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[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2006 Dennis Myers.]]

Update: Monday, July 31, 2006, 2:00 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1964, the American space probe Ranger 7 transmitted pictures of the moon's surface. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1777, nineteen year-old Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roche Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, was made a major general by the Continental Congress; in 1875, work on the new state prison in Reno was halted while a dispute between the architect and the contractor over the quality of the work already done was brought before the state board of prison commissioners; in 1877, amid the great railroad strike of 1877, sometimes called the first national strike, smugness was the order of the day in Nevada newspapers, with the Reno Journal saying the strike was over (it was not — President Rutherford B. Hayes was still sending federal troops from state to state to break the strike) and the Lyon County Times argued "The people of Nevada may well congratulate themselves on their undisturbed and comparatively happy condition. Nowhere in the state are there any labor troubles of any kind whatever, and especially is this true in a marked degree on the Comstock. All the mines now in operation pay the same wages as during the flush days of former years, and this is the case we believe in every branch of business — Happy Nevada, thrice happy Nevada!"; in 1878, the Sacramento Bee suggested that with the growth of farming along Nevada rivers "In a few years it may be that Nevada will be independent of California in this line. She can do nothing, of course, without irrigation, but she is bending her energies rapidly in that direction."; in 1903, the Capital City Wheelman in Sacramento (this was at a time when bicycling was a huge sport) won the Pacific coast championship and then declined to face the Reno Wheelmen because the Reno team had repeatedly refused to face Sacramento, so the Renoites claimed they had the championship by forfeit; in 1922, the Nevada Board of Regents appointed Laura Ambler to be an English instructor, in which position she launched the University of Nevada's first journalism instruction; in 1922, old stopes under Tonopah gave way, opening a pit in town that swallowed the assay office; in 1922, Governor Emmet Boyle took ownership of the Nevada State Journal, Reno's morning newspaper; in 1941, the Nevada Northern Railroad made its last passenger run from Ely; in 1942, what may have been the first photograph of Vietnam to appear in a Reno newspaper was printed in the Nevada State Journal, an aerial view of Haiphong where the Japanese had built a base under a lease from the Vichy collaborationist government of France (which had colonized Indo-China); in 1968, the Beatles began three days of work on recording Hey Jude, their first recording at Trident studio; in 1971, Carole King's You've Got A Friend by James Taylor hit number one on the Billboard chart, becoming his only number one hit; in 2002, Pope John Paul II canonized (conferred sainthood on) 16th century Nahuatl farmer Juan Diego, though there is uncertainty about whether Diego ever existed.

