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Yesterday, today and tomorrow
NEWS BULLETIN & ALMANIACAL ARCHIVES
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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.]]
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.
UPDATE: August 31, 2007, 6:39 a.m. PDT, 13:39 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 31, 1777, at Fort Henry on the Ohio frontier, British-allied Native Americans attacked a few men who outside the fort working with horses in an effort to lure additional whites from the fort, and Captain Samuel Mason accommodated them by riding to the rescue with 14 more men, and all the whites except Mason were wiped out; in 1837, in a speech to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke some of the most powerful words ever penned: "They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."; in 1863, Powhatan Locke was temporarily appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Nevada (the temporary appointment lasted a year, most of the remaining life of the Territory); in 1899, F.O. Stanley drove the Stanley Steamer to the top of Mountain Washington in New Hampshire, a 6288-foot high mountain; in 1919, after being confirmed as President Wilson's attorney general over the opposition of U.S. Senator Joseph Frelinghuysen, Mitchell Palmer called Frelingheysen a German sympathizer; in 1920, Loyd Alvia "Dutch" Myers was born in Cozad, Nebraska; in 1921, the Nevada Board of Regents voted to spend $1,000 to pave the road into the University of Nevada grounds from the gate to the Orr Ditch; in 1936, Asheboro, North Carolina, neighbors of Gus Langley, who was convicted of murder, had his head shaved for electrocution seven times in three years in prison and was reprieved each time, then was proven innocent, petitioned for him to be paid for the labors he performed while in prison, including painting the warden's quarters; in 1939, to provide a rationale for an attack on Poland, SS troops wearing Polish uniforms staged an invasion of Germany and an attack on a radio station at Gleiwitz and left behind several dead Germans in Polish uniforms; in 1939, three days after the Las Vegas Review-Journal carried an editorial headlined "War is not probable", its front page headline was "WAR IS MATTER OF HOURS"; in 1939, in reaction to the general belief that war would be good for Nevada farms and ranches, Nevada Farm Bureau Federation executive secretary Florence Bovett said she did not believe that any kind of war would help Nevada; in 1939, U.S. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a Salt Lake City speech that it would be easier to stay out of the next war than it was to stay out of World War One because recently enacted neutrality legislation abandoned the free shipping rights the U.S. entered the last war to defend; in 1939, the U.S. House Committee on UnAmerican Activities asked the customs service to take "extraordinary precautions" to prevent German American Bund Fuehrer Fritz Kuhn from leaving the country, which he had every right to do; in 1944, as the fifth anniversary of the European war approached, British military officials said they believed the war would end within 35 days, though they expressed nervousness about the then-chic theory that fanatical Nazis would establish a redoubt in the Alps; in 1944, German forces were beginning to abandon some of the coastal rocket bomb sites as Allied forces extended their hold, with most of the bomb launches still coming from sites between Calais and Dunkerque (though a German radio broadcast said the equipment was being made mobile); in 1944, a U.S. soldier named Juan Casas filed in Las Vegas for an annulment from one wife and a divorce from another after learning from the Army that his 1941 Juarez divorce from wife number one was not recognized by the U.S; in 1951, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called for diplomatic recognition of mainland China, setting off an angry debate in Congress (about him, not about his proposal); in 1955, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles endorsed Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem's refusal to hold elections required by the Geneva accords of 1954; in 1964, the U.S. Food Stamp Act was signed into law; in 1980, the Solidarity workers organization was started at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk.
On Aug. 31, 1997, Diana Spencer was killed in a Paris car wreck; in 2005, U.S. Representative James Gibbons of Nevada announced his candidacy for the governorship.
George Bush viewing Hurricane Katrina flood damage from Air Force One / August 31, 2005: It's devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground.
UPDATE: August 30, 2007, 11:43 a.m. PDT, 18:43 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 30, 1963, the hot-line communications link between Washington, D.C., and Moscow went into operation. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 30, 2000: Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness.
