a shoelace and kept one. I understood his intent. He tied one end of the shoelace to his wrist and the other end to the handle of his suitcase.

“Gives us a fighting chance to keep our stuff.”

There was an announcement at the entrance of the room, and then the lights went out. I took off my shoes, socks and jeans, and stuck my wallet and passport inside the waistband of my underpants. I accepted the likelihood that I was going to be bitten by bedbugs.

I was soon surrounded by a cacophony of deep breathing, hacking, coughing, wheezing and snoring. Even after my eyes adjusted I couldn’t see much because the room was so dark. A shaft of light reached out from a bathroom on the far side of the room. The only window was a dirty skylight that sucked in a hazy glow from a half moon. I couldn’t sleep, no, that wasn’t right, I didn’t want to sleep. We had made a bad decision but instead of lamenting it, I was almost savoring being in this awful place. I had started off the summer wanting to step outside the conventions of the familiar, wanting to experience something different in life. With that as a parameter, the trip so far qualified as a success. We had had encounters I couldn’t have even imagined at the beginning of the summer. And, as long as it didn’t become a frequent occurrence, every young man should spend at least one night in a flophouse.

Even with everybody, or most everybody asleep, the room was not quiet. And it grew steadily louder. There was tossing and turning as men struggled to escape to a sweeter sanctuary. Rhythmic squeaking of springs as other men, even in these dire conditions, sought a different relief. The greatest noise, however, came from those already asleep. I had noticed that most of those in the mission were in their late forties or early fifties. I speculated that twenty-five years earlier, given their age, they could have been the very ones who victoriously goose-stepped their way across Europe. And twenty years ago stumbled back to Germany in defeat. As the night wore on, my assumptions seemed more correct. No language skills were necessary to understand that the trauma of war was announcing its presence. A man mumbled in his sleep, a tremulous whine of fear rising. The thin-pitched wail ended with a gasp as the man woke and escaped his terror. I heard deep anxious breaths being sucked in as the man, conscious now, fought to regain whatever fragile grip he held in the world. Another man on the other side of me acted out a similar performance.

Rick was snoring softly so he missed the action. Despite the distractions I soon fell asleep myself.

A scream woke me in the middle of the night, a loud, wretched scream of terror. I heard another man sobbing uncontrollably. The remnants of Hitler’s once mighty armies were struggling desperately to make it through another flophouse night. A different kind of Blitzkrieg was taking place, a Blitzkrieg of PTSD.

I thought about a story my father had told me. Dad was still in the states, at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. He was walking across the base, past a row of tents, when he saw someone he knew, a casual acquaintance from a neighboring town. He stopped to talk and found the man depressed, distraught even.

“I’m not going to make it.” He lamented to my father.

“Come on,” my father said. “We’re not even overseas yet, you can’t think that way.”

The young man said a strong feeling had seized him, telling him he wasn’t going to survive the war. His premonition was correct; he was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.

As I lay awake, listening to the war being relived, I wondered if one of the men in this room was responsible for that young man’s death. Surrounded by the hated enemy, evil personified in the war movies I had watched as a child, I felt only compassion. All traces of the German storm trooper had long vanished. I thought about the terrified young man in my father’s story. I listened to the sounds of trauma in this room and wondered if leaders of nations ever considered those kinds of scenarios before sending their young off to war. No, of course not.

My first act when I awoke the next morning was to tug on the shoelace. The reassuring weight of my suitcase on the other end brought relief. Men were rolling out of their cots all around me, hollow eyes on the floor, not looking at anybody else. Rick and I used the bathroom facilities as quickly as possible and escaped from our brief descent into someone else’s hell.

I’m a dove, not a hawk when it comes to war. I see it as a dubious and ludicrous path to peace. I became fervently anti-war during the Vietnam years. A night in a flophouse in Berlin just might have been the first step in that direction.

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1965 – Watts Riot begins. Or as it is sometimes called, the Watts Rebellion. After WWII a half million African-Americans moved to the West Coast, hoping to escape racism. This hope did not materialize as they found housing and employment still not equally available. After twenty years of marginalized existence, the resentment came to a boil on August 11th in the Los Angeles suburb of Watts. A crowd gathered to watch the arrest of a Black motorist, his brother and mother. Anger grew at their treatment, the crowd multiplied and more police arrived. The street confrontation became violent, and as night fell the violence escalated. “Burn baby burn” became the rallying chant during the six days of rioting that followed. The night skies were lit with flames as buildings were burned and looted, and gunfire sounded. Fourteen thousand national guardsmen were called in to try quell the uprising. The final toll was 34 dead, 1,032 injured, 3,436 arrested and tens of millions of dollars in property damage.

Much has been written about the causes of the riot since then. All the analysis brings forth no great surprises. Racial discrimination, unfair housing practices, police brutality. Proposition 14 supported by the majority of white voters and sponsored by the real estate industry of California overturned the Rumford Fair Housing Act which had tried to address segregation in housing. Police Chief William Parker had created a military style police force and its ranks included many white southerners who had anti-Black and anti-Mexican attitudes. Once the riot started Parker added fuel to the flames by saying the rioters were acting like monkeys in a zoo. The authorities also placed blame on outside agitators, communist sympathizers, Muslims, and criminal elements for the riot. As far as criminals, most of those arrested had no prior criminal record. Despite many studies, and some official attempts at redress, much of the same conditions that caused the riot are still in place today.

My friend, Rick, and I were in West Germany at the time of the riot. We were in the town of Helmsted, on the border of East Germany, looking for a way to get to Berlin. It was there we happened upon a circus. As we watched the circus being set up for its show, a small man, a dwarf, bustled up to us. I don’t remember his name, so I’ll just call him Klaus. Small though he was, he was also formidable, and frightening. His square-shaped body was mostly torso and he had short but powerful looking arms and legs. His head appeared disproportionately large on top of the small body. He had gray curly hair and gray stubble on his face. His eyes were threatening, spiteful even, as if he had endured too much in life and was looking for payback. He barked something at us in a language we didn’t understand. When that didn’t work he tried German next.

Rick replied, “Verstehen Deutsch ein bishcen.”

Klaus regarded us disdainfully as he said, “Ach, Amerikaners.” Then he spat off to the side.

“Work, do you want work?” He asked in an Eastern European accented English.

Rick and I quickly nodded and with that achieved just about every little boy’s dream by joining the circus. We helped erect the big top and then assembled the bleachers inside the tent. Klaus was the head roustabout and ordered everybody around. Whether he was German, Pole, or some other nationality, I didn’t know. But he was European and twenty years earlier all of Europe had been part of the horror. I wondered how Klaus had managed to survive the Nazi scourge. Besides Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals, people like Klaus were also slated to be part of the “final solution.” The purity of the Aryan race could not afford to be tainted.

Whatever he had been forced to do to survive, whatever he had witnessed, probably accounted for the fire in his eyes. The man both terrified and fascinated me. His body, although small, looked powerful enough to rip off one of my arms if he grabbed hold. And the cold eyes were even scarier, as if there was nothing left in life that could touch him.

We ate supper with the rest of the circus workers and watched that evening’s performance. Some of the roustabouts were also performers. Klaus was a clown, which didn’t help me much what with my fear of clowns. I also fell in love with a trapeze artist, certain that at the end of her performance, she was staring directly at me. Rick was just as certain she had been staring directly at him.

That night we slept on stacks of folded canvas behind the bleachers. The next morning Klaus asked us if we wanted to travel with the circus. It took us about an eighth of a second to say yes. The fact that the circus was going to tour East Germany and Poland made it all the more enticing. Traveling behind the Iron Curtin with a circus? I mean, c’mon! At twenty one this was the adventure I was seeking. Added to the mix were fantasies about the lithe, acrobatic trapeze artist.

Then, on the way to breakfast, Klaus tossed a New York Times newspaper to Rick. “Your great democracy,” he said sarcastically. The headlines read: “Burn Baby, Burn!” We were stunned to read of the rioting in Watts. I knew the area having lived just west of there for almost a year after being discharged from the Navy. Klaus had a snide smile on his lips, as if the riots in America were some kind of personal triumph for him. Rick and I read the news articles and accompanying editorials. Starting with JFK’s assassination, it was another shock in what was to be a shock-filled decade.

Then it was time to go back to work. We helped dismantle the big top and pack a caravan of trucks with boxes and equipment. Klaus took our passports, which made us a bit uneasy, but he had everybody else’s also, in order to cross the border. While we waited we tried to comprehend all that was happening. As disturbed as we were about Watts, we could not long shift our thoughts away from a suddenly exciting future. I looked around at the circus crew, leaning against the line of trucks, smoking cigarettes. They were a hard, tough lot but I felt confident. After a summer of scrounging our way across Europe, hair lengthening, unshaven, tanned from being outside, clothes scruffy and worn, we looked the part. I also felt at ease because our presence was met with neither hostility nor curiosity by the rest of the crew, as if there were no minimum requirements.

We saw Klaus coming, walking down the line of workers, handing back passports. When he reached us, his scowl was even darker than normal.

“Nichts gut.” Klaus said.

“What?”

“You can’t come. They won’t let Americans travel with us.”

A wave of disappointment washed over me as he handed back our passports.

“Why not?” Rick asked.

Klaus shrugged, a shrug directed at all the rules, laws and stupidity that all the governments and authorities of the world could invent. He had, no doubt, dealt with far worse decrees, so this one deserved only a shrug. With that he stomped off and my life in the circus ended before it started.

As the circus passed from our reality, so oddly, did Watts. There were no more newspapers or reports and it wasn’t until months later back in the States that I read about it in more detail. With the resilience of youth we quickly left disappointment and memory behind and moved forward to embrace the joy of now. Nearly broke, no direction home, we stuck out our thumbs and put our focus on the adventure of surviving another day on the road.

