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Breaking News, Bulletins & Almanac, March 2007
Yesterday, today and tomorrow
CURRENT NEWS BULLETINS & ALMANIACAL ARCHIVES
Also see NevadaLabor.com's Statewide U-News RoundupClick here to get on our news & bulletins mailing list...
But before you do so, please read this note. —AB[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]
Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits
and Ego Trips
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006"Our long national nightmare is over."
Did I say that a dozen years ago?
CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough
Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator
Time to bring back NAGPAC?
CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006
NEWLY UPLOADED BLAST FROM THE PAST: The reasons behind the failure of Nevada's first non-smoking casino
Barbwire 3-2-1990
UPDATE: March 31, 2007, 12:01 a.m PDT, 07:01 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1492, in Granada's Alhambra Palace, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain signed an "edict of expulsion" ordering all Spanish Jews to leave the nation and giving them three months to dispose of their homes, property and assets, usually at a fraction of their value (Isabella said it was not their decision, it was God's); in 1870, Thomas Peterson Mundy of Perth Amboy became the first African-American to vote under the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been ratified the previous day; in 1898, in an essay by reporter Alf Doten about his recently deceased colleague William Wright aka Dan DeQuille, Doten observed, "Even the Piute Indians along the street heartily enjoyed his efforts to joke with them in their native language, which he sympathetically admired for its natural oddity."; in 1900, renovation of the Steamboat Springs hot springs resort south of Reno was underway, with a hotel and baths planned; in 1900, the Nevada State Journal wrote "Capital at the present time holds the fort and its guns are directed against the rights of labor."; in 1911, after three years of prosecutions by the Roosevelt and Taft administrations of newspapers that reported on tawdry government conduct in the construction of the Panama canal, the cases, which were thrown out by the courts, formally came to an end when a U.S. attorney in New York requested permission to enter a filing called a nolle prosse dropping all criminal libel charges; in 1914, a New York artist named Charlotte von Kuohnan residing in Lucerne was convicted of engaging in secret service work on behalf of Germany and sentenced to two months in jail followed by banishment from Switzerland; in 1927, César Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona; in 1930, Nevada fish and game chair R.L. Douglass reported the Pyramid Lake tribe to Secretary of the Interior Lyman Wilbur for allegedly slaughtering spawning fish on their reservation and meanwhile a couple of Utah officials were (under what authority is unknown) investigating spawn taking by tribal members at Walker Lake; in 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps was created to train and aid youth during the Depression; in 1934, a report from a prospector that "some strange things were going on" at abandoned Fort Churchill sent Reno police there looking for vanished federal former Reno city councilmember Roy Frisch, who was the chief witness against Reno's two crime bosses; in 1945, at the Ravensbruck women's death camp, a Russian Orthodox nun and poet (see below) named Elizabeta Skobtsova but known as Mother Maria who had aided and rescued Jews in France, was gassed; in 1949, attorney Madison Graves filed charges against Las Vegas police officers after a teenager was beaten in the city jail and then given no medical attention to head injuries for four hours; in 1957, the first and only musical written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for television, Cinderella, was broadcast (performed live!) and introduced the United States to a new performer until then seen only on Broadway, Julie Andrews ("Just before I went on, a very kind soul pointed out to me that more people probably would see me in that single telecast than all the full houses of My Fair Lady for 100 years"), a program not broadcast again until December 9, 2004; in 1958, Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode was released; in 1960, Pope John XXIII appointed Tanganyika [Tanzania] Bishop Laurian Rugambwa the first black Catholic Cardinal; in 1961, there was a vague UPI report that the Secret Service may have increased security around President Kennedy and his family because of a possible plan to kidnap Caroline or harm the family, etc.; in 1961, what was reported to be Reno's first sit-in was staged by African-Americans at the Overland Hotel's café while elsewhere in the downtown a picket line was thrown up at the Nevada Bank of Commerce; in 1965, a massive airborne offensive began in Vietnam, with a hundred U.S. planes pouring tons of napalm, phosphorus bombs and fuel oil on a 19,000-acre section of Vietnam; in 1965, guests at the Tally Ho Hotel Casino on the Las Vegas strip were told to check out because the hotel was preparing to shut down, the second such closure in the hotel's months-long history; in 1965, the members of the University of Nevada debate team quit on the eve of a 40-college championship tournament hosted in Reno by the UN and issued a statement saying it was the result of a dispute with the campus hate group Coffin and Keys; in 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to negotiations with the Vietnamese, ordered a partial bombing halt in Vietnam and withdrew from the presidential race; in 1971, a court martial board sentenced Lt. William Calley to life at hard labor for murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai; in 1976, the 25th day of a massive water rights trial in the lawsuit of the Pyramid Lake tribal reservation and the U.S. government against the Truckee Carson Irigation District and 13,000 water rights holders focused on whether the reservation was created primarily as a fishery or for agricultural purposes; in 1982, a massive avalanche hit Alpine Meadows ski resort, killing seven and entombing chairlift operator Anna Conrad, who was trapped under a bank of lockers buried in ten feet of snow (she was found alive in a hollowed-out ice cave five days later); in 1995, Latina star Selena was shot and killed in Corpus Christi; in 2005, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charged Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with having a workplace climate that allowed repeated, severe and gross sexual harassment, such as a supervisor trying to have forced sex with a worker who was four months pregnant and another supervisor grabbing a worker by the hair and forcing her to perform fellatio and other supervisors exposing themselves to female workers.
Israel
by Elizabeta Skobtsova
Two triangles, a star,
The shield of King David, our forefather.
This is election, not offense.
The great path and not an evil.
Once more in a term fulfilled,
Once more roars the trumpet of the end;
And the fate of a great people
Once more is by the prophet proclaimed.
Thou art persecuted again, O Israel,
But what can human ill will mean to thee,
who have heard the thunder from Sinai?UPDATE: March 30, 2007, 1:04 a.m. PDT, 08:04 GMT/CUT/SUT — On March 30, 1981, President Reagan was shot and seriously injured outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John W. Hinckley, Jr. Also wounded were White House news secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent and a District of Columbia police officer. [New York Times/AP e-headlines] [EDITORS' NOTE: Why does no one ever seem to mention the names of the latter two men? Didn't they bleed enough? The Secret Service agent was Timothy McCarthy, the DC Police officer was Thomas Delanty.]
On March 30, 1870, slavery was ended in the United States with ratification of the fifteenth amendment and celebrations were planned throughout the nation, including at Elko (where it was the occasion for demands for integrated local schools) and Virginia City; in 1889, fifty leading citizens of Reno and the Bank of Nevada sent a petition to the Southern Pacific: "Your petitioners beg leave to respectfully represent that the present accommodations for the traveling public at the Reno depot of your company are entirely inadequate to the comfort and convenience of the patrons of the road, and that in particular the waiting room at the depot, both in size and for the comfort of the travelers, is a miserable apology for a waiting room for a company like the Southern Pacific, and at a station of the importance of Reno. We urgently request that at your earliest convenience, steps may be taken to provide additional room and facilities conducive to the health and pleasure of the traveling public at this place."; in 1900, a traveling man in Reno on business commented on the lack of a public park in a city of 7,000 people and suggested that the city plaza would be a good location for a park; in 1905, a report was published in Reno that Carson City newspapers were agitating for removal of the university from Reno to Carson, with state controller and Nevada Appeal editor Sam Davis offering free land for the purpose (Reno's Nevada State Journal argued "that if Sam Davis gives a site for a university, it is on land discarded even by the Indians"); in 1915, Abraham Lincoln's son Robert, chair of the Pullman Company, was planning an appearance before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, which wanted information on the salaries paid and tips earned to African-American porters on Pullman cars (the commission was worried that tips could be having a debasing effect on the porters); in 1920, officials estimated that U.S. citizens were spending a billion dollars annually (about $10.7 billion in 2005 dollars) in Mexican border towns like Mexicali, Nogales, Juarez and Tijuana where alcohol was legal; in 1932, the New York Renaissance, an African-American team, defeated the Boston Celtics, a mostly white team, to win the national basketball championship; in 1945, just days before the Ravensbruck women's death camp was liberated, a group of women attacked their guards as they were being led to the gas chambers (nine escaped but were recaptured and killed); in 1947, plans for the Tucker automobile were announced; in 1948, Frances "Peaches" Browning, whose 1920s marriage on her sixteenth birthday to 51 year-old millionaire Edward "Daddy" Browning and subsequent 1926 divorce action became a New York tabloid sensation (she said he kept a honking African goose in their bedroom), was divorced for the fourth time in Redwood City, California (she had already obtained a Reno divorce); in 1948, on the eve of state takeover of the Basic Magnesium industrial complex in Henderson from the federal government, Governor Vail Pittman and other officials sought to reassure residents of the company town that they would not have to pay higher rates now that the state was operating their power company; in 1960, thirty thousand blacks marched in protest on the South African National Assembly and the government mobilized the home guard; in 1961, two days after his minorities-friendly New China Club in Reno was picketed by civil rights activists for its alleged association with anti-civil rights Senator James Slattery, Club owner Bill Fong took out a full page newspaper ad denying any association with Slattery and reasserting his support for an end to color bars in the casino industry: "And I can assure them now that there is not and never has been one word of truth in the allegations that I am an enemy of civil rights in Nevada. Why I have suffered discrimination myself! Let me put it on the record: I want to see an end to discrimination in Nevada. This is not just sentiment, it is business. I cater to the Negro here and common sense tells me that so long as discrimination exists many Negroes will refuse to come to Reno either as residents or visitors. So I would gain, not lose, by an end to discrimination."; in 1963, aeronautical engineer Ed Dwight, an African-American air force test pilot, was admitted to U.S. astronaut training, where — after full public relations mileage was obtained from him — he was harrassed and threatened into quitting two years later (he is now a renowned sculptor); in 1969, twenty year-old Charles Lynn Hodge of Reno, Nevada, died in Tay Ninh province, Vietnam (panel 28w, row 91); in 1972, at a meeting in Key Biscayne, Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell allegedly approved the break-in at Democratic National headquarters in the Watergate office complex; in 1989, Gladys Knight performed without the Pips for the first time, at a casino in Las Vegas.