On this date in 1813, after a group of U.S. soldiers from Fort Mims in Alabama ambushed a large party of Creek tribal members, the Creek, believing the whites had declared war, struck back at the fort, killing 400 in the second battle of the Creek War; in 1878, the Territorial Enterprise demanded to know why Nevada Mineralogist (then an elective post) Henry Whitehill was spending time in eastern Nevada and suggested he was in the pay of the Central Pacific Railroad; in 1919, Texas Federal Oil Company was advertising lots for sale in Las Vegas for oil exploration; in 1936, a new Geiger Grade highway to Virginia City was opened to traffic; in 1939, Overton superintendent of schools Paul Thurston said new school buildings in Moapa would be ready by the start of the school year on September 6; in 1944, Anna Lucasta, the first all-black theatrical production with a non-racial story, opened on Broadway where it played for 950 performances; in 1944, the Las Vegas board of education named the Huntridge school building after John Hunt and the Biltmore school building after Helen Stewart; in 1963, the hot line, a teletype line and a product of concern over poor communication during the Cuban missile crisis, was installed between Washington and Moscow to make communication more rapid, with a test message sent to Moscow: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890" (news film was shown of the teletype machines being rolled not into the state department or White House but the Pentagon); in 1968, the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair began in a pasture near Sultan, Washington, the nation's second outdoor rock concert of the sixties, with Santana, Big Mama Thornton, James Cotton, Country Joe and the Fish, Richard Pryor, Dino Valenti, Byron Pope, It's a Beautiful Day, Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Alice Stuart Thomas, the Youngbloods, New Lost City Ramblers and The Grateful Dead in attendance (the Dead were not scheduled and came on their own initiative); in 1972, John and Yoko staged two concerts in Madison Square Garden that also featured Roberta Flack and Stevie Wonder and raised $1,500,000 for Willowbrook, an institution for mentally disabled children; in 2001, Southern Nevada Community College administrator Mike Meyer resigned after saying of the wife of a state legislator "She's a nigger and niggers are never on time"; in 2004, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported that health care among Native Americans (in the U.S.) had fallen to third-world levels.UPDATE: August 29, 2007, 4:48 a.m. PDT, 11:48 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 29, 1991, the Supreme Soviet, the parliament of the U.S.S.R., suspended all activities of the Communist Party, bringing an end to the institution. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 29, 2002: There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide.
On this date in 1844, Acting President John Tyler, the candidate of the Democratic Republican Party in a three-way election campaign, withdrew from the race and thus assured James Polk's election over Henry Clay (Polk and Tyler shared the same position on statehood for Texas, a dominant issue in the campaign, and Tyler won passage of a Texas statehood bill after the election); in 1910, the Student Record, student newspaper at the University of Nevada in Reno, changed its name to The U. of N. Sagebrush; in 1921, New York City held a farewell-to-Lightnin' parade presided over by Mayor John Hylan, two days after the play (set at the "Calivada Hotel" built astraddle the state line between Nevada and California at Lake Tahoe and at "Superior Court" in Reno) closed with a record-breaking 1,291 performances; in 1921, a committee of the Reno chamber of commerce to support the Victory Highway (a coast to coast highway) was formed; in 1936, a dance was held in Silver City to help pay for renovation of the town school; in 1962, President Kennedy said that as a result of growing public concern over pesticides, which he attributed to "Miss Carson's book", his administration's health and agriculture agencies were taking a closer look at pesticide use; in 1977, the morning New York Daily News refused to publish the day's Doonesbury comic strip, which ridiculed the newspaper's overheated "Son of Sam" coverage and its writer Jimmy Breslin, so when afternoon came the competing New York Post published the strip; in 2006, Cable News Network morning anchor Kyra Phillips was chatting with a friend in the bathroom during a George Bush speech, unaware that the control room had the mike she was wearing open, and her words (praising her husband and calling her sister in law a control freak) were going out over a George Bush speech.
Rachel Carson: For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan, or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in the stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. . . . We spray our elms and following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elmleaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life-or-death that scientists know as ecology.
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.