Sources:

.wikipedia.org/

crdl.usg.edu

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1930 – Lynching in Marion, Indiana. A mob of ten to fifteen thousand whites broke into the Marion jail and lynched two Black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who were suspected of murder and rape. A third suspect, sixteen year old James Cameron, was beaten but escaped being hung. A local photographer took the iconic photo of the two men hanging from a tree surrounded by a gleeful crowd. Despite this photographic evidence no one was ever indicted for the lynching. A Jewish man, Abel Meeropol, was inspired to write the song, “Strange Fruit” when he saw the photo. The song was later famously recorded by Billie Holliday.

Whenever I see someone wearing a red hat that says “Make America Great Again,” I wonder if 1930, Marion, Indiana, is the time and place when America was great.

1956 – Dynamite explosion in Cali, Colombia. Seven army trucks loaded with dynamite, and parked overnight in an old train station, exploded. The early morning explosion of 1,053 boxes of dynamite killed 1,300 people and injured thousands more. The crater left by the blast was fifty meters wide and twenty-five meters deep. No cause for the disaster has ever been determined although the president of the country blamed opposition terrorists.

Knowing nothing of this incident, I’ll go with the theory of someone trying to grab a quick smoke.

1970 – Marin County courthouse shootout. In January of 1970, during a racial confrontation in the exercise yard of Soledad prison, three Black prisoners were shot and killed by a white guard. He was exonerated of any misdoings. A short time later a different white guard was killed in retaliation. The three Black prisoners accused of this crime, including George Jackson, became known as the “Soledad Brothers”. In an effort to seek his own justice, the seventeen-year-old brother of George, Jonathan Jackson, entered the Marin County courthouse with three weapons under his raincoat, including a saw-offed shotgun. He threw a weapon to the defendant on trial, a Black Panther member accused of stabbing a prison guard. They released two other prisoners and took everyone in the courtroom hostage.

Their demand was that the Soledad Brothers be freed. In trying to make their escape they took Judge Haley, the prosecuting attorney and three jurors as hostages. They taped the muzzle of the shotgun under the judge’s chin. Trying to escape with a rented van, they encountered a roadblock where the police opened fire. Jonathan Jackson, Judge Haley, and two other kidnappers were killed. The prosecutor was paralyzed for life and one juror was slightly wounded.

I remember it as an ugly, violent scene. The law and order folks, with racial overtones, went berserk with righteous indignation. Revolutionary violence was in vogue during that era with bombings and shootings the order of the day. Much like now with school shootings being the order of the day. But strangely now, the current wave of violence only results in muted handwringing and thoughts and prayers from the law and order crowd.

Birthdays:

1742 – Nathanael Greene. Revolutionary War general. A Quaker and a blacksmith from Rhode Island, Greene was expelled from the church for showing an interest in military science. Inspired by Lexington and Concord, Greene was at the siege of Boston and so impressed George Washington there that he was made a major general. He fought at the battles of Trenton, Brandywine and Germantown, and was quartermaster at Valley Forge. Washington then assigned him to the southern colonies to fight the British there. Leading a weak army against a formidable British force led by General Cornwallis, Greene devised a brilliant campaign. Utilizing hit and run tactics, he led the British on a chase through swamps and wilderness until they were far from their supply lines and weakened. Eventually the Continentals pushed the English out of Georgia. After the war he was rewarded with a small planation outside of Savannah but he was never successful as a landowner. Greene died at the early age of forty-six from sunstroke.

Some rise to the occasion during times of need but never find their footing afterwards.

1836 – Evander McIvor Law. Confederate Army general. He became a general at the tender age of twenty-six and fought in many major battles of the Civil War and was wounded twice. The brigade he commanded at Gettysburg fought in the bloody encounters at Little Round Top and Devil’s Den. After the war Law settled in Florida and established a military college that, along with some other schools, were combined to form the University of Florida. When Law died in 1920 he was the last surviving general of the Confederate Army.

In 1890 Law gave a speech in which he said the “Vast accumulation of wealth to so few people might cause the United States problems in its future.” He went on to state that giving so much power to so few was the biggest reason for corruption and decay within our nation. (Hear hear!) But he did not hesitate to declare himself in favor of lynching for certain crimes.

And there for a moment I almost liked the guy.

1927 – Carl Switzer. Switzer played the role of “Alfalfa” in the “Our Gang” comedy shorts of the 1930s. Typecast, he struggled to find movie roles after that series ended. He had a brief part as Donna Reed’s date in the beginning of “It’s A Wonderful Life” and his last role was in “The Defiant Ones.” Later he became a dog breeder and hunting guide. In 1959 he was killed by a gunshot wound in a dispute over fifty dollars.

Through third grade I lived in a town that had a movie theater. Every Saturday afternoon I’d troop off to see a matinee. Admission for a kid was twelve cents; obviously this was a long time ago. Most of the time the feature was a western, but not always. Some of those films remain stuck in my memory. “Down to the Sea in Ships”, “Mighty Joe Young”, “The Boy with Green Hair” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” There was a whole presentation back then, not just a movie. Starting off with a cartoon, then Previews of Coming Attractions, followed by a newsreel, or, joy joy joy to me and my little buddies, an “Our Gang” short. This was almost two decades after the shorts had been shot, a different era, but to us it didn’t matter. We were mesmerized watching the comedic antics of kids our own age. For the joy Alfalfa, Spanky and the rest bought for a while, it’s sad that life didn’t turn out better for many of them.

Sources:

www.blackpast.org

www.history.com

en.wikipedia.org

civilwaref.blogspot.com

1952 - Theodore Roe murdered. Roe was an African-American mob kingpin in Chicago. He ran numbers, an illegal gambling operation that funneled money back into legitimate businesses in impoverished Black neighborhoods. He was known to be a generous man to the poor and gained the nickname “Robinhood.” The Italian mob, the Chicago Outfit, had its eye on his operation and wanted to muscle in. During a Chicago Outfit attempt to kidnap him, Roe fought back and shot and killed Fat Lenny Caifano, a Chicago Outfit hitman. Roe was arrested and tried for murder but the charges were dismissed when a link was uncovered between the prosecutors office and the Chicago Outfit.

One of the leaders of the Italian mob at the time was Sam Giancana. Giancana led a shakedown of Roe’s operation, shooting and threatening his runners. His life threatened, Roe holed up in his mansion, protected by a team of bodyguards. Then Roe was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. He dismissed his bodyguards and brazenly walked the streets of Chicago. Two shotgun blasts ended his life on Michigan Avenue. His funeral was the largest African-American funeral in Chicago since that of heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson. Thousands lined the streets for “Robinhood.”

Giancana also was murdered, twenty-three years later. This took place shortly before he was scheduled to testify before the Church committee, investigating JFK’s assassination and the link between the Mafia and the CIA.

Certainly seems like a screenplay in waiting.

1964 - USS Maddox and USS Turner Joy “attacked” in the Bay of Tonkin. Enemy gunboats supposedly launched a number of torpedoes at the U.S. destroyers. This led to the Bay of Tonkin Resolution which basically allowed the president to wage war without it being voted on by Congress. The initial rationalization for this war was based on an aggressive enemy act that may not have happened. President Johnson privately expressed doubt about the incident. He reportedly said, “those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!” But it was a presidential election year and LBJ’s opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater was an anti-communist war hawk. Johnson couldn’t appear weak. 58,000 American lives later the U.S. finally pulled out of Vietnam.

At the time I was a twenty year old sailor in San Diego, scheduled to be discharged from the Navy in less than a month. I worried my discharge would be delayed, and I would be extended. Even at my young age, right from the start, I knew the whole Vietnam thing stunk. Of course I was biased, having some skin in the game. I could be extended, I could go to war, and Congress doesn’t even vote on it? Fortunately my buddy Darrold and I had enrolled for the fall semester at a junior college in Cerritos, California. The Navy had a program where they allowed an early discharge if enrolled in college. So instead of getting out on October 15th, I was discharged at the end of August. That month and a half saved me, for shortly thereafter guys were being extended. Who says education doesn’t pay?

1972 - Idi Amin orders expulsions of South Asians from Uganda. 80,000 South Asians, most from India, lived there at the time. Many had been brought there by England when the country was a British colony. Amin accused the Asian minority of disloyalty, non-integration and business malpractice. He sen a letter to the U.N. expressing sympathy for Hitler’s solution to a minority problem. The tactic worked and many countries offered to accept the South Asians as refugees. Amin’s defense of the expulsion was that he was giving Uganda back to the Ugandas. Once the expulsion started, violence against the Asian community and theft of their property increased. Most of the businesses and property ended up under the control of the government’s Uganda Development Corporation.

Dictators always need a scapegoat.

Birthdays:

1901 - Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Musician. Arguably one of the most recognizable musician of all time. This summation of his art from www.britannica.com is an apt description. “With his great sensitivity, technique, and capacity to express emotion, Armstrong not only ensured the survival of jazz but led in its development into a fine art.”

Armstrong was born into abject poverty in New Orleans and found his way out through playing first the coronet and then the trumpet. He bought his first horn with the help of a Jewish family that befriended him when he was a boy. He wore a Star of David for the rest of his life in memory of them. Armstrong played in New Orleans, Chicago and New York City where he was part of the Harlem Renaissance, garnering Langston Hughes as one of his admirers. Armstrong became most influential in the rise of jazz and played to audiences world wide. Because of his friendly, outgoing personality he was widely accepted by white audiences. He received criticism for playing in segregated venues and for not taking a more strident stance regarding the civil rights issue. However he did call President Eisenhower “two-faced, and gutless” for not challenging school segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. In protest he canceled his goodwill tour for State Department in the Soviet Union. He said, “The way they’re treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell”

Armstrong spent much of his life on the road, playing an exhausting schedule. Against the advice of his doctor he continued to perform and after a performance in New York, suffered a heart attack. He died in 1971 at the age of seventy years old.

It must have been about 1966 when I was lucky enough to see him in concert. He was doing a college campus tour and played at St. Cloud State, my alma mater. While the audience wasn’t segregated that night, it had to have been 99% white.

