2022 – Page 8 – Historical Easter Eggs

July 21, 1865 Aces and Eights

Wild Bill Hickok lived in an age when the good guys and the bad guys, were hard to tell apart.

The Wild West gunfight is the stuff of American legend. A lone gunslinger rides down a dusty street. Townsfolk dive for shelter leaving two men standing. Only one can be the quickest draw. One man will walk away and another will die.

And yet these are movie images. If anything, the real gunfights of the wild west were uglier, more violent and less heroic than anything we ever saw on film. It was often hard to tell the good guys, from the bad.

So step aside Clint Eastwood, John Wayne. We’re here to talk about a real-life gunslinger, called “Wild Bill” Hickok.

James Butler Hickok was born in Homer Illinois in the present-day town of Troy Grove, the 4th of 6 children of William “Bill” Hickok and his wife, Pamelia “Polly” Butler Hickok. The family home is gone now but believed to be a stop on the “underground railroad”, a network of households offering refuge and assistance, to runaway slaves.

James learned from an early age to shoot a pistol. He was good at it. Photographs of the era depict him with dark hair but the age of photography, was in its infancy. Those who knew Hickok described the man, with red hair.

He was fifteen when his father died. At 18 he fled the Illinois territory after a fight, with one Charles Hudson. Both fell into a canal and believed (wrongly) he had killed the other man. He was attracted to the “Banditti of the prairie” lifestyle and took up with Jim Lane’s violently abolitionist Free State Army known as Jayhawkers, during the Bleeding Kansas era. There he met a 12-year-old who, despite his young age became a scout for the US Army, only two years later. We remember the boy today for the soldier, showman and bison hunter he would later become, Buffalo Bill Cody.

A young James Hickok in the 1860s, before his gunfighting days

Hired as a stagecoach driver by the Russell, Majors and Waddell freight company, Hickok was driving a team from Independence, Missouri, to Santa Fe, New Mexico, when an incident with a cinnamon bear resulted in one dead bear, and four months in bed recovering from a crushed chest and a shoulder and arm, mangled in the melee.

Recovering from the bear incident, Hickok was sent to become a stable hand at the Rock Creek station, a stagecoach and Pony Express stop in the Nebraska territory.

David Colbert McCanles leased a well and a cabin to Hickok’s employer. The former sheriff of Watauga County, North Carolina, McCanles was a bully who didn’t like this newcomer, Hickok. He called the younger man “Duck Bill” for his large nose and protruding lips and derided the man’s slender, almost girlish build. McCanles’ mistress Sarah (Kate) Shull didn’t seem to mind any of it and became romantically involved, with Hickok.

You know where this is going, right?

McCanles arrived at the station with his cousin James Woods, another employee called James Gordon and his 12-year-old son, Monroe. Accounts vary but soon, there was a brawl. Hickok stepped from behind a curtain where he was hiding and shot McCanles, dead. He shot Gordon and Woods as well, one of whom was finished off with a shotgun blast by station employee J. W. “Doc” Brink and the other hacked to death with a garden hoe, either by Horace Wellman, or Wellman’s wife.

I did say these things could be ugly, right? As for 12-year-old Monroe, he managed to get away.

The trial lasted all of 15 minutes and ended in acquittal, based on self-defense. Hickok rode out to the McCanles home and told the widow he was sorry, he had killed her man. He gave her all the money in his pocket saying ‘This is all I have, sorry I do not have more to give you”. It was $35, equivalent to $1,056 today.

After the McCanles episode Hickok grew a moustache, to hide that protruding lip. He encouraged people to call him “Wild Bill”.

Surprising though it may seem to the modern reader, the “news” media, couldn’t always be trusted. According to George Ward Nichols of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, “Hundreds” of men lay dead at the smoking barrel of Hickok’s gun. Never mind that, everywhere Hickok was actually known his supposed death counts, were often disputed.

Like the rest of Wild Bill’s life his civil War service is shrouded in mystery. No scion of stout abolitionists would have missed an opportunity to serve, with the federal cause. He seems to have begun as a teamster, later rejoining now-General James Henry Lane’s Kansas brigade as provost marshal, basically military police. Some say he managed to infiltrate the other side as a spy. Buffalo Bill Cody claimed to have seen the man in 1964, wearing Confederate gray.

Hickok lived in an age when the good guys and the bad guys, were hard to tell apart. In 1869 the good folks of Ellis Kansas appointed Hickok, interim Sheriff. Tall, hard and imposing this was no longer the scrawny youth of his younger days. One cowboy described Hickok standing “with his back to the wall, looking at everything and everybody under his eyebrows — just like a mad old bull”.

As for “keeping the peace”, Hickok managed to kill two men in his first five weeks. He lost the election to his own deputy after three months on the job.

In Springfield Missouri, Hickok had several run-ins with a local gambler, called Davis Tutt. The two men had affection for some of the same women as well, and that’s never a good place to start. By 1865, gambling disputes had upped the ante to lethal levels.

Hickok was sentimental about a gold watch and lost it in a poker game, to Davis Tutt. He asked the man not to wear the thing in public but Tutt couldn’t resist, rubbing his nose in the loss. Hickok warned Tutt to stay away. That came to an end on July 21 in a scene, right out of the spaghetti western. The two men stopped in the street glaring, ever so slowly turning to the side, to provide a smaller target. Tutt drew first, and missed his target. Hickok’s bullet struck right through the heart. Tutt clutched his chest and cried out, “Boys, I’m killed” before he collapsed, and died. The “quick draw” duel has become the stuff of legend, but this was the first.

Judge Sempronius Boyd (how do you not love that name) instructed the jury they could not acquit, if there had been reasonable opportunity to avoid the fight. The unwritten doctrine of the “fair fight” however did apply, and the jury voted to acquit.

Wild Bill Hickok fought and won the first “quick draw” duel in history, killing Davis Tutt with a bullet through the heart, at 75 yards

Wild Bill Hickok was the best gunfighter of his time but not always, the fastest draw. Tom Clavin’s book WILD BILL: The True Story of the American Frontier’s First Gunfighter claims Tutt drew first but Hickok…he didn’t miss.

His favorite weapons were a pair of 1851 twin cap & ball navy revolvers he’d wear butt first and cross-draw, cavalry style. In an age when weapons were not always on target Hickok was cold as ice and took a moment to steady his aim. On top of that the man was ambidextrous and aimed as well with one eye, as the other.

Nothing lasts forever. For Wild Bill Hickok the beginning of the end came in 1871. As Marshall for Abilene Kansas Hickok’s methods were tried and familiar and understood if not liked, by all. It is said that Hickok had but three options for troublemakers. They could leave on the train going east or the one heading west. Or they could go north. If they didn’t already know they would find out soon enough. The town cemetery was located to the north.

On October 5, 1871 he had a terrible shootout with local saloon owner, Phil Coe. Hickok managed to kill Coe but turned like a flash and fired at a third man, sprinting toward him. Both bullets hit their mark, mortally wounding Hickok’s deputy and good friend, Mike Williams. Hardened as he was it’s said that he cried, as they carried his friend away to die.

James Hickok was a gambler, a gunfighter and a part-time law man, what the History of Greene County, Missouri later described as “by nature a ruffian … a drunken, swaggering fellow, who delighted when ‘on a spree’ to frighten nervous men and timid women.”

Mike Williams was the last man he would ever kill.

On August 1, 1876, Hickok was playing poker at Nuttal & Mann’s saloon in Deadwood, in the Dakota territory. A seat opened up and John “Broken Nose Jack” McCall joined the game. McCall started out drunk and he lost. Badly. Hickok encouraged McCall to quit the game until he could cover his losses and he gave the man money, for breakfast. McCall accepted the money but felt insulted. Next day he returned, intending to settle the score.

Hickok was once again at the table but this time, with his back to the door. Wild Bill Hickok always sat with his back to the wall but this time Charles Rich had that seat, and wouldn’t give it up. McCall strode into the saloon and drew his .45-caliber revolver shouting “Damn you, take that!”. The bullet entered the back of Hickok’s head from point-blank range and came out his right cheek before striking another player on the wrist. Wild Bill Hickok was dead before his head hit the table. He held two pair in his hand. Aces and eights, remembered from that day to this, as the “dead man’s hand”.

The 5^th card hand is disputed and remains unknown, to this day.

Jack McCall was “tried” and acquitted by a loose collection of miners and local businessmen. He claimed to be avenging the death of his brother but there is no way to verify the story. McCall was re-arrested and re-tried, the second trial was held in Yankton, capital of the Dakota territory. Deadwood was at the time part of unorganized Indian territory and for that reason, the 2nd trial wasn’t considered double jeopardy.