Update: Sunday, July 30, 2006, 3:30 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1945, the USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Only 316 out of 1,196 men survived the sinking and shark-infested waters. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1619, twenty-two burgesses met at Jamestown, Virginia, a meeting generally regarded as the first representative legislative assembly in the colonies; in 1875, a test was underway of Nevada's new quack law, with "Doctor" A.B. Spinney of Storey County (who could not produce a medical diploma) the target of a prosecution for practicing medicine without being a graduate of a medical college or practicing in the state for ten years; in 1878, the Central Pacific Railroad was providing half freight charges on round trips for Californians shipping animals or articles to Reno for the Nevada State Fair; in 1879, Comstock mines were defying a new state law guaranteeing the right of stockholders to (with adequate notice) inspect their mines until the courts ruled on the validity of the law; in 1880, after a visit to the Pyramid tribal reservation, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz was quoted claiming that Native Americans would never be happy on reservations and that he would try to convince Congress to allocate 25 acre plots to Indians (apparently breaking up the reservations for the purpose), that he would arrange for an irrigating canal at Pyramid for agriculture purposes, that he would have a school started there, and that he would have the reservation resurveyed to settle boundary questions; in 1880, there was a newspaper report that Sarah Winnemucca had moved to Oregon where she was given a home and garden and a $600 a year federal pension for her services during the Bannock war; in 1899, the Nevada State Journal wrote: "Nevada does not abound in multi millionaires. The reason is, before they become multi they scoot out for some other State or country. Nevada, just the same, has made more multi millionaires that any other State in the Union of twenty times its population. She can make them fast enough but it seems that she can‚t keep them. Wonder the reason why?; in 1901, under the headline "Tried to escape" the Nevada State Journal described excuses used by members of a jury pool to try to escape jury duty and named names, including an official of the Reno Water, Land, and Light Company and Police Chief Henry Brown; in 1901, the Virginia and Truckee Railroad was constructing a building to hold dairy products of the Douglas County Creamery where they could be kept cold until being shipped; in 1903, in response to anger in Reno, Floriston Pulp and Paper Company exec B.J. Bither said his company was not polluting the Truckee River and would not do it again; in 1903, mismanagement of the Virginia and Truckee was being criticized: "It was understood after the fiasco of a couple of weeks ago, when the 8 o'clock train on the V. & T. delayed a picnic party until noon, that arrangements had been made to run picnic parties out of Bowers mansion in a special and then return for the regular run, but yesterday there was a repetition of the offense."; in 1907, the Sierra Club, a business club, was organized in Reno; in 1921, it was reported that the 1875 Baldwin engine number one used as a logging engine was still in service between Tahoe City and Truckee; in 1922, after the Mutual Oil Company refused to stop oil exploration on the Teapot Dome naval oil reserve, assistant secretary of the navy Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., sent a squad of marines to eject the oil drillers; in 1922, Reno had a new isolation hospital for treatment of infectious diseases, located alongside the county hospital on Mill Street; in 1941, Reno "herbist" (and Nevada chair of the Chinese Nationalists Party) Q.S. Wong was arrested for manslaughter for treating an Oregon woman who subsequently died; in 1941, U.S. reclamation commissioner John Page said that $94,520 in gold had been found during the construction of the Friant Dam in California; in 1954, Elvis appeared in concert at the Shell in Overton Park in Memphis, opening for Slim Whitman and Billy Walker, his first billed appearance (often described as his first professional appearance), for which he joined the Memphis Federation of Musicians (unfortunately, he was spotted by audience member Tom Parker, who later became his manager and eventually sent his career into mediocrity); in 1964, the U.S. sent Saigon patrol boats to attack a radar station and a busy port in the north of Vietnam, provoking retaliation two days later against the U.S. destroyer Maddox, which President Johnson (keeping the raids secret) portrayed as an attack instead of a retaliation, eliciting a declaration of war from a gullible Congress; in 1966, Chip Taylor's Wild Thing by the Troggs hit number one on the Billboard chart (another version of the song, an oddball rendering by a Robert Kennedy imitator, was also released in 1966 by" Senator Bobby"); in 1966, a "blue ribbon commission" appointed by Governor Grant Sawyer to investigate the state highway department issued a report clearing the department of any criminal wrongdoing but finding problems with the department's operations (Sawyer had appointed the commission after he disbanded a grand jury called by Lieutenant Governor Paul Laxalt while Sawyer was out of the state); in 1996, the Atlanta Journal Constitution unskeptically used a leak from a law enforcement source that named Richard Jewell as a suspect in the 1996 Summer Olympics bombing (which killed one woman), aiming at Jewell a media firestorm that convicted him in the court of public opinion. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Jewell was cleared and won cash settlements from the paper and others. Abortion clinic bomber Eric Robert Rudolph was arrested for the murder years later.]

Update: Saturday, July 29, 2006, 3:33 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1981, Britain's Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul's Cathedral in London. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1854, the Mormon magazine Millenial Star reprinted the broadside Defence of Polygamy by a Lady of Utah by Belinda Marden Pratt; in 1874, Carson City's Appeal theorized that fish were dying in Washoe Lake because a Reno newspaper editor had walked across the bridge over the lake; in 1874, a meeting was held in Reno to plan how to help the people of Eureka, Nevada, devastated by a flood; in 1905, Clara Bow, the actress known as the archetype of the 1920s flapper who later married cowboy actor Rex Bell and lived on his Searchlight, Nevada ranch, was born in a Brooklyn tenement. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Their son, Rex Bell, Jr., became Nevada lieutenant governor]; in 1914, U.S. Secretary of War Lindley Garrison ordered the deportation from Mexico of U.S. reporter Fred L. Boalt, who had reported that a U.S. naval officer had employed the "law of flight" against Mexican prisoners, a story which the army denied; in 1914, Austrian Fritz Wessley of Reno was notified by the Austrian vice consul in San Francisco to report for duty in the war against Serbia; in 1918, the National Liberty Congress of Colored Americans called on Congress to make lynching (which had thrived in the climate created by Woodrow Wilson's anti-black views and imposition of segregation in federal agencies) a federal crime; in 1919, at McGill and Ruth, Nevada, members of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Western Federation of Miners struck the mines; in 1921, Sacramento newspaper publisher V.S. McClatchy denied that his Chinese Exclusion League of California was responsible for the deportation of Japanese workers at Turlock; in 1921, a Yellowstone bear known as Jesse James revived his habit of sitting in the middle of a road and preventing cars from passing until he was fed; in 1934, the Willows night club on South Main Street near Fifth in Las Vegas was destroyed by fire; in 1963, Blowin' In The Wind by Peter, Paul, and Mary was released; in 1970, U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy told other Democrats that they would not allow their alliance with antiwar students to break up the party's traditional alliance with labor; in 1970, in an auction, Kirk Kerkorian bought the Bonanza on the Las Vegas strip for $3.9 million [EDITOR'S NOTE: Kerkorian built the original MGM Grand, now Bally's Las Vegas, on that site]; in 1970, Washoe County Senator Bill Farr said a Sparks/Reno merger was a dead issue; in 2004, Arlo Gurthrie appeared in concert at the Bartley Ranch in Reno.