1912 - Raoul Wallenberg - Swedish businessman, diplomat and humanitarian. Wallenberg is credited with saving the lives of ten of thousands of Hungarian Jews at the end of WWII. He worked for a Swedish import-export company that did business in Hungary. Deportation to death camps, mostly Auschwitz, had just begun for Hungary’s 430,000 Jews when the War Refugee Board recruited Wallenberg. He spoke Hungarian and because of his work, had reason to travel to Budapest. He set up a network of 350 people working to save those destined for the camps. He did this by issuing fake protective passports, identifying the holder as Swedish subjects waiting for repatriation. He also rented thirty-two buildings and declared them protected by diplomatic immunity. They flew the Swedish flag and were identified as Swedish libraries or research institutes. Persuasion and bribes both played a part in Wallenberg’s scheme. As the Russian Army besieged Budapest, Wallenberg convinced Nazi officials not to blow up the Jewish ghetto, sparing the lives of the 70,000 people living there.

On January 17th, 1945, Wallenberg was called to the headquarters of the commander of the Russian Army. His last words were wondering if it was as a guest or a prisoner. It turned out to be the latter. He was never seen in public again. Why he was seized is uncertain. Belief he was a spy, or as a bargaining chip, or simply Stalin-inspired Russian paranoia. His fate remains a mystery. Russia eventually acknowledged that he died in a prison camp in 1947, probably executed. However even that is uncertain as other former prisoners report seeing a man who described himself as a Swedish diplomat as late as 1987.

So much for any belief in karma. A cruel and uncertain fate for a man who was a true hero and humanitarian. It’s hard to fathom why the Soviets viewed this man as a threat. Other than goodness is suspect, and therefore a threat to totalitarianism.

Sources:

onthisday.com

blackthen.com

www.history.com

en.wikipedia.org

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1619 – First meeting of the House of Burgesses. Meeting in a church in Jamestown, it was the first gathering in America with the goal being self-rule. It became the legislative body of Virginia from 1619 to 1776. Six representatives were appointed by the Governor and another fifteen were elected.

It was also the first recorded incident of voter restriction in North America in that only men were allowed to vote.

1825 – Malden Island discovered. The HMS Blonde happened across the uninhabited island in the South Pacific. The island, however, had at one time been occupied. By whom remains a mystery, other than it being some megalithic culture. There was a paved volcanic rock highway system and the ruins of some temples in addition to a number of small, 20-60 feet in height, pyramids. Speculation was that some Polynesian culture existed there centuries ago. When or why they left is unknown. In 1957 Britain tested its first H-bomb at the site.

One culture built temples to their gods, another tested ways to destroy the world. I would have liked to witness the former. A fantasy of mine has always been to enter a time tunnel and travel back to observe history. A paved highway, some of it leading into the ocean. What inspired those islanders, how did they do it, and for what purpose? A guy can only wonder and dream. As far as the H-bomb, I’ll pass on that.

1866 – Massacre in New Orleans. Hundreds died in race riot. The dead included approximately 200 black veterans of the Civil War and 40 delegates to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention. The mayor, a Democrat and former supporter of the Confederacy, was upset because the Republican convention was going to be integrated with both Black and white delegates. He led the city police force and a mob of white supremacists to confront the delegates who were marching to the convention hall behind the American flag. Many of the unarmed delegates were shot and those who tried to flee were beaten and killed as the rioting spread beyond the area of the convention.

Repercussions of the riot included the mayor being removed from office and the Republican Party, supported by outraged Northerners, gaining control of the U.S. House and Senate. Congress then passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that allowed U.S. Army occupation of many cities throughout the South and other harsh restrictions of the Reconstruction Era.

Republicans were the party of inclusion and Democrats resistant to change. My, how things have evolved.

Birthdays:

Because of the significance of the man I’m going to focus on only one person today.

1881 – Major General Smedley Butler. Recipient of many military awards including the Medal of Honor twice. Although he did try return the first one, received for action at Vera Cruz, Mexico, believing he did not deserve it. Butler served in the Spanish-American War, Philippine-American War, Boxer Rebellion (see the July 13th column, Battle of Tientsin) Banana Wars, Vera Cruz, Mexico, Haiti (where he received his 2nd Medal of Honor) and WWI.

Butler eventually became disillusioned by his military service and wrote a book entitled “War is a Racket”. He believed the military was being used for corporate interests and imperialism. The Banana Wars, for example, were conducted to solidify United Fruit’s holding in Central America. After he retired from the military he conducted lecture tours in which he railed against war profiteering. He unsuccessfully ran for the Senate and he supported the War Bonus March on Washington, DC by WWI vets.

In 1933 a group of American businessmen supposedly came to Butler to get him to lead a coup to overthrow newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler instead exposed the plot. He was subsequently ridiculed in the media and dismissed as a crackpot. However a Congressional committee did confirm some of his allegations although no prosecutions were ever brought forth. Butler’s views on the military were best expressed in the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense. “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues. I helped in the raping of a half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903.”

The most decorated man in Marine Corps history at the time making statements like those? In the sacred interest of patriotism, and more importantly, money, of course he has to be branded a crackpot. I think about America’s war on terror, which for the most part, especially the invasion of Iraq, was a war for oil, with greed at its base. This is evidenced by the huge sums of money reaped by war profiteers in the form of no-bid contracts. For those who think patriotism and defense of our country is the basis for most of our incursions into other countries, read Butler’s “War is a Racket.”

Sources:

www.onthisday.com

wikipedia.org

www.landofthebrave.info

www.blackpast.org

unmyst3.blogspot.com

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1944 - Invasion of Tinian. After a month long naval bombardment U.S. Marines invaded the small Japanese held island of Tinian. The battle lasted a week before the island was secured. The reason for taking it was to build an airfield and hospitals for the invasion of Japan. 394 Marines were killed and almost 2,000 wounded and two U.S Navy ships were hit by cannon fire from the island with 62 sailors being killed and another 245 wounded. The entire 9,000 Japanese contingent was wiped out and many Japanese civilians committed suicide rather than being taken captive. The battle ended on August 1st.

I’ve done interviews with WWII veterans to record their stories. Two of the men I interviewed were at Tinian. One a Marine, the other in the Navy. Bud, from my hometown, served aboard a minesweeper. Before the battle started they sailed around Tinian clearing the area of mines so bigger ships could approach. He said the Japanese didn’t fire on them before they didn’t want to reveal their gun positions for such a small ship.

Dick was the father-in-law of my sister, Jan. My sister and her husband, Dave, asked me if I would interview Dick, which I did. He had fought on Saipan, a nearby island, and took an amphibious landing craft from Saipan to Tinian. He didn’t say much about Tinian, focusing instead on the tragic fact that his brother, also a Marine, had been killed on Saipan. Instead of accepting the leave that was offered at the time, Dick chose to continue with his unit to fight on Tinian.

One of the stories Bud told me was of picking up a group of Marines from Tinian and taking them to a larger ship. He said, “They just sat there staring straight ahead, those guys had it tough.” Not that Bud had it all that easy. He told me that in 1944 he did not step foot on land one time.

1978 - Billy Martin resigns. The Yankee manager resigned one day after making remarks about star outfielder Reggie Jackson and team owner George Steinbrenner. Martin had said, “The two of them deserve each other, one’s a born liar, the other convicted.”

This was an amusing Major League soap opera that would continue as Martin would serve two more stints with the Yankees.

1986 - Jerry Whitworth convicted of espionage. Navy radioman John Walker had been running a spy ring for 20 years, passing classified military secrets to the Soviet Union. He recruited another Navy radioman, Jerry Whitworth, to help him. Whitworth had joined the Navy in 1956 and became a Storekeeper. He mustered out in the early 1960s. He reenlisted in 1962 and in 1965 decided to change his rate to Radioman. He went to Radioman A School at Bainbridge, Maryland and then quickly advanced in rank to Chief Radioman by 1973. Using his security clearance, Whitworth helped Walker pass data on the Navy’s encrypted communications to the Russians. Walker initially led Whitworth to believe they were passing information to Israel, an ally. By the time Whitworth found out the truth he was in too deep. Plus they were being paid well for their efforts. Having qualms about his involvement he anonymously wrote to the FBI offering to expose the spy ring in exchange for his own immunity. He didn’t follow through on that however and was retired from the Navy when the spy ring was broken. Whitworth was sentenced to 365 years in prison. Walker testified against him and received a much more lenient sentence.

I went to the same radio school as Whitworth. Although I had a high security clearance, I never thought what I was doing was all that secretive. He must have had access to more sophisticated systems than I did.

Birthdays:

1892 - Alice Ball. Scientist. Ball received a master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Hawaii, the first woman and also the first African-American to do so. She then began to teach at the university. While doing so, at age 23, she developed an injectable solution that became the first effective treatment for the disease of leprosy. Instead of being banished to a leper colony those treated with the Ball Method could stay home with their families. Ball unfortunately died at age 24 from the effects of chlorine released in a lab accident. The president of the university, Arthur Dean, published her findings under his own name, renaming it the Dean Method. It took the University of Hawaii 90 years but they finally recognized her work and held a “Alice Ball Day.”

I wonder how Arthur Dean justified the name changed in his own mind.

1897 - Amelia Earhart. Aviator. Earhart was the first female pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set numerous flying records and because she had some physical resemblance to Charles Lindbergh, became known as the female “Lucky Lindy”, some newspapers referred to her as “Lady Lindy”. Earhart was married to George Putnam but she insisted on keeping her own name. On the day of their wedding she gave him a note stating she did not expect faithfulness on his part nor would she promise fidelity. She was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt, took the First Lady flying, and they shared an interest in women’s issues. In 1937, along with navigator Fred Noonan, Earhart set off on an attempt to fly around the world. They had a scheduled refueling stop at Howland Island in the Central Pacific Ocean. They never arrived and to this day their disappearance remains a mystery. Theories abound with the most likely being they ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. Another is they landed on an unoccupied island and perished there as castaways. There is even speculation with some word of mouth evidence from Marshall Islanders that they landed on a Japanese held island, were suspected of being spies, held a number of years and then executed.

