Odds & Ends – Page 13 – Historical Easter Eggs

December 6, 1768 The Murderer’s Dictionary

Among the entire catalog of works there is no tale so queer as the Oxford English dictionary, and the convicted murderer who helped to bring it into being. From an insane asylum, no less.

For the great reference works of the English language, the beginnings were often surprisingly modest. Encyclopedia Britannica was first published on this day in 1768 in Edinburgh, Scotland: part of the Scottish enlightenment. Webster’s dictionary got its beginnings with a single infantrymen of the American Revolution, who went on to codify what would become the standardized system of spelling for “American English“. In Noah Webster’s dictionary, ‘colour’ became ‘color’, and programme’ became ‘program’, a novel concept at a time when the thought of a “correct“ way of spelling, was a new and unfamiliar idea.

Among the entire catalog of works there is no tale so queer as the Oxford English dictionary, and the convicted murderer who helped bring it into being. From an insane asylum, no less.

Dissatisfied with what were at that time a spare four reference works including Webster’s dictionary, the Philological society of London first discussed what was to become the standard reference work of the English language, in 1857. The work was expected to take 10 years in compilation and cover some 64,000 pages. The editors were off by sixty years. Five years into the project, the team had made it all the way to “ant“.

William Chester Minor was a physician around this time, serving the Union army during the American Civil War.

The role of this experience in the man’s later psychosis, is impossible to know. Minor was in all likelihood a paranoid schizophrenic, a condition poorly understood in his day.

As a combat surgeon, Minor saw things that no man was ever meant to see. Terrible mutilation was inflicted on both sides at the 1864 Battle of the Wilderness. Hundreds were wounded and unable to get out of the way of the brush fire, burning alive those sufferers too broken to move, before the horrified eyes of comrades and enemies, alike. One soldier would later write: It was as though “hell itself had usurped the place of earth“.

Dr. Minor was ordered to brand the forehead of an Irish deserter, with the letter “D”. The episode scarred the soldier, and left the doctor with paranoid delusions that the Irish were coming to ‘get him’.

As a child born to New England missionaries working in Ceylon, Minor was well adjusted to the idea of foreign travel, as a means of dealing with travail. He took a military pension and moved to London in 1871, to escape the demons who were by that time, closing in.

One day, Minor shot and killed one George Merritt, a stoker who was walking to work. He believed the man had broken into his room. The trial was published widely, the “Lambeth Tragedy” revealing the full extent of Minor’s delusional state, to the public.

Minor was judged not guilty on grounds of insanity, and remanded “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known”, to the Broadmoor institution for the criminally insane. Victorian England was by no means ‘enlightened’ by modern standards, and inmates were always referred to as ‘criminals’ and ‘lunatics’. Never as ‘patients’. Yet Broadmoor, located on 290 acres in the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire was England’s newest such asylum, and a long way from previous such institutions.

Minor was housed in block 2, the “Swell Block”, where his military pension and family wealth afforded him two rooms, instead of the usual one. In time, Minor acquired so many books that one room was converted to a library. Surprisingly, it was Merritt’s widow Eliza, who delivered many of the books. The pair became friends, and Minor used a portion of his wealth to “pay” for his crime, and to help the widow raise her six kids.

Broadmoor-outside — Broadmoor asylum for the criminally insane

Dr. James Murray assumed editorship of the “Big Dictionary” of English in 1879, and issued an appeal in magazines and newspapers, for outside contributions. Whether this seemed a shot at redemption to William Minor or merely something to do with his time is anyone’s guess, but Minor had nothing but time. And books.

William Minor collected his first quotation in 1880 and continued to do so for twenty years, always signing his submissions: Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire.

The scope of the man’s work was prodigious, he himself an enigma, assumed to be some country gentlemen. Perhaps one of the overseers, at the asylum.

In 1897, “The Surgeon of Crowthorne” failed to attend the Great Dictionary dinner. Dr. Murray decided to meet his mysterious contributor in person and finally did so, four years later. In his cell. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall, when this Oxford don was ushered into the office of Broadmoor’s director, only to learn that the man he looked for, was an inmate.

murray-at-work-scriptorium — Dr. “Murray at work in his scriptorium, a dedicated room filled with books, at Oxford University (date unknown)”. H/T allthatsinteresting.com

Dr. Minor would carefully index and document each entry, which editors compared with the earliest such word use submitted by other lexicographers. In this manner, over 10,000 of his submissions made it into the finished work, including the words ‘colander’, ‘countenance’ and ‘ulcerated’.

By 1902, Minor’s paranoid delusions had crowded out his mind. His submissions came to an end. What monsters lurked inside the man’s head is anyone’s guess. Home Secretary Winston Churchill ordered Minor to be removed back home to the United States, following a 1910 episode in which Minor emasculated himself, with a knife.

The madman lived out the last ten years of his life, in various institutions for the criminally insane. William Chester Minor died in 1920 and went to his rest in a small inauspicious grave, in Connecticut.

Over seventy years in compilation, only one single individual is credited with more entries to the greatest reference work in the history of the English language, than this one murderer, working from a home for lunatics.

Feature image, top of page: Dr. Murray and his Oxford University editorial team, 1915. H/T allthatsinteresting.com

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December 5, 63BC The Catiline Conspiracy

Lucius Sergius Catilina was a Roman Senator, best remembered for his attempt to overthrow the Republic. In particular the power of the aristocratic Senate. He seems to have been an unsavory character, having murdered first his brother in law and later his own wife, before being tried for adultery with a vestal virgin.