Jack McCall was convicted that second time and sentenced to death, his hanging carried out on March 1, 1877. The cemetery was moved nearly five years later. When McCall was exhumed the noose was still tied, around his neck.

July 20, 1969 Holy Communion

Is there anyone alive that day who doesn’t remember Neil Armstrong’s words, as he stepped onto the lunar surface “There’s one small step for [a] man, and one great leap for mankind”. Yet something else happened up there only hours earlier, and most of us never heard about it.

On May 25, 1961, American President John F. Kennedy delivered a message before an audience at Rice University in Houston, articulating a goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” by the end of the decade.

The president wouldn’t live to see it, but his pledge would come to life 53 years ago, today. July 20, 1969.

The accomplishments of the Apollo series seem almost foreordained to us, the massive complexities of the undertaking, all but forgotten.

In the modern era, the most powerful supercomputers on earth put space telescopes into orbit, albeit sometimes with “vision” needing to be corrected with “glasses”, as in the case of the Hubbell space telescope.

In 1969, these guys were sending human beings 240,000 miles into space to land on the moon and come back again, on less computing “horsepower” than your cellphone.

Any one of countless calculations could have misfired, slinging three astronauts into the black void of space, there to spend eternity, in a flying tomb.

The Apollo spacecraft consisted of three components: a Command Module (CM) with a cabin for the three astronauts, a Service Module (SM) supporting the CM with propulsion, electrical power, oxygen and water; and a Lunar Module (LM) for the actual landing.

105338411-1531944151153nasamoonimage.530x298 — The moon as seen from the International Space Station on July 9, 2018 H/T Alexander Gerst, NASA

The vehicle was launched into space by a Saturn V rocket, designed to break apart as each of a series of rocket stages were exhausted, and separated from the main craft.

The 363-foot, nearly seven million pound Saturn V launch vehicle lifted off from the John F. Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island Florida on July 16, carrying mission commander Neil Armstrong, Lunar module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Command Module pilot, Michael Collins.

The Command/Service Module passed behind the moon at 12:21 Eastern Standard Time on July 19, firing its service propulsion engine and inserting the craft into lunar orbit.

Aldrin and Armstrong next moved into the LM, the only component to actually land on the lunar surface, with Collins remaining to orbit the moon in the CM.

The pair landed on a flat plain called the “Sea of Tranquility” on this day in 1969, three-foot probes touching the lunar surface at 4:18pm eastern standard time followed within seconds, by the LM itself. There were fifteen seconds of fuel left, in the “gas tank”.

Two men had landed in the 1/6th gravity of the moon, in a vehicle so delicate that the thing couldn’t support its own weight, back on earth. Half the world heard the words “Tranquility base, the eagle has landed”.

Back in Houston, controllers joked about turning blue. Now at last, they could breathe.

The schedule called for a break. A few hours to rest before that now-famous walk, on the surface of the moon.

Is there anyone alive that day who doesn’t remember Neil Armstrong’s words, as he stepped onto the lunar surface “There’s one small step for [a] man, and one great leap for mankind“. Yet something else happened up there only hours earlier, and most of us never heard about it.

Buzz Aldrin was a Christian. An elder in the Presbyterian church. He wanted to mark this momentous occasion and so he discussed it, with his pastor. The two agreed. He would bring with him the bread and the wine of Christian sacrament. He would receive holy communion, on the surface of the moon.

Conscious that this was a moment for all mankind and not only Christians, Aldrin invited listeners to pause, to reflect on the significance of the moment and to give thanks, in their own way. Then he opened the bread and the wine. Let him tell this part of the story, himself:

“In the radio blackout, I opened the little plastic packages which contained the bread and the wine. I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine slowly curled and gracefully came up the side of the cup. Then I read the Scripture, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Whosoever abides in me will bring forth much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing.” I had intended to read my communion passage back to earth, but at the last minute [they] had requested that I not do this. NASA was already embroiled in a legal battle with Madelyn Murray O’Hare [sic], the celebrated opponent of religion, over the Apollo 8 crew reading from Genesis while orbiting the moon at Christmas. I agreed reluctantly. I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility. It was interesting for me to think: the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the very first food eaten there, were the communion elements. And of course, it’s interesting to think that some of the first words spoken on the moon were the words of Jesus Christ, who made the Earth and the moon — and Who, in the immortal words of Dante, is Himself the “Love that moves the Sun and other stars”.
Buzz Aldrin

At 10:39 Eastern Daylight Time, Neil Armstrong opened the door. And stepped onto the surface of the moon.

July 19, 1916 The Red Zone

“The Zone Rouge is a 42,000-acre territory that, nearly a century after the conflict, has no human residents and only allows limited access”. – National Geographic

In an alternate history, the June 1914 assassination of the heir-apparent to the Habsburg Empire may have led to nothing more than a regional squabble. Little more than a policing action, in the Balkans. As it was, mutual distrust and entangling alliances drew the Great Powers of Europe into the vortex. On August 3, the “War to End Wars” exploded across the European continent.

The early 20th century has been called the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration”, and for good reason. As the diplomatic wrangling, mobilizations and counter-mobilizations of the “period preparatory to war” advanced through July, 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton made the final arrangements for his third expedition into the Antarctic. Despite the outbreak of war, 1^st Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered Shackleton to proceed. The “Endurance” expedition” departed British waters on August 8.

The German invasion of France ground to a halt that September. The first entrenchments were being dug as Shackleton himself remained in England, departing on September 27 to meet up with the Endurance expedition in Buenos Aires.

Endurance was destined to be stuck in the ice, stranding the men of the Shackleton Expedition floating on pack ice, in open ocean.

As the unofficial Christmas Truce descended over the trenches of Europe, Shackleton’s expedition slowly picked their way through the ice floes of the Weddell Sea.

The disaster of WWI became “Total War” with the zeppelin raids of January, as Endurance met with disaster of her own. The ship was frozen fast, with no hope of escape. As the nine-month battle unfolded across the Gallipoli Peninsula, Shackleton’s men abandoned ship’s routine and converted to winter station. Finally, camps were set up across the drifting ice. On November 21, the wreck of the Endurance slipped below the surface.

In December 1915, Allies began preparations for a summer offensive along the upper reaches of the river Somme. In February, Erich von Falkenhayn began an offensive in Verdun designed to “bleed France white”. The Shackleton party was at this time camped on an ice pack, adrift in open ocean.

The ice began to break up that April, forcing Shackleton and his party into three small lifeboats. Five brutal days would come and go in those open boats, the last of 457 days spent at sea before finally reaching the desolate shores of Elephant Island.

The whaling station at South Georgia Island some 720 miles distant, was the nearest outpost of civilization. The only hope for survival. Shackleton and a party of five set out on April 24 in a 20-foot lifeboat. They shouldn’t have made it, but somehow did. In hurricane-force winds, the cliffs of South Georgia Island came into view four weeks later.

Scaling those terrible cliffs alone was a survival epic, worthy of its own story. Somehow, not a man was lost. They must have been a sight, with thick ice encrusting long, filthy beards, saltwater-soaked sealskin clothing rotting from their bodies. The first people they came across were children, who ran in fright at the sight of them. At last, on May 20, 1916, the Shackleton expedition was saved.

Like a latter-day Robinson Crusoe emerged from the frozen wastes of the Antarctic, Shackleton asked for news on the war. How it had all ended. The response came back as if every word of it, was a hammer blow.

“The war isn’t over. Millions are dead. Europe is mad. The world is mad”.

Preparatory bombardment for the Somme offensive began that June, 1,500 guns firing 1.7 million shells into a twelve-mile front. 27 shells for every foot of the front. Allies went “over the top” on July 1, the single worst day in British military history. 19,240 British soldiers were killed in that single day, along with 1,590 French. German losses numbered 10,000–12,000. By July 19, 1916, the Somme offensive was just getting started. The battle would last another 122 days.

Former battlefield at Dououmont. The sign reads “Danger Access Forbidden”

The toll exacted by the 1st World War was cataclysmic in human, economic and environmental terms. After the war, hundreds of square miles along the north of France were identified, thusly:

“Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible”.

Vast quantities of human and animal remains permeate this “Zone Rouge”, an area saturated with unexploded shells and munitions of all sizes and types: gas, high explosive, anti-personnel. There are hand grenades and bombs, small arms and rusted ammunition, by the truckload.