I visited Saipan several years ago and while there met a woman whose grandmother did laundry for the occupying Japanese and prisoners they held in a jail. One of those prisoners was a white woman with short hair who wore a leather jacket. She and her male companion were later executed. There is speculation, skeptical though it may be, that woman was Amelia Earhart.

1900 - Zelda Fitzgerald. Writer, socialite. She was also the wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was a source of inspiration for him and he also plagiarized parts of her diary for his first novel, “This Side of Paradise.” They lived a wild lifestyle, were the embodiment of the Jazz Age, and Scott called Zelda “America’s first flapper.” Alcohol, living beyond their means in a troubled marriage and Zelda’s schizophrenia brought about their decline. Despite mental breakdowns and being institutionalized, Zelda continued to try to write. She died at age 48 in a hospital fire where she was institutionalized.

They certainly fit the motto of “Drink hard, live fast, die young.. ” I don’t know if either left a good looking corpse or not.

Sources:

onthisday.com

en.wikipedia.org

historyofwar.org

nytimes.com

scientificwomen.net

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“What Happened?”

2018 - I was in a coffee house with a friend and “what happened” was the focus of our conversation. She had spent a night and two days in the hospital and I was telling her the story of how she had ended up there. Naomi and I were co-workers before I retired. We shared a belief in the unnatural order of the world, along with a morbid sense of humor which allowed us to laugh during the telling of this story, which wasn’t all that funny at the time.

The incident had taken place three days earlier, on Sunday. Naomi, myself, and Freddie, another former co-worker, went on a long bike ride that day. Although I was already an old man at the time of the ride, I was in very good shape. Freddie, over twenty years younger than I, and built like a college football linebacker which he once was, is a powerhouse on a bicycle. He is also a very nice man and adjusts his riding style to whomever he is with. Naomi is half my age and not the same kind of bicycling fanatic as Freddie and I. However that day she more than held her own.

Early Sunday morning we met on a bluff on Shepard Road overlooking downtown St. Paul. It promised to be one of those gorgeous summer days that are uniquely appreciated in Minnesota. The Sam Morgan, Bruce Vento, Gateway and Brown’s Creek trails passed swiftly under our wheels. Our pace was brisk, but not rushed. We rode anywhere from 15 to 18 miles per hour. There was no awkwardness to our riding, the three of us quickly fell into a natural rhythm. Sometimes we rode in single file, sometimes two would ride abreast and chat. We glided through the river town of Stillwater and along highway 95 to Lakeland where we took a break for lunch at an outdoor restaurant. We all agreed it was a perfect riding experience. Little did we know what was awaiting.

Having coasted down into the river valley, we now faced a long climb out. Highway 18 was uphill and twisting, but with an adequate shoulder. We biked through the sprawling suburb of Woodbury and had ridden more than sixty miles so far and I was starting to feel the effects of the miles, and age. Not struggling, but tiring. I needed a break and suggested we stop at Battle Creek Park. There we sat in the shade, drank water and ate Clif Bars. Naomi walked down to take a look at the creek. She was wearing a pink riding jersey and as I glanced over at her I got a vague sense of uneasiness. It passed quickly as I instead focused on my feet, which were hot and one was cramping. Naomi returned and now I walked to the creek with the intent of soaking my feet in the cool water. When I got there however, the uneasiness hit me again, much more intense. A dark threat of foreboding seemed to envelope me. I attributed it to location, something was wrong there and I abandoned the idea of cooling off my feet.

The other two were ready to ride when I got back so we saddled up. We were on our final leg, a downhill unnamed trail between Battle Creek and Shepard Road. Immediately we ran into a problem, a cement barrier had been placed in front of the entrance to the trail. We decided to take a chance to see if we could get through. I made a joke about sending a scout ahead so all three wouldn’t have to backtrack if we couldn’t. Freddie, still full of energy, took me up on it. He lifted his bike over the barrier, hopped over, and sped off. Naomi decided to follow suit and soon she was riding off also. I saw no point in waiting alone so I climbed over the barrier. Now for the first time today we were completely spread out. There was perhaps a hundred yard gap between Freddie and Naomi, and the same distance between her and I. Having been on this trail before, I had wanted to warn the other two to be careful. There was a section that was deceptively steep and speed could be gained quickly. Freddie disappeared around a corner to where the downhill section started. The trail was in bad shape and a portion of it had caved in, leaving only a two foot wide path on which to ride. I navigated slowly and then looked up to see Naomi disappear around the corner. The trail was full of potholes and branches and I made no attempt to catch up. I rounded the corner and in the heavily wooded, shadowy darkness ahead, I saw something lying on the path. The trail was dark, the sun blocked by a thick canopy of trees. I could see the color pink through the shadows. One part of me knew exactly what I was looking at, but another part refused to accept it, searching for a different explanation. As I got closer there was no more denying, Naomi was lying motionless on the trail. I braked as I descended, so I wouldn’t fall also. I coasted up to Naomi who was unconscious, or maybe semi-conscious. Even before I got off my bike I heard her. A sound I’m still trying to erase from my memory. Each breath she exhaled was accompanied by a low, desperate moan of pain and distress. I reached for my cellphone, intending to call 9-1-1. Except I didn’t know where I was. How I would give directions to a 9-1-1 dispatcher? Freddie! I had to get Freddie back here. But... I couldn’t call him. I had worked with Freddie for 15 years, and now I couldn’t remember his last name. At that moment I realized I was in a state of total panic. Somehow, that realization helped. I began to calm down and knew I had to do something, even if it was wrong. Collect your wits, Jenneke, attend to Naomi. I knelt beside her.

“Naomi, it’s Gary, I’m going to help you.”

The left side of her face and helmet were pressed against the ground. Her left arm was folded underneath her body. Her legs were twisted up in the bicycle, which somehow was facing uphill, the wrong direction.

“Naomi, can you hear me?” The moaning subsided. I gently took a hold of her hand. “If you can hear me, squeeze my hand.”

After a moment’s hesitation there was pressure on my hand and I felt some relief. She was in such an awkward twisted position I addressed that next.

“Move your right arm for me.” She did. Her eyes were still closed but she was responding. “Wiggle your left foot.” Her left foot moved. “Now your right foot.” Impeded by the bike, her right leg and foot moved. Good, she could move.

My voice was as calm as I could make it. “I’m going to get this bike off you. I’m going to lift your left leg.” I disentangled her from the bike and pushed it aside. She was making some movement, an attempt to turn. “Do you want to turn over on your back?” Eyes still closed, she gave a small nod. There has been some criticism of my actions that day, of moving her. I just did what I thought I had to do at the time. I slid a hand under her neck, put my other hand on her right shoulder, and said, “Ok, let’s turn.” Gently she turned onto her back. Now I saw the blood. Her left side was a mess. Her face was scraped and bloody, as was her left leg, and her left wrist was a raw open wound. It also looked crooked and I thought maybe she had a broken wrist. Her eyes flickered open which was a good sign, but they were scared and confused. Then I remembered I had texted Freddie this morning, when we were meeting up. “Come back. Naomi fell.” I texted.

With some help from me, she now sat up. She looked at her injuries. “What happened?” That question would become a recurring theme. I explained she had taken a fall. Her breathing became quicker, panicky and her eyes darted about in fear. “Naomi, take a deep breath,” I commanded. “Another. Ok, drink some water.” Later I joked it was probably the first time in my life a woman had ever listened to me.

With my water bottle I washed the dirt and gravel from her wounds. It was dark where we sat, the sun barely penetrating through the thick canopy of branches. Naomi again asked what had happened and again I told her. Then I saw someone biking through the shadows up the trail toward us, another biker, not Freddie. In his fifties, he was on an expensive bike and wore all the high-end appropriate gear. He slowed, looked at Naomi and said, “Wow, that doesn’t look good!” and rode on. An incredulous laugh escaped from me. “Thanks, guy.”

Naomi kept asking me what had happened. I’d explain, and thirty seconds later she would look with new wonderment at her injuries, and ask again. I was becoming more worried and after what seemed an interminable period of time, but probably wasn’t, Freddie showed up.

“9-1-1?’

Freddie shook his head as he got out his cell phone. “I’m going to call Karla.”

Karla was Freddie’s wife, and a friend of Naomi’s. Naomi was able to walk so we walked our bikes to the end of the trail. Karla was coming with a car to take Naomi to a hospital. Naomi continued to repeatedly ask what had happened to her. She occasionally would get a scared, wild look in her eyes but I was able to calm her down.

Karla arrived to take her to a hospital. I buckled the seatbelt for Naomi and almost had to laugh for she looked at the seatbelt like it was a new and wondrous invention she had never seen before. Karla left and Freddie and I biked to the hospital and got updates on her condition. A scan had shown no brain bleeding and there were no serious back or neck injuries.

So, scary as it had been, several days later over coffee, Naomi and I were able to laugh. She still has no memory of that day. Not the accident, nor any part of the ride. The last thing she remembers is getting ready to leave her house that morning.

A weird side effect is that she came out of the other end of the accident with a new and more positive outlook on life. Prior to the accident she had been struggling with some personal issues, including unhappiness, anxiety attacks and migraines, all of which have evaporated. She jokingly recommends a serious brain injury as a path to happiness. There are some lingering ongoing memory issues but hopefully that is getting better.

Later in the summer we returned to the scene, trying to understand how she had fallen. Speed, a mogul on the path, and faulty brakes on her bike had all combined somehow. Because the bike was pointed in the wrong direction we surmised she did a complete flip. The impact with the ground was obviously violent so thank goodness she was wearing a helmet.

Oddly, because of her memory loss, the accident was more traumatic for me than her. I can still feel the jolt of rounding that corner and seeing the color pink splayed out on the path. Those first few awful moments of finding her haunt me yet. I think about the dark premonition I had at Battle Creek although there was no way to act on it. The experience has made me a more cautious rider. Some would say that is a good, and sensible, thing, but, I’ve never found much joy in embracing sensible.