Following the overthrow of the Monarchy in 509BC, the Rome of antiquity governed itself, as a Republic. The government was headed by two consuls, annually elected by the citizens and advised by a Senate. The Republic operated on a separation of powers principle, with checks and balances and a strong aversion to the concentration of power. Except in times of national emergency, no single individual was allowed to wield absolute power over his fellow citizens.

A series of civil wars and other events took place during the first century BC, ending the republican period and leaving in its wake an Imperium, best remembered for its conga line of dictators.

medium_Lucius_Sergius_Catilina — Lucius Sergius Catilina

Lucius Sergius Catilina was a Roman Senator during this period, best remembered for his attempt to overthrow the Republic. In particular the power of the aristocratic Senate. He seems to have been an unsavory character, having murdered first his brother in law and later his own wife, before being tried for adultery with a vestal virgin.

Catilina’s second wife, the formidable Aurelia Orestilla, reputedly murdered the Senator’s grown son, for objecting to the match. The American political commentator and Rutgers professor Leonard A. Cole once said “You are not responsible for what your friends do, but you will be judged by the company you keep“. Seems about right, to me.

The first of two conspiracies bearing his name began in 65BC. Catilina was supposed to have conspired to murder a number of Senators on their entering office, and making himself, Consul. He may or may not have been involved at this stage, but he certainly would be for the second.

Aurelia_Head_Keyshot_File.31_writing puny — H/T zbrushcentral.com for this astonishing representation, of the second wife of Catilina

In 63BC, Catilina and a group of heavily indebted aristocrats concocted a plan with a number of disaffected veterans, to overthrow the Republic. On the night of October 18, Crassus brought letters to Consul Marcus Tullius Cicero warning of the plot. Cicero read the letters in the Senate the following day, later giving a series of four speeches: the Catiline Orations, considered by many to be his best political oratory.

In his last speech, delivered in the Temple of Concordia on December 5, 63BC, Cicero established a basis for other speakers to take up the cause. As Consul, Cicero was not allowed to voice an opinion on the execution of conspirators, but this speech laid the groundwork for others to do so, primarily Cato the Younger.

The actual Senate debates are lost to history, leaving only Cicero’s four orations, but there was considerable resistance in the Senate to executing the conspirators. They were, after all, fellow aristocrats.

Armed forces of the conspirators were ambushed at the Milvian Bridge, where the Via Flaminia crosses the Tiber River. The rest were executed by the end of December. Cicero’s actions had saved the Republic. For now.

At one point during this period, then-Senator Julius Caesar stepped to the rostrum to have his say. He was handed a paper and, reading it, stuck the note in his toga and resumed his speech. Cato, Caesar’s implacable foe, stood in the senate and demanded that Caesar read the note. It’s nothing, replied the future emperor, but Cato thought he had caught the hated Caesar red handed. “I demand you read that note”, he said, or words to that effect. He wouldn’t let it go.

Finally, Caesar relented. With an actor’s timing, he pulled out the note and read it to a hushed senate. It turned out to be a love letter, a graphic one, wherein Servilia Caepionis described in detail what she wanted to do with Caesar when she got him alone. As if the scene wasn’t bad enough, Servilia just happened to be Cato’s half-sister.

Here’s where the story becomes very interesting. Caesar was a well-known lady’s man. By the time of his assassination, the Emperor had carried on with Servilia Caepionis, for years. Servilia had a son, called Marcus Brutus. He was 41 on the 15th of March, 44BC. The “Ides of March”. Caesar was 56. The Emperor’s dying words are supposed to have been “Et tu, Brute?”, as Brutus plunged the dagger in. “And you, Brutus?” But that’s not what he said. Those words were put in his mouth 1,643 years later, by William Shakespeare.

death-of-caesar-2 — Ciaran Hinds plays Julius Caesar in the series Rome

Eyewitness accounts to Caesar’s last words are lost to history, but more contemporary sources recorded his dying words to be “Kai su, Teknon?” In Greek, it means “And you, my child?”

It seems unlikely that Brutus murdered his own father on the Ides of March. The dates don’t seem to work out. Still, it makes you wonder…

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November 26, 1783 Franksgiving

In 1941, a Commerce Department survey demonstrated little difference in Christmas sales between those states observing Franksgiving, and those observing the more traditional date. To this day, the years 1939, ’40 and ’41 remain the only outliers, outside the fourth-Thursday tradition.

The first Autumn feast of Thanksgiving dates well before the European settlement of North America.

Historian Michael Gannon writes that the “real first Thanksgiving” in America took place in 1565, when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés landed in modern-day Florida, and “had the Indians fed and then dined himself.” Likely, it was salt-pork stew with garbanzo beans. Yum.

According to the Library of Congress, the English colony of Popham in present-day Maine held a “harvest feast and prayer meeting” with the Abenaki people in 1607, twenty-four years before that “first Thanksgiving” at Plymouth.

George Washington proclaimed the first Presidential National day of Thanksgiving on November 26, 1783, “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness“.

So much for separation of Church and state.

President Abraham Lincoln followed suit in 1863, declaring a general day of Thanksgiving to be observed on the last Thursday of November. The date seemed to work out OK and the tradition stuck, until 1939.

Roughly two in every seven Novembers, contain an extra Thursday. November 1939, was one of them.

In those days, it was considered poor form for retailers to put up Christmas displays or run Christmas sales, before Thanksgiving. Lew Hahn, General Manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, was afraid that extra week was going to cut into Christmas sales.

Ten years into the Great Depression with no end in sight, the Federal government was afraid of the same thing. By late August, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided to deviate from the customary last Thursday, and declared the fourth Thursday, November 23, to be a national day of prayer and thanksgiving.