Lochnagar Crater — Lochnagar bomb crater in the Somme Photo Credit Telegraph Newspaper: HENRY SAMUEL

Lead, mercury, chlorine, arsenic and other toxins permeate the soil. In two areas near Ypres and Woëvre, arsenic constitutes up to 17% of some soil samples. The Red Zone is smaller today than it once was but, to this day, 99% of all plants still die in some of these places.

During World War 1 the two sides fired an estimated ton of explosives at each other, for every square meter of the western Front. As many as one in three shells failed to explode. The Ypres salient alone was believed to contain as many as 300 million unexploded shells at the war’s end. 87 years after the cessation of hostilities, one “Red Zone” survey uncovered up to 150 shells per 5,000 square meters in the top six inches of soil, alone.

By means of comparison, an American football field covers 5,351.215 square meters.

Signs like this dot the landscape in parts of France and Belgium: “Village Destroyed”

100 years after WW1, more than 20 members of Belgian Explosive Ordnance Disposal (DOVO) were killed in 1998, alone.

In June 2016, head of the bomb disposal unit at Amiens Michel Colling, said: “Since the start of the year we’ve been called out 300 times to dispose of 25 tons of bombs. As soon as you start turning the earth up”, Colling said, “you find them. At this rate, we have another 500 years to clear the area, so the work is far from over.”

The rotor blades from farmers’ tractors sometimes set them off. In June 2016, farmer Claude Samain plowed up a Lee-Enfield rifle. Last held in all probability by a British infantryman, the rifle was now seeing the sun for the first time, in 100 years. He placed it on a pile rusted old shells and ironworks. As a farm kid of the 1930s, Claude remembered turning up bodies in his fields. ‘We find shells every time we turn the earth over for potatoes or sugar beet.” he explained.

French farmers call the stuff, récolte de fer. Iron harvest.

800px-Red_Zone_Map-fr — By derivative work: Tinodela (talk)Zone_rougeRed_Zone_Map.jpg: Lamiot – Zone_rougeRed_Zone_Map.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4798391

That part about Claud Samain comes from a Mirror story published July 1, 2016 and written, by Andy Lines. “As Claude, 76, passed me the gun” Lines writes, “he smiled: “You Brits are so respectful of what happened here on the Somme. “Three coachloads of children arrive every single day to learn what happened 100 years ago – you never see any French children.””

Nor I would guess, any American children, and that’s a damned shame.

July 18, 1969 When Hell was in Session

“After a period of time, pain becomes an all‑encompassing entity, a fiery, blinding devil that courses into every part of the brain until you would literally do anything to escape it. After three cycles, the rig became too much. It had driven me to the point where I would have happily committed suicide to escape it. I would have run my own mother down with a truck if the price was freedom from pain, but I could do nothing. I felt my heart pumping mightily to force the blood through my strangled limbs and hoped that it would give out.

I prayed to die”.

POW, Commander Jeremiah Denton

A lot can happen in eight years. Like when your preschooler comes home one day, and he’s ready for high school. Eight years after that your little bundle of joy is a college graduate and headed for medical school. It’ll take another eight years or so to become a doctor, depending on the specialty.

As a POW, Jeremiah Denton endured eight years in a brutally harsh captivity punctuated by daily abuse and frequent torture sessions, and went on to become a United states Senator.

His story deserves to be told.

Jeremiah Denton had already compiled an impressive resume when he slid into the cockpit of the A-6A Intruder attack aircraft on July 18, 1965.

Entering the United States Naval Academy in 1943, Denton joined an “accelerated class” to graduate in June 1946, along with future President of the United Sates, Jimmy Carter. Then came Armed Forces Staff College, a Master of Arts in International Affairs from George Washington University and the Naval War College, where Denton’s thesis revolutionized naval tactics earning top honors, including the prestigious President’s Award, in 1964.

Get an education or you’ll get stuck…how was that again…Mister Kerry?

Then it was July 18, 1965. For Jeremiah Denton, that was the day when everything changed.

While serving as a naval aviator, Commander Denton was leading a 28-aircraft bombing mission over North Vietnam, along with Bombardier/Navigator LTJG Bill Tschudy. The pair was forced to bail out when one of their own Mark 82 bombs exploded prematurely, sending the A-6A Intruder spinning out of control.

The two were quickly captured and brought to a colonial prison the French used to call, La Maison Centrale. The Vietnamese called this place Hỏa Lò, the name translating as “fiery furnace”. Some Americans called it the Hell Hole but for most, mocking their captors was a technique that helped them survive. They called this place, the “Hanoi Hilton”.

“They beat you with fists and fan belts. They warmed you up and threatened you with death. Then they really got serious and gave you something called the rope trick.”
Jeremiah Denton

Over nearly eight years of captivity, Denton, Tschudy and others endured daily abuse up to and including outright torture. Torments unimaginable but for the most sadistic among us. Shackles on the floor meant for far smaller men caused Americans’ hands to turn black. Lice and cockroaches joined with rats and all manner of vermin to prey on men shackled to the floor, forced to live in their own excrement as they slowly, starved.

American POW is escorted by North Vietnamese militia

Denton endured eight years of these stinking, fetid cells including periods of solitary confinement, locked day and night in a sweltering box and shackled to the floor of an iron box, measuring 3-feet by nine..

Over 700 Americans were held captive by enemy forces over roughly ten years during the war in Vietnam. 114 did not survive. One of them went on to run unsuccessfully, for President. He can tell you better than I can, what it was like.

And then there were the torture sessions. Let Denton tell his own story about an episode with one guard, he and his fellow POWs called Mickey Mouse.

“Having beaten them in my last two torture sessions in 1966, I thought I could do it again. In an effort to deter the punishment, I wrote Mickey Mouse a note reminding him of my previous success, and said that if they were determined to torture me, they would have to torture me to death. That was a mistake. It was a pledge I couldn’t keep.

The next stage was rear cuffs and leg irons. A guard dragged me around the rough cement floor until the leg cuffs began tearing into my ankles. He jerked me left and right, lifted me by the rear handcuffs – the same mess all over again for hours. Then I was left on the floor for a day.

Mickey Mouse gave me one more chance to write the letter, and again I refused.

In the months since my last torture, the Vietnamese had developed a rig that was unknown to me, and it was the perfect answer to my ability to take pain until passing out. As soon as Mickey Mouse left the room, a guard slammed open the door, and held out a rope and a four-and-a-half-foot pole, pointed at one end.

Two more guards came into the room, and the three of them began tying my wrists and lower forearms together in front of me. They forced my elbows apart and forced my knees between them, and pushed the pole through the hole created by my elbows and knees. Then they tipped me back on my spine and propped my feet on an overturned stool so that my feet were raised about a foot off the ground.

In essence, I was in the fetal position, my thighs pressed against my chest so tightly that I could hardly breathe. My body was tipped at such an angle that most of my weight was on the tip of my spine. The pole was the key to the rig. If the rig was properly tied, I would pass out eventually and fall on my side; the end of the pole would hit the floor and slide out of the rig, easing the pressure on my arms and restoring circulation. The pain that came with the blood circulation would bring me back to consciousness; thus the prisoner couldn’t beat the rig by passing out.

“A stone mural memorializes inmates who were tortured and killed at the former Hoa Lo prison, otherwise known as the Hanoi Hilton, which held Vietnamese revolutionaries and later American prisoners of war”. Hat tip KIM GAMEL/STARS AND STRIPES

“As a POW in the Hanoi Hilton, I could recall nothing from military survival training that explained the use of a meat hook suspended from the ceiling. It would hang above you in the torture room like a sadistic tease — you couldn’t drag your gaze from it. During a routine torture session with the hook, the Vietnamese tied a prisoner’s hands and feet, then bound his hands to his ankles — sometimes behind the back, sometimes in front. The ropes were tightened to the point that you couldn’t breathe. Then, bowed or bent in half, the prisoner was hoisted up onto the hook to hang by ropes. Guards would return at intervals to tighten them until all feeling was gone, and the prisoner’s limbs turned purple and swelled to twice their normal size. This would go on for hours, sometimes even days on end.”
ex-POW, Sam Johnson

Over time, camaraderie became the key to survival. POWs learned to communicate. During his first four months in solitary confinement, Lt. Cmdr. Bob Shumaker noticed one particular inmate, regularly dumping his slop bucket. In a note scribbled out on a scrap of toilet paper and slipped under the door, Shumaker wrote, “Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton. If you get note, scratch balls as you are coming back.” The soldier did as asked and even wrote his own note, identifying himself as Air Force Captain Ron Storz.