Update: Friday, July 28, 2006, 3:35 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. World War I began as declarations of war by other European nations quickly followed. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1148, fresh from losing Edessa, forces of the second crusade attacked Damascus (which they also lost); in 1864, the second Nevada constitutional convention ended (it was just barely the 28th — five minutes past midnight; the convention actually completed its work on the 27th); in 1895, a large plot of land at Monte Diablo Creek AKA Convict Creek and Convict Lake, now the site of the Sierra Nevada Aquaculture Research Laboratory, was purchased by Elizabeth and Richard Kirman, husband and wife, and Thomas B. Rickey of Ormsby County (Rickey later bought out Kirman's widow and son Richard, Jr.); in 1906, marketing specialist Simon Litman of the University of California said in Philadelphia that San Francisco would not again be destroyed by earthquake because new structures were being made earthquake proof; in 1917, during World War One and after rioting whites in East St. Louis killed 40 black residents, 8,000 African Americans marched down Fifth Avenue in absolute silence to protest U.S. oppression of its black citizens in community life and in the armed services; in 1932, in the District of Columbia, four troops of cavalry, six tanks, infantrymen with machine guns, and miscellaneous other forces all led by Douglas MacArthur (who said the fate of the republic was at stake) attacked the Bonus Army, unemployed veterans of World War One who had marched across the nation to demand early payment of a promised bonus; in 1934, first daughter Anna Roosevelt Dall, in Reno for a divorce, was reported planning to marry again as soon as her divorce was granted; in 1935, Joseph Neal, Jr., who has served as Nevada Senate minority floor leader, president pro tempore, acting governor, and at his retirement was tied for longevity of service as a Nevada state senator, was born in Mounds, Louisiana; in 1939, some people in Reno started receiving 50-cent checks from a company that built a toll bridge in Vallejo and was supposed to turn the bridge over to the government after five years of operation and failed to do with the result that a court ordered it to refund tolls; in 1945, in heavy fog, a U.S. Army B-25 bomber piloted by an experienced pilot headed down Manhattan's 42d Street, banked onto Fifth Avenue, dodged several skyscrapers, and plowed at an estimated 200 miles an hour into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, exploding inside the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and killing 14 people (two women whose elevator dropped more than 70 floors survived; one of the plane's engines came out the other side of the building and landed on a 12- story building); in 1956, Elvis' I Want You, I Need You, I Love You hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1959, it became belatedly known that Robert Stroud, author and illustrator of the authoritative Stroud's Digest on the Diseases of Birds, had been transferred a couple of weeks earlier from Alcatraz federal prison after 17 years (and a total half century in various prisons) to a federal medical facility in Springfield, Missouri (where he saw television for the first time); in 1967, President Johnson established the National Commission on Civil Disorders (whose report, submitted on February 29, 1968, he ignored); in 1999, archeological excavation began of Island Mountain, Nevada, a Chinese mining camp that was a living community from 1873 to 1915; in 2002, on a trip to Toronto for a youth conference, John Paul II failed to apologize for the clergy sex abuse scandal, saying only "The harm done by some priests to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame, but think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests whose only wish is to serve and do good."