Opposition to the plan was quick in forming. Alf Landon, Roosevelt’s Republican challenger in the earlier election, complained of Roosevelt’s impulsiveness, and resulting confusion. “More time should have been taken working it out” Landon said, “instead of springing it upon an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.”

In Plymouth Massachusetts, self-described home of the “first Thanksgiving”, Chairman of the Board of Selectmen James Frasier, “heartily disapproved”.

The short-notice change in schedule disrupted vacation plans for millions of Americans, to say nothing of traditional Thanksgiving day football rivalries between high school and college teams, across the nation.

Unsurprisingly, support for Roosevelt’s plan split across ideological lines. A late 1939 Gallup poll reported Democrats favoring the move by a 52% to 48% majority, with Republicans opposing it by 79% to 21%.

Such proclamations represent little more than the “’moral authority” of the Presidency, and states are free to do as they please. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia observed Thanksgiving day on the non-traditional date, and twenty-two kept Thanksgiving on the 30^th. Colorado, Mississippi and Texas, did both.

The next two years, thirty-two states and the District of Columbia celebrated what came to be called “Franksgiving” on the third Thursday of the month, while the remainder observed a more traditional “Republican Thanksgiving” on the last.

In 1941, a Commerce Department survey demonstrated little difference in Christmas sales between those states observing Franksgiving, and those observing the more traditional date. A joint resolution of Congress declared the fourth Thursday beginning the following year to be a national day of Thanksgiving. President Roosevelt signed the measure into law on November 26.

Interestingly, the phrase “Thanksgiving Day” had appeared only once in the 20^th century prior to the 1941 resolution, that in President Calvin Coolidge’s first of six such proclamations.

Most state legislatures followed suit with the Federal fourth-Thursday approach, but not all. In 1945, the next year with five November Thursdays, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia reverted to the last Thursday. Texas held out the longest, celebrating its fifth-Thursday Thanksgiving for the last time in 1956.

To this day, the years 1939, ’40 and ’41 remain the only outliers, outside the fourth-Thursday tradition.

Popular comedians of the day got a lot of laughs out of it, including Burns & Allen and Jack Benny. One 1940 Warner Brothers cartoon shows two Thanksgivings, one “for Democrats” and one a week later “for Republicans.”

The Three Stooges short film of the same year has Moe questioning Curly, why he put the fourth of July in October. “You never can tell”, he replies. “Look what they did to Thanksgiving!”

Joe Toye, the “Easy Company” character in the 2001 HBO miniseries “A Band of Brothers”, may have had the last word on Franksgiving. Explaining his plan to get the war over quickly, the paratrooper quips “Hitler gets one of these [knives] right across the windpipe, Roosevelt changes Thanksgiving to Joe Toye Day, [and] pays me ten grand a year for the rest of my f*****g life.”

Sounds like a plan.

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November 22, 1307 Friday the 13th

On Friday the 13th of October, 1307, King Philip IV of France sent out his arrest warrant, against the knights Templar. Under pressure from the French King, Pope Clement issued the bull “Pastoralis praeeminentiae” on November 22, instructing Christian monarchs throughout Europe to arrest Templar officials and seize their assets. Within a couple of years, the order had ceased to exist.

From the dawn of Christianity, faithful believers have traveled from the length and breadth of Europe to the Holy City of Jerusalem, to renew and affirm a lifelong faith in scripture.

The Rashidun Caliphate captured the Holy City in 637, following a long siege. Except for an 88-year period following the first crusade in 1099, the Temple Mount in the old city has been under Islamic administration, from that day to this.

Nevertheless, the number of these pilgrims increased over time. Many suffered robbery and even murder at the hands of Muslim fanatics, who considered it their Islamic duty to kill the “Infidel”.

The French knight Hugues de Payens approached King Baldwin II of Jerusalem and Warmund, Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1119, with a proposal. He would create a monastic order of warrior knights to protect these pilgrims, to be headquartered in a wing of the recaptured Al Aqsa Mosque, built on the ruins of the Temple of Solomon.

They were monks and they were warriors, “Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon”. For 200 years, these “Knights Templar” provided for the safe passage of Christian pilgrims.

The original nine knights of the order lived up to the “poor knights” part of their name, relying on financial donations for their survival. So destitute were they that their emblem showed two knights riding a single horse.

That would change.

In time, the Templars gained favored charity status, their new-found wealth helping them to found an early banking system. Pilgrims to the holy land could deposit gold coins in Paris and take them out in Jerusalem, or vice-versa. The knights Templar achieved vast wealth in this manner, at their height running over 800 castles, every one of which ran as a full service banking institution, financing military campaigns and shoring up the treasuries of Kings.

Following what must have seemed a never ending series of wars with the English King, Philip IV of France found himself deeply in debt to the Templars. In 1307, he needed to wriggle out of it.

It was Friday the 13th of October that year, when Philip sent out his arrest warrant. Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and scores of other French Templars were simultaneously arrested. Charges included everything from obscene secret rituals to financial fraud. “Confessions” were extracted by torture.

Under pressure from the French King, Pope Clement issued the bull “Pastoralis praeeminentiae” on November 22, instructing Christian monarchs throughout Europe to arrest Templar officials and seize their assets.

Thousands of knights fled to areas outside Papal control. Some were burned at the stake, or absorbed into the rival Knights Hospitaller. Within a couple of years, the order had ceased to exist.