UPDATE: August 28, 2007, 1:40 a.m. PDT, 08:40 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 28, 1963, 200,000 people participated in a peaceful civil rights rally in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1793, President Washington, in a letter to Governor William Moultrie of South Carolina, declined to make war on the Chickamauga nation because it was the exclusive prerogative of Congress to decide on war: "The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure" (Washington had by then already placed information on the issue before Congress and informed its members "It remains to be considered by Congress whether in the present situation of the United States it is advisable or not to pursue any further or other measures than those which have already been adopted" and Congress took no action to declare war); in 1894, the faculty of Nevada State University met with the new president, Joseph Stubbs; in 1913, just weeks after taking office as president, Woodrow Wilson — who invaded Mexico incessantly during his presidency — warned U.S. citizens to leave Mexico in preparation for an invasion; in 1921, federal alcohol prohibition agents traveled 210 miles from Reno to Paradise to bust two saloons that were selling whiskey; in 1936, as former Spanish King Alfonso moved close to the Spanish border, leaders of the fascist forces announced that if they won the civil war, they would set up a military dictatorship allied with the "friendly nations" Germany and Italy that had made their victory possible, followed by reestablishment of Alfonso's monarchy; in 1943, the University of Nevada faculty met and approved a recommended list of graduates to the Board of Regents, a roll that had few men listed in a world at war; in 1953, in a ceremony at the Fifth Street School, three new Carson City schools were dedicated with two Nevada governors in attendence, incumbent Charles Russell and future governor Paul Laxalt, then the school district lawyer; in 1955, fourteen year old African-American Emmitt Till of Chicago who was visiting Money, Mississippi, was lynched by being dragged from his bed, beaten to death, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his confessed killers acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury, an event that helped spark the civil rights movement and became a touchstone for a generation of student radicals; in 1963, African-American labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, who first scheduled his March on Washington for July 1, 1941, but cancelled it after President Roosevelt signed an executive order throwing thousands of defense jobs open to previously barred blacks and creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it, finally held the March on this day (this time over the objection of President Kennedy), drawing 200,000 to the nation's capital where they heard Martin King's "dream" speech (see below); in 1968, the year's major student street protests in Warsaw, Rome and Paris were joined by those at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police rioted in the course of quelling the protests, protests that helped shatter the unhealthy bipartisan consensus on U.S. cold war policies since the Truman administration; in 1988, Margaret Wheat, Native American scholar and author of Survival Arts of the Paiutes (the all-time bestseller of the University of Nevada Press) died; in 2006, polygamist Warren Jeffs, reported husband of 40 women and father of 60 children, was arrested in Las Vegas after a year as a fugitive on the FBI most wanted list to face charges involving preying on underage girls in arranging plural marriages.
Martin Luther King / August 28, 1963: This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.UPDATE: August 27, 2007, 1:39 a.m. PDT, 08:39 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 27, 1962, the United States launched the Mariner 2 space probe, which flew past Venus the following December. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
New York Evening Post / August 27, 1921, on Lightnin': There is only one drawback to prolonged runs in the theatre — so many people miss seeing the play. After it has run for a year or two the belief arises that the play will run on forever, until some of us find it is too late.
On Aug. 27, 1832, Sauk tribal chief Black Hawk, a legendary warrior (because of repeated broken and misrepresented treaties, the Sauk joined the British in the war of 1812 and continued fighting the U.S. after the British sued for peace) surrendered two weeks after the Bad Axe massacre in Wisconsin in which, using cannon and rifles from a ship and using axes, clubs and guns on shore, whites killed hundreds, mainly women and children and the elderly (see below); in 1878, the Territorial Enterprise reported on a split among African-Americans in the state, with a Virginia City group repudiating a Nevada Union Colored League formed by a Carson City group; in 1893, a major hurricane made landfall at Savannah, killing 1,000 to 2,000 people and making 30,000 mostly African-American residents homeless in the region of Sea Islands off South Carolina with Clara Barton on the scene among the relief workers. Another hurricane five weeks later nearly destroyed relief efforts. Most casualty and cost figures are probably understated because many of the losses were among blacks. The hurricane is regarded as the worst in U.S. history, on a par with Katrina; in 1915, newspapers reported „important advantages gained by [Allied] troops‰ in the grisly Gallipoli campaign, which was not true; in 1921, Lightnin', the play set in a Lake Tahoe hotel that had the Nevada/California state line running through it (allowing people to establish their residency for Nevada quickie divorces while getting their mail in California to fool the folks back home) ended its Broadway run with the all time record — 1,291 