“A diorama shows an inmate in solitary confinement at the former Hoa Lo prison, otherwise known as the Hanoi Hilton, which held Vietnamese revolutionaries and later American prisoners of war”. Hat tip KIM GAMEL/STARS AND STRIPES

POWs developed a tap code to warn about particularly sadistic guards, what to expect during interrogations and a hundred other things. They even tapped out jokes. A kick on the wall meant laughter. Air Force pilot Ron Bliss once said the Hanoi Hilton “sounded like a den of runaway woodpeckers.”

In this place each other, was all they had. “I guess they thought if they had a Southern white boy taking care of a black man” Porter Halyburton once told the Washington Post, “it would be the worst place for both of us,” Fred Vann Cherry turned out to be tougher than either man realized, at the time. “It turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me, said Halyburton”.

Halyburton looked after his injured cellmate, changing the dressings on his infected wounds, feeding him, bathing him and watching over him. “He said I saved his life, and he saved my life. . . . Taking care of my friend gave my life some meaning that it had not had before.”

Humbert Roque “Rocky” Versace was a US Army Ranger who planned to become a priest of the Roman Catholic faith , who planned to come back to Vietnam to help the many orphans who had touched his heart. It was a bright and shining future, never meant to be.

Despite terrible injuries and incessant beatings Rocky would crawl away and escape, only to be beaten, yet again. So fluent was he in the tongue of his captors he would berate them and their communist ideology in their own language, humiliating his captors in front of villagers.

Rocky Versace was captured, but never defeated.

Even from solitary confinement Rocky would belt out words of inspiration to his fellow prisoners, sung to the tune of popular songs. Finally his guards had had enough. Rocky Versace was murdered in cold blood and later earned the Medal of Honor, for his defiance.

In July 1966, Denton and 50 fellow POWs were bound and paraded through the streets of Saigon, beaten and kicked by North Vietnamese civilians, along the way.

And yet some acts of defiance, astonishing even to contemplate. Summoned to appear to appear in a propaganda film to attest to his “good treatment”, Vice Admiral James Stockdale battered his own face with a stool and cut his hands and wrists, rather than appear in such a production. The man was a leader and an inspiration to his fellow captives, for which he too was awarded the Medal of honor.

“We had a war to fight and were committed to fighting it from lonely concrete boxes. Our very fiber and sinew were the only weapons at our disposal. Each man’s values from his own private sources provided the strength enabling him to maintain his sense of purpose and dedication. They placed unity above self. Self-indulgence was a luxury that could not be afforded.”
Vice Admiral James Stockdale

Jeremiah Denton was summoned to produce such a video. Feigning trouble with the bright lights, he blinked out the word T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code.

The stunt earned him no end of abuse when his communist captors figured out what he had done but by that time, it was too late. Somehow the tape made it out. It was the first confirmation of long-standing rumors that American POWs were in fact, being tortured.

Civilian pilot Ernest Cary Brace was the longest serving POW, at 7 years, 10 months and 7 days. Brace’s wife Patricia assumed he was dead and remarried, a fact he learned at the processing station, following his release.

With the war winding to a close, Tschudy and Denton were released on February 12, 1973. The release was part of “Operation Homecoming”, the return of some 591 POWs following the Paris Peace Accords.

POWs in their cell awaiting release, March 29, 1973

How you or I would endure even a day of such a place is a question, without an answer. Many of them are gone now, those years of abuse surely robbing many of their later years. And yet endure they did.

Jeremiah Denton wrote a book about his experiences called When Hell was in Session, if you want to learn more. James Stockdale, John McCain, Denton and others went on to further service, to the nation. There are those who will tell you some of our POWs, Never came home. All of them, every one, have earned the right to be remembered.

July 16, 1979 Yellow Dirt

To this day the spill at Church Rock remains the US’ worst nuclear disaster, and best kept secret.

They call themselves Diné, (din neh) meaning literally, “the people”. Originally a hunter/gatherer culture, the Diné are believed to have migrated from northwestern Canada and eastern Alaska long before there were such place names, around the year 1400. Mostly hunters and gatherers at this time, they lived in a region known as Dinétah, occupying parts of the modern American states of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

Over time, the Diné adopted the farming methods of the Pueblo peoples, mainly the “three sisters” of corn, squash and beans. They acquired livestock, sheep and goats mostly, the animals becoming not only food sources but also symbols of wealth, and status. Tewa-speaking pueblo groups called them Navahu, meaning large areas of cultivated land. Spanish settlers knew them as, Navajo.

In the 21st century, many Navajos live a traditional lifestyle including language, religious practices a social structure based on kinship, and locality of residence. Despite the legacy of bitterness resulting from 19th century conflicts between first nations and relative newcomers to the North American continent, Navajos have volunteered for military service in numbers disproportionate to their population.

Shiprock (Navajo: Tsé Bitʼaʼí, “rock with wings” ), located in traditional Dinétah territory (northwestern New Mexico). – H/T Wikipedia

During World War 1 some 10,000 “Indians” including Navajo served the United States armed services both as volunteers, and conscripts. Navajo “code talkers” served a pivotal role during World War 2, building on the work of the Choctaw during the “Great War” and producing secret communications based on native languages, indecipherable to the adversary.

The number four is sacred to the Navajo people. The four cardinal directions of north, south, east and west. The four seasons. The four original clans and the creation story, of four worlds. Four mountains mark the land given to the people of Navajo lore, by the creator. The four day-parts of dawn, day, dusk and night. Four colors correspond to each of four mountains marking the land: the color white for shell, the blue of turquoise, the shimmering black of obsidian and the color yellow, representing but one shade of the multi-colored abalone.

A yellow that most assuredly DOES NOT symbolize, Uranium.

In August 1939, a letter written by physicist Leó Szilárd and signed by Albert Einstein warned President Franklin Roosevelt that Nazi Germany was working to develop a war-winning super weapon. A bomb, capable of obliterating entire cities in a single blast. The American-led effort to produce such a weapon began in 1942, the US Army component of the team at first headquartered in Manhattan. So began the ultra-secret “Manhattan Project” culminating in the Trinity test blast of July 16, 1945 and that famous line from the “father of the atomic bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita:

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds“.

First used during WW1 to harden the steel hulls of ocean-going vessels, vanadium is often bound with oxygen and other substances in a lemon yellow, radioactive mineral called carnotite. One of the substances contained in this “yellow dirt”, is Uranium.

First identified by German chemist Martin Klaproth in 1789, Uranium is 40 times as common as silver but only rarely found, in concentration. The ancient Romans used the stuff in its natural oxide form as early as the year 79, to add a yellow hue to ceramic glazes.

The Navajo were no strangers to the yellow rocks of the Dinetah, possessed as it is of one of the highest concentrations of such minerals, on the planet. Fed by the need to defeat Nazi Germany, the 1942 “discovery” of yellow dirt on Navajo lands set off a feeding frenzy from which the people, have yet to recover.

Such concentrations were well suited to the work of men and wheelbarrows and Navajo men went to work, as miners. That the stuff was dangerous in high concentrations was well known to mining corporations, military and government officials alike, but no matter. There was a war going on.

The squared-off contours of blasted rock it turned out, made for very fine building material. The by-products of Uranium mines could be used in a cement nearly the equal of concrete, so these unstable, mildly radioactive minerals were concentrated not only in the lives of Navajo miners but also in their homes, in which they built masonry additions. The ovens in which they cooked their bread were often built, using yellow rocks. The clothing of Navajo children playing outside were stained by yellow dust.

Even among those not in daily contact with dangerous minerals many lacked running water, on the reservation. Water resources themselves were often contaminated.

“Susan Black, who lost her son Sylvester Stanley to Navajo neuropathy, drank from the open pits during her pregnancy while sheep herding. The grazing territory had been so parched at times they drank from puddles in depressions of the sandstone less than a mile from the mine where uranium residue was everywhere”. Hat tip TeenVogue, and Gail Fisher

World War 2 gave way to the “cold war” but the need for uranium, seemed without end. Sickness and death occurred among the Navajo in numbers disproportionate, to their population. Cancers of the liver, kidney, stomach and lungs. A mélange of symptoms affecting mostly (but not entirely) children received a name, hitherto unheard of: “Navajo Neuropathy“.