Some will tell you that’s where the Friday 13th superstition began. Others say it goes back to the Friday when Eve offered Adam that forbidden apple, or the Friday crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Ancient Egyptians and Chinese believed the number 13 brought good luck, but some actually fear Friday the 13^th. It’s called “Friggatriskaidekaphobia”.

People in Spanish-speaking countries will tell you it’s the 13-part that brings bad luck, but for most, it’s Friday. At least one psychotherapist asserts that 21 million Americans are afraid of Friday the 13th.

Smithsonian Magazine reports that fear of the number 13 costs the United States a Billion dollars a year in absenteeism, train and plane cancellations and related commerce on the 13th of the month.

FDR avoided dinner parties with 13 guests. In France, there are professional 14th party guests called “quatorzieme“. I wonder how you get that job.

Who knows, maybe thirteen really is bad luck. There are 13 steps leading to the gallows, where the condemned meets the 13 knots of the hangman’s noose. The guillotine’s blade falls 13 feet. Diana hit the 13th pillar at Place d’Alma. Tupac was shot on Friday the 13th, and Fidel Castro was born on one.

So knock on wood, and cross your fingers. Watch out for black cats. Don’t look at the full moon through a pane of glass, and be sure throw salt over your shoulder. You’ll be fine.

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November 17, 1968 The Heidi Bowl

“Short of pre-empting Heidi for a skin flick, NBC could not have managed to alienate more viewers that evening.”

For a football fan, November 17, 1968 was shaping up to be one hell of a game. The second-best team in the world Oakland Raiders if the results of Super Bowl II were any indication, against the future American Football League champion and Super Bowl III winner, New York Jets.

NBC executives, were thrilled. The AFL was only eight years old in 1968 and as yet unproven compared with the older league, the NFL/AFL merger still two years in the future.

This game was expected to keep viewers in their seats, adding to the already large audience expected for the 7:00pm presentation of Heidi, a modern remake of the children’s classic story from 1880.

Most pro football games were played in 2½ hours in those days, and league executives scheduled this one, for three. The contract with Heidi prime sponsor Timex specified a 7:00 start and so the order went down. There would be no delays.

The game did not disappoint, voted among the ten most memorable games in professional football history in 1997, and the most memorable regular season contest, ever. The rivalry between the two clubs was intense, a high-scoring game where the lead changed, no fewer than eight times.

Network brass began to worry as early as 6:20 E.T., that the game wouldn’t end on time. 7:00 arrived with a minute & five seconds left to play and the Jets ahead, 32-29.

Network and affiliate switchboards began to light up, fans demanding the game be broadcast in its entirety, while others asked if Heidi would begin, on time.

NBC Sports executive producer Don “Scotty” Connal and network president Julian Goodman had by this time agreed to “slide the network”, to begin Heidi as soon as Curt Gowdy signed off from the game.

By this time phone switchboards were jammed, solid. NBC’s CIrcle-7 phone exchange blew twenty-six fuses, in an hour. Broadcast Operations Control (BOC) supervisor Dick Cline nervously watched the clock as Connal frantically tried to call, but couldn’t get through.

The television audience watched Oakland running back Charlie Smith return the kickoff from the end zone to the Oakland 22-yard line with 1:01 remaining on the clock, when the feed was broken.

Heads exploded across the nation as callers reached out to newspapers and television stations, even local police departments, to demand the score. And to bitch. Humorist Art Buchwald wrote “Men who wouldn’t get out of their chairs in an earthquake rushed to the phone to scream obscenities [at the network].”

Meanwhile, the Oakland Raiders staged the most amazing come-from-behind rally in the history of sport, scoring two touchdowns in nine seconds. Gamblers were apoplectic on learning the news, that the Raiders had beat the 7½ point spread.

The film was just reaching a most tear-jerking moment as Heidi’s paralyzed cousin Clara was taking her first halting steps, as NBC broke in: “SPORTS BULLETIN: RAIDERS DEFEAT JETS 43-32”.

If half the nation hated NBC at that moment, now the other half did, as well. Sportswriter Jack Clary quipped, “The football fans were indignant when they saw what they had missed. The Heidi audience was peeved at having an ambulatory football score intrude on one of the story’s more touching moments. Short of pre-empting Heidi for a skin flick, NBC could not have managed to alienate more viewers that evening.”

The “Heidi Bowl” was prime time news the following night, on all three networks. NBC’s Huntley-Brinkley Report aired the last sixty seconds while ABC Evening News anchor Frank Reynolds read excerpts from the movie, with clips of the Raiders’ two touchdowns cut in. CBS Evening News’ Harry Reasoner announced the “result” of the game: “Heidi married the goat-herder“.

NBC had no option but self-mockery, to redeem itself from the fiasco. One testimonial read “I didn’t get a chance to see it, but I hear it was great”. It was signed by Joe Namath.

A special “Heidi phone” was installed in the BOC, to prevent future such disasters. In 2005, TV Guide listed the Heidi Bowl at #6 of the “100 Most Unexpected TV Moments” in television history.

Actress Jennifer Edwards in the title role of the film, may have had the final word: “My gravestone is gonna say, ‘She was a great moment in sports'”.

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November 7, 1957 Nuke the Moon

The second Vanguard launch was nearly as bad as the first, exploding in flames only seconds after launch. Soviet leaders were beside themselves with joy, and stamped the twin disasters “Kaputnik”. “Flopnik”.

As World War II drew to a close in 1945, there arose a different sort of conflict, a contest of wills, between the two remaining Great Powers of the world. The “Cold War” pitted the free market economy and constitutional republicanism of the United States against the top-down, authoritarian governing and economic models of the Soviet Union. The stakes could not have been higher, as each side sought to demonstrate the superiority of its own technology, military might and, by implication, the dominance of its political and economic system.