Before I posted this I asked Naomi for her permission. I’m adding her reaction as a postscript.

“It’s strange to read it. It’s like I am reading someone else’s experience. When I read the description of how you found me I thought, ‘Whoa, that sounds painful, I hope she’s okay.’” She added, “Turns out the path to happiness is mindlessness, or heart centered. The Buddhists were right.”

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1240 – Battle of the Neva. An invading Swedish army was defeated by a much smaller, and mostly civilian, army from the Russian city of Novgorod. The intent of the Swedes was to establish a trade route and also to force the Russians to convert from Greek Orthodoxy to Catholicism. Both sides believed to have God on their side. Led by Prince Alexander Varoslavich, the Novgorods initiated a sneak attacked on the Swedish camp and emerged victorious. Little is known about this battle and it is all from the Russian side, none from the Swedish.

As they say, history is written by the victors.

1933 – Wiley Post begins solo flight around the world. Taking off from Floyd Bennett Field in New York, Post returned to the same field just under eight days later. He made eleven stops for fuel and rest, including Berlin, several in Russia, Alaska and Canada before returning back. Post was an unlikely hero. He wore a patch over one sightless eye, had dropped out of school after sixth grade, worked as oil field roughneck, and turned to armed robbery, for which he served time in the penitentiary. Through it all he harbored a dream of flying. Flying at extremely high altitudes Post also help develop the first pressure suit. Post died in a 1937 plane crash in Alaska with fellow Oklahoman and friend, humorist Will Rogers. They were attempting to fly over the North Pole to Russia when they crashed near Point Barrow. At one point in his life Post tried to start his own flying school but because of his lack of education, even with his notoriety, could not find financial backing.

As far as financial backing, I suspect the armed robbery rap counted more than his achievements as an aviator.

2002 – John Walker Lindh pleads guilty. Lindh, an American citizen fighting with the Taliban, was captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in November, 2001. Raised in northern California, Walker converted to Islam at age sixteen. He went to Yemen in 1998 to study Arabic, and eventually ended up in Afghanistan. He maintained he was fighting for Islam, and did not intend to oppose the United States. Once U.S. forces were there he said he wasn’t allowed to leave and was forced to continue fighting. There was a Taliban uprising at the prison where Lindh was being held and of the several hundred prisoners there, only eighty-six were still alive after the riot. He was shot in the thigh during the quelling of the riot. An American interrogator was also killed. That death was included in the case against Lindh. A plea bargain allowed him to plead guilty to lessor charges and he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Lindh saw Spike Lee’s movie “Malcolm X” at a young age and it initiated his interest in Islam. Lindh now goes by the name Sulayman al-Irandl.

It’s strange what can light a person’s candle and change the direction of their life. You wonder what might have happened had he picked a different movie that day. Or would he have seen a different sign and still ended up in the same place?

Birthdays:

1779 – Clement Clark Moore. Theologian and writer. He may or may not have anonymously penned the Christmas poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”. The poem is better known as “Twas the Night Before Christmas”. First published in 1823, it wasn’t until 1837 that it was attributed to Moore. The family of Henry Livingston, Jr., however, later claimed that it was he who had written the poem. Livingston never claimed authorship himself, and Moore because of his prestigious position as a scholar and university professor, wasn’t sure he wanted to be associated with it either. So their families were left to fight it out. The controversy still exists today with the evidence leaning slightly to the Livingston side.

In researching this topic I found that Moore owned a few slaves, and was against the abolition of slavery, so my vote goes to Livingston.

1913 – Lloyd Copas. Or better known as Cowboy Copas. Copas was a popular country western singer and a regular performer on The Grand Old Opry. On March 3rd, 1963, he died in a plane crash along with Hawkshaw Hawkins and Patsy Cline.

I was halfway through my tour at Holiday Beach Naval Communication Station at the time of this event. I had never heard of Cowboy Copas or Hawkshaw Hawkins and thought their names kind of funny. Patsy Cline of course I knew but unlike some of my crewmates, I wasn’t a country western fan. To them, when the news reached us, it hit hard. We were one radio station, one barracks, isolated from the main base. We were surrounded by nature’s grandeur and beauty but after a while that mattered little. We were also encapsulated in a near impenetrable cocoon of boredom. Trapped by the snowcapped mountains behind us, the endless expanse of the northern Pacific in front, day after gloomy day was the same. Other than work there were no diversions. So news such as the plane crash, tragic though it was, had a significant impact upon our little community. Something to occupy our minds, talk about, speculate upon. Energy flowed for a few days, sad energy but even if in a negative way spirits were awakened. I guess in our situation bad news was better than no news. So while the crash did not touch me the way it did some, I remember the event well.

1935 – Alex Karras. Professional football player and actor. Karras was a defensive tackle with the Detroit Lions from 1958 to 1970. He made the Pro Bowl four times. As an actor he had a memorable appearance as Mongo in “Blazing Saddles”, acted in the TV series “Webster” and had a significant role in the movie “Victor/Victoria” with James Garner and Julie Andrews.

In the early days of the Minnesota Vikings they had a bit of a wild man as a coach, Norm Van Brocklin. The Vikings were to play the Lions in Detroit and Van Brocklin had learned that Karras had notoriously bad eyesight and couldn’t wear glasses while playing. So instead of taking along their away uniforms, Van Brocklin had the Vikings bring their home uniforms because they were similar in color to Detroit’s uniform. The idea being Karras would get confused and maybe tackle the wrong players. I liked the NFL better in those days.

Sources:

www.prlib.ru

www.history.com

www.onthisday.com

wikipedia.org

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1917 – KKK in Minnesota. In what may have been the first incident of Ku Klux Klan activity in Minnesota took place in my hometown, Lester Prairie. The target was the Klatt family, owners of the Klatt’s Hotel. “That the Klatt family kept the best country hotel at Lester Prairie to be found in any town of this size in the state is a fact known to the traveling public. That fact alone, it would seem, should have spared them the mob violence visited upon them by the citizens of Lester Prairie one night last July. The Klatts have done the right thing in employing a detective and rounding up the toughs in the gang that assaulted them,” reported the Hutchinson Leader, Nov. 2, 1917.

There was patriotic zeal at this time over America’s entry into WWI against Germany. The Klatt’s, two brothers, two sisters, and their father, were German immigrants. There were rumors that the Klatts had never taken out citizenship papers, did not buy liberty war bonds, did not contribute to the Red Cross for the war effort, and refused to sign an loyalty oath.

Around 11PM on a warm July evening all the electric streets lights in the village mysteriously went out. One of the Klatt brothers came outside to investigate and was set upon by a dozen men wearing white hoods over their heads. They began to beat him viciously and his brother, hearing his cries, came to his aid. He also was assaulted. The two sisters next come outside. They were pelted with rotten eggs soaked in acid. An egg hit one of the sisters in the face and she was permanently disfigured. Stones were thrown, breaking windows in the hotel. No law enforcement came to their aid. The attack only ended when the father came outside with a shotgun and fired it. One man saw the beginning of the attack and fled the scene. The next day the local policeman told him he better keep quiet about what he saw. The press articles at the time sided with the attackers. The area newspapers listed the grievances against the Klatt’s, as if justifying the attack, or insinuating they deserved it because they were German immigrants.

There was no official investigation but the Klatt’s refused to let the matter drop. They hired a detective who found out the identities of the attackers. Charges against the men, who became known as the Lester Prairie 12, were brought in November of that year.

I had never heard about this incident until a few years ago. From my father I had heard of the good reputation of the Klatt’s Hotel. A nursing home for the elderly when I was a kid, it was located a block from the train depot. Salesmen would take the train from the Twin Cities, rent a horse and buggy from a local livery stable, and trot out of town to sell their wares to the area farmers. A few years later my father sold newspapers and he said the Klatt’s Hotel was the place to go because if the salesmen had a good day, they would leave him a tip. My father was only four at the time of the attack so had no memory of it.

The KKK in Minnesota was mostly Scandinavians and being there were few minorities to discriminate against, they became anti-Catholic and Irish. When WWI started they turned their ire on German immigrants. At the time there were efforts by German-Americans to prove they were good Americans. A neighboring town is named New Germany. During the war they changed it to Motordale. And sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, which is possibly even sillier than freedom fries. Nowhere in the newspaper accounts did it list the names of the Lester Prairie 12. It was as if they were being protected. I was anxious to find out if I had a relative, hopefully not a grandfather, in that group. I researched through McLeod County court documents where I found a list of indictments against the men involved. Most of the surnames were familiar and I had a family connection to three of the men. The leader of the pack, the town’s veterinarian, was married to my maternal grandmother’s sister. Another, married to my maternal grandfather’s sister, turned state’s evidence. I remember him from when I was young. A raconteur, drink ever present in hand, he held center stage at family gatherings. I doubt any of his stories involved the KKK. The third family member was my maternal grandmother’s cousin. He had recently emigrated from Germany and was living on my grandparents’ farm while getting settled in America. I suspect he was trying to prove he fit in, was a good American, and got caught up in a bad idea. He later joined the American Army and fought in France. His brother, still in the home country, was in the German army. Both survived and the other brother also eventually immigrated to America.

Until recently Lester Prairie was about 98% German. When I was a kid the Lutheran church I attended had services in both English and German. There has always been a heavy German influence in the town. People who had lived there for many decades still talked like they had just stepped off the boat. So an anti-German incident in a town almost totally German is more than a little ironic.

My investigative trail ended at the indictments. Searches through old newspapers turned up no articles about a trial. I suspect everybody just wanted it to go away, and to protect the guilty, so no more mention was made. I’m guessing there were fines leveed but no jail time. If they had been found innocent that would have made the news.

Sources:

“Ku Klux Klan in Minnesota” by Elizabeth Dorsey Hatle.