UPDATE: March 29, 2007, 7:31 a.m. PDT, 14:31 CUT/SUT/GMT — On this date in 1516, to placate Catholic authorities, the city government of Venice ordered all the city's Jews into Europe's first Jewish ghetto where they continued to live in misery until 1797 when Napoleon 3d conquered the city and liberated the ghetto; in 1886, Coca Cola (laced with cocaine), was introduced, delighting dentists everywhere; in 1888, United Parcel Service founder James Casey was born in Candelaria, Nevada; in 1890, the Nevada State Journal reported "There will have to be imitation savages in the circuses this Summer, as the Secretary of the Interior has decided that no more Indians shall be allowed to leave the agencies for this purpose becanse of the demoralizing effects upon them. Representatives of the various circus companies protest against this order, and they have appealed to the President who, however, sustains Secretary [John] Noble. They explained to the President that they had already advertised their attractions for the coming year, and had gone to great expense in printing show bills and circulars in which they offer as an attraction to the public, scenes in savage life, and that they will be put to a great loss unless they are allowed to carry out their plans. The President [Benjamin Harrison] listened to them patiently, but would not yield, and they will have to find the best possible substitute. As soon as the Indians who are now with Buffalo Bill in Europe return to this country, they will be ordered back to their agencies and will be required to stay there."; in 1923, in the new issue of Fascisti Review Gerarchia, Italian Premier Benito Mussolini said liberalism was a remnant of the nineteenth century and that "men nowadays are tired of liberty"; in 1926, Washoe County Sheriff John Hillhouse abandoned his search for the Weston Band, a gang of cattle rustlers, but the state police continued the search into Churchill County; in 1934, the German government revoked the citizenship of 37 people, including a socialist member of the Reichstag, a labor journal editor and Albert Einstein, who the government said lost his citizenship because his "conduct violated his obligation of fidelity to the reich and its people, thereby harming German interests"; in 1934, the German government also banned boxer Max Baer's MGM movie The Prizefighter and the Lady (Baer, at his Lake Tahoe training camp, responded "They didn't ban the picture because I have Jewish blood, they banned it because I knocked out [German boxer] Max Schmeling); in 1948, residents of an East Liberty Street neighborhood gave a petition to the Reno city council asking for construction of a crossing guard where the Virginia and Truckee railroad crossed Liberty; in 1949, Richard Trachok was hired by the Reno School District No. 10 to be head football and track coach at Reno High School at a salary of $2,820 a year; in 1957, a report on the causes of a February 5 explosion and fire in downtown Reno was released; in 1961, the Kennedy administration was saber-rattling in southeast Asia, threatening to invade Laos; in 1961, Kansas' approval gave final ratification to a U.S. constitutional amendment giving D.C. residents the vote in presidential elections, winning praise from U.S. Senator Alan Bible of Nevada, who called himself the "unofficial mayor of Washington" by virtue of his chairing the Senate District of Columbia Committee; in 1962, Gene Chandler received a gold record for Duke of Earl; in 1967, The Beatles recorded With A Little Help From My Friends (lead vocal: Ringo), the second track of Sgt. Pepper; in 1967, CBS corporate lawyer Arnold Zenker entered the elite group of principal anchors of the CBS Evening News and U.S. folklore, replacing Walter Cronkite for 13 days during a strike (Cronkite's open on his first day back: "This is Walter Cronkite sitting in for Arnold Zenker"); in 1971, Lt. William Calley was convicted of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians, the only responsible official ever brought to justice for the My Lai massacre; in 1971, production began on The Godfather, partially filmed in Nevada; in 1973, the United States withdrew ground forces from Vietnam but kept bombing the devil out of the unfortunate nation; in 1973, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, who had a hit with Cover of the Rolling Stone, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone; in 1985, the New York Opera performed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; in 1992, Bill Clinton admitted to an inability to correctly operate a doobie: "I didn't inhale and I didn't try it again".
Time Magazine
4-7-1967
Portrait of the Artists
"Direct from our newsroom in New York — in color — this is the CBS Evening for News, with Arnold Zenker substituting for Walter Cronkite and. . ." Arnold Zenker? Across the U.S. last week, televiewers gawked curiously at the unfamiliar faces — balding salesmen, pert secretaries, scrubbed junior executives — telling about "Veet Nom," "Cheeze Juftif Warren," "cloddy skies" and "mosterly easterly winds." All, like 28-year-old Arnold Zenker, manager of program administration for CBS, were filling in — and sometimes falling apart — for regular newscasters as the result of a strike called by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
The walkout, the first in the union's 30-year-history, involved announcers, newsmen, disk jockeys and performers working on TV and radio stations owned by CBS, NBC, ABC and the Mutual Broadcasting System. The principal issue in the dispute is a salary increase for 100 newsmen at network-owned stations in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The union was demanding a base salary of $325 plus 50% of the fees earned from sponsored programs; the networks are offering $300 and 25%.
Swallow or Spit? Though lumping all these people in a union of "artists" is a bit like calling a tailback a tap dancer, the performance of some of the pinch newscasters was worthy of an Emmy, or at least a Hammy, for the best comedy show of the season. Scripts rattled, eyes squinted at TelePrompTers. In Chicago, WLS Advertising Director Frank Nardi made his broadcasting debut as a substitute disk jockey, struggled hysterically to keep up the machinegun patter. Sample: "Hey there! That was the great Ramsey Lewis Duo. . . aah. . .trio. . .whee. . .It's. . .aah. . . . . .three minutes. . .aah. . .I mean twelve minutes after three. . . wheee."At Chicago's WBBM-TV, Salesman Frank Palmer all but burned up the airways. Winding up the 5 p.m. news, he lit his pipe just like a real Walter Cronkite, burned his fingers, dumped tobacco all over the desk, grinned wanly and shrugged. In Los Angeles, KNBC viewers telephoned the station to complain that Pinch Newscaster Harry Howe was chewing gum while reading the financial news. Not so, Howe later explained. Seems that while struggling with all those Dow-Jones figures, he dislodged a filling in his tooth and, not knowing whether to swallow it or spit it out, bounced it from cheek to cheek between syllables.
Morning, Hugh. On the first day of the strike, Hugh Downs, host of NBC's Today show, arrived live and in color at Manhattan's RCA Building in a pelting rain, disembarked from his NBC-supplied limousine, clapped on his sandwich board, popped open his umbrella, walked the picket line for a while, popped back into his Caddy and drove off. Other familiar pickets, such as Bud Collyer, Edwin Newman and Peter Jennings, were kept busy signing autographs, using the back of each other's signs for support. But whatever frivolity existed on the picket line during the early hours of the strike was later tempered by NBC News caster Chet Huntley's announcement that he would not honor the walkout because A.F.T.R.A. is a union of "singers, actors, jugglers, announcers, entertainers and comedians whose problems have no relation to ours." He sent a telegram to 40 fellow newsmen calling for their support and suggesting that a National Labor Relations Board election be held to decide representation and possible withdrawal of newscasters from the union. Claiming that he had received the approval of 37 of the 40 newsmen, Huntley said: "If I carry the ball, they're completely behind me."
Good Night, Chet! NBC Newsmen Frank McGee, Morgan Beatty and Ray Scherer joined Huntley in crossing the picket line. At the other networks, CBS's Cronkite and ABC's Howard K. Smith demurred. Said Cronkite: "I think the time to complain is past. If you don't like the army, you get out before the battle starts." As for David Brinkley, the Washington-based half of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, he stayed out of the controversy and away from the studio. The reaction of some newsmen to the Huntley-Huntley Report was good night, Chet!Snapped NBC's Jack Costello: "Chet Huntley is the biggest liar and scab in the world." But most seemed to agree with ABC's Jules Bergman: "Huntley's stand is valid, but we won't forgive him because he weakened our position." At Hurley's bar in Manhattan, hangout for network staffers, one picketer placed a photograph of Huntley in the window and wreathed it with black crepe paper. Whatever the upshot of the strike, it at least provided the best broadcasting entertainment of the year.