American nuclear preeminence lasted but four short years, coming to an end with the first successful Soviet atomic weapon test code named “First Lightning”, carried out on August 29, 1949. Mutual fear and distrust fueled the Soviet-American “arms race”, a buildup of nuclear stockpiles beyond any rational purpose. An entire generation grew up under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. A single mistake, misunderstanding or one fool in the wrong place at the wrong time, initiating a sequence and bringing about the extinction of life on this planet.

The arms race acquired the dimensions of a Space Race on July 29, 1956, when the United States announced its intention to launch an artificial satellite, into earth orbit. Two days later, the Soviet Union announced its intention to do the same.

The early phase of the Space Race was a time of serial humiliation for the American side, the Soviet Union launching the first Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) on August 21, 1957, and the first artificial satellite “Sputnik 1” on October 4.

The first living creature to enter space was the dog “Laika“, launched aboard the spacecraft Sputnik 2 on November 3 and labeled by the more smartass specimens among the American commentariat, as “Muttnik”. Soviet propaganda proclaimed “the first traveler in the cosmos”, with heroic images printed on posters, stamps and matchbook covers. The American news media could do little but focus on the politics of the launch, as animal lovers the world over questioned the ethics of sending a dog to certain death, in space.

On the American side, the giant Vanguard series rocket was scheduled to launch the grapefruit-sized test satellite into earth orbit in September, but the program was plagued by one delay after another. The December 6 launch was a comprehensive disaster, the rocket lifting all of four feet off the pad before crashing to the ground in a sheet of flame, the satellite rolling free where it continued to beep, only feet from the burning wreck.

The second Vanguard launch was nearly as bad, exploding in flames only seconds after launch. Soviet leaders were beside themselves with joy, and stamped the twin disasters “Kaputnik”. “Flopnik”.

Out of this mess emerged an idea destined to go down in the Hare-Brain Hall of fame, if there ever is such a place. A show of force sufficient to boost domestic morale, while showing the Soviets, we mean business. It was the top-secret “Project A119”, also known as A Study of Lunar Research Flights. We would detonate a nuclear weapon, on the moon.

In 1957, newspapers reported a rumor that the Soviet Union planned a nuclear test explosion on the moon, timed to coincide with the lunar eclipse of November 7, and celebrating the anniversary of the Glorious October Revolution. Edward Teller himself, the ‘Father of the H-Bomb” is said to have proposed such an idea as early as February, to test the effects of the explosion in a vacuum, and conditions of zero gravity.

Today, we take for granted the massively complex mathematics, involved in hitting an object like the moon. In 1957 there was a very real possibility of missing the thing, and the bomb returning to earth.

Though the information is still classified, the project was revealed in 2000 by former NASA executive Leonard Reiffel, who said he was asked to “fast track” the program in 1958, by senior Air Force officials. A young Carl Sagan was all for the idea, believing at the time that living microbes may inhabit the moon, and a nuclear explosion may help in detecting such organisms.

In an interview with the Guardian newspaper, Reiffel said “It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on earth. The US was lagging behind in the space race.” The now-retired NASA executive went on to explain that “The explosion would obviously be best on the dark side of the moon and the theory was that if the bomb exploded on the edge of the moon, the mushroom cloud would be illuminated by the sun.”

The Air Force canceled the A119 program in 1959, apparently out of concern that a ‘militarization of space’ would create public backlash, and that nuclear fallout may hamper future research and even colonization efforts, on the moon.

Previously secret reports revealed in 2010 that Soviet leaders had indeed contemplated such a project, part of a multi-part program code named “E”. Project E-1 involved reaching the moon, while E-2 and E-3 focused on sending a probe around the far side of the celestial body. The final stage, project E-4, involved a nuclear strike on the moon as a “display of force”.

Construction plans for the aforementioned Hare-Brain Hall of Fame have yet to be announced but, it appears the place may need another wing.

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November 3, 1954 Godzilla

He was a Kaiju, a Japanese word meaning “strange creature”, more specifically a “daikaiju”, meaning a really, really big one.

In 1954, the fishing boat Daigo Fukuryū Maru (“Lucky Dragon No.5”) was working the grounds near the Marshall Islands, in the equatorial Pacific. At 6:45am local time, March 1, 23 fishermen were witness to “Castle Bravo”, a thermonuclear test explosion that lit up the western sky “like a sunrise”. Then came the sound the explosion. The TX-21 device with a predicted yield of 6 megatons, and code named “Shrimp”.

For eight minutes, these twenty-three men watched the mushroom cloud rise into the sky. An hour and one-half later came the fallout, the fine white dust, calcinated coral of the Bikini atoll, falling like snow from the sky.

None of the twenty-three crew members of the Lucky Dragon recognized the material as hazardous, and made no effort to avoid exposure. Some even tasted the stuff.

A few fishermen developed acute radiation sickness, over the next three days. By the time of their return to Yaizu on the 14th, all 23 were suffering from nausea, headaches, bleeding from the gums, and other symptoms. One was destined to die of a liver disorder on September 23, a complication of radiation sickness. They had entered the ranks of the “hibakusha”. The “explosion-effected people”.

The atomic explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only nine years in the past at this time, and a fierce anti-nuclear sentiment was building in Japan. In this context, there arose a metaphor for all that destruction. Literally rising from the sea, this product of the Japanese entertainment industry took the form of a monster. “Godzilla”, Ishirō Honda’s first film released by Toho Studios, this day in 1954.