Hutchinson Leader

Lester Prairie News

Emmert Jenneke

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1859 - 1st intercollegiate baseball game. Amherst beat Williams College by a score of 73-32. The rules were quite different from the rules of modern day baseball which helps explain the large score. There was no foul territory, the field was a square rather than a diamond and the bases, wooden stakes four feet high, were sixty feet apart, not ninety. Also, an out could be recorded by throwing the ball at a runner and hitting him.

When I was a kid, we sometimes played by that same rule, throwing the ball at a runner to record an out. Quite exciting but, as I’m sure you can imagine, it did not usually end well.

1916 - Battle of the Somme. In France during WWI there was stalemate at the front between the Allied and German armies. Both sides were heavily fortified in their own systems of trenches. The British designed a breakthrough plan and launched it on July 1st. An immediate breakthrough failed and the battle raged on for five months. Combined the British, French and Germans suffered over a million casualties, including over 300,000 deaths. It is one of if not the bloodiest battle in history. The British alone suffered 19,240 killed on the first day of the Somme. When the battle ended in November the British had advanced six miles into previously held German territory but tactically nothing had changed and the war dragged on for two more years. The British commander-in-chief labeled his battle plan “The Great Push Forward.” His soldiers called it “The Great F**k Up”.

Week after week of sending men charging into entrenched machine gun fire? Think I’ll side with the soldiers on what the battle should have been called.

1932 - FDR nominated for president. President Hoover, a Republican, had handled the Depression badly and it was a foregone conclusion a Democrat would take the White House. FDR, governor of New York, was the frontrunner and on the 4th ballot was nominated. Acceptance speeches were not considered good form at the time and nominees did not attend the convention. When he learned he was nominated FDR convinced the delegates to stay another day so he could be there. Flying was still considered unsafe but FDR took a plane from New York to Chicago. In his acceptance speech FDR promised a “New Deal” for the American people. Roosevelt was considered such a shoo-in he was advised to play it safe. His VP candidate, John Nance Garner, told him, “All you have got to do is stay alive until election day.” But FDR loved campaigning and and his charm and energy propelled him to a large victory.

Given the Great Depression and with war looming in the future, he was certainly the right person for the time.

Birthdays:

1725 - Conte de Rochambeau. French general. De Rochambeau was commander of 5,500 French troops that came to America in 1780 to assist General Washington’s Continental Army. Washington’s soldiers combined with de Rochambeau’s to trap Lord Cornwallis and the British army at Yorktown and gaining victory and independence for the new nation. Washington wrote a letter to Congress shortly before the surrender praising the assistance provided by the French general. De Rochambeau returned to France and when the French revolution erupted he barely escaped the guillotine during the Reign of Terror. When Napoleon came into power he pardoned de Rochambeau who then lived out the rest of his life on his estate.

There is a sometimes tendency in America to deride the French. Mostly when they don’t heed our beck and call. One such incident resulted in the silliness of calling French fries, freedom fries. Critics also like to point out their debt to us from WWII, how we saved them from fascism. Although it should be noted the French are more attentive to and respective of the U.S. dead at Normandy than America is. What is often forgotten however is, as gallant and brave as the Continental Army was, if it hadn’t been for the intervention of the French army and navy, it is questionable whether our revolution would have succeeded.

1916 - Olivia de Havilland. Actress. Winner of two Academy Awards, de Havilland’s career spanned five decades. One of her more famous roles was as Melanie in “Gone With the Wind.” She was born in Tokyo to British citizens so English became her nationality also. She had a younger sister, Joan Fontaine, who was also an Academy Award winner. Their father was unfaithful and their mother left him, taking the two girls on a ship voyage from Japan to England. The ship made a stop in San Francisco, they got off because both girls were ill, and they stayed. De Havilland made eight films with Errol Flynn and both were infatuated with the other, however de Havilland refused to enter into a relationship until he was divorced. That never happened so neither did the relationship. De Havilland said the great love of her life was director John Huston. She was married twice, had two children, and lived to be 104 years old, dying in 2020 in Paris, France.

I saw some of those old swashbuckling films like “Captain Blood” with de Havilland and Flynn when I was a kid but don’t remember her, mostly because I’m sure I was concentrating on the swashbuckle and not the romance.

1950 - David Duke. American Neo-Nazi. A former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Duke promotion of racism and white supremacy began at an early age. Educated in a conservative Church of Christ school in New Orleans, he was a member of the KKK by the time he graduated from high school. He received a degree from Louisiana State University and in 1976 became the youngest ever grand wizard of the KKK. He has spent his entire life as a racist, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier, in addition to being a convicted felon, a born again Christian and elected official for public office. He first ran as a Democrat, garnered little support, and then changed his party affiliation and was elected to the Louisiana House as a Republican. He has also run for the U.S. House, U.S. Senate and for president. The KKK accused him of misappropriating funds, and he was convicted of filing false tax returns and defrauding followers by using campaign funds for personal expenses. Duke is still actively promoting his agenda of racism and hate.

Duke tapped into the sad reality that espousing racism and division was one way of achieving notoriety, financial stability, and even the possibility of political success in America.

Sources:

onthisday.com

ncaa.com

en.wikipedia.org

fdrlibrary.org

battlefields.org

1778 - Liberty Bell returns home. After the British won the Battle of Brandywine on September 11th, 1777, they were poised to seize the city of Philadelphia. The fleeing colonists took everything that might be of use to the British, including bells that could be recast into cannons. After its return the Bell wasn’t rehung in the State House because the steeple was too rotten. Instead it remained in storage for seven years. A new steeple was built and the Bell was rehung in 1785. The Bell was rung on notable occasions such as the signing of the Constitution and the deaths of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lafayette and other patriots. The State House was sold with the land being subdivided into lots for sale and the ownership of the Bell was in dispute for a time. When the famous crack occurred is unclear. It had cracked several times with repairs being made. Most likely though the historical crack appeared in 1846 when the Bell was being rung for Washington’s birthday. In 1852 it was taken down and placed in Independence Hall. Since then the Bell has not tolled, being used for ceremonial purposes only.

An iconic symbol of our country’s liberty.

1833 - Prudence Crandall arrested. Crandall, a Quaker, had opened a young women’s boarding school in Canterbury, Connecticut in 1831. Catering to the daughters of the wealthy the school was a success. She was also a subscriber to an abolitionist newspaper. (Damn liberal media) When she received a request from a wealthy free African-American family for their daughter to attend, Crandall accepted the young woman and horrified white families pulled their daughters from the school. Now determined to educate young Black women she ran an ad in the abolitionist newspaper and soon had many applicants. Laws were quickly passed to keep her from operating but she refused to close her school. She was arrested, endured several trials with the case eventually being dismissed on a technicality. She continued with the school but both she and her students suffered verbal abuse and were in danger of physical assault. Crandall closed the school, moved out of Connecticut but would continue to advocate for equal civil rights for all.

Silly woman, nobody takes the Constitution at face value. Other than the 2nd Amendment.

1954 - Guatemalan Coup. Guatemala had had a democratically elected government since 1944. Jacobo Arbenz became president in 1951 and immediately incurred the wrath of the U.S. by instituting land reforms. United Fruit, a U.S. owned corporation lost much of its land in Guatemala and this was unacceptable to the U.S. So the CIA was sent in to rectify the situation. They were successful and a right-wing dictator became head of the country and United Fruit regained its rightful place in the world.

In America we value democracy... in its proper place. Guatemala was slow to accept the principle of profit before people and thereby not understanding the importance of corporations within a society.

Birthdays:

1880 - Helen Keller. Writer, educator, humanitarian. Keller lost her ability to see or hear at age 19 months due to an unspecified disease, perhaps scarlet fever or meningitis. A special educator, Anne Sullivan, was able to successfully teach Keller to communicate. As an adult Keller became an advocate for social change, supporting women’s suffrage, birth control and pacifism. She advocated for those with disabilities and testified before Congress for the welfare of the blind. Keller was also co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. Widely admired, that is until she announced she was a socialist and supported Eugene Debs for president. Then she was criticized in the press and her disabilities noted, as if they were responsible for her faulty reasoning. Undeterred, Keller kept advocating for those less fortunate. Throughout her life she traveled extensively, visiting 35 countries while offering inspiration to millions of people. Keller and Anne Sullivan were life-long companions until Sullivan died in 1936. Keller passed away in 1968 at age 88.

I think everybody is aware of the story of Helen Keller, if not, they should be. She was a courageous, remarkable force in this world. I must also confess to some ignorance however, I hadn’t known she was a co-founder of the ACLU.

1928 - Rudy Perpich. Dentist, politician. Perpich was the 34th governor of Minnesota, the longest serving governor, and the only one to serve non-consecutive terms. Perpich’s father, from Croatia, immigrated to America and worked in a Minnesota iron ore mine. Young Rudy did not learn to speak English until he was in the first grade. He graduated from Hibbing high school, spent two years in the army, went to dental school and returned to Hibbing to practice dentistry. (I could find no record of him ever filling any of young Bobby Zimmerman’s cavities) Rudy entered politics, first serving as a state senator from the Hibbing area. He then was elected Lt. Governor, and became Governor when Wendell Anderson appointed himself to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat. He was defeated in the 1978 election but returned to win in 1982 and again served as Minnesota’s governor from 1983 to 1991. His policies contributed to the Minnesota economy by promoting the state internationally. A Republican rival, future Governor Arne Carlson said of him: “Perpich was the first person that I was aware of to focus on the international role that states are going to have to play.” Rudy was a colorful and controversial figure who promoted everything from the idea of the Mall of America to a chopstick factory on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Here’s a Rudy story from a friend of mine, Darrold. 1983 Super Bowl, Beverly Hills Hilton. He sees Rudy walking across the lobby. Perhaps without the proper deference, Darrold calls out to him. “Rudy, what’s a Ranger like you doing in a place like this?” Rudy, delighted to see another Minnesotan, loved it and came over to talk. And as Darrold put it, talked and talked and talked. Darrold, still trying to score some tickets to the game, had to make an excuse to leave. Stories like that are why Rudy was my favorite governor.