UPDATE: March 28, 2007, 12:01 a.m. PDT, 19:01 CUT/SUT/GMT — On this date in 193, after the death of emperor Pertinax, Didius Julianus became Roman emperor by outbidding Flavius Sulpicianus for the job in an auction, thus providing precedent for U.S. politics; in 1834, by a vote of 26 to 20, the U.S. Senate censured President Jackson for removing the government's deposits without the permission of Congress, causing a business downturn; in 1887, President Cleveland appointed Charles Irish of Iowa City to be U.S. surveyor general in Nevada; in 1900, the Nevada State Journal bragged that its campaign against illegal fishing in the Truckee was making headway and complained about Native Americans: "It is reported that a number of Indians have been infringing the law between here and Langhton's [west of Reno] and it would be well if the offenders were captured and made an example of."; in 1906, the Consolidated Power and Telephone Company was started in southern Nevada; in 1909, Oklahoma Governor Charles Haskell ordered five companies of the state militia into the Hickory Ground (holy ground) to wipe out the Creek Nation, which had long resisted allotment (breaking up tribal lands and distributing them to individual members) and had reestablished the ancient laws and courts recognized by the United States in the treaty of 1825, on grounds that the U.S. had no power to break up the land or disband the government of another nation; in 1912, what a local newspaper called a sure sign of spring — the first circus advance person — arrived in Reno to prepare the way for performances of the 101 Wild West Show north of the Western Gypsum Company plant between Reno and Sparks, and he announced that both whites and Native Americans would be welcome and that the show's performers included members of seven tribes; in 1915, for the first time in the United States, people were told publicly how to use a contraceptive, in remarks by Emma Goldman before a crowd of 600 at New York's Sunrise Club, resulting in her conviction for "inflammatory speech" and a sentence of 15 days in the workhouse, the first of many such court actions (a woman journalist wrote in the Little Review that "Goldman was sent to prison for advocating that women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open"); in 1923, distressed by the behavior of men in the capital, young women in Washington, D.C. formed an Anti-Flirting Club; in 1934, former Nevada boss George Wingfield sold a Las Vegas lot at the corner of Second and Fremont streets that he purchased for $5,000 five years earlier to Ed Von Tobel for $15,750; in 1939, an agent for Argentine meat packers who supplied dog food in the U.S. was quoted by columnist Drew Pearson: "My two best sales areas are Park Avenue and the deep South. On Park Avenue, it is the dogs that eat the dog food, but in the deep South, it is the negroes and the poor whites."; in 1942, attorney Minoru Yasui, a U.S. citizen who had quit a job at a Japanese consulate because of Pearl Harbor, walked the streets of Portland after a curfew imposed only on citizens of Japanese descent in order to provoke his arrest and a court test of the law (the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction); in 1944, the two-day murder of all the Jewish children in Lithuania's Zezmariai death camp was completed; in 1946, a meeting was held at Reno city hall to organize a Sagebrush Baseball League, with possible teams from western Nevada and eastern California communities, including Nixon, Loyalton, Verdi, Yerington, Sparks, the Nevada State Prison and various Reno teams; in 1950, E.R. Fryer of the Carson Indian Agency spoke to Reno's Twentieth Century Club on living conditions among Nevada's Native Americans; in 1953, the Reno Sparks Indian Colony formed a planning board to prepare for release of the colony's residents from wardship and resultant securing of deeds to their properties; in 1961, a day after the Nevada Senate defeated a civil rights measure by one vote, civil rights leaders threw up picket lines at two Reno casinos — one of them the New China Club, which was known as the one casino that welcomed minorities, and owner Bill Fong denied a report that he barred Native Americans and said "I was profoundly disheartened and disillusioned by the picketing this morning by people I had always considered my friends." (Fong's club was apparently targeted because Senator James Slattery, an outspoken opponent of the civil rights measure, was known as a hand puppet for the two casinos targeted); in 1962, public radio reporter Carol Cizauskas was born in Bonn, daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer; in 1979, an accident at Three Mile Island set off the nation's worst nuclear power plant disaster; in 2000, Fellowship of the Rings movie director Peter Jackson told New Zealand's Wellington Evening Post that The Beatles once had plans for production of the Rings trilogy, with John slated to play Gollum, Paul to play Frodo, George to play Gandalf and Ringo to play Sam, but that the project was personally vetoed by J.R.R. Tolkien.UPDATE: March 27, 2007, 7:12 a.m. PDT, 14:12 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 28, 1883, James Reavis filed his famed "Peralta land grant" with the Surveyor General of the Territory of Arizona claiming a 75 by 250 mile strip in Arizona and New Mexico containing nearly 19,000 square miles of land, a claim that kept the southwest in an uproar for the next eleven years (Reavis had spent years traveling to alter old Spanish and Mexican land records in Madrid, Seville and California to support the fraudulent claim); in 1884, the first long distance call was made between New York and Boston, but the line went dead after an hour and a half and it took two months to repair; in 1886, the Buffalo Bill Dramatic Combination appeared in Reno a day after it was in Carson City and two day after a Virginia City performance (Territorial Enterprise: "The Pawnee Indians — real genuine Indians by the way— performed their parts with eloquent silence, their catlike movements on the stage were very impressive and formed quite an attraction to the general rounding of the performance."); in 1923, San Francisco supervisors named the dam that destroyed the storied Hetch Hetchy Valley for city engineer M.M. O'Shaughnessy; in 1923, after a day of searching, Reno post office officials, who had been informed by Washington of a fourth class post office in a Washoe County town called Diessner of which they had never heard, finally located it twenty miles north of Vya and six miles south of the Oregon border; in 1932, Mayor Edwin Roberts turned Idlewild Park over to Reno children, who searched for thousands of Easter eggs provided by Gray Reid Wright department store and the Nevada State Journal, with 25 golden eggs redeemable for live bunnies; in 1934, following the disappearance of Roy Frisch, chief witness in the federal fraud trial of Reno's crime figures and political bosses William Graham and James MacKay, guards were put on bank assistant cashier Joseph Fuetsch, the next most important witness; in 1946, after a six-week battle with Gen. John Lee over Mail Call, a column in which soldiers aired their grievances, Maj. Hal Kestler, publications officer who oversaw the Rome edition of the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, was relieved of duty and requested a court martial, whereupon the entire 51-person staff requested transfers (a mediator was later called in, censorship was ended and Kestler was reinstated with a peacemaker installed between him and Lee); in 1949, engineers said Davis Dam, which would provide a fourth of its power to Nevada, would be complete by August 1, and meanwhile a effort was underway to name the lake created by the dam Mohave after the tribe whose land would be submerged; in 1956, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column "Recently I received a letter from a woman on an Indian reservation. The writer describes to me the unbelievable poverty in which our American Indians live. They were wards of the state. We were supposed to prepare them for citizenship. We have given them neither good education, good economic conditions, nor education for citizenship. When needed for war, we have used their young men, and now we are telling them they should cease to be wards of the state."; in 1961, after a morning in which African-Americans from around Nevada poured into the state capital, a senate committee kept approving a weak civil rights bill and then revoking its approval, finally allowing a full senate vote by which the measure lost 9 to 8; in 1961, casino owner and former lieutenant governor Cliff Jones said the Thunderbird, New Frontier and Dunes hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas strip would be driven out of business by a proposed gambling tax increase on high-gross operators. [EDITORS' NOTE: Click here for more on the neverending litany of that perennial lie.]; in 2000, ABC began broadcasting reports by Diane Sawyer in which she made Elian Gonzalez relive the loss of his mother and rolled around on the floor with him, drawing harsh criticism from fellow journalists and psychiatrists for exploitation and child abuse (and the right wing criticized her for censoring a comment by the boy in which he supposedly said he did not want to go back to Cuba).