“William McCray, 4, overlooks a clean up operation of radium and uranium contaminated soils near his home on Oct. 9, 2009. Uranium mining from the mid-1900s left over 500 unregulated mines scattered once mining stopped in 1986. Photo by Teddy Nez” – H/T indiearizona.com

Helen Nez is but one person, among many. For most of her adult life she drank from a spring located on Navajo lands, in northeastern Arizona. Uranium levels were at least five times greater than safe drinking water standards, but who knew? The stuff has no odor. It has no taste. Helen Nez gave birth, ten times. Four of her children died, as toddlers. Three died as young adults, their bellies bloated, their eyes, turned gray. The last three are all adults now. All of them have serious health problems.

There is barely a parent alive who doesn’t dread the death of their child. Helen Nez lost seven. Thanks to Helen Nez herself and northcountrypublicradio.org for this image

Four generations of Navajo have come and gone since that first discovery, in 1942. Activist types have come, and they went home. Mining company commitments to restore the land to its original form, failed to materialize. Elected officials conducted hearings. Congressmen with familiar names like Waxman and Udall showed seemingly genuine concern, but little came of it. Bureaucratic Washington offered bland and infuriatingly meaningless responses to pointed questions. The EPA even refused assistance to one family whose hilltop home was the victim of “natural” radiation. Until their “hill” was demonstrated to be a pile of mine waste.

By 1977, the discarded by-products of Uranium mines formed piles large enough climb and enjoy the view, but I wouldn’t recommend it. That was the year United Nuclear Corporation took a different approach. A pond.

Mining and crushing up to 4,000 tons of ore daily leaves a prodigious amount of waste. “Yellowcake” is extracted leaving a sandy sludge, called tailings. These may contain up to 85% of the radioactivity, of the original ore. Another byproduct of the acid leach solvent extraction process is called “liquor”, a witches brew containing Thorium-230, Radium-222, Lead-210 and other isotopes.

A 20-foot breach in the Church Rock tailings dam opened around 5:30 on the morning of July 16, 1979 H/T Wikipedia

At 5:30am on July 16, 1979, the dam holding back the Church Rock tailings pond, gave way . A thousand tons of Uranium mill waste and 93 million gallons of acidic, radioactive tailings solution gushed through an ever-widening breach in the dam, down the pipeline arroyo and into the Puerco River, a tributary to the Little Colorado River.

A little perspective on what 93 million gallons looks like.

Was there anyone alive on March 28, 1979, who didn’t hear about Three Mile Island? The New York-Washington media corridor went wall to wall with coverage as they tend to do, with stories that effect them personally.

And yet, the Church Rock nuclear release four months later far exceeded that of Three Mile Island. Ever hear of Church Rock? Don’t feel bad if the answer is no. The “News” just wasn’t that into it. The Navajo Nation requested a disaster declaration from New Mexico Governor Bruce King, in order to facilitate federal assistance with the cleanup. For reasons which remain unclear, the governor refused such a declaration.

Between 1944 and 1986 some 521 mines extracted 30 million tons of Uranium ore from Navajo lands. Most of that was sold to the United States Atomic Energy Commission, until 1966, the only customer.

To this day the spill at Church Rock remains the US’ worst nuclear disaster, and best kept secret.

In 1990, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was passed into law establishing an administrative framework for compensating victims of radiation, whether from atmospheric nuclear testing or employment in uranium mining. As of April 20 2018, 34,372 claims have been approved with total compensation amounting to $2,243,205,380. On June 7, 2022, the president signed into law the RECA Extension Act of 2022. This law extends the termination of the RECA Trust Fund and the filing deadline for all claims for two years from its date of enactment.

Thus far, several Navajo have received the maximum compensation allowed under the act, of $100,000. Even so. It’s difficult to understand how something like this remains to torment so few, for so many years. All that really matters is results. Everything else is excuses.

Afterward

“The 2020-2029 Ten-Year Plan continues the effort of the previous Five-Year Plans and identifies the next steps in addressing the human health and environmental risks associated with the legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation. The Ten-Year Plan was developed in cooperation with multiple federal partner agencies including Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of Energy, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Navajo Area Indian Health Service, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry to incorporate goals and milestones for achieving assessment and cleanup actions”.
EPA.gov

Special hat tip to LA Times journalist Judy Pasternak for her disturbing and important new book, Yellow Dirt. Much of the material in this essay is based on her work.

July 15, 1799 Rosetta Stone

Two centuries after its discovery, the term Rosetta Stone is still used to describe that first clue, leading to new levels of human understanding.

In geologic time, the Holocene epoch refers roughly to the last 11,700 years, a time delineated by the retreat of massive formations which, together, constitute the last of eight glacial periods to occur over the last 740,000 years.

The north of Africa was once wetter than it is now, a vast, green savannah of grasses, lakes and trees with abundant herds of ungulates. The geologic record reflects some of the earliest attempts at agriculture and animal husbandry in this region sometime around the sixth millennium, BC.

The gradual end of this “African humid period” led great numbers of small nomadic and tribal cultures to settle in the fertile Nile River valley where predictable, seasonal flooding supported a cessation of hunter/gatherer sustenance and increased reliance on the growing of food and the raising of domesticated livestock.

This inevitably led to trade among and competition between the various tribes and the growth of some, often at the expense of others. And then at last, there were two.

In the third century BC the Egyptian priest Manetho grouped a long succession of Kings over a period of thirty dynasties, beginning with the mythical King Menes. It is he who united what was then the two kingdoms of upper and lower Egypt.

This early dynastic period gave way to the first of three relatively stable periods in ancient Egypt, separated by long intermediate periods of chaos. These were the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms.

Taken as a whole, ancient Egypt created a system of mathematics, the earliest known peace treaty and a lasting legacy of art, and literature. Innovations in quarrying and construction led to monumental temples, pyramids and statuary inspiring scientific and archeological investigation which lasts, to this day.

It is often forgotten or overlooked in the modern era that, since the time of Alexander, the Ptolemaic rulers of ancient Egypt, were Greek. Ptolemy V rose to power at the age of six (r. 205-180BC) on the death of his father, Ptolemy IV.

The most successful of several violent uprisings against this foreign rule began in upper Egypt in 206BC and lasted for 20 years under the leadership of the last of the Egyptian Pharoahs, Hyrgonaphor (Haronnophris) and Chaonnophris.

Full restoration of the Ptolomaic dynasty occurred around 196BC, when Ptolomy V was only fourteen. A royal decree was issued by the high priests of Memphis, proclaiming the glorious victory of the young ruler and proclaiming the royal cult of King Ptolomy V Epiphanes. This Memphis Decree was inscribed on a black stone slab believed to measure some 4-feet 11-inches in length, one of several such carved stone stelas erected throughout the region, of the late revolt. Three renditions of the proclamation were carved into the granodiorite stela, the same text rendered in Hieroglyphic, Greek and Demotic script, the ‘language of the people’ itself derived from the much older, Hieratic script.

The Ptolomaic dynasty came to an end with the death of Cleopatra, the Macedonian queen who spoke Egyptian, along with several other languages. There followed in Egypt nearly 700 years of Roman and later Byzantine rule, ending with the Arab Conquests of 639 – 646.

Within three hundred years or so the old language, was dead. These were the Heiratic cursive script most often drawn out with brush and ink on papyrus and the Hieroglyphic system comprising some 900 symbols representing words and sentences most often used for permanent inscription, on stone. The scholar viewing the ancient texts throughout much of the first 2,000 years of the modern era, had no idea what he was looking at.

Rosetta stone superimposed on an artist’s conception of what the original, may have looked like.

French forces led by Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Ottoman territories of Egypt and Syria in 1798, with an ultimate intention of joining forces with the Indian ruler Tipu Sultan to drive the British from the Indian subcontinent. It was the French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard who discovered this first among a handful of bilingual Hieroglyphic scripts on July 15, 1799 near the ancient city of Rashid (Rosetta) from which the stele derives its name.

The long work of translation began with that of Antoine Isaac Silvestre de Sacy who first deciphered the 32 lines of Demotic script, in the middle.

The work was performed thanks to a knowledge of the Coptic language derived from the ancient Egyptian tongue, and fortified by reference to readily identifiable aspects of the ancient Greek text.

“In the ancient city of Thmuis, at Tell Timai in the Nile Delta of northern Egypt, archaeologists have encountered the first tangible evidence corresponding to the time and events of the Great Revolt alluded to on the Rosetta Stone. There, in a layer characterized by broad devastation, a number of pottery kilns (left) were systematically destroyed and later built over. This unburied male human skeleton (right) was discovered lying amid the rubble. It bears unmistakable signs of a violent death“. – Hat tip archaeology.org

On September 27, 1822, French scholar Jean-François Champollion announced the successful translation, of the Rosetta Stone.