performances (President Harding sent a letter of congratulations); in 1913 in Topeka, there was a raid where several cigarette dealers were arrested for violating Kansas tobacco prohibition, prompting a lawsuit by a merchant against the Kansas Anti-cigarette League; in 1932, the death of U.S. Senator Charles Waterman of Colorado threatened to create a senate evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, with Senator Henrick Shipstead of Minnesota, a Farmer Labor Party senator, holding the balance of power; in 1936, Utah Democratic Party chair Calvin Rawlins assured Democratic national chair James Farley that his state was safe for President Franklin Roosevelt (who won the state by 39 percentage points) and Nevada Democratic chair Ed Clark gave the same assurance about his state (which Roosevelt won by 46 points); in 1952, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the Democratic presidential nominee, gave a speech (that Lowell Thomas reported "had its turn of courage and boldness") to the national convention of the anti-free expression American Legion: "Too often sinister threats to the bill of rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism."; in 1954, President Eisenhower wired Nevada Governor Charles Russell that he had authorized additional expenditures of emergency funds to speed repairs to the earthquakes-damaged Truckee-Carson Irrigation District system; in 1954, Nevada District Judge John Belford pleaded guilty to failure to file income tax returns for 1951 and 1952 and said he would not resign and would continue his campaign for reelection (he resigned six days later, on September 2d); in 1959, 54 year-old Beatrice Workman of a Chicago suburb, one of a group of women known as the "radium girls" and the "Society of the Living Dead" — workers who painted the radium on watch dials in the 1920s, many of whom died young or suffered if they survived — died in Illinois and an autopsy put the cause of death as radium poisoning; in 1960, the last performance of Shreveport's celebrated Louisiana Hayride took place; in 1971 in Chicago, Lil Hardin Armstrong died as she completed playing St. Louis Blues in memory of her husband Louis in Chicago's Civic Center Plaza; in 2001, Israeli agents murdered Palestinian leader Mustafa Zibri; in 2003, a religious monument was removed from the Supreme Court of Alabama.
Black Hawk: A few summers ago, I was fighting against you. I did wrong, perhaps, but that is past. It is buried. Let it be forgotten. Rock river was beautiful country. I loved my towns, my cornfields, and the home of my people. It is yours now. Keep it as we did.UPDATE: August 26, 2007, 1:06 p.m. PDT, 20:06 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was declared in effect. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On Aug. 26, 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was adopted by the French National Assembly; in 1872, Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald sent a telegram to corporate lawyer John Abbott, which was leaked to the press and seemed to indicate bribery ("I must have another ten thousand; will be the last time of calling; do not fail me; answer today"), causing the government to fall and Macdonald's Conservative Party to lose the impending election (incredibly, Abbott later became prime minister); in 1886, indigenous Argentine Native American Ceferino Namuncura was born in Rio Negro province, later becoming a Catholic student priest who died too young to do very much but became a cult figure and will be beatified by Pope Benedict in November 2007 because a 24-year-old woman with uterine cancer was allegedly instantly cured in 2000 after her family asked for Namuncura's intervention; in 1901, the American Standard Version of the Bible was published by Thomas Nelson and Sons (which would also later publish the Revised Standard Version in 1946-52 and which still exists today as an arm of The Thomson Organization, a communications conglomerate); in 1905, George Washington, son of a slave and the African-American founder of Centralia, Washington, died there at age 88; in 1914, Nevada Attorney General George Thatcher released a legal opinion arguing that the Wadsworth postmaster could legally run for justice of the peace so long as he resigned as postmaster before election day; in 1921, a two-day meeting to organize a Nevada farm cooperative began at the Reno chamber of commerce; in 1936, EPIC (End Poverty In California, founded by Francis Townsend) candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives won 11 nominations out of California's twenty congressional districts; in 1939, the Cincinnati Reds and Brooklyn Dodgers played at Ebbets Field in the first baseball game broadcast on television [EDITOR'S NOTE: Hall of Fame announcer Red Barber, who had previously worked for the Reds but was now the Dodgers' voice, called the game which few saw because few television sets were in use.]; in 1941, the collaborationist Petain government of France appeared on the verge of collapse as a hundred members of Parliament met in an unauthorized session in protest against Petain's increasing close cooperation with the Nazis; in 1941, the Army announced plans to air condition with swamp coolers Camp Sibert in Nevada; in 1968, the Democratic National Convention began in Chicago after presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy asked his supporters to stay away and protesters were gathered in city parks by the tens of thousands; in 1970, on the anniversary of the ratification of suffrage, the Women's Strike for Peace was held around the nation, with tens of thousands of people marching and demanding approval by Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment; in 1978, Albino Luciani of Venice was elected pope, taking the name John Paul I; in 1998, former Nevada assemblymember (1972-76) and senator (1978-82) Jean Ford died.