UPDATE: March 26, 2007, 5:05 a.m. PDT, 12:05 GMT/CUT/SUT — On March 26, 1979, the Camp David peace treaty was signed by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the White House. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On March 26, 1860, the Missouri Republican and the New York Herald carried advertisements seeking riders for the short-lived Pony Express (the ad mentioned that the express would travel through Carson City and the Washoe silver mining country, see below); in 1861, the Wilmington Daily Journal in North Carolina reported the creation of the Territory of Nevada by printing the entire congressional act establishing the territory on page 3 (the act was signed by President Buchanan on March 2d in his final week in office); in 1862, President Lincoln forwarded to Congress a request from Governor James Nye of the Territory of Nevada a request for a private secretary and a salary increase for federal officials in the territory; in 1878, a few days after a Native American was murdered in Reno, a procession of tribal family and friends passed through Reno to the hillside cemetery where the body of the victim was exhumed, removed from its coffin, and then reburied as part of tribal rites; in 1885, Eastman manufactured the first motion picture film, which could only be viewed on individual viewers like nickelodeons, because not until March 26, 1895, was the first motion picture projector patented by Charles Francis Jenkins, a resident of Indiana; in 1923, Reno city councilmember Roy Frisch proposed creation of a park in a rock quarry at Stewart and Wheeler streets; in 1929, the current Nevada state flag design was adopted (a minor change was later made); in 1932, United Press sent out a red-baiting report about a demonstration at the Japanese embassy that reported the crowd of protesters included "a substantial sprinkling of women and negroes" which for some reason made it a "communistic" demonstration, but the report never got around to mentioning the reason for the gathering (a UP Chicago report the same day said an anti-Herbert Hoover protest in Chicago was composed of "four hundred communists, including many women and children."); in 1946, Wendell Lattimer, one of the scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb, said that how to apply atomic energy to industrial use had been known for some time and it was "disgraceful" that the U.S. was not closer to atomic power plants; in 1946, the American Legion chartered a Reno post for African-Americans (no explanation was given for why the black veterans were not simply welcomed into the existing Reno post) and it was named for Robert Brooks, an African-American war hero from Kentucky who was killed in the Philippines; in 1955, The Ballad of Davy Crockett became number one on the hit parade; in 1956, with police brutality charges on their way to the Clark County grand jury, Las Vegas Police Chief George Allen said that so far as he could determine, there was no truth to accusations that officers beat two Latino prisoners; in 1956, a Nevada Assembly select committee on taxation issued a report saying the 1955 enactment of a sales tax was unnecessary and could have been prevented if the legislature had been better informed on all possible revenue sources, and the committee said it would gather such information to provide to lawmakers if the sales tax was overturned by voters in the 1956 election; in 1960, under a threat of protest marches organized by Dr. James McMillan, casinos in Clark County, Nevada, desegregated their facilities; in 1960, Elvis taped an appearance with Frank Sinatra at the Fontainbleu Hotel in Miami for later broadcast, helping Sinatra finally break his losing streak as a television ratings performer; in 1964, at the Scala Theatre, The Beatles shot the final concert scene for A Hard Days Night; in 1968, twenty-four year-old Larry Earl Barger of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Binh Dinh province, Vietnam (panel 46e, row 28 of the Vietnam wall); in 1969, twenty-eight year- old Carlos Wilson Rucker of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Khanh Hoa province, Vietnam (panel 28w, row 52); in 1982, ground was broken for the Vietnam veterans memorial wall; in 1997, the Las Vegas Sun disclosed an investigation by the Nevada attorney general's office of state casino regulators.
TO SAN FRANCISCO IN EIGHT DAYS,
--BY--
THE CENTRAL OVERLAND CALIFORNIA
--AND--
PIKE'S PEAK EXPRESS CO.The first courier of the Pony Express will leave the Missouri River on Tuesday, April 3, at 5 o'clock p. m. and will run regularly weekly thereafter, carrying a letter mail only. The point of departure on the Missouri River, will be in telegraphic connection with the East and will be announced in due time.
Telegraphic messages from all parts of the United States and Canada in connection with the point of departure will be received up to 5 o'clock p. m. of the day of leaving, and transmitted over the Placerville and St. Joseph telegraph wire to San Francisco and intermediate points, by the connecting express in eight days.
The letter mail will be delivered in San Francisco in ten days from the departure of the express. The Express passes through Forts Kearney, Laramie, and Bridger, Great Salt Lake City, Camp Floyd, Carson City, the Washoe Silver Mines, Placerville, and Sacramento.
Letters for Oregon, Washington Territory, British Columbia, the Pacific Mexican ports, Russian Possessions, Sandwich Islands, China, Japan and India, will be mailed in San Francisco.
Special messengers, bearers of letters to connect with the Express of the 3d of April, will receive communications for the courier of that day at No. 481 Tenth street, Washington City, up to 2:45 p. m. on Friday, March 30, and in New York at the office of J. B. Simpson, Room No. 8, Continental Bank Building, Nassau street, up to 6:30 a. m. of March 31.
Full particulars can be obtained on application at the above place and agents of the company.
W. H. RUSSELL, President.
Leavenworth City, Kansas, March, 1860.
Office in New York, J. B. Simpson, Vice President.
Samuel & Allen, Agents, St. Louis.
H. J. Spaulding, Agent, Chicago.
[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]UPDATE: March 25, 2007, 9:44 a.m. PDT, 16:44 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 25, 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., led 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Allen Ginsberg/Howl:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix;
Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
On March 25, 1885, Beadle's New York Dime Library released Flash Dan, the Nabob; or The Blades of Bowie Bar. A Story of the Gold Lands by Howard Holmes, a dime novel set in northern California and near Carson City, Nevada in 1869; in 1896, a measles epidemic in Lincoln County was hitting Native Americans particularly hard, with six Indians dead in a week; in 1911, a fire broke out in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, killing 146, 132 of them girls (the lack of safety exits and fire escapes and the condition of the building galvanized the union movement and led to legal reforms in working conditons and the conviction on manslaughter charges of the owners); in 1917, at a rally in New York's Metropolitan Opera House held to celebrate the February revolution, Charles Evans Hughes, Alton Parker, Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root spoke or sent messages expressing pleasure at the entry of Russia into the community of democratic nations and pledging to aid the new nation; in 1917, a representative of a new national organization, the League to Enforce Peace, arrived in Reno to form a local chapter and advance an April speech in Reno by former Minnesota governor Adolph Eberhart (peace activity was very risky during the world war because the Wilson administration prosecuted it under the Espionage Act); in 1939, with war talk common, the Nevada Bureau of Mines was doing a study of the prospects for development of strategic war minerals in the state; in 1947, President Truman issued executive order 9835, creating a program to adjudge the "loyalty" of civil service employees and empowering the U.S. attorney general to compile a "list of subversive organizations"; in 1955, customs inspectors seized a shipment of copies of Allan Ginsberg's Howl as they were brought in to the U.S. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco responded by publishing a U.S. edition); in 1958, John Ensign, now U.S. senator from Nevada, was born in Roseville, California; in 1961, Elvis performed at Pearl Harbor to raise money for the U.S.S. Arizona memorial (it was his last public performance for nine years); in 1963, the Nevada Legislature ratified the 24th amendment to the United States Constitution (outlawing the poll tax); in 1966, the fab four posed for the "butcher cover" of their Yesterday and Today album; in 1968, KLVX television in Las Vegas began operation; in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's only album, the magnificent Déjà Vu (containing Teach Your Children, Helpless, Our House, Woodstock), went gold; in 1971, Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan, though it took a day to become known to the public; in 1972, America's A Horse With No Name, written by Dewey Bunnel as a accolade to the desert he missed, hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1975, Sparks city councilmember Pete Lemberes, who was being investigated by a county grand jury, read a public statement in which he criticized the grand jury, Sparks city attorney Paul Freitag, two of his fellow councilmembers, and Sparks Nugget owner John Ascuaga; in 1976, Jackson Browne's wife, Phyllis, took her own life; in 1977, Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan vetoed Assemblymember Steve Coulter's, D-Reno, legislation repealing the mandatory motorcycle helmet law for adults; in 1977, former Washoe County superintendent of schools Earl Wooster, who counted the 1944 shutdown of the Washoe Indian school and integration of Native Americans into the white Orvis Ring School among his most important achievements, died in Reno; in 1977, Sid Doan testified in court that in 1973 he had threatened beating Sparks city councilmember James Vernon "within an inch of his life" if his Sierra Sid's truck stop was denied a gambling license; in 1992, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returned to a changed world after ten months on the Mir space station (his nation, the Soviet Union, no longer existed).UPDATE: March 24, 2007, 2:19 a.m. PDT, 09:19 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 24, 1989, the nation's worst oil spill occurred as the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound and began leaking 11 million gallons of crude. [New York Times/AP e-headlines] A new study revealed that an estimated 26,600 gallons of oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill continues to pollute Prince William Sound in Alaska. [Harper's Magazine, April, 2007, page 108]
Robert Kennedy/March 24, 1968: Our brave young men are dying in the swamps of Southeast Asia. Which of them might have written a poem? Which of them might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in a World Series or given us the gift of laughter from the stage or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them would have taught a child to read? It is our responsibility to let these men live.... It is indecent if they die because of the empty vanity of their country.