Today, large pieces of the original stele are broken away. Much of the original text is lost. Other bilingual and even trilingual inscriptions have since been discovered but this was the first time western scholars were able to peep through that small keyhole into one of the great civilizations, of antiquity.

The Rosetta Stone by The British Museum on Sketchfab – H/T Archaeology.org

Two centuries later the term “Rosetta Stone“ still describes that first clue, leading to new levels of human understanding.

July 14, 1933 Willy Hitler, USN

Drafted into the Navy, the induction officer asked his name. The reply came back, “Hitler”. “Glad to see you Hitler,” the officer replied, “My name’s Hess.”

Suppose for a moment that Gallup or Ipsos were to conduct a survey, naming the top ten bad guys in history. One name on the top of such a list, would be that of the Nazi party leader, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler himself wouldn’t have the term, “Nazi”. That was bitter insult, coined long before the rise of the Nazi party. Hitler himself used the term, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei for the National Socialist German Workers ‘ Party or NSDAP for short.

Alois Johann was born on June 7, 1837 to the 42-year-old unmarried peasant woman, Maria Schicklgruber. The boy’s father was known to her, but the priest wrote “illegitimate” on the baptismal certificate. So it was the boy took the surname Schicklgruber, after his mother.

Johann Georg Hiedler married Maria when Alois was five. By age ten, the boy was sent to live with Heidler’s brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. Three years later, Alois Schicklgruber moved to Vienna where he worked as a cobbler’s apprentice, finally becoming a low level civil servant in the Austrian Finance Ministry.

There are plenty of variations on the Hiedler family surname. ‘Hiedler’ apparently derives from an Austro-Bavarian dialect, meaning one who lives by a Hiedl, or underground spring. Other derivations come from the German Hutte (hut), as in “one who lives in a hut”. Be that as it may, the variations appear to have been interchangeable. Common variations included Hitler, Hiedler, Hüttler, Hytler, and Hittler.

There are plenty of tales regarding the man’s paternity, but none are any more than that. Alois Schicklgruber ‘legitimized’ himself in 1877, adopting a variant on the name of his stepfather and calling himself ‘Hitler”.

Historian Alan Bullock has described Alois Hitler as “hard, unsympathetic and short-tempered”. He seems to have had a problem with marital fidelity, as well. Alois was thirty-six when he married Anna Glasl-Hörer, the 50-year-old, invalid daughter of a customs official. By age 43, he was carrying on with the 19-year-old servant girl, Franziska “Fanni” Matzelsberger, with whom he had an illegitimate son, Alois Jr.

Alois Sr. was for all intents and purposes ‘married’ to the Matzelsberger girl for the next two years, while his lawful wife Anna, sickened and died. Hitler, 45, married Matzelsberger, age 21 in May, 1883. The couple’s second child Angela, was born two months later.

Sixteen-year-old Klara Pölzl moved in years earlier as household servant, and no woman was going to do to the new Mrs. Hitler, that which she herself had done to another woman. Frau Hitler demanded that the “servant girl” be sent away but Pölzl would return the following year, as she too sickened and died.

170px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1989-0322-506,_Adolf_Hitler,_Kinderbild_retouched — Adolf Hitler as an infant

Pölzl was by this time pregnant with the first of the couple’s four children, but there was a problem. There are many candidates for Alois (Schicklgruber) Hitler’s biological father. If Hitler’s step-father was in fact his real sire as implied by the name change, that made Klara Pölzl his first cousin once removed, at least by law. The couple was too close to marry.

Alois petitioned the church for a humanitarian waiver. The waiver was granted and Klara Pölzl became the third Frau Hitler in January 1885. The couple welcomed little Gustav into the world, four months later.

The future leader of the National Socialist Party was born four years later, by that time the only child born to his mother Klara. Her first three children Gustav, Ida and Otto, all died in childhood.

Alois Hitler, Sr. seems to have been a thoroughly unlikable man, lording it over neighbors and brutalizing his own family. Historian Robert Waite notes that, “Even one of his closest friends admitted that Alois was ‘awfully rough’ with his wife and ‘hardly ever spoke a word to her at home’.” The man would berate Klara and children alike and apparently beat them, on a regular basis. Alois Jr. left home never to return, following a violent argument with his father. The elder Alois swore that he would never give the boy a single mark of inheritance, over what the law required. The youngest, Adolf, grew up a frail and sickly child, doted on by his mother and often at the center of violent rages by his father.

Alois tried to browbeat his youngest into following him, into the civil service. The boy feared and detested his father, and wanted nothing to do with him. Adolf Hitler would follow the path which would bring him to that list of the great monsters of the 20th century, as his brother Alois Jr., made his own way in the world.

Some apples don’t fall far from the tree. Alois Hitler Jr. went to Ireland, where he met Bridget Dowling at the Dublin Horse Show. Nothing more than a poor kitchen porter at the Shelbourne Hotel, Hitler managed to convince her that he was, in fact, a wealthy hotelier, touring Europe. The couple eloped to London in June 1910. Bridget’s father William threatened to bring Hitler up on charges of kidnapping, and only relented when Bridget pleaded with him to stop.

It was a decision she would come to regret.

The couple had their only child in 1911, William Patrick Hitler. Alois left home in Liverpool in May 1914 to establish himself in the safety razor business. He had become violent by this time and begun to beat the boy. Bridget refused to go with William’s father and ended up, raising the boy alone.

War descended over Europe in 1914, when the elder Hitler met and (bigamously) married his second wife, Hedwig Heidemann.

heinz-640x462 — Heinz Hitler was captured by Soviet Forces in 1942, and tortured to death

Alois’ second marriage produced a son, Heinz, who went on to become a committed Nazi. In 1933, William moved to Germany, in an effort to take advantage of his uncle’s rise to power. He got a job at an Opel factory and later worked as a car salesman, but badgered his uncle for a better job. At last, he threatened to sell embarrassing family stories to the newspapers, if Uncle Adolf didn’t do something to improve his “personal circumstances”.

Ironically, Nazi party regulations precluded Adolf Hitler himself from proving his own “Aryan Purity”, based on his father’s unknown paternity. For years, Hitler was dogged by hushed speculation about “Jewish blood”. Quiet rumor became front-page headline this day in 1933, when Austrian newspapers published reports that the German Chancellor, sworn enemy of all things Jewish was himself, a Jew. That same day, July 14, all political parties but the Nazi party, were banned from Germany.

William-Patrick-Hitler — Pharmacists Mate William Patrick Hitler

Der Führer of the fledgling thousand-year Reich promised his nephew a “high ranking post” in 1938, in exchange for renunciation of his British citizenship. Suspecting a trap, the younger Hitler fled Germany, traveling to the United States in 1939. William Patrick Hitler petitioned President Roosevelt for permission to join the American side which he received, in 1944.

Drafted into the Navy, the induction officer asked his name. The reply came back, “Hitler”. “Glad to see you Hitler,” the officer replied, “My name’s Hess.”

William Patrick Hitler served honorably for the duration of the war, holding the rank of Pharmacists Mate (a designation later changed to Hospital Corpsman) and earning a purple heart in the process. The infamous dictator’s half-brother Heinz was captured by Soviet forces in 1942, and tortured to death. Their infamous uncle took his own life in 1945 and died, childless.

The younger Hitler’s childhood home in Liverpool was destroyed in the last air raid of the Liverpool Blitz, in 1942.Alexander

Wishing to live a life of anonymity, “Willy” Hitler changed his name to William Patrick Stuart-Houston at the end of the war, and married fellow German emigre Phyllis Jean-Jacques in 1947. The couple made a home in Patchogue, New York and raised four sons: Alexander Adolf (b. 1949), Louis (b. 1951), Howard Ronald (1957–1989), and Brian William (b. 1965).

William Patrick Stuart-Houston, nephew to one of the worst dictators in history, fought with honor on the side of his uncle’s mortal enemy and died July 14, 1987.

None of Willy and Phyllis’ four sons ever produced an heir. Much has been made of a pact to end the Hitler line. Alexander Adolf Stuart-Houston became an American social worker, and always dismissed such speculation. There was no such agreement among the last four boys in the family. It’s just the way things turned out.

July 8, 1776 The Liberty Bell

In Denver, a group of blind girls were allowed to touch the Bell. One of them wanted to read the letters. You could have heard a pin drop, as a hushed crowd heard a small, sightless girl, pronounce these words: “Proclaim…Liberty…throughout…all…the…land.”