The name is a portmanteau, two words combined to form a third, of the Japanese word “gorira”, (gorilla), and “kujira”, meaning whale. Godzilla was the Gorilla Whale, with the head of a Tyrannosaur, Stegasaur-like plates on his back and skin modeled after the keloid scarring of the hibakusha.

The original Godzilla (“ɡodʑiɽa”) was awakened by atomic testing and impervious to any but a nuclear weapon. Emerging from the depths with his atomic breath, havoc and destruction was always accompanied by the distinctive roar, a sound effect made by rubbing a resin glove down the strings of a bass violin, then changing the speed at playback.

The actor who played Godzilla in the original films, Haruo Nakajima, was a black belt in Judo. His expertise was used to choreograph the monster’s movements, defining the standard for most of the Godzilla films, to follow.

Originally an “it”, Godzilla was usually depicted as a “he”, although that became a little complicated with the 1998 American remake “Zilla”, when he started laying eggs.

He was a Kaiju, a Japanese word meaning “strange creature”, more specifically a “daikaiju”, meaning a really, really big one. Godzilla is the best known, but certainly not the only such creature. You may remember other kaiju, including Gamera, Mothra, King Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla and Rodan.

Godzilla has appeared in 28 original films, with more in the works. Over the course of his existence he has been a hero, a villain, and a destructive but values-neutral force of nature.

Godzilla got his own star on the Hollywood “Walk of Fame” in 2004, timed to coincide with the release of the 29th movie, “Godzilla: Final Wars.” Instead of nuclear weapons testing, this version was spawned by “environmental pollution”. It takes the superheroes of the “Earth Defense Organization” (but, of course) to freeze him back into the ice of the South Pole. The film was a flop, grossing less than $12 million after a production budget of $19 million.

The franchise came roaring back ten years later, when Godzilla was released in 2014, grossing $200 million domestically and $529.1 million on worldwide sales.

A film franchise 64 years in the making is still going strong, and will continue to do so, for the foreseeable future. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is set to be released in 2019 and Godzilla vs. Kong, in 2020.

Tip of the hat to http://www.mykaiju.com, for most of the images used in this story.

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October 31, 1883 The Dress in the Closet

Major Rathbone would heal, in time, but he never came to terms with his failure to protect the President. He was tormented, distraught with guilt, unable to understand what he could have done differently. Surely there must have been…Something.

An historical ghost story, for your Halloween enjoyment. But there are no such things as ghosts…Right?

Albany, New York businessman Jared Rathbone passed away in 1845, leaving a considerable fortune to his widow Pauline, and their four children.

New York Supreme Court Justice Ira Harris, himself a widower, joined his household with hers when the couple married, in 1848. There were now eight kids. A regular 19th-century “Brady Bunch.”

Pauline’s son Henry and Ira’s daughter Clara became close friends and later, more. Much more. They were step-siblings, yes, but there was no “blood” between them. Such a relationship seems not to have been so ‘odd’ then, as it may seem, today.

With the incoming Lincoln administration, Ira Harris was elected to the United States Senate, replacing Senator William H. Seward who’d been picked to serve in the new administration.

By the time of the War between the States, Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone were engaged to be married.

Rathbone served the Union army for the duration of the war, becoming Captain in the 12th Infantry Regiment and participating in the battles at Antietam and Fredericksburg. By the end of the war, Rathbone had attained the rank of Major.

Meanwhile, Senator Harris’ daughter Clara had conceived a friendship with the First Lady of the United States, Mary Todd Lincoln.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, before and after photographs tell of the burdens, born by the chief executive of a nation at war with itself. Making matters worse, the Lincolns had lost two of their four boys in childhood, by war’s end. In April 1865, a night out must have seemed like a welcome break. An evening at the theater. The play, a three-act farce by English playwright Tom Taylor. “Our American Cousin”.

The Lincoln’s companions for the evening were to be General Grant and his wife, Julia, but the General had other plans. It was probably convenient, because the ladies didn’t get along. Mary suggested her neighbor Clara Harris, of whom she was quite fond. And besides, didn’t her fiancée cut a dashing figure, in his blue uniform.

The story of that night is familiar, the assassin creeping up from behind. The mark of the coward.

John Wilkes Booth was himself one of the great actors of his day, and chose his moment, carefully. Raucous laughter and applause could be expected to follow the line “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdolagizing old man-trap!”

John_Wilkes_Booth_dagger — John Wilkes Booth dagger, used to attack Rathbone

The bullet was fired at point-blank range, entering the President’s skull behind the left ear and coming to rest, behind the right eye. Rathbone sprang to the attack but the assassin was ready, the dagger slashing the major nearly bone-deep, from shoulder to elbow. Rathbone made one last lunge, knocking Booth off balance as he leapt to the stage, below. Witnesses remembered that he cried out “Sic Semper Tyrannis”. Thus always, to tyrants. And then, he was gone.

In the President’s box, all was chaos. The first lady was inconsolable, sobbing and shrieking, like a wildcat. Rathbone was losing blood at a prodigious rate, a major artery slashed in the scuffle.

Clara’s new dress was soaked with the blood of her fiancee, her face splashed and clothing drenched through the layers of petticoats to the skin, beneath. The small group was taken across the street to the Peterson house, the President laid out on a bed. Henry Rathbone faded in and out of consciousness due to blood loss, raving in his delirium how he should have caught the assassin, his head on Clara’s lap, her handkerchief stuffed into the void where the bicep used to be.