UPDATE: August 25, 2007, 2:29 p.m. PDT, 21:29 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 25, 1944, Paris was liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1737, British royal appointee James Logan, who was desperate to obtain title to Native American lands that he had already sold to whites, lied to Delaware tribal leaders in presenting them with a fraudulent deed to their land that he claimed had already been purchased by William Penn in 1686 and further presented them with a fraudulent agreement from the Iroquois Confederacy in which that tribal nation surrendered its claims in the area (indicating that the Iroquois would be unlikely to make common cause with the Delaware) and thus convinced the Delaware to sign a surrender of all lands from the present day site of Wrightstown northwest "as far as a man could walk in a day and a half", the walk to be held on September 19, 1737, giving the agreement the name of the Walking Purchase; in 1875, the construction of a flume from Lake Tahoe to the Truckee Meadows was providing temporary prosperity to Reno, with 570 workers employed ("No Chinamen" the Nevada State Journal assured readers) and a $50,000 monthly payroll; in 1883, the French conquest of Vietnam became official with the signing of the Treaty of Hue, after which the French eliminated the nation's name, carved it up into three "protectorates" called Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, all of which prompted China to occupy Tonkin and led to another war; in 1908, the National Association of Colored Nurses was founded; in 1921, Young's Hotel in Sparks was raided by alcohol prohibition agents; in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was organized with A. Philip Randolph as president; in 1933, jazz impresario Wayne Shorter (Native Dancer) was born in Newark; in 1943, a meeting of Reno community leaders voted in favor of parallel parking; in 1944, Paris was liberated from years of Nazi occupation; in 1945, a week after the Vietnamese declared their independence after the end of Japanese occupation, and three weeks before the French with U.S. support reoccupied the nation, tens of thousands of Saigonese marched for nine hours in support of the new Ho Chi Minh government and on the same day Ho convinced French puppet emperor Bao Dai to abdicate; in 1953, the use of radar by police as a speed trap was approved by Municipal Judge Guy Walts in finding two speeders guilty, saying his decision was based in part on the fact that 200 Nevadans had already been cited without objecting to the technology (one prosecution witness was asked why the rader had shown a street sweeper traveling at 60 miles an hour); in 1954, the Reno Evening Gazette endorsed U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey's bill outlawing the Communist Party: "Giving it a tryout for a couple of years will do no harm and might be of great benefit."; in 1966, The Beatles performed at the Seattle Center Coliseum; in 2006, conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan released a column that likened illegal immigrants to the Goths, the Germanic tribes who ravaged the Roman Empire in the centuries preceding the collapse of its western half, which he said would be "how America ends".