On March 24, 1886, the Reese River Reveille said that lobbyists were costing the state of Nevada thousands of 1886 dollars: "If such a thing were possible there are at least half a dozen men in Nevada who should be quarantined for sixty days every two years."; in 1923, Elko County Sheriff Joe Harris said that rumors he was being considered for appointment as state prison warden came "like a bolt from a clear sky" and Governor James Scrugham, who was in Elko, apparently said he had no intention of removing Warden Rufe Henrichs; in 1923, miner and rancher William McGill, for whom the town of McGill is named, died in Ely; in 1934, people crowded into Reno's civic auditorium for Governor Fred Balzar's funeral (work on the Boulder Dam project was halted for three minutes at 2 p.m., the start time of the funeral), and a major topic of conversation at the funeral was the disappearance of former Reno City Councilmember Roy Frisch, chief prosecution witness in the federal bunco trial of Reno political/crime bosses James "Cinch" McKay and William Graham; in 1944, in reprisal for an attack by Italian patriot forces on German occupation troops, the Nazis executed 335 civilians, mostly Italians, in the Ardeatine caves near Rome; THE GREAT ESCAPE — in 1944, in Poland, Allied airmen began escaping through a tunnel 30 feet deep and 300 feet long from the German prison camp Stalag Luft III, continuing into the early morning hours of March 25, 76 men eventually escaping, 73 being recaptured, 50 executed, and three avoiding recapture to reach freedom; in 1955, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway; in 1956, U.S. Navy officials confronted Lt. Thomas Dooley, a physician who had become famous for his work among Indochina refugees, with the results of an investigation into his sexuality and forced him to resign his commission; in 1956, in Washington, Captain Walter Newton, Jr., commander of the Fallon Naval Air Station, was criticized by members of a congressional committee for lobbying local Nevada businesses and civic groups to support the Navy's plan to withdraw two million acres of land in northeast Nevada from public use for a gunnery range; in 1959, The Drifters' There Goes My Baby was released; in 1960, Harold's Club general manager Raymond I. Smith resigned as secretary-treasurer of the All American Society, a group he founded to warn against "creeping communism" whose officers included American Legion official Thomas Miller and former U.S. Representative Cliff Young, R-Nev.; in 1963, Patti Homer of Bijou Pines, California, who was a dealer at a Stateline, Nevada, casino, appeared on the television show What's My Line?; in 1964, four months after the assassination, the first Kennedy half dollars were released to the public (so many of them were hoarded that the half dollar declined as a commonly used coin); in 1965, with the support of 200 professors and over the opposition of Governor George Romney and the Michigan Senate, the first Vietnam teach-in was held at the University of Michigan, an action that spread across the nation (Michigan Supreme Court Justice Paul Adams attended, calling the teach-in "a vital service...in promoting debate on the question of U.S. policy in Vietnam"); in 1975, two years after U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the Hanoi government launched the Ho Chi Minh campaign that closed in on Saigon and ended the war; in 1977, on the anniversary of the coup that brought the military dictatorship to power, Argentine investigative journalist Rodolfo Walsh published Open Letter From A Writer To The Military Junta on the torture, disappearance and murder of thousands of Argentinians, and was assassinated the next day; in 1980, during a U.S.-funded war by the El Salvador government against its own people that claimed 3,000 lives a month, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while he said mass, shortly after he unsuccessfully begged President Carter to stop financing the slaughter and a United Nations investigation later concluded that the murder had been ordered by Salvadoran Major Roberto D'Aubuisson; in 1980, ABC News, which had promised to keep airing its late night news program America Held Hostage until the Iran hostages were freed, changed the name of the program to Nightline (the program, which generally focused on a single topic each night, lasted until November 28, 2005, when it retained the name but changed to a multi-subject format heavy on celebrity news and entertainment); in 1996, the Las Vegas movie Showgirls starring Elizabeth Berkley won the 16th annual Golden Raspberry Award; in 2002, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the best acting Oscars.UPDATE: March 23, 2007, 1:05 a.m. PDT, 8:05 CUT/SUT/GMT — On March 23, 1965, America's first two-person space flight began as Gemini 3 blasted off from Cape Kennedy with astronauts Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young aboard. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits
and Ego Trips
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006"Our long national nightmare is over."
Did I say that a dozen years ago?
CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough
Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator
Time to bring back NAGPAC?
CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006
NEWLY UPLOADED BLAST FROM THE PAST: The reasons behind the failure of Nevada's first non-smoking casino
Barbwire 3-2-1990
On March 23, 1842, Whig U.S. Rep. Joshua Giddings of Ohio was censured for mentioning slavery in violation of the House's "Gag Rule" (he defended slave mutineers on board the Creole, an incident similar to the Amistad case), after which he resigned and was then reelected; in 1874, President Grant signed an executive order reserving land in the Pyramid Lake region "for the Pah-Ute and other Indians residing thereon"; in 1918, Lithuania's independence was recognized by German emperor Wilhelm II; in 1918, trial began of 101 labor leaders indicted for "espionage" for (opposing U.S. participation in World War One), among them Bill Haywood, who at age 15 worked in a mine in Nevada's Humboldt County; in 1921, the War Resisters League International was founded in the Netherlands; in 1922 in Belfast, Ulster police sledgehammered open the door to a family home, lined up a Catholic father, his five sons and a boarder, and opened fire, killing all but one child in retaliation for the killings of two police auxiliaries; in 1923, Albert Einstein resigned from a League of Nations panel because he had concluded the league was powerless and "as a convinced pacifist it does not seem well to me to have any relation with the league whatever"; in 1923, Chollar Mine worker Andy Antunovich lost an arm on the job as rumors circulated of a miners strike on the Comstock; in 1932, the Nevada State Journal wrote "A life of enforced idleness, huddled on a narrow parcel of barren land, wind-swept in winter and sun-scorched in summer, with the dingiest of shanties and dog houses‚ as homes, is rapidly causing the deterioration of the Indians on the Reno reservation between here and Sparks. The United States senate Indian affairs committee promised the Indians the aid of the federal government in providing them some means of earning a livelihood — perhaps an industry of some small nature, a few dairy cows to give milk for the young, water to grow small quantities of truck crops. The committee left here May 26, 1931, and disappeared as completely as if it never existed. The people in Reno and other cities do not want to employ Indians, according to Meredith Crooks, Indian officer in charge of the reservation."; in 1933, the Reichstag enacted the Ermächtigungagesetz, making Adolf Hitler a dictator; in 1942, the U.S. began interning U.S. citizens in camps around the west, eventually imprisoning citizens of Japanese, German, Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian and Czech descent; in 1943, twenty-nine Jewish children from the La Rose Orphanage in France, and their adult caretaker, were gassed at Sobibor death camp; in 1950, All the King's Men won the best picture Oscar; in 1954, former cowboy actor Rex Bell of Las Vegas, who lost a congressional race in 1944, announced that he would oppose Reno Mayor Francis "Tank" Smith and White Pine County Assemblymember George Hawes in the Republican primary for lieutenant governor; in 1956, in her newspaper column, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote "There must be great pride, not only among the Negroes but among white people all over the country, in the remarkable restraint and courage shown by the Negroes in their struggle for their rights in Montgomery, Ala., and other places in the South. Never before has such a peaceful but determined movement taken place. It is inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi and his followers in India and calls for remarkable fortitude and perseverance. Dr. Luther King, in his insistence that there be no hatred in this struggle, is asking almost more than human beings can achieve. Yet there has not been one single word of praise from any member of the [Eisenhower] administration."; in 1956, Nevada labor commissioner D.W. Everett reminded employers that adult women workers must be paid the minimum wage, $1 an hour, and that women under 18 must be paid a minimum of 87.5 cents an hour; in 1960, after Nevada District Judge Richard Hanna declared Joe Conforte's Triangle Ranch brothel a public nuisance, Storey County Sheriff Cecil Morrison burned it down (meanwhile, a few hundred yards away in Lyon County, another branch of the brothel continued doing business); in 1963, Surfin‚ U.S.A. by The Beach Boys was released; in 1964, John Lennon's In His Own Write was published; in 1976, former Chilean Ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington, DC, by two Cuban exiles hired by the U.S.-supported regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. [EDITORS' NOTE: The correct date is 21 Sept 1976. Letelier's aide, American Ronni Karpen Moffitt, was also killed in the car bomb murder. Her widowed husband still grieves and sends letters to newspapers calling for justice for his wife.]; in 2002, Rex Daniels, who took the first master's degree in journalism from the University of Nevada, died in Reno; in 2003, Donald John Cline, Jr., of Sparks, Nevada, Frederick Pokorney, Jr., of Nye County, Nevada, and Michael Williams of Yuma (who was born in Reno), all died in Nasiriyah, Iraq.