There wasn’t even time to clean off her face. Mary Lincoln would just begin to calm down when she’d see Clara and fall apart, wailing “My husband’s blood!”. It wasn’t, but, no matter. Perception is reality. The death vigil lasted this way, for nine hours. The 16th President of the United States passed away at 7:22 the following morning, April 15, 1865.

Clara Harris couldn’t bring herself to wash that dress, nor to burn it. She hung it in a guest room closet, blood and all, in the family’s vacation home in New York.

What demons afflicted the mind of Henry Rathbone can only be guessed at, as a mental illness which had no name, crept into his soul. He was possessed with that night. Was I not quick enough? Or brave enough? Or Strong enough? It was MY fault. A Better Man would have taken that bullet. Or Stopped that man. No he wouldn’t…yes he would…but…I…what, the, hell, is WRONG WITH YOU???!!!

Washington DC was saturated with All Things Lincoln in April 1866, and Clara fled to the family home in Albany, to get away. There in that closet hung the bloody dress. On the anniversary of the assassination, she heard laughter, she knew she did, coming down the hall. Lincoln’s laughter.

Others reported the same thing in the following years. The sound of laughter. A single gun shot. But there are no such things as ghosts…Right?

Major Rathbone and Clara Harris were married in July 1867 and the couple had three children, Henry rising to the rank of brevet Colonel, in 1870. That was the year he resigned from the army, but work was hard to come by, due to increasing mental instability.

Rathbone convinced himself that Clara was unfaithful, and that she planned to take the kids away. He would fly into rages and she considered divorce, but couldn’t bear the thought, nor the stigma.

Clara went so far as to have the closet bricked up with that dress inside, like Montresor bricked up Fortunato. It changed, nothing. The family traveled to Europe and back in search of a cure, but Rathbone’s condition only worsened.

Vault_ag1982_0119x_085_1_opt — US Capitol as it looked, in 1872

Despite all this or possibly because of it, President Chester A. Arthur appointed Rathbone US Consul to the Province of Hannover in Germany, in 1882.

“Trick or Treating” had yet to take hold by this time, back in the United States. For most, October 31, 1883 passed pleasantly enough: Fall festivals, children bobbing for apples, young women consulting mirrors or tossing nuts into fires, to see whom they would marry. Not so, Henry Rathbone. He had Monsters in his head.

Two months later, December 23, Henry Rathbone shot his wife, and stabbed himself, in the chest. Six times. He lived. She died.

He claimed he was defending her, against an attacker.

The three children, Henry Riggs, Gerald Lawrence and Clara Pauline, went to live with relatives. Henry Reed Rathbone was convicted of their mother’s murder and committed to an asylum for the criminally insane in Hildesheim, Germany, there to spend the next twenty-eight years.

Henry Reed Rathbone died on August 14, 1911 and was buried, next to his wife.

In 1922, Henry Riggs Rathbone would be elected to the United States House of Representatives. Twelve years earlier he unbricked that closet and burned the hated dress, the dress which had stolen his childhood, and murdered his mother, and cursed his father. But there are no such things as ghosts…Right?

loudoncottagetoday — “The modern day home where Union Army Officer Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris resided”. Hat tip, HISTORIAN’S OFFICE, TOWN OF COLONIE.

Afterward

Burial customs are different in Germany, than in the United States. Grave plots are generally leased for a period of 20 – 30 years, with an option to renew. In 1952, officials with the city cemetery at Hanover/Engesohde looked over visitation records, and determined that there was no further interest, in Clara Harris or Henry Rathbone. The couple was exhumed and their remains burned, and disposed of. Like they were never even there.

But there are no such things as ghosts.

Right?

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October 30, 1938 War of the Worlds

Despite repeated notices that the broadcast was fictional, it’s been estimated that as many as 1.2 million thought the news, was real. According to Grover’s Mill folklore, a local named William Dock shot a water tower, mistaking it for a Martian in the moonlight. Traffic was jammed in both directions in the little town, as locals tried to get out, and curiosity seekers came to see what Martians looked like.

34.6 million miles distant, the Red Planet is our nearest neighbor in the solar system. To the Babylonians of 3000B.C. Mars was the God of Death, lending its name to the war gods of Greek and Roman antiquity, alike.

In the 19th century, amateur astronomer Percival Lowell was convinced that he saw canals on Mars, evidence of some great civilization. In 1898, H.G. Wells published a book about a Martian invasion of earth, beginning with a landing in England. On this day in 1938, the Mercury Theater of the Air brought the story to life.

The radio drama began with a statement that, what followed, was fictional. The warning was repeated at the 40 and 55-minute mark, and again at the end of the broadcast. It began with a weather report, and then went to a dance band remote, featuring “Ramon Raquello and his orchestra”. The music was periodically interrupted by live “news” flashes, beginning with strange explosions on Mars. Producer Orson Welles made his first radio appearance as the “famous” (but non-existent) Princeton Professor Dr. Richard Pierson, who dismissed speculation about life on Mars.

A short time later, another “news flash” reported a fiery crash in Grovers Mill, NJ. What was originally thought to be a meteorite was revealed to be a rocket machine as a tentacled, pulsating Martian unscrewed the hatch and incinerated the crowd with a death ray.

The dramatic technique was brilliant. Welles had his cast listen to the Hindenburg tape, explaining that was the “feel” that he wanted in his broadcast. Fictional on-the-spot reporter Carl Phillips describes the death ray in the same rising crescendo, only to be cut off in mid-sentence as it was turned on him.

The 60-minute play unfolds with Martians wiping out a militia unit sent against them, and finally attacking New York City with poison gas.