1975 - Toby McGuire. Actor. After he dropped out of high school, later getting his GED, McGuire turned to acting. He often found himself in competition with Leonardo DiCaprio for the same parts. (Guess who won) But they became friends and tried to help each other advance their careers. McGuire developed a drinking problem as a young actor but joined AA and has been sober since. He’s a vegan and in 2002 PETA named him world’s sexiest vegan. McGuire is best known for his lead role in the Spider Man movies.

I’m not a fan of comic book movies so I’ve never seen him in the Spider Man role. However McGuire starred in two movies I really liked, “The Cider House Rules” and “Seabiscuit.”

Sources:

onthisday.com

ushistory.org

todayinchistory.com

history.com

biography.com

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1684 – King Charles II revokes the charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This was done because of frustration over being unable to exert control over the colony. (Those pesky colonists) The King wanted to weaken the influence of religion in the charter and also eliminate the stringent voting requirements. (What! If only temporarily I’m coming down on the side of a King.) Charles died in 1685 and James II took over. He followed in the footsteps of Charles and continued to introduce more measures in order to control the colonies.

Bad idea Jimmy, for we all know how that turned out.

1877 – 10 Molly Maguires hanged. The Molly Maguires were a secret organization of Irish immigrants in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania. They fought against injustice, sometimes with violence, and tired to organize coal miners into a union. That, perhaps, was their greater crime. They were infiltrated by an undercover agent from the Pinkertons, exposed, and arrested. At their trial some of the prosecuting attorneys worked for the coal mining companies, which apparently no one saw as a conflict of interest. The ten young Irish men, including their leader, John Kehoe, were convicted and executed. Another ten would also eventually be executed. Kehoe was probably innocent of the charges brought against him and a hundred years later the governor of Pennsylvania issued him a pardon.

“The Molly Maguires” is a movie about this incident starring Sean Connery as John Kehoe. The director of the movie was Walter Bernstein who was a blacklisted screenwriter and director during the Joseph McCarthy era. Bernstein was an interesting figure who was with the OSS during WWII and fought with Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia. He wrote a bitter autobiography about his experiences with the so-called communist purge of Hollywood. The movie is said to be his response to the “friendly witnesses” of the House of Un-American Activities Committee.

1968 – Earl Warren resigns. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren submitted his resignation to President Lyndon Johnson. One of the reasons for his resignation was that he was worried Richard Nixon was going to win in the upcoming presidential race and he didn’t want Nixon to pick his successor. Despite being a Republican (Warren was Dewey’s running mate in the 1948 presidential election and three-time governor of California) he detested Nixon. By stepping off the court in January, before Nixon’s inauguration, he wanted to allow LBJ to choose his replacement. This plan was derailed however when Republicans filibustered his chosen replacement, Abe Fortas. Warren was appalled by Nixon’s presidency and later said “If I had ever known what was going to happen to this country and this Court, I never would have resigned and they would have had to carry me out of there on a plank”.

If Nixon appalled him I wonder what he would have thought about 45 and 47.

Birthdays:

1921 – Jane Russell. American born actress.

1921 – Judy Holliday. American born actress.

1921 – Jean Kent. English born actress.

1921 – Joan Tetzel. American born actress.

1925 – Maureen Stapleton. American born actress.

1940 – Mariette Hartley. American born actress.

1944 – Corinna Tsopel. Greek born actress. Also Miss Universe 1964.

If you have a daughter and she aspires to be an actress, it seems it might be wise to alter her birth certificate to show a June 21st birth date.

1947 – Shirin Ebadi. Iranian lawyer and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize. She won the prize for promoting the rights of women, children and political prisoners in Iran. She was a judge in Tehran until the 1979 Iranian Revolution. The clerics said Islam prohibited women from being judges. Demoted to a clerk position, she resigned from the court. She was allowed to begin practicing law again in 1993 and immediately began to take on controversial cases. She has been arrested a number of times for taking the cases of political dissidents. Ebadi also has written many articles and thirteen books promoting human rights. While not a defender of the West (she originally was a supporter of the Iranian revolution) she has received threats that now prohibit her from living in Iran.

Among Ebadi’s views she supports Iran’s nuclear development, believes the state of Israel participates in criminal activity, does not believe there should be a forced regime change in Iran, and she defends homosexuality.

From en.wikipedia.org “In light of the increased power of ISIS, Ebadi communicated in April 2015 that she believes the Western world should spend money funding education and an end to corruption rather than fighting with guns and bombs. She reasons that because the Islamic State stems from an ideology based on a “wrong interpretation of Islam,” physical force will not end ISIS because it will not end its beliefs.”

But guns and bombs are an easier sell than education, for we know how much that is valued in our government. And an uneducated population is easier to mind control.

Sources:

wikipedia.org

historyofmassachusetts.org

www.onthisday.com

blog.oup.com

nobelwomensinitiative.org

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1920 - Three men lynched in Duluth. Local African-American workers had been hired when the John Robinson circus came to town. After the show on the night of June 14th a young white couple reported they were robbed and the woman raped. The Duluth police chief rounded up 100 local African-American men and the couple identified six as the culprits. A mob of thousands gathered and the police force offered no resistance when the jail was stormed. Three men were taken, the mob was unable to break into the cells of the others. Elmer Clayton, Isaac McGhie, and Elmer Jackson were beaten and hung. Hideous photos exist of a grinning crowd standing around the lynched men.

An investigation followed and despite murder indictments, the participants of the mob suffered little retribution. Three white men spent a year in jail. Seven black men spent four years in jail each, despite a lack of evidence of any crimes have taken place on their part. The father of the rape victim had immediately taken the girl to a doctor for an examination. The doctor reported no physical trauma of assault or rape.

Just writing this brief description of the incident sickens me. A dark, indelible stain on Minnesota’s history.

1965 - Bob Dylan records “Like a Rolling Stone”. Dylan struggled with the song until he reworked it using a rock and roll format. Then Columbia Records was reluctant to release the record because of its six minute length and the heavy electric sound. However it was leaked and even though radio stations were equally reluctant it soon became a hit. It marked the crossover for Dylan from folk to rock and roll. The Rolling Stone magazine placed it at the top of the list of the 500 greatest songs of all time. (Based on the name of their magazine, what choice did they have?) At the time he wrote the song Dylan said he was thinking about quitting singing. In an interview, he said the creation of the song signaled a breakthrough in his career. He had a new perception of the career course he should follow.

There has been a certain amount of analysis regarding the song. Speculation as to whom Dylan may have been referencing in it. A former lover, some other notable person he disdained, people he saw as phonies, or even Dylan himself?

I’ve never given that aspect of the song any thought, instead just enjoyed it for what it was. Although at times the lyrics did seem to apply to the wayward course of my own life. Perhaps others felt that way and was part of the song’s appeal.

1992 - Vice President Dan Quayle misspells “potato”. Helping facilitate a spelling bee in an elementary school in Trenton, NJ, the VP corrected a student who had spelled the word right. He urged the student to add an “e” to the end. It was called the vowel heard round the world and helped derail any presidential hopes he might have had.

Different era that a blunder like that could be so lethal. President # 45/47 would have simply denied that it happened, despite video evidence. Or say facts don’t exist and the dictionary is wrong. Another possibility is that he would have brought suit against the publisher of the dictionary with the current Supreme Court ruling against the dictionary.

Birthdays:

1767 - Rachel Donelson Jackson. The First Lady that never was. Wife of President-elect Andrew Jackson, she died just weeks before he was inaugurated. During the campaign their marriage had been a target for attack. At age eighteen she fled an unhappy marriage, and that’s when she met Andrew Jackson. Believing her husband had drowned, she married Andrew. When her husband resurfaced, (sorry), things got messy. Divorce papers were filed, and because of distances between those involved, and slow communication, the situation was in limbo for a time. Eventually there was a second more official marriage between Rachel and Andrew. Later this all became political ammunition, a smear against her reputation and supposedly loose character. Jackson attributed her death in part to the stress caused by those vicious attacks and never forgave his political foes.

I’ve never been a fan of “Old Hickory” but I sympathize with him on this one.

1938 - Billy Williams. Hall of Fame baseball player. Williams spent most of his eighteen year career playing left field for the Chicago Cubs. A left-handed hitter, he was Rookie of the Year in 1961 and was selected as an All-Star six times. He played with a quiet dignity that belied the passion he brought to every game he played. Sadly, during his prime, the Cubs never advanced to post season play. Williams ended his career with Oakland.

Williams was always a favorite of mine and he had one of the sweetest swings I ever saw. He was a member of the 1969 Cubs, called the most celebrated 2nd place team of all time. After being in 1st place much of the year, they lost 17 out of their last 25 games to finish behind the Miracle Mets.

1945 - Lawrence Wilkerson. Vietnam combat veteran, retired army officer, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and a political analyst. As a member of the Bush administration Wilkerson was an important cog in the buildup to the Iraq War. Later he became critical of that war, including his own role. He aided in providing information to Colin Powell for his speech at the U.N. justifying the need to go to war. In 2011 Wilkerson said “My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. I participated in hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council.” He also described VP Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donal Rumsfeld as having formed a cabal that hijacked the decision-making process. Continuing his outspoken ways, Wilkerson was critical of the power the president holds over the armed forces in that he can do anything he wants. He called the American public “apathetic” and their representatives in Congress “cowards.” Other aggressive positions he has stated are Cheney okayed torture of prisoners in Iraq, the Bush administration knew there were innocent men held at Guantanamo, and Israel has too much influence on our government.

He was a refreshing and honest presence on the national scene and his criticism is still relevant even though it was directed at a different regime.