UPDATE: March 22, 2007, 12:01 a.m. PDT, 7:01 CUT/GMT/SUT — On March 22, 1972, Congress sent the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to the states for ratification. It fell short of the three-fourths approval needed. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On March 22, 1638, Anne Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy (church and state were so tightly bound that her questioning of doctrine was seen as questioning the authority of the state) and she, her husband and her allies went south where they helped found Rhode Island as a refuge from religious power and from civil enforcement of religious views (her heresy conviction was posthumously reversed in 1987 by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis); in 1861, President Lincoln appointed James Nye of New York as governor of the new Territory of Nevada, and Orion Clemens of Iowa as territorial secretary; in 1895, at the Utah constitutional convention, it was expected that the document would be silent on gender in voting, effectively making women's suffrage legal from the beginning of statehood; in 1912, with the bunk house in the Southern Pacific railroad preserve in Sparks abolished, Sparks boarding houses were gaining new customers and some workers were living in Reno and riding the train to Sparks; in 1923, the Elko Independent reported that "an army of hoboes" was invading the town, "traveling to and fro in search of warmer climes and easy living. The youths are apparently heeding Horace Greely's [sic] adminition, 'Go west, young man,' but few are lingering to grow up with the country" (Greeley always denied saying "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country"; the adage actually originated with Terre Haute [Indiana] Express editor John Soule); in 1923, two instances of claim jumping in Elko county oil fields were reported; in 1922, Nevada state water engineer James Scrugham returned from California and Arizona meetings of the Colorado River Commission with U.S. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and said Hoover had, after viewing the Boulder Canyon site, committed himself fully to construction of a dam; in 1923, the annual women-edited issue of the University of Nevada Sagebrush carried an editorial on the role of women (see below); in 1934, as part of a bet, George Gallo and "Young" Firpo of Reno ate 14 pounds of spaghetti in an hour and ten minutes (after eating some sandwiches) at Colombo's; in 1947, long before Senator Joseph McCarthy came on the scene, President Truman ordered loyalty investigations of every federal worker in the United States; in 1949, Nevada Governor Vail Pittman vetoed a bill making prostitution legal if localities consented, calling on legislators "to protect the name of Nevada, to keep it synonymous with personal liberty but not with licentiousness"; in 1951, a committee of the Argentine Congress created to take over and investigate the newspaper La Prensa said officials had been unable to locate and jail its editor, Alberto Gainza Paz, and declared him a fugitive from justice (Gainza Paz was in Uruguay and was not able to reclaim his newspaper until the overthrow of Juan Peron in 1955; on April 16 1957, NBC's Armstrong Circle Theatre presented a docudrama Slow Assassination/Peron vs. La Prensa); in 1951, Carson City March of Dimes chair Paul Laxalt reported that a house to house solicitation had produced $849.53 for the anti-polio campaign; in 1954, the headline on the cover of the new issue of Newsweek (postdated March 29) asked in the wake of See It Now's McCarthy broadcast "Should television take sides?"; in 1954, syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, using material from the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada, ran an innuendo-filled column attacking Edward R. Murrow; in 1954, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a speculative story on the meaning of new 500-foot atomic test towers on Frenchman Flat, with a reference to "the highly accurate information" the Atomic Energy Commission had released in the past; in 1956: "MONTGOMERY, Ala., March 22. — (UP) — A circuit court judge found a young Negro minister guilty of conspiring to boycott segregated city buses and sentenced him to a $500 fine or 140 days at hard labor. The trials of 89 other Negroes on the same charge were continued until a higher court rules on the first case, that of the Rev. Martin Luther King, 27. "; in 1956, U.S. Senator Richard Neuberger criticized his fellow Oregonian, Interior Secretary Douglas McKay, for cronyism for McKay's appointment of his campaign manager in the upcoming U.S. senate campaign to supervise distribution of the assets of the state's Klamath tribe (Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Neuberger of a "completely unfair and unwarranted attack"); in 1961, a tobacco industry scientific advisory board announced that after six years of work it had found no evidence of a link between smoking and lung cancer; in 1961, a Clark County grand jury convened to investigate local police was dismissed after filing a report calling officers "burglars behind badges" but also saying that the police department was making progress in reforming itself; in 1963, Please Please Me, the first Beatles album, was released in Britain; in 1965, Bob Dylan's album Bringing It All Back Home was released; in 1971, the captain commanding 53 armored cavalry troopers who refused to obey orders to protect a damaged helicopter and their commanding officer's vehicle at Khe Sanh was relieved of his command and Gen. John Hill said he would take no action against the other men; in 1971, Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan said he would comply with a federal court order reinstating welfare recipients who had been thrown off the welfare rolls by his administration; in 1971, Latter Day Saints Church members in Reno said they were being encouraged by Salt Lake City church officials to get involved in the Nevada Legislature debates over abortion reform; in 1974, Sam Donahue, leader of the Tommy Dorsey Band since Dorsey‚s death in 1956, died in Reno; in 1980, Dark Side of the Moon broke Tapestry's record for longest stay on the Billboard top 100 album chart; in 2003, a group of about 300 (including Lt. Jim Ballard and Washoe County deputy district attorneys Jim Shewan and Roger Whomes) left the site of a pro-Iraq war demonstration in downtown Reno and walked to the site of an antiwar protest in a different part of downtown Reno and overran the peace vigil, tearing signs from protesters' hands, yelling to drown out hymns and spitting on protesters while at least 16 police officers stood by observing and did nothing (the antiwar group had altered the plans and route for their protest at the request of police in order to avoid interacting with the prowar group); in 2004, using a missile, Israel murdered Sheik Ahmed Yassin and seven other people standing near the wheelchair-bound sheik.
UPDATE: March 21, 2007, 4:31 p.m. PDT, 23:31 GMT/SUT/CUT — KRNV TV-4 reported on its noon newscast today about a mass-firing without notice at a telemarketing firm affiliated with Walley's Hot Springs in Genoa, Douglas County, Nev., southeast of Lake Tahoe. The sudden terminations may have violated the federal WARN Act, as did the firings at the Riverboat Casino in Reno in 1998. UPDATE 3-26-2007: Boomtown's recent firing and subcontracting of its housekeepers may fall into the same category. Stay tuned. Be well. Raise hell.
UPDATE: March 21, 2007, 2:35 a.m. PDT, 9:35 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 21, 1965, more than 3,000 civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., began their march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On March 21, 1685, Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany; in 1857, Australian journalist, trade union activist, and anti-imperialist Alice Henry, who started Chicago's Women's Trade Union League, was born in Richmond, Tasmania; in 1864, President Lincoln approved An Act to enable the people of Nevada to form a Constitution and State Government, and for the admission of such State into the Union on an equal footing with the original States.; in 1907, the United States attacked Honduras, one of at least seven U.S. invasions of that nation; in 1923, Idaho Senator William Borah hinted in an Akron speech that he and other Republicans might bolt the party and form a third party rather than support President Harding for reelection; in 1923, the first charges (against two men arrested in a Taylor Street home in Reno) were filed under Nevada's state alcohol prohibition law, setting the stage for a court test of the law, which state Attorney General Michael Diskin contended was unconstitutional; in 1929, the Nevada Legislature completed its business for the year, with one of the last pieces of business dealing with a state flag bill; in 1930, President Hoover nominated racist John J. Parker to the U.S. Supreme Court, drawing NAACP opposition (the nomination was rejected by the Senate); in 1934, Nevada Governor Fred Balzar died at the governor's mansion in Carson City and Lieutenant Governor Morley Griswold became acting governor; in 1935, the Nevada Senate approved an Assembly bill to hire one staff person to care for the untended Nevada Historical Society collection in the basement of the State Building in Reno; in 1939, Billie Holliday recorded Long Gone Blues on the Columbia label; in 1950, after being acquitted of all fraud charges brought against him by federal prosecutors, car manufacturer Preston Tucker filed suit against the prosecutors; in 1953, President Eisenhower endorsed construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, which obliterated a river canyon some considered another Grand Canyon (an effort is now underway to remove the dam and restore the canyon); in 1953, Las Vegas Elks Lodge officials reported that a Cleveland Indians/New York Giants exhibition game at Cashman Field on March 19 attracted 9,088 people and would probably be repeated; in 1954, the National Security Council approved joint chiefs chairman Arthur Radford's plan to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam to reverse the recent victory of the Vietnamese over the French; in 1956, "Robert Rich" won the Oscar for best writing of a motion picture story for The Brave One but he failed to appear to claim the statuette and the audience was told that he was at his wife's side as she gave birth (the screenplay was actually written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo; a public ceremony was finally held on May 2, 1975, at which the Oscar was presented to him); in 1960, at Sharpeville, South African officers raked a crowd of protesters with machine gun fire, killing 69 people and provoking young attorney Nelson Mandela's abandonment of nonviolence; in 1963, the last inmates departed Alcatraz after Attorney General Kennedy ordered the shutdown of the island prison; in 1961, The Beatles appeared in the Cavern Club for the first time; in 1965, voting rights marchers escorted by federal troops finally made it across Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Ala., on the third attempt in a month; in 1985, at a march in Langa, South Africa, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, police again opened fire on protesters, killing at least 21; in 1994, The Grateful Dead played in concert for the last time with Jerry Garcia; in 2002, Veteran Nevada journalist Lee Adler, a skilled reporter and writer, died in Carson City.