For thousands of years, bells have rung out to announce religious and civic occasions, weddings, funerals and other public announcements. The rich tones of a well-cast bell is capable of carrying for miles. Great Britain has so many bells, the place has been called the “Ringing Isle”.

The first bell in the city of Philadelphia would ring out to alert citizens of civic events and proclamations, and to the occasional public danger. Originally hung from a tree near the Pennsylvania State House, (now known as Independence Hall), that first bell dates back as far as the city itself, around 1682.

Sesqui-bellpostcard001-501x800 — Eighty-foot-high replica of the Liberty Bell, built for the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in 1926

The “Liberty Bell” was ordered from the London bell foundry of Lester and Pack in 1752, (today the Whitechapel Bell Foundry), though that name wouldn’t come around until much later. Weighing in at 2,080 lbs, the bell arrived in August of that year. Written upon it was a passage from the Book of Leviticus, the third book of the Hebrew Bible; the third of five books of the Torah. “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof”.

Mounted to a stand to test the sound, the first strike of the clapper cracked the bell’s rim. Authorities attempted to return it, but the ship’s master couldn’t take it on board. The bell was broken into pieces, melted down and re-cast by two local workmen, John Pass and John Stow.

The recast bell used 10% copper, making the metal less brittle. Pass and Snow bragged that the bell’s lettering was clearer on this second casting than the original. The newly re-cast bell was ready in March 1753, when City officials scheduled a public celebration to test the sound. There was free food and drink all around, but the crowd gasped and started to laugh when the bell was struck. It didn’t break this time, it was worse. Somebody said the thing sounded like two coal scuttles, banging together.

Humiliated, Pass and Stow hurriedly took the bell away, and once again broke it into pieces, and melted it down.

The whole performance was repeated, three months later. This time, most thought the sound to be satisfactory, and the bell was hung in the steeple of the State House. One who did not like the sound was Isaac Norris, speaker of the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly. Norris ordered a second bell in 1754 and attempted to return the old one for credit, but his efforts proved unsuccessful.

157d02a0f0a37536d64b750a91cce3b6 — Chief Little Bear with Liberty Bell, 1915

The new bell was attached to the tower clock, while the old one was, by vote of the Assembly, devoted “to such Uses as this House may hereafter appoint.” One of the earliest documented uses of the old bell comes to us in a letter from Benjamin Franklin to Catherine Ray, dated October 16, 1755: “Adieu. The Bell rings, and I must go among the Grave ones, and talk Politiks.”

Legends have grown around the bell, ringing in the public reading of the Declaration of independence on July 4, 1776. The story is a myth. There was no such reading on that day. The 2nd Continental Congress’ Declaration was announced to the public four days later on July 8, to a great ringing of bells. Whether the old bell itself rang on this day, remains uncertain. John C. Paige, author of an historical study of the bell for the National

Park Service, wrote “We do not know whether or not the steeple was still strong enough to permit the State House bell to ring on this day. If it could possibly be rung, we can assume it was. Whether or not it did, it has come to symbolize all of the bells throughout the United States which proclaimed Independence.”

Bells are easily melted down and recast as bullets, and the bell was removed for safekeeping before the British occupation of Philadelphia, in 1777. The distinctive large crack began to develop sometime in the early 19th century, around the time when abolitionist societies adopted the symbol and began calling it “The Liberty Bell”.

The Philadelphia Public Ledger reported the last clear note ever sounded by the Liberty Bell, in its February 26, 1846 edition:

“The old Independence Bell rang its last clear note on Monday last in honor of the birthday of Washington and now hangs in the great city steeple irreparably cracked and dumb. It had been cracked before but was set in order of that day by having the edges of the fracture filed so as not to vibrate against each other … It gave out clear notes and loud, and appeared to be in excellent condition until noon, when it received a sort of compound fracture in a zig-zag direction through one of its sides which put it completely out of tune and left it a mere wreck of what it was.”

The bell would periodically travel to expositions and celebrations, but souvenir hunters would break off pieces from the rim. Additional cracking developed after several of these trips, and the bell’s travels were sharply curtailed after its return from Chicago, in 1893.

With the 1915 World’s Fair about to open in San Francisco, there were discussions of sending the Liberty Bell to California. The bell had never been west of St. Louis at that time, and the Philadelphia establishment balked. Former Pennsylvania governor Samuel Pennypacker complained that “The Bell is injured every time it leaves…children have seen this sacred Metal at fairs associated with fat pigs and fancy furniture. They lose all the benefit of the associations that cling to Independence Hall, and the bell should, therefore, never be separated from [Philadelphia].”

With the California tour off for now, Philadelphia Mayor Rudolph Blankenburg offered the next best thing. Bell Telephone had just completed a new transcontinental line, 3,400 miles of wire suspended from 130,000 poles. Three hundred dignitaries gathered at Bell offices in Philadelphia and San Francisco on February 11, 1915. With Alexander Graham Bell himself listening in from his own private line in Washington DC, the Liberty bell was sounded at 5pm, with all of them listening in on candlestick phones.

The California trip gained fresh impetus following the May 7 sinking ofn the British liner Lusitania. A cross-country whistle stop tour was planned for the bell, using the “best cushioned” rail car, in history.

As the nation’s most prominent German-American, Mayor Blankenburg himself came along, delivering “loyalty lectures” to immigrant groups on the importance of devotion to their adopted home country. “It is important to prepare against a possible foe abroad“, he would say, “….Let us, therefore, abolish all distinctions that may lead to ill feeling and let us call ourselves, before the whole world, Americans, first, last and all the time.”

apr2017_k13_libertybell — “A quarter of the U.S. population (including a girl in Moline, Illinois) turned out for the Liberty Bell”. H/T Smithsonian

The Liberty Bell drew crowds beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Fully one- quarter of the American population turned out to see the liberty bell, a generator rigged so the bell could be seen by day or night. In many cities, those on the train couldn’t see where the crowd ended.

“Big Jim” Quirk, one of the police officers assigned to the train, recalled “In Kansas City, an old colored man who had been a slave came to touch it—he was 100 years old.” When the train pulled into another town, “an aged Mammie hobbled to the door of her cabin near the tracks, raised her hands and with her eyes streaming tears called out, ‘God Bless the Bell! God Bless the Dear Bell!’ It got to us somehow.”

Liberty Bell, Atchison, Kansas — Liberty Bell 1915, Atchison, Kansas. H/T Smithsonian Magazine, for this image

The Liberty Bell was enlisted once again in 1917 as the United States prepared to send her soldiers “over there” in the first democratically financed war, in history. Americans hurried to buy up war bonds, far exceeding the national goal of $2 Billion.

Today, two other bells join the Liberty Bell in the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, PA. Weighing in at 13,000lbs, a half-ton for every original colony, the Centennial Bell was cast for America’s 100th birthday in 1876. To this day, this enormous bell rings once an hour, in the tower at Independence Hall.

In 1976, the people of Great Britain presented a gift to the people of the United States, in recognition of the friendship between the former adversaries. Weighing in at six tons and cast at the same foundry which produced the original bell, the “Bicentennial Bell” was dedicated by her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth, II, on July 6, 1976. On the side of the bell are inscribed these words:

FOR THE
PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES
FROM THE
PEOPLE OF BRITAIN
4 JULY 1976
LET FREEDOM RING

Back in 1893, the Liberty Bell passed through Indianapolis. Former President Benjamin Harrison may have had the last word on the subject, a sentiment fit to be inscribed on the old bell itself, below that verse from the Torah. “This old bell was made in England”, Harrison said, “but it had to be re-cast in America before it was attuned to proclaim the right of self-government and the equal rights of men.”

July 1, 1863 Gettysburg

The “North” came up from the south that day, the “South” approached from the north. No one wanted the fight to be in Gettysburg, it was more of an accident.

After two years of civil war, the man his soldiers called “Marse Robert” sought to take the war to his adversary. Robert E. Lee intended to do enough damage to create overwhelming political pressure in the North, to end the war and let the South go its own way. Lee had his best cartographers draw up maps of the Pennsylvania countryside, all the way to Philadelphia.

One hundred and fifty-nine years ago today, the Union and the Confederacy met in the south central Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.

Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker, to whom Lee contemptuously referred as “Mr. F.J. Hooker”, wanted to attack Richmond, but Lincoln ordered him to intercept Lee’s army to protect Washington DC. Hooker was replaced on the 28th by Major General George Gordon Meade, “that damn old goggle eyed snapping turtle” to his men, in a move that so surprised the general that he thought he was being arrested over army politics, when the messenger came to his tent.

