Category: Today in History

Sometime around 1890, opportunities for promotion led Arthur Reuel Tolkien to South Africa, where the bank clerk became manager of the Bloemfontein branch of the Bank of Africa.  Tolkein’s fiancée Mabel joined him in the Orange Free State in 1891, and the couple was married that April.  The first of two boys arrived the following year. They called him John Ronald Reuel.

Mabel returned to England shortly after the birth of their second son, believing the climate to be healthier than that of the African continent.  She may have been right. Arthur died unexpectedly in South Africa, when the older boy was four.  The family’s departure left John Ronald with only “slight but vivid” memories of Africa. One of them involved an encounter with an enormous, hairy, spider.

The family lived for a time next to a rail line, south of Birmingham. John always had an interest in languages, even before he began to invent words of his own. It must have fired the young boy’s linguistic imagination to see the Welsh coal trucks go by, with names like “Nantyglo“, “Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd”, painted on their sides.

These  were difficult times for the Tolkein family, which only became worse when Mabel succumbed to diabetes.  Now orphaned, John Ronald Reuel was only twelve years old.

At King Edward’s school, one Father Francis looked after the boys’ spiritual and educational development.  Here J.R.R. mastered Latin and Greek, while gaining competence in a number of other languages.  John would make up entire languages for fun, while he and a few school chums met regularly after school as the “TCBS” (Tea Club and Barrovian Society), exchanging and criticizing one another’s literary work.

Around this time, Tolkein discovered Christ II also known as The Ascension, one of only four signed works known to survive by the 9th century Olde English poet, Cynewulf. One couplet captured the boy’s imagination: “Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast, Ofer middangeard monnum sended” – Hail Earendel brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men.

Tolkien served briefly on the Western Front of the Great War, before contracting a typhus-like infection called “trench fever”. He convalesced back in England, and served out the rest of the war on Home Duty. Most of JRR’s TCBS friends had been killed by this time, and he wrote of his experiences in their memory. “…in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire“.

It’s easy to see these early experiences in the author’s first works, the notes he called his “Legendarium”: the Deep Elves, the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond.

Tolkien took a professorship at Oxford after the war, where he one day found himself correcting papers. For some reason or no reason at all, one of his students had left a page blank. Who knows what possessed the professor but he wrote on the page “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit“.

In typical Tolkien fashion, he then felt the need to discover what a “Hobbit” was, why it lived in a hole, and on, and on, and on.

Tolkien’s musings grew into a narrative tale, a story he shared with his children. It grew from there when the publishing firm George, Allen and Unwin got hands on an incomplete typescript, and encouraged the professor to finish his work. J.R.R. Tolkein’s tale was published on this day in 1937, under the title “The Hobbit“.

The Hobbit was so successful, the publisher asked if Tolkein had similar material available for release.  By this time, Tolkien’s Legendarium had taken a more complete form which he was calling his “Qenya Silmarillion”.  Tolkien submitted the work to mixed reviews. the prevailing sense being that the work was not commercially viable.

The author was disappointed by the setback, but agreed to take up the challenge of writing “The New Hobbit”.  This writer was anything but hurried.  It took 16 years of coaxing and prodding by the now-grown son of one of the publishers, Rayner Unwin. Tolkien even offered the work to a rival publisher at one point, but they backed off the project on realizing the scope and size of the work.

J.R.R. Tolkein’s tale grew and blossomed into far more than a children’s story, published in three parts in 1954-1955 under the title “Lord of the Rings“. Early misgivings that the project would be a financial loss, soon evaporated.

Author and publisher alike had greatly underestimated the public appeal of Tolkien’s work. As of 2017, the Lord of the Rings trilogy ranked among the top-ten selling books of all time, including the Holy Bible, the Islamic Qu’ran and the book of Mormon. Taken together, the Peter Jackson Hobbit film trilogy of 2012 achieved the highest worldwide Box Office, of all time.

At the turn of the 20th century, a great wave of immigrants came to the United States, 20 million Europeans and more, making the long journey to become Americans.