UPDATE: August 24, 2007, 12:14 a.m. PDT, 07:14 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew smashed into Florida, causing record damage; 55 deaths in Florida, Louisiana and the Bahamas were blamed on the storm. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1781, Mohawk warriors led by Chief Joseph Brant ambushed the Pennsylvania militia on the Ohio River in Indiana. Brant routed it, a battle that became known as Lochry's Defeat; in 1807, Chief Joseph Brant died near Lake Ontario; in 1873, William Henry Jackson took the first photographs of Colorado's Mount of the Holy Cross, providing proof of the rumored natural formation that created a cross of snow; in 1896, after an out-of-state magazine reported that the Latter Day Saint vote held the balance of power in Nevada, the Virginia City Evening Chronicle commented "This will be news to the political bosses"; in 1918, the Clark County Review reported that the county was two-thirds of the way to filling its quota of $90,000 in sales of war savings stamps; in 1927, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Curtis Wilbur met with San Francisco officials and then announced formation of a panel to study construction of a bridge over San Francisco bay that would accomodate the needs both of the locals and the navy; in 1933, the Public Works Administration approved $2 million for the Humboldt reclamation project in Nevada; in 1936, at a rally for Republican presidential nominee Alfred Landon in Conneautville, Pennsylvania, a sheriff ran through the crowd firing shots in the air while chasing an alleged pickpocket; in 1936, for the eighth year in a row, children in a Reno Baptist Sunday school mailed off Christmas presents for the children of Holstensborg, Greenland, the native town of Nevada snow scientist James E. Church, with the four cartons costing nearly ten dollars to mail; in 1966, Vu Van Mau, foreign minister of the Saigon regime, resigned in protest against the southern dictatorship's treatment of Buddhists; in 1969, Company A, 3d Battalion, 196th Light Infantry Brigade refused to obey order from its commander, Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr., to continue an attack on well entrenched enemy positions in the Song Chang valley, 30 miles south of Da Nang, the first of a number of combat refusals that joined a growing number of expressions of rage (fraggings, desertions) at the pointless war (see below); in 1982, in a meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City, arbitrageur Ivan Boesky and Kidder, Peabody mergers and acquisitions executive Martin Siegel agreed that Siegel would provide Boesky with inside information on upcoming mergers; in 2006, the International Astronomical Union, which apparently owns the galaxy, demoted Pluto, declaring that it is not a planet (we had nine planets before Bush became president).
RADIO TRAFFIC / SONG CHANG VALLEY / AUGUST 24, 1969:
Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr.: I am sorry, sir, but my men refused to go . . . We cannot move out.
Lieut. Colonel Robert C. Bacon: Repeat that, please. Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?
Schurtz: I think they understand, but some of them simply had enough — they are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Viet Nam. They want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.UPDATE: August 23, 2007, 8:12 a.m. PDT, 15:12 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 23, 1927, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery. [New York Times/AP e-headlines] (EDITOR'S NOTE: Death penalty advocates who say there is no record of a U.S. execution of the innocent since the 19th Century, please Google these names.)
On this date in 1784, settlers in western North Carolina, after the legislature ceded their territory to the federal government, declared independence and petitioned for statehood (after it was refused, the area became a nation, Franklin, that functioned for about four years with its own chief of state and legislature, treaties and courts, and it later added additional territory before finally reuniting with North Carolina to make common defense against local tribes); in 1873, it was reported in Reno that the Western Union office had begun staying open all night; in 1874, the Reno band traveled to Poe City on Peavine Mountain where it played several selections and were well treated by the Poe City band; in 1913, cars were allowed to enter Yosemite National Park for the first time, marking a basic change in federal policy that eventually took an enormous toll on national parks and changed the design of their trappings thereafter; in 1919, Pacific Coast Shipbuilding Company in Suisun Bay launched a merchant ship, the Lavada, named for Las Vegas, Nevada, in honor of the city's highest-city status for the fourth liberty loan (the ship was christenened by Nevada first lady Vida Boyle); in 1919, after a meeting between company officials and Governor Emmet Boyle, striking workers on the Nevada Northern Railway agreed to accept $6.50 a day and to await a court ruling on a public service commissioner's order to the company to resume service and pay the workers their full demands; in 1963, side by side on its front page, The New York Times ran two stories flatly contradicting each other preceded by an editor's note acknowledging the contradiction, both stories giving accounts of a Saigon crackdown on Buddhists, representing a slap at the Times' reporter on the scene that was unprecedented (the accurate story, smuggled out of Vietnam during a government blackout, credited the invasions of Buddhist pagodas and executions of leading monks to Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, was written by David Halberstam and came from his sources there, and the inaccurate story, which said the Saigon military was behind the crackdown, was written by Ted Szulc and came from Washington sources); in 1966, U.S. Senator Stephen Young of Ohio called for the dismissal of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who Young called the "supreme war hawk"; in 1966, New York City Mayor John Lindsay apologized to residents for a VFW parade with 30,000 marchers that began in early evening and lasted until after midnight (the VFW said Lindsay should reprimand the unhappy residents); in 1968, halfway through a recording session, Ringo Starr, feeling he was no longer doing good work, resigned from The Beatles (after a week with his wife and children, he agreed to return and found his drums decorated with flowers); in 1983, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington appointed Fred Rice as the city's first African American police superintendent.