Update: Thursday, July 27, 2006, 2:17 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1875, the Nevada State Journal said the practice of firing guns in town after dark was out of hand — "Quiet, peaceable citizens should not be put in fear and danger of their lives at the pleasure of every hoodlum who happens to own a pistol."; in 1931 the death toll in California's Imperial Valley was 40 and in Phoenix it was 14 as a brutal 41-day heat wave bore down on the southwest; in 1934, former Reno mayor Richard Kirman announced he would run for governor; in 1934, Minnesota Governor Floyd Olsen declared martial law in Minneapolis in response to police opening fire on unarmed union pickets and to a rejection by employers of a strike settlement accepted by teamsters, imposing limited press restrictions and a ban on parking in the business district while milk, ice, and grocery trucks were under guard; in 1939, new state figures showed that tourist traffic using the Victory Highway in Nevada (U.S. 40) had increased in one year from 18,194 to 23,305 vehicles and the Lincoln Highway (U.S. 50) from 14,431 to 15,606; in 1940, with its release of A Wild Hare, Warner Brothers introduced the character of Bugs Bunny; in 1949, Las Vegas city commissioners Wendell Bunker and William Peccole accused municipal tax officials of failing to assess property owners in the Biltmore addition for the costs of a street lighting system; in 1950, Cresent township near Searchlight in Clark County, which almost no one knew existed, was eliminated so that three people living at the Rex Bell ranch could legally vote without the necessity of forming an entire precinct and polling place for them; in 1953, the Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom, ending three years of fighting [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 1959, The Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal, which joined the campaign for a convention hall and auditorium and donated free advertising to the campaign but did not scrutinize the proposal in its news coverage, ran front page endorsement editorials on the day before the election in which the bonds were approved, leading to years of difficulties, mismanagement, and a white elephant downtown auditorium; in 1959, a photo of a young Washington attorney, Robert Kennedy, appeared on the front page of the Reno Evening Gazette when he dared labor leader James Hoffa to sue him for libel after Kennedy charged Hoffa with mismanaging the Teamsters Union; in 1960, Vice-President Richard Nixon was nominated for president by the Republican National Convention in Chicago; in 1974, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend that the House of Representatives impeach President Nixon; in 1974, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama was released; in 1976, after a long court battle with U.S. immigration officials, John Lennon won permanent residency in the United States; in 1985, a day after the New York Times crossword puzzle clue for 42 down was "Vegas term", the key to the puzzle came out and the correct term was "odds"; in 1992, a $7.5 million renovation of the Thomas/Mack Center at UNLV was announced; in 2000, the Nevada historical records advisory board discussed a problem of improper storage of state records by state agencies, such as a prison storage building where records were "covered with pigeon droppings, dead pigeons and dead rodents" so severe that an archivist suggested keeping everyone out of the building and calling a hazardous materials team.

Update: Wednesday, July 26, 2006, 3:05 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1867, Fort Halleck, Nevada was established on lower Soldier Creek; in 1906, it was reported that William Randolph Hearst had been offered the New York City mayoral nomination of the Independence League and that a competing candidate, Judge William Gaynor, had pulled out of the race; in 1906, at a board of directors meeting in Boston, the Guggenheims gained control of the Nevada Consolidated Copper Company and its railroad, the Nevada and Northern Railway Company; in 1921, masked men entered a public dance pavilion at Spring Lake Park in Texarkana and kidnapped Gordon Harrison, the African American orchestra conductor; in 1921, Attorney General Harry Daugherty was researching all the wartime laws passed by Congress that could be affected if U.S. participation in the world war was formally ended (the war ended in 1918 but Woodrow Wilson vetoed a previous measure to end the war); in 1921, the Rio Grande, boundary between Mexico and the U.S., kept changing its course, and El Paso's Acting Mayor R.C. Semple led a search party to find the river but failed; in 1938, the U.S. Public Works Administration was holding up funding for construction of an engineering building, an arts and sciences building, and a gymnasium at the University of Nevada until the state took some required legislative actions, which raised a question of whether a special session of the Nevada Legislature was needed; in 1944, PFC Jack Lichtenberg of Reno was missing in action in France (in November his family would be notified that he was a German prisoner of war); in 1952, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson and other party leaders chose segregationist John Sparkman to be the vice presidential nominee; in 1969, a two day strike and lockout at twelve Las Vegas casinos ended with an agreement between the casinos and the Operating Engineers and Teamsters; in 1985, 42 down in the New York Times crossword was a four letter word defined as "Vegas term"; in 1990, in Las Vegas, Bally casino and gambling device manufacturer chair Robert Mullane accused Merrill Lynch and Company of issuing a July 11 analysis describing Bally as deep in debt and facing insolvency in order to divert attention from Merrill Lynch's own involvement with Donald Trump's debt-ridden Taj Mahal casino.