Guy Clifton/Reno Gazette-Journal/March 29, 2002: PASSAGE: Lee Adler was a New York City boy who found a home in the high desert of Nevada. He died in Carson City last week at age 65. Adler covered Carson City for several of the state's newspapers for parts four decades, working at a famously messy desk in the basement of the Capitol. The late Guy Shipler, legendary dean of the Capitol press corps, wrote of Adler in 1985: "During the 1981 session of the legislature, Adler could cover three committee meetings at once. He managed this feat by using three tape recorders, two of them borrowed, scurrying from one meeting to the other to make sure the tapes had not run out. No other inhabitants of our basement burrow have shown that much ingenuity or energy. He alone among us could somehow accomplish this juggling act flawlessly enough to come up with three authoritative and informative stories."
UPDATE: March 20, 2007, 8:01 a.m. PDT, 15:01 SUT/GMT — On March 20, 1841, Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue was published, considered by some to be the first detective story; in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in protest against the fugitive slave laws, was published, spreading anti-slavery sentiment (in the novel, Tom is an African-American who is portrayed as a noble, courageous and self sacrificing figure, so naturally when white playwrights got ahold of the story they changed the character into a groveling, submissive figure); in 1854, a group of former Whigs met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to start the Republican Party; in 1879, the Nevada State Journal wrote "American commerce must be a miserable affair if it cannot be maintained without sacrificing the rights of the American people."; in 1896, the United States attacked Nicaragua, one of many U.S. invasions of that nation; in 1898, thirteen wagonloads of Latter Day Saints settlers from Moroni, Utah, arrived in White Pine County, Nevada, where they established the hamlet of Preston; in 1903, the Washoe County library board advertised for architects to submit plans for the county's first library at a cost of no more than $15,000; in 1916, African Ota Benga, who was kidnapped and brought to the U.S. for a world's fair and then put on exhibit in a monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, committed suicide; in 1917, the sagebrush was "hereby adopted as the state emblem of the State of Nevada"; in 1919, a Navy official in Washington, Lieutenant Commander S.C. Hooper, said officials in the United States could have spoken by wireless telephone with President Wilson if needed at any time during Wilson's stay at the Versailles conference; in 1919, distillers said they were circulating anti-alcohol prohibition initiative petitions in twelve states, including Nevada; in 1923, a day after Utah Governor Charles Mabey, Nevada Governor James Scrugham and California highway commissioner Harvey Toy were invited to speak at a meeting of the Overland Trail Club in Elko on the importance of completing the Victory highway across their states, Scrugham said he would attend (the next day the Reno chamber of commerce board voted to send its president Charles Knight to the meeting); in 1923, in Blanding, San Juan County, Utah, Sheriff W.E. Aliver was pistol whipping a Native American in the jail when another one grabbed his gun and the two Paiute Indians disarmed him, locked him in the cell, and escaped (newspaper reports referred to the two as "young bucks"); in 1928, U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California called for approval of legislation to construct Boulder Dam; in 1935, at a funeral for his friend Grant Rice at Reno's Ross-Burke funeral home, amateur songwriter Raymond Penry spoke the words of a song he wrote for the deceased, "Softly Now the Light of Day, Fades Upon My Sight Away," and then died himself; in 1939, the German reich was in negotiations with Lithuania over the fate of Memel, which had been administered by France under a League of Nations mandate since the end of the world war; in 1940, University of Nevada freshman halfback Marion Motleykilled an elderly Japanese man in a car accident and was charged with negligent homicide; in 1945, Governor Edward Carville had on his desk awaiting signature measures sponsored by Senator Kenneth Johnson of Ormsby County to ratify under white law marriages performed under tribal law and to appropriate $1,500 ($16,613.29 in 2006 dollars) for state acquisition of Dat So La Lee's woven baskets; in 1947, Acting Georgia Governor Melvin Thompson, finally installed in the governor's office by the state supreme court after a mammoth political battle, called his ousted predecessor Herman Talmadge and said he might veto a whites-only primary election bill that Talmadge had already signed during his weeks as governor (Eugene Talmadge had won the governor's office, then died before taking office, the legislature had ignored the lieutenant governor-elect and appointed Talmadge's son Herman to be governor, and outgoing Governor Ellis Arnell had refused to leave office until the matter was settled, giving the state three governors); in 1949, Gentleman's Agreement, an indictment of anti-Semitism in the U.S., won the Academy Award for best picture of the year; in 1953, in New Orleans, T Bone Walker recorded Long Distance Blues; in 1954, in the Indiana high school basketball finals in Indianapolis, the Milan High School Indians defeated the powerhouse Muncie Central team with an epic last minute shot by Bobby Plump, a thrilling David over Goliath win that became legendary, inspiring the Gene Hackman/ Barbara Hershey movie Hoosiers, placing the 1954 Indians on the Sports Illustrated list of the twenty best teams of the 20th century, and electrifying Indiana (two days later the line of cars following the team back to Milan for welcoming ceremonies was thirteen miles long and swelled the town's population temporarily from 1,150 to 40,000); in 1954, Las Vegas Sun reporter Ed Reid (later author of The Green Felt Jungle) was beaten in the lobby of the Desert Inn; in 1959, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in Las Vegas in a station wagon after a sightseeing trip to the Grand Canyon; in 1969, in Gibraltar, John and Yoko were married; in 1971, Army Secretary Stanley Resor announced reforms to deal with treatment of African-Americans, particularly at U.S. posts in Germany where they received fewer promotions and harsher punishments than whites, and where they faced discrimination in off-base housing rentals; in 1971, the University of Nevada-Reno student government was considering changing its allocation of student fees from basketball and football to basketball only; in 1988, over a park in Mountain View, California, a passing aircraft snagged the tail of a kite, lifting 8-year old DeAndra Anrig off the ground and carrying her 100 feet, when she let go (she was not seriously injured); in 1992, President Bush the Elder vetoed a tax cut for middle income taxpayers; in 1999, Las Vegas civil rights pioneer James McMillan died.
UPDATE: March 19, 2007, 3:58 a.m.
PDT, 10:58 GMT/SUT — On
March 19, 1920, the United States Senate rejected for the second
time the Treaty of Versailles by a vote of 49-35, falling short of the two-thirds
majority needed for approval. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On March 19, 624, Muhammed proclaimed the "Day of Deliverance"; in 1848, Wyatt Earp, who closed out his career as a lawman in Tonopah, Nevada, was born in Warren County, Illinois; in 1879, Paiute leader Johnson Sides stopped in at a Reno newspaper office to find out if anything was known of the rumored killing of three Native Americans in the Honey Lake Valley; in 1902, a letter to the editor from Washo leader Captain Jim was published in Reno about the loss of tribal lands: "Now on account of not having homes the Washoe Indians wander from place to place and learn these destructive habits which the white people have introduced. Some white men says that we have no business to drink whisky if we know it to be dangerous but they do the very same thing yet they are supposed to be civilized men."; in 1908, after a Center Party deputy in the German Reichstag observed that "a negro also has immortal soul", reporters in the press gallery were heard to make joking remarks, whereupon the Centrists rose to their feet and the Center floor leader pointed a finger at the press and shouted "Swine!" after which the offended reporters sent word to the Reichstag president that they might strike unless an apology was forthcoming, and the day's newspapers ended their account of the session at the dispute; in 1908, Southern Pacific Railroad officials from throughout the nation met briefly in Sparks, though whether they were actually meeting or passing each other while waiting for east- and westbound trains was not clear (a Nevada State Journal headline said "No labor troubles involved" but the subject was not even mentioned in the story); in 1910, the coroner in Marion, Arkansas, ruled that the lynchings of Robert Austin and Charles Richardson were suicides; in 1917, in Wilson vs. New, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the eight-hour day and minimum wages by approving the Adamson Act of 1916, enacted to cover railroad workers; in 1914, the U.S. Senate voted for a women's suffrage constitutional amendment, though not by the majority needed for passage, after Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi was defeated in his effort to tie repeal of the 15th amendment (guaranteeing the African-American right to vote) to passage of women's suffrage and most southern Democrats voted against it without the Vardaman attachment (Senator Charles Townsend of Michigan said it was unnecessary to do injustice to blacks in order to do justice to women, and white supremacist Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada said he favored making the U.S. a white man's nation but said women's suffrage was not the vehicle for it); in 1914 mine owners in the Colorado coalfield war said they would sue union officials for $4,000,000 ($78,703,571.94 in 2006 dollars) for strike-related losses (one month later the Rockefeller interests launched the Ludlow massacre, burning miners and their families alive while machine guns raked the worker encampment at Ludlow, Colorado); in 1918, Iowa farmer Raymond Hall of Minerva, who had just been exempted from the draft on an agricultural exemption, was dragged from his home by a group of eight men, driven eight miles into