The “North” came up from the south that day, the “South” approached from the north. No one wanted the fight to be in Gettysburg, it was more of an accident.

What started out as a skirmish turned into a general engagement as fighting cascaded through the town. Confederate forces held the town at the end of the day, with the two armies’ taking parallel positions along a three-mile-long “fishhook” from Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill to the north, toward two prominences known as Big and Little Round Top to the south.

Fighting would continue and prove inconclusive at Culp’s Hill on day two, as the two armies stretched their positions toward the Round Tops.

Dan Sickles, the Tammany Hall politician best known for murdering the nephew of Francis Scott Key (he would be the first in American legal history to plead temporary insanity), had been ordered to move his corps into position on cemetery ridge, anchored at Little Round Top. Instead he took his corps a mile forward, into a Peach Orchard, only to be torn apart in the Confederate assault. Some of the most savage fighting of the Civil War took place that day in places like Devil’s Den, the Wheat Field, and bloody run. Sickles himself lost a leg to a cannonball. There was a foot race to the top of Little Round Top, leading to as many as 15 attacks and counterattacks for control of this small prominence at the Union’s extreme left. At the end of the day, the positions of the Armies had not changed.

On day 3, the last day, Lee came up the middle. 13,000 Confederate soldiers came across 1¼ miles of open field, to attack the Union Center. The target was a position between a small copse of trees and a corner in a stone fence called the angle. Cannon fire from their left, right and center tore them apart as they pressed on. A battered remnant actually penetrated Union lines: the “high water mark” of the Confederacy. It’s anyone’s guess what would have happened, had 4,000 Confederate cavalry smashed into the Union rear at that point, as Lee seems to have intended. But a 23-year-old general named George Armstrong Custer had waded into them with his 450 Union cavalry, routing the much larger force and very possibly changing history.

Lee withdrew in the rain of the 4th, ending the largest battle of the civil war. Lincoln was convinced that the time had come to destroy the Army of Northern Virginia, but Meade and his battered army did not follow. Lee and his army slipped back across the line and returned to Confederate territory. The most lethal war in American history would continue for two more years.

Years before, then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis brought some 75 camels into West Texas, to try the creatures out as pack animals. Davis’ camel experiment had been a flop but the King of Siam, (now Thailand), didn’t know that. Seeing the military advantage to the Confederacy, the King wrote to President Abraham Lincoln, proposing to send elephants to help the Union war effort. This “animal arms race” appears to have gotten no further than the King’s one letter to Lincoln but, the imagination runs wild, doesn’t it? What would war elephants have looked like, at Gettysburg?

June 28, 1981 Marathon of Hope

“The running I can do, even if I have to crawl every last mile. We need your help. The people in cancer clinics all over the world need people who believe in miracles. I am not a dreamer, and I am not saying that this will initiate any kind of definitive answer or cure to cancer. But I believe in miracles. I have to”. Terry Fox, letter to the Canadian Cancer Society, October 1979

We’ve all known a “natural”. Be it academics, sports or what-have-you, we’re talking about that person who is naturally wired for a task. Who just…”gets it”. Then there is a second type. One born without that natural talent whose success depends on guts, drive and determination to succeed.

When it came to sports, Terrance Stanley Fox was one of those.

The second child of four born to Betty and Rolland Fox, Terry arrived on July 28, 1958 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the family later moving to British Columbia, the westernmost province in Canada.

Terry’s best buddy Doug Alward was a basketball natural, starting for the Mary Hill Jr. High School Cobras. Fox loved the sport but basketball is difficult for a guy who stood barely five feet high in Jr. high. Coach Bob McGill suggested he go out for cross country which he did, but he never lost the desire to play hoops.

Fox would practice every morning before school and during the summers. He finally made the team in grade 8, dead last, and only played a single minute for the whole season. By grade 10 Fox and Alward were first string guards for the Port Coquitlam High School Ravens. Later that year the two shared the school’s Athlete of the Year award. Fox continued with cross-country running and also soccer and rugby. By grade 12 Fox was actually the better basketball player while Alward went on to distinguish himself, in long distance running.

The year was 1976. The year when Terry first noticed that pain, in his right leg.

Terry began college that year at Simon Fraser University where he tried out and won, a place on the schools Junior Varsity basketball squad. A car wreck later that year did little to help that sore knee. Terry worked through it but, a training run the following spring left him in so much pain he could barely move. Suspecting something more serious Rolly took his son to the family doctor.

Dr. Michael Piper suspected osteogenic sarcoma, an aggressive bone cancer which often begins in the knee. The diagnosis was confirmed on March 4. The only choice was amputation.

The night before his surgery, high school basketball coach Terri Fleming brought him an article. It was about an amputee named Dick Traum who went on to run the marathon, in New York city. “Someday” he told nurse Judith Ray the following morning, “I’m going to do something like that”. Doctors amputated the leg above the knee on March 9, 1977.

Terry was walking again in a few weeks, with the help of an artificial leg. There were chemotherapy sessions and physiotherapy. Golf dates with his father and through it all, a growing sense of…something. Yes his hair was falling out but Terry saw other cancer patients during this time and somehow, he felt like one of the lucky ones. Many of these people were destroyed by this disease, some were dying, but…Terry…he had a Future.

There were sixteen months of chemotherapy and, despite the nausea, Terry took up wheelchair basketball. His hands would blister and bleed as he struggled to master this new approach to an old game. Within two years he had made the national team.

But he never forgot that article, or his own sense of responsibility to those who, like himself, suffered from this terrible disease.

Fox began to train at night, first a half-mile, and then more. Prosthetist Ben Spencer helped with modifications to his artificial leg, making it easier to withstand the impact of running.

There was a half-marathon in 1979 in which he finished dead last but only ten minutes behind, the last two-legged runner. Around this time Terry had an idea that turned into an obsession. A fund raiser for cancer research. He would run across Canada in a “Marathon of Hope” and he would do it, the following spring. The goal to raise $24 million, representing a dollar from every person in Canada.

The marathon of hope got off to a wet, cold start on April 12, 1980, when Terry dipped his artificial leg in Atlantic waters, off of Newfoundland. He filled two bottles, one for a souvenir and the other, he would dump into the Pacific.

Terry Fox, Doug Alward and Darrell Fox near White river, Ontario. H/T the Canadian Encyclopedia

The response was disappointing throughout much of the maritime provinces. Little had been done to publicize the run. Very few even knew it was happening. Terry pushed on running about 42km a day, supported by Doug Alward in the van and later joined by Terry’s brother, Darrell.

Nothing whatever had been done to publicize the run throughout all of Quebec but that all changed in Ontario, with the help of businessman Isadore Sharp and Bill Vigars, of the Canadian Cancer Society. Journalist Leslie Scrivener of the Toronto Star began to write a weekly column on Fox’s run.

He became a national star in Ontario, gaining personal meetings with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, British actress Maggie Smith and NHL Greats Darryl Sittler and Bobby Orr.

For 143 days Fox ran ever westward covering a total of 5,373 kilometers, equivalent to over 128 full-length marathons. It all came to an end on September 1 in a place called Thunder bay.

The pain he could live with. Terry Fox had demonstrated that but the cough was relentless, and debilitating. The cancer had returned and now, it was in his lungs. He was airlifted on September 2.

STOCK Terry Fox. Published 19800903 with caption: Terry Fox’s mother and father are embraced by his companion Bill Vigars as ambulance attendants wheel Terry to jet for flight to British Columbia. Photo taken by David Cooper Sept. 2, 1980.

The CTV telethon airing later that week raised $6.5 million, for cancer research. Fox received the Companion to the Order of Canada two weeks later, becoming the youngest person ever to win Canada’s highest civilian honor. That December he won the Lou Marsh trophy as Canada’s Athlete of the Year.

Port Coquitlam High School was later renamed, in his honor.

Donations topped $24.17 million on February 1, 1981, achieving Terry’s goal of raising a dollar from every person in Canada. Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope was a success. His struggle against that hideous disease which had taken his leg, was not.

There were long months of cancer treatments but this thing was relentless. In June 1981 Terry contracted pneumonia. He went into a coma on June 27. Terry Fox died at 4:35 am on June 28 at Royal Columbian Hospital. He would have been 23 in about a month.

Flags across all of Canada were lowered that day, to half-staff. Let Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau have the last word in this story as he himself spoke, before the House of Commons:

“It occurs very rarely in the life of a nation that the courageous spirit of one person unites all people in the celebration of his life and in the mourning of his death. Our profound gratitude for the gift which Terry gave to all of us, the gift of his own boundless courage and hope.”

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