UPDATE: August 22, 2007, 10:59 p.m. PDT, 05:59 Aug. 23 GMT/SUT/CUT — BREAKING NEWS —
TWO AND TWO TOGETHER DEPT. — Dubai World, part of the same Arab oil money which once proposed to manage several major U.S. ports until Americans complained, today announced a $5 billion CASH investment in MGM-Mirage. Does this diminish the chances of a Culinary Union strike on the Las Vegas Strip? Some wise guys are saying don't bet against it. Stay tuned. And remember, you heard it here first.Marketwatch.com today reported that "Dubai World will ultimately acquire a 9.5% stake in MGM and partial ownership of a massive real-estate project. Under the terms of the pact, Dubai World, a holding company for the Persian Gulf state, will pay $2.7 billion for a half-interest in MGM-Mirage's CityCenter, a gambling, hotel, condominium and retail complex set to open in 2009. At $7 billion and change, it is the largest privately funded real-estate development in history."
MGM-Mirage's refusal to allow the Culinary Union access to the City Center project was the issue which caused negotiations to break down and strike preparations to begin.
2+2= ?
Be well. Raise hell.TOLJASO DEPT: The following was posted at the Las Vegas Review-Journal's website when the paper's web edition uploaded around 3:00 a.m. PDT on Aug. 23 — Mirage, Culinary land deal
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.
UPDATE: August 22, 2007, 12:46 a.m. PDT, 09:46 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 22, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first United States chief executive to ride in an automobile. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 22, 2002: President Musharraf, he's still tight with us on the war against terror, and that's what I appreciate. He's a — he understands that we've got to keep Al Qaeda on the run, and that by keeping him on the run, it's more likely we will bring him to justice.
On this date in 565, Celtic missionary Columba supposedly confronted the Loch Ness monster, who had been disturbed by the swimming of a man named Lugne mocu-Min, and scared the monster off by telling him/her "You will go no further. Do not touch the man. Turn back speedily" (the tale, however, did not surface until a century after Columba's death); in 1789, the U.S. Senate, with President Washington in attendance at the senators' request to obtain their advice, listened to a reading of an Indian treaty and then received Washington's questions which it decided to consider and deliberate on before answering, whereupon Washington said of the delay "This defeats every purpose of my being here" and departed; in 1860, census takers were working in Gold Hill, Territory of Utah; in 1872, a fire destroyed the county treasurer's building in Unionville, Nevada, and damaged the sheriff/treasurer's building; in 1911, painter Louis Béroud entered the Louvre and walked to the salon that held the Mona Lisa, only to find the painting missing (painter Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire were both suspected of the theft but were cleared and it was later discovered that Italian patriot Vincenzo Peruggia had returned the painting to Italy, where it had been created); in 1920, independent U.S. Senate candidate Anne Martin spoke from her automobile to a street gathering in Las Vegas, giving an address titled "Profiteers of the People"; in 1925, President Coolidge appointed Ku Klux Klan official Marion Dunning to be collector of customs in Savannah; in 1927, three red police alert lights were in operation at the Masonic temple, the band stand and the alley behind the bank in Sparks; in 1936, the Nevada State Journal reported that Herbert Hoover, U.S. Representative James Scrugham of Nevada and Dr. Bart Hood of Reno all were taking an interest in Nevada's new Jumbo mining district (in Humboldt County, not to be confused with the early 1900s Jumbo district in Washoe County); in 1956, at the first nationally televised presidential news conference in history, President Eisenhower — shortly before his renomination for president — announced that deputy secretary of state Harold Stassen had dropped his effort to dump Richard Nixon from the Republican ticket in favor of Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts; in 1959, at a "fly-in" in Reno of sheriff's aero squadrons from around the west, Miss Nevada Dawn Wells greeted the arrivals; in 2003, Alabama's chief justice Roy Moore was suspended from office for breaking the law in refusing to obey a court order to remove a religious marker from the rotunda of the public's court house.