the country, painted head to toe in yellow and black, and left to walk home (Hall attributed the action not to resentment of his exemption but to jealousy for his recent marriage to Miss Grace Jones); in 1919, Leo Henrikson, later a labor leader in Las Vegas, was born in Charleston, South Carolina; in 1925, Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, was made a bishop; in 1926 Genovaite Cizauskas, matriarch of the Cizauskas clan that has included a diplomat, NPR reporter, hangliding instructor, brewing exec and Fannie Mae exec, was born Genovaite Ambraziejus in Brooklyn; in 1928, Hans Kung, a Swiss Catholic priest and theologian who is a critic of the doctrine of papal infallibility and so was stripped in 1979 of his authority to teach Catholic theology, and who wrote the Declaration of the Religions for a Global Ethic that was adopted by the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1993, was born in Sursee, Canton of Lucerne; in 1928, U.S. court watermaster Harry Dukes filed a report with the federal court in Carson City on the division of waters from natural storage and artificial storage in Lake Tahoe; in 1931, gambling was made legal again in Nevada; in 1939, Langston Hughes established the New Negro Theatre in Los Angeles; in 1943, the Reno USO Council held a meeting to decide what to do after the owner of a building rented for a USO center for African-American soldiers cancelled the rental agreement, returned the rent check, and told Mayor Froehlich he had received complaints from nearby property owners; in 1943, after the Nevada Senate failed to authorize money for the paving of Wells Avenue in Reno, city officials said they were not giving up on the project; in 1954, Catholic Bishop Thomas Gorman announced the early start on construction of a new Catholic high school in Clark County to be named Santa Maria de Las Vegas (St. Mary of the Meadows), now called Gorman High School; in 1954, U.S. Representative Kenneth Keating introduced legislation designed to curb the Nevada gambling industry by banning casino advertising over state lines, prohibiting the shipment of gambling equipment into the state, and block collection of gambling debts with bank checks (the Las Vegas Review-Journal referred to him as Emmett Keating); in 1960, actor William Talman, who had been arrested a few days earlier on drug charges, threatened legal action against CBS for using a "morals" clause in his contract to fire him from his role as the district attorney on Perry Mason (Talman was later cleared of the drug charges and his fellow cast members demanded that CBS rehire him, which it did); in 1960, actor James Garner, who was being paid $1,500 a week by Warner Brothers, said he was a free agent and was leaving the Maverick television series, but a Warner Brothers spokesperson said the company still considered Garner under contract; in 1968, a group of "wise men" presidential advisors convened by President Johnson, many of whom supported getting into Vietnam, advised Johnson to get out of Vietnam; in 1969, the Chicago 8 were indicted; in 1971, National Welfare Rights Organization leader George Wiley praised Gloria Steinem and Flo Kennedy for coming to Reno for protest marches on the Mustang Ranch brothel and Reno casinos, but those marches were cancelled and the group flew to Las Vegas because of a shift in emphasis in the NWRO's Nevada campaign to the southern city (the Nevada State Journal referred to Steinem and Kennedy as "the Misses Steinem and Kennedy" and to Steinem as "a chic blonde"); in 1984, Kate and Allie debuted on CBS; in 1991, Phoenix lost the right to host the 1993 Super Bowl because of the behavior of state political leaders in denigrating Martin Luther King, Jr.; in 1996, a new Beatles song Real Love (created by adding the voices of George, Ringo and Paul to a recording made by John) was released as part of The Beatles Anthology; in 1997, President Clinton named George Tenet as CIA director.
[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]
UPDATE: March 18, 2007, 2:28 p.m. PDT, 21:28 GMT/SUT —
On March 18, 1832, several British citizens were sentenced to seven years on the Australia penal colony for trade union organizing; in 1849, on his first day at sea after sailing from Massachusetts for the California gold fields, nineteen year-old Alf Doten began the diary that he would keep all his life (including his years as a Nevada editor), eventually stretching to 79 volumes, and would be edited by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and published in three mammoth volumes by the University of Nevada Press 70 years after his death; in 1879, African-Americans from Vickburg and other parts of Mississippi and Louisiana were for some reason arriving by the hundreds in St. Louis, alarming the populace (Mayor Henry Overstolz warned anyone against coming to the city without means) since there were few jobs, and a news report said "The negroes express the utmost horror at the thought of returning South, where they say their condition is utterly unbearable. They claim that all the ills of the old time slavery are inflicted on them upon the plantations, and say they would rather starve than return."; in 1907, during flooding in western Nevada, dozens of buildings in Reno were destroyed, 200 yards of railroad track at Floriston was swept away, Reno's Chinatown was underwater, the Verdi steel bridge went under, the Floriston dam was blown up to save the paper mills, sending logs into the river where they destroyed the Mayberry Bridge, and the Reno Evening Gazette got out a one-sheet edition; in 1908, in an era of frequent illegal U.S. interventions in Latin American and the Caribbean, Reno's Nevada State Journal approved: "We have no patience with the complacent ignorance of the people and newspapers of this country, that persist in regarding Haiti as a nation of cultured negroes. Haiti is a land of savage beasts, who cannot be called men by anyone familiar with their history."; in 1922, after a nonviolent public protest he led resulted in violence, Mahatma Gandhi pleaded guilty to "bringing or attempting to excite disaffection towards His Majesty's Government established by law in British India" by publishing three articles in Young India (see below); in 1926, whites (whose construction of Derby Dam on the Truckee impeded the spawn of trout from Pyramid Lake), reacting to rumors that Pyramid tribal members were slaughtering tons of trout to harvest the spawn, were demanding that the U.S. attorney or Congress or someone do something about the (possible) problem, but Pyramid Superindentent Snyder said the spawn harvesting was done by James Vogt of the state hatchery and Snyder also called for diverting all water in the Truckee from the Newlands Project to Pyramid for two weeks; in 1926, in keeping with a call by U.S. secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, a group of Nevadans was formed to study means to eliminate waste in Nevada industry; in 1932, final congressional approval was given to U.S. Senator George Norris' bill shielding workers from unrestricted federal court injunctions against strikes [EDITOR'S NOTE: The Norris-LaGuardia Act remains a towering landmark in U.S. labor law.]; in 1932, modification of the abatement order on the Sunset club on the Boulder Dam highway about eight miles east of Las Vegas was denied in federal court in Carson City, and three other clubs, the Mecca club at 29 Douglas Alley, the Atlas at 28 Douglas Alley in Reno and the Blue Goose in Las Vegas were abated (padlocked) for one year under the alcohol prohibition laws; in 1932, traveling to San Francisco to embark on a ship to Hawaii to handle the Fortescue Massie case, Clarence Darrow was interviewed while his train was standing in Reno and predicted that President Hoover would be swept out of office in November by an "astounding" vote; in 1932, the national "commander" of the American Legion arrived in Reno for a two-day visit and said he did not support making beer legal; in 1942, an internment program was established to imprison U.S. citizens in camps throughout the west (eventually, citizens of Japanese, German, Italian and Romanian descent were interned); in 1949, the publicity committee (chaired by an H.G. Wells!) of the Reno Chamber of Commerce, which had 100 "You'll like Reno" and 34 "Fly to Reno" signs around every section of the U.S. except the Pacific northwest, decided to add that section to the campaign; in 1954, former Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Constance Heehn was interviewed by her former newspaper on her efforts to save Utah death row inmate Don Neal from a firing squad; in 1954, a funeral was held for murdered Las Vegas labor figure James Hartley (24 years later, one of his pallbearers, Tom Hanley, was convicted of murdering another labor leader, Al Bramlet); in 1954, Las Vegas school officials said construction of Rancho High School would begin within a month; in 1961, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that non-whites made up about 7% per cent of Nevada's population of 285,278 persons — 21,835 persons, with 13,484 African-Americans, 6,681 Native Americans, 572 Chinese, 544 Japanese and 286 Filipinos, the black population mostly in Reno and Las Vegas and the Indian population mostly in rural areas; in 1967, Penny Lane hit number one; in 1969, Richard Nixon secretly and illegally ordered the bombing of neutral Cambodia; in 1970, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Country Joe McDonald was fined $500 for obscenity for leading a concert audience in his famous Gimme an F! cheer; in 1971, California Assemblymember Gene Chappie said he did not expect problems in the state for his bill, already approved by the assembly, to turn Coso Hot Springs over to the Paiute/Shoshone of Inyo County; in 1972, Neil Young's Heart of Gold (with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor on background vocals) hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1991, silent film star Vilma Banky, who starred in The Winning of Barbara Worth, filmed in Pershing County in 1926, died in Los Angeles.
Mahatma Gandhi/March 18, 1922: I wanted to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered has done an irreparable harm to my country or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it; and I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, Mr. Judge, is, as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are assisting to administer are good for the people.
UPDATE: March 17, 2007, 10:56 a.m. PDT, 17:56 GMT/SUT —