Sources:

onthisday.com

enwikipedia.com

mentalfloss.com

www.blackpast.org

baseballhall.org

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thehermitage.com

1864 - Battle of Trevillian Station. This was the largest all cavalry battle in the Civil War. Union forces led by General Sheridan were to destroy rebel railroad facilities and to distract from General Grant’s move south. They were opposed by Confederate cavalry led by Generals Hampton and Fitzhugh Lee. No infantry was involved at all in this two day clash of forces. Being that Sheridan didn’t achieve his objective it was viewed as a Confederate victory, although the battle did detract from Grant’s movement. At one point during the fight, after capturing a supply train, the unit led by Brigadier General George Custer found itself surrounded. Other Union forces arrived to help them fight their way free.

Not the last time Custer would find himself surrounded.

1955 - LeMans road race. This annual 24 hour race quickly turned to horror. Three hours into the race, a driver trying to make a pit stop, swerved in front of another car causing it to brake suddenly. A car behind that, a Mercedes driven by Pierre Levegh at 125 miles per hour, hit it and was catapulted into the crowd. The only barrier between the race track and spectators was straw bales. Levegh was killed instantly as the car broke into three sections, the engine, hood, and chassis, with each section scything through the crowd. The carnage was horrific as the chassis exploded and burned. Besides the driver, the official death toll for spectators was 82 with over a hundred more injured. Spread out as the LeMans course is, many other spectators were unaware of the accident so race officials decided to continue with the race. Their rationale was they wanted to avoid panic and keep the roads open for the ambulances arriving. The driver of the car that swerved, setting off the accident, Mike Hawthorn, was the eventual winner. An official inquiry absolved any drivers of blame and instead said the course was antiquated for the speed of current cars.

The initial rationale not to cancel the race because of panic was sound, but to continue it another 12-15 hours after that seems callous.

2018 - Immigrant ruling. Attorney General Jeff Sessions imposed new limits on who can get asylum in the United States. Refugees fleeing from domestic abuse or gang violence would no longer qualify. The woman at the center of the case, who has lived in the U.S. for four years, feared for her life if returned to El Salvador, as do many other abuse victims refugees. Sessions’ intent, he said, was that this message would reach Central America and discourage other such asylum seekers.

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” If you’re merely being beaten up and in danger for your life, you are not enough of a wretched refuse. Unless, of course, you have the right skin tone.

Birthdays:

1572 - Ben Jonson. Playwright and poet. Jonson was an English writer whose popularity rivaled that of Shakespeare. He wrote satirical comedies about the powers-that-be that often got him into trouble. Born into poverty he briefly worked as a bricklayer and then served a stint in the army. Fortunately he had received a good education, paid for by an anonymous friend. Jonson had an explosive temper and was always in pen and ink quarrels, and sometimes physical ones. He reportedly killed two men in duals. Although they were friends Jonson could be critical of Shakespeare, but conceded he had the magic touch. Jonson’s satire twice landed him in prison but his fortunes changed when he became a favorite of King James I. Jonson continued writing until the end of his life in 1637.

I wonder who the first satirist was. Going back to Greek times? Or some brave soul who dared to poke fun at Nero?

1864 - Richard Strauss. Composer. Considered a successor to Richard Wagner, Strauss was one of Germany’s leading composer. Born into a musical family, his father was a member in a Munich Orchestra, he wrote his first composition at age six and spent his whole life in music. His work consisted of many types of classical composition but some of his greatest success was in operas. Strauss lived long enough to fall under the influence of the Nazi regime. He was criticized for seemingly collaborating with them. But he had a Jewish daughter-in-law and half-Jewish grandchildren and used his connections to save them. Instead of a concentration camp, members of his family survived the war under house arrest. Even though he personally drove to Theresienstadt concentration camp he was unable to save his daughter-in-laws’ mother and twenty-five other members of her family who were all killed. After the war a tribunal removed all stains from his record. Strauss died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1949.

It’s always fascinating when I learn something more about a personality than their generally known fame.

1902 - Ernie Nevers. Football player. Born in Willow River, Minnesota, Nevers was a star running back in both the college and professional ranks. The family moved from Willow River to Superior, Wisconsin where Nevers went to school and then to California where he finished high school. He then attended Stanford University where he became an All-American fullback and was the kicker on the team. In addition to football he also competed in basketball, baseball and track. After college he played football professionally, including the Duluth Eskimos, and also played baseball professionally before becoming a coach. He is in the college and NFL Hall of Fame, being inducted in the inaugural class for each. Nevers died in 1976 at age 73.

I wonder when another athlete is going to come along who is so gifted he, or she, is allowed to compete in more than one sport.

Sources:

onthisday.com

battlefields.org

jalopnik.com

www.npr.org

en.wikipedia.org

biography.com

www.luminarium.org

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1942 - Battle of Midway ends. Six months after their successful sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese navy’s next target was the American occupied island of Midway. As a feint they had landed troops on the island of Attu in the Aleutian chain. Their hope was to draw the American navy away. Due to America having broken the Japanese code that deception did not work. Two fleets sailed toward Midway for a rendezvous with death. This was to be a major sea battle fought by air, with the surface ships of the opposing forces never engaging. The Japanese task force included four aircraft carries while the American had three. The Japanese attacked Midway and destroyed defense installations and a number of aircraft. However an American scout plane, through an opening in the clouds, found the Japanese fleet. America attacked with waves of torpedo and dive bombers. Due to rearmament confusion the Japanese were caught with more planes aboard the ships rather than in the air. The battle started poorly for the Americans when the first flight of torpedo bombers was decimated. Sixteen of the seventeen planes were shot down. These were slow, antiquated planes that were replaced with faster models after this battle. Of those pilots shot down only one survived. He watched the Battle of Midway unfold as he bobbed in the ocean in his lifejacket. The dive bombers were more successful. The battle started on the 4th and ended on the 7th in a total American victory. The Japanese lost all four aircraft carriers sunk while the Americans lost one, the USS Yorktown. The plane tally was 320 lost for Japan, 150 for America. In addition the Japanese suffered somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 men killed, including an admiral and many irreplaceable pilots. The U.S. suffered 317 killed in action.

Before Midway Japan had a vastly superior naval force with its sights on invading Hawaii and then attacking the American mainland. Midway changed all of that, and along with Guadalcanal was the turning point in the Pacific War.

As a boy I was transfixed watching “Victory at Sea” on television, including the stirring Battle of Midway. Midway was one of the most important victories in American history. Although there would be much bloodshed and many trials in the years to come, from that point on Japan really had no chance at winning the war.

1977 - Anita Bryant forces repeal ordinance. Dade County, Florida had passed a law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Angered by the ordinance, and referring to homosexuals as “human garbage,” Bryant, a pop singer and former Miss Oklahoma, led a campaign to repeal it. She was successful and it was voted down on June 7th. Bryant took pride in “saving our children.”

Nothing much ever changes in Florida, does it? Thirty-five years separated the Battle of Midway from Dade County, Florida. One represented America at its best, the other, well... Funny thing is, based on statistics, several hundred of the sailors in the American task force that day in the Pacific were human garbage.

2012 - Bus falls into ravine in LaPaz, Bolivia. 16 killed, 32 injured.

2013 - Bus catches fire in Xiamen, China. 42 killed, 30 injured.

2013 - Bus plunges off mountain road in Himachel Pradesh, India. 18 killed and 40 injured.

I have it on good authority that psychics around the world were warning people to stay away from buses on June 7th. Equal good authority informs me they do that every day.

Birthdays:

1878 - Beau Brummel. English trendsetter. Brummel had a total disregard for men’s fashion of his era. Until then men had worn bright colors; Brummel arguably affected male fashion for the next 200 years. He was a “dandy” as opposed to being a “fop.” A fop was someone who was overly concerned with his appearance and clothes. According to esquire.com: “A dandy could be found apathetically lounging on doorjambs at parties, smoking a cigarette and doing an excellent and studied performance of cynical carelessness. Brummel made an art of pretentious dishevelment. In fact, it allegedly took him hours to be so artfully and pretentiously disheveled.” Friends with a future king of English, George IV, he was accomplished at putting other people down with his wry cruelty. Brummel elevated his own social status by mocking others.

I’ve heard his name but never knew what he stood for. Sad that the reputation of a do-nothing phony could last so long, and sadder yet, to this day there are those who emulate him.

1843 - Susan Blow. Educator. Blow is credited with opening the first public kindergarten in the United States. (Now I know who to blame.) Her early kindergarten classes were described as being more playful and cheerful than usual classrooms. Blow never married and devoted her life to education. A strange twist and no commentary upon her, but Blow’s grandfather was a slaveholder and the man who owned Dred Scott. Dred Scott sued for his freedom and the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution was not meant to include people of African descent.

This opens the door for any number of snarky comments on my part but I think I’ll just say Blow spent a lifetime atoning for her grandfather.

1975 - Allen Iverson. Basketball player. Playing mostly for the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers, Iverson was Rookie of the year in 1997, an 11 time All-Star and the NBA’s MVP in 2001. At 6 feet tall, small in the NBA, Iverson was an aggressive presence in the land of the giants. In his own words, “I feared so many other things off the court, but nothing on the court.” Born to a 15 year old single mother, abandoned by his father, Iverson’s early live was a struggle. His escape was sports and in high school he excelled at both basketball and football. However that was marred by an altercation at a bowling alley in Hampton, Virginia. A shouting match led to a fight, a Black versus white fight. Police were called and only the Black participants, including Iverson, were arrested. Despite a videotape showing him leaving shortly before the fight, the 17 year old Iverson was tried as an adult and convicted of a felony. He served 4 months before the governor granted his clemency and the Court of Appeals eventually overturned the conviction because of insufficient evidence. Iverson played 2 years at Georgetown University before leaving for the NBA. Legal issues and brushes with the law continued to follow Iverson during his NBA career and afterwards.

Whatever anybody may think of him, he was the most fearless basketball player I’ve ever seen. Driving against players a foot taller and hundred pounds heavier, his body was bounced around as if in a pinball machine, he never backed off. There is an excellent documentary film about him titled “No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson.”

Sources:

onthisday.com

en.wikipedia.org

esquire.com

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