Among those vast multitudes came the Ogonowski family, emigrating from Poland and making a new home in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, along the New Hampshire line.

Those early members of the Ogonowski family received invaluable assistance from Yankee farmers, well accustomed to growing conditions in the harsh New England climate.  Generations later, the family still tilled the soil of the 150-acre “White Gate Farm” in Dracut, Massachusetts.

Graduating from UMass Lowell in 1972 with a degree in nuclear engineering, John Alexander Ogonowski joined the United States Air Force.  During the war in Vietnam, this farmer-turned military pilot would ferry equipment from Charleston, South Carolina to Southeast Asia, often returning with the bodies of the fallen aboard that giant, C-141 transport aircraft.

Ogonowski left the Air Force with the rank of Captain, becoming a commercial pilot and joining American Airlines in 1978. There John  met Margaret, a flight attendant, “Peggy” to friends and family. The two would later marry and raise a family of three daughters, Laura, Caroline, and Mary Catherine.

Twelve days a month, Ogonowski would leave the farm in his Captain’s uniform, flying jumbo jets out of Logan Airport.  When he was finished , he would always return to the land he loved.

Family farming is not what it used to be, as suburban development and subdivisions creep into formerly open spaces. “When you plant a building on a field”, John would say, “it’s the last crop that will ever grow there”.

John Ogonowski helped to create the Dracut Land Trust in 1998, working to conserve the growing town’s agricultural heritage. He worked to bring more people into farming, as well.  The bumper sticker on his truck read “There is no farming without farmers”.

That was the year the farm Service Agency in Westford came looking for open agricultural land, for Cambodian immigrants from Lowell.

“This is what he was all about. He flew airplanes, he loved flying, and that provided all the money, but this is what he lived for. He was a very lucky man, he had both a vocation and an avocation and he loved them both”. – Margaret “Peggy” Ogonowski

It was a natural fit.  Ogonowski felt a connection with these people, based on his time in Southeast Asia. He would help them, here putting up a shed, there getting a greenhouse in order or putting up irrigation. He would help these immigrants, just as those Yankee farmers of long ago, had helped his ancestors.

Cambodian farmers learned to grow their native vegetables in an unfamiliar climate. They would lease small plots, growing water spinach, lemon grass, pigweed, Asian basil, and Asian squash. They raised taro and Laotian mint, coconut amaranth, pickling spices, pea tendrils and more. It was the food they grew up with, the food they knew.  They would sell their produce into nearby immigrant communities, and to the high-end restaurants of Boston.

The program was a great success.  Ogonowski told The Boston Globe in 1999, “These guys are putting more care and attention into their one acre than most Yankee farmers put into their entire 100 acres.”

So it was that, with the fall harvest of 2001, Cambodian immigrants found themselves among the pumpkins and the hay of a New England farm, putting on a special lunch spread for visiting agricultural officials from Washington, DC.  It was September 11.

By now you know that John Ogonowski was flying that day, Senior Captain on American Airlines flight 11. He may have been the first to die, attacked from behind and murdered in his cockpit by Islamist terrorist Mohammed Atta and his accomplices.

It’s a new perspective on a now-familiar story, to think of the shock and the grief of those refugees from the killing fields of Pol Pot, on hearing the news that their friend and benefactor had been hijacked and murdered, his body flown into a New York skyscraper.

The White Gate Farm was closed for a week, but the Ogonowski family was determined.  John’s dream would not die.  Peg said it best:  “This is what he was all about. He flew airplanes, he loved flying, and that provided all the money, but this is what he lived for. He was a very lucky man, he had both a vocation and an avocation and he loved them both.”

John Ogonowski was working with the Land Trust at the time of his death, in an effort  to raise $760,000 to purchase a 34-acre farm in Dracut, slated for development.  Federal funds were raised with help from two members of Congress.  The “Captain John Ogonowski Memorial Preservation Farmland” project was dedicated in 2003.  A living memorial to one day that changed the world.   And to John Alexander Ogonowski.  Pilot.  Farmer.  Fallen angel.

Loyalty