Ufo in the night sky — Alien spacecraft, hovering over the trees

The USA Today Newspaper reporting on the 75th anniversary of the broadcast, that “The broadcast … disrupted households, interrupted religious services, created traffic jams and clogged communications systems. “The New York Times reported on Oct. 31, 1938: “In Newark, in a single block at Heddon Terrace and Hawthorne Avenue, more than 20 families rushed out of their houses with wet handkerchiefs and towels over their faces to flee from what they believed was to be a gas raid. Some began moving household furniture”.

Then as today, supposed “victims” of the broadcast and their lawyers lined up to get paid for “mental anguish” and “personal injury”. All suits were dismissed, except for a claim for a pair of black men’s shoes, size 9B, by a Massachusetts man who had spent his shoe money to escape the Martians. Welles thought the man should be paid.

In the end, the War of the Worlds was just what the broadcast described itself to be. A Halloween concoction. The equivalent of dressing up in a sheet, and jumping out of a bush, and saying, ‘Boo!’.

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October 28, 1945 Town Line, NY – Last Stronghold of the Confederacy

By October 1945 there legally remained only one part of the former Confederate States of America. The little hamlet of Town Line, New York.

By the early 1830s, cotton exceeded the value of all other American exports, combined. As secession loomed over the nation, a Chicago Daily Times editorial warned that if the South left “in one single blow, our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one half of what it is now”.

South Carolina seceded in December 1860, and the world waited to see who’d follow. New York City became the next to call for secession on January 6, when Mayor Fernando Wood addressed the city’s governing body. “When Disunion has become a fixed and certain fact”, he said, “why may not New York disrupt the bands which bind her to a venal and corrupt master…and destroyed the Confederacy of which she was the proud Empire City?”

In New York city and state alike, economic ties with the south ran deep. 40¢ of every dollar paid for southern cotton stayed in New York, in the form of insurance, shipping, warehouse fees and profits.

30 minutes’ east of Buffalo, the village of Lancaster contemplated staying with the Union. 500 miles from the nearest Confederate state, George Huber remembered the time. “When war was declared, Lancaster seethed with the news, and many were the nights we stayed up as late as 12 o’clock to talk things out. I was twelve years old at the time, but I remember the stern faces of the elders and the storm of passionate and angry discussion. Soon the town split into two factions, it was a very tense situation…Often the excitement ran so high that if a man in either group had made the slightest sign, neighbors would have been at each other’s throats and fists would have taken the place of words.”

town line courthouse — The old blacksmith shop

“Town Line”, a hamlet on the village’s eastern boundary, put it to a vote. In the fall of 1861, residents gathered in the old schoolhouse-turned blacksmith’s shop. By a margin of 85 to 40, Town Line voted to secede from the Union.

There was angry talk of arresting “Copperheads” for sedition, as casualty reports came back from the front. “Seceders” became quiet, afraid to meet in public amidst angry talk of lynching. A half-dozen or so more ardent secessionists went south to fight for the Confederacy. Others quietly moved north, to Canada. Outside of Lancaster, no one seemed to notice. Taxes continued to be paid. No federal force ever arrived to enforce the loyalty of the small village.

A rumor went around in 1864, that a large Confederate army was building in Canada, poised to invade from the north. Town Line became a dangerous place for the few southern sympathizers left. Most of those remaining moved to Canada and, once again, Lancaster became the quiet little village in upstate New York, that nobody ever heard of.

Impatient to get on with it, Dade County “symbolically” seceded both from Georgia as well as the Union, back in 1860. Officially, Dade County seceded with Georgia in 1861, and rejoined with the rest of the state in 1870, but the deal was sealed on July 4, 1945, when a telegram from President Harry S. Truman was read at a celebration marking Dade County’s “rejoining” the Union.

The “Confederate Gibraltar”, Vicksburg Mississippi, fell on July 4, 1863. The city wouldn’t celebrate another Independence Day for 80 years.

86C8E1D8-4085-47BE-B54D-C3FB11BF0363_w1023_r1_s — In 2011, the residents of Town Line, New York dressed up to mark the town’s sesquicentennial of secession from the Union

By October 1945 there legally remained only one part of the former Confederate States of America. The little hamlet of Town Line, New York.

Even Georgians couldn’t help themselves, from commenting. 97-year-old Confederate General T.W. Dowling said: “We been rather pleased with the results since we rejoined the Union. Town Line ought to give the United States another try“. Judge A.L. Townsend of Trenton Georgia commented “Town Line ought to give the United States a good second chance“.

A courier express note arrived on October 7, 1945. “There are few controversies that are not susceptible to a peace time resolution” read the note, “if examined in an atmosphere of tranquility and calm rather than strife and turmoil. I would suggest the possibility of roast veal as a vehicle of peace. Why don’t you run down the fattest calf in Erie County, barbecue it and serve it with fixin’s in the old blacksmith shop where the ruckus started? Who can tell? The dissidents might decide to resume citizenship.” The note was signed “Very Sincerely Yours, Harry Truman”.

Fireman’s Hall was the site of the barbecue, “The old blacksmith shop where the ruckus started” being too small for the assembled crowd. On October 28, 1945 residents adopted a resolution suspending the 1861 ordinance of secession, by a vote of 90-23. The Stars and Bars of the Confederate States of America was lowered for the last time, outside the old blacksmith shop.

Alabama member of the United States House of Representatives John Jackson Sparkman, may have had the last word: “As one reconstructed rebel to another, let me say that I find much comfort in the fact that you good people so far up in Yankee land have held out during the years. However, I suppose we grow soft as we grow older.”

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