Nevada State Journal / August 30, 1891 / "The Dutch Flat Girls Strike.": A correspondent of the Placer Republican, writing from the classic precinct of Dutch Flat, discourses as follows: "During the Summer the young ladies of Sacramento who are spending their vacation here have attended the many dances and social events and their city ways have made them favorites with the young men, much to the disgust of our country belles. At last Saturday [August 22d] night's dance our town girls treated the boys to a genuine surprise, as when invited to dance they positively refused and gave the young men to understand that they did not play 'second fiddle.' This move put things at a standstill, but after talking the matter over and with a promise from the boys that they would pay more attention to home, the hatchet was buried, the cigarette of peace was smoked, and all went merry for the balance of the evening."UPDATE: August 21, 2007, 12:55 a.m. PDT, 09:55 GMT/SUT/CUT — LAME EXCUSES DEPT. — Sens. Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton both backed out of their commitments to address the Nevada State AFL-CIO convention in Reno today. This round goes to Dodd, who came up with the superior lame excuse. MORE>
UPDATE: August 21, 2007, 12:50 a.m. PDT, 09:50 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 21, 1956, President Eisenhower signed an executive order proclaiming Hawaii the 50th state of the union. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
UPDATE: August 20, 2007, 11:29 a.m. PDT, 18:29 GMT/SUT/CUT —
BREAKING NEWS — Culinary union sets Aug. 30 for strike vote against Reno hotel-casinosALMANAC — On Aug. 20, 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the ''Prague Spring'' liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek's regime. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
UPDATE: August 19, 2007, 1:29 a.m. PDT, 08:29 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 19, 1934, a plebiscite in Germany approved the vesting of sole executive power in Adolf Hitler as Fuhrer. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
John Tyndall / August 19, 1874: It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.
On this date in 1782, nearly a year after the French won the American Revolution for the colonials at Yorktown, the last battle of the war was fought in Kentucky at the Licking River (the British force of 350, made up mostly of Native American allies of the British, won against the colonials); in 1866, Brigham Young declared: "The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy."; in 1870, U.S. census takers found 93 residents, all white and all but one (a laundress) male, living in a mining camp in Egan Canyon, White Pine County; in 1900, silent movie star Colleen Moore, who made The Sky Pilot in Truckee (see below), was born in Port Huron, Michigan; in 1911, a drilling rig headed for Carson City from Reno on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad would not fit through the Lakeview tunnel and had to be taken off the train; in 1927, six members of the 1926 University of Nevada football squad — Max Larsen, Jim Bailey, Max Lawlor, Reynold Hansen, Max Allen and Robert Cooley — were featured in Spalding's Official Football Guide 1927; in 1940, a Portuguese cargo ship, the Quanza, arrived in New York with 317 refugees from the European war but only the non-Jewish passengers were allowed to disembark, 21 Jews being sent away (86 were later accepted by Mexico and as the ship's captain prepared to take them back to Europe where they might well have died in the death camps, Eleanor Roosevelt learned of their plight and prevailed on the U.S. State Department to issue them visas); in 1943, Nevada highway engineer Robert Allen said two new highways that would speed up war industry travel in the state were completed and open (one was from Reno to Gabbs Valley and the new route was 33 miles shorter, and the other was the Basic Magnesium plant near Las Vegas to the Three Kids Manganese plant to Lake Mead); in 1953, the United States and Britain engineered a coup d'etat against the elected government of Iran, overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installing Reza Pahlavi, who for a quarter- century then presided over one of the world's horrific dictatorships; in 1953, the Nevada Tax Commission approved Clark County Assemblymember William Byrne for a gambling license to operate "Johnnie Lane's Race Book Sports Pool"; in 1960, federal, state and local officials (including Governor Grant Sawyer, State Controller Keith Lee, Attorney General Roger Foley and U.S Representative Walter Baring) met in the Las Vegas city council hall on the Eisenhower administration's canc