Update: Tuesday, July 25, 2006, 12:46 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1866, Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant, resulting in his West Point nickname, "Hug," which is why he started using Ulysses S.), was named General of the Army, the first ever to hold the rank; in 1946, the big, badass United States detonated an atomic bomb underwater at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, having displaced the island population in order to do so; they are still fighting for just compensation and some have finally moved back to their ancestral homes; in 1952, Puerto Rico became a sort of self-governing satellite of the U.S.; in 1956, the Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm off the New England coast, claiming the lives of (at least) 51 people. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 1963, the U.S., the Soviet Union and Great Britain signed a treaty in Moscow prohibiting the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, space or underwater; in 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world's first official "test tube baby," was born in Oldham, England, having been conceived through the now-common procedure known as in-vitro fertilization (I still don't get what the "in life" part means). [AP and BARBWIRE]

On this date in 1593, King Henry IV of France converted from Protestant to Catholic while still offering protection of the freedom to worship of both; in 1871, the New York Times carried a story about a Nevada lynching, reprinted from the Gold Hill News (George Kirk was hanged at the Sierra Nevada Mill on Geiger Grade for not leaving Virginia City fast enough to satisfy his critics in town); in 1904, Tonopah celebrated the completion of the Tonopah & Goldfield Railroad [Nevada Magazine calendar]; in 1915, it was reported that New Zealand Bishop Thomas O'Shea visited the Nevada State Prison in Carson City; in 1934, Nazis began the Juliputsch (July Putsch) in Austria, assassinating fascist Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, and in Germany Hitler rushed to the Austrian border, but the coup failed in part because Hitler held back after Mussolini assembled troops on the Italo-Austrian border to attack any German units that invaded Austria; in 1952, Democratic party bosses terrified by the prospect of the presidential nomination of economic populist Estes Kefauver, who had swept the presidential primaries (including defeating President Truman in the New Hampshire primary), managed to swing the nomination to Illinois' Adlai Stevenson on the third ballot; in 1952, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a report placing Nevada teacher salaries, at an average of $3,209 a year, 17th in the nation; in 1972, at Fillmore East, Neil Young appeared with Crosby Stills and Nash for the first time; in 1970, 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago, a song about the difficulty of writing a song, was released; in 1979, the U.S. House voted to cut Amtrak again, with several routes likely to be eliminated and one (Los Angeles to Ogden through Las Vegas) added; in 2001, a London-bound American Airlines jet out of Los Angeles made an emergency landing safely in Las Vegas after the pilot suffered a midair heart attack (the pilot was hospitalized and survived); in 2001, the Annapolis Capital in Maryland filed a $20,000 lawsuit against two men who obtained Capital letterhead stationery and used it to obtain press passes to Orioles games and the Super Bowl.

Update: Monday, July 24, 2006, 4:33 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1873, Reno's Congregational Society purchased a used 450 pound bell from the state prison for a church bell; in 1895, A.M. Beebe, superintendent of the Nevada Orphans' Home, brought five boys from the home in Carson City to show them the university in Reno; in 1920, Bella Savitzky Abzug was born in the Bronx; in 1931, United Press reported that western European businesspeople were apprehensive about the approaching end of the first Russian five year plan (actually completed in four years) and wanted huge tariffs to protect themselves; in 1934, a year after the National League (by a vote of 5 owners to 3) adopted the uniform game ball (a tighter wound and friskier ball also known as the jack rabbit ball), it was reported that some owners planned to try to reverse the vote because they believed it had led to inferior play, with one news report describing Pirates owner Pie Traynor launching "a vehement, vitriolic excoriation that almost flayed the horse hide off the capricious sphere" (they don't let us write that way anymore); in 1934, Tucson police officers were relieved at the killing of bank robber John Dillinger in Chicago because they had captured him and other members of his gang on January 25 and feared he would return to take his revenge (after being extradited from Arizona to Indiana, Dillinger had made his famous wooden gun escape from the Crown Point, Indiana jail); in 1936, law enforcement officials were preparing to drain Honey Creek Mill Pond near Pinckney, Michigan to try to find the bodies of more murder victims of the Black Legion, a right wing terrorist group that operated in the middle west; in 1936, Douglas Fairbanks (Sr.) said his acting days were over and he would devote himself to producing (the last film in which he ever acted was 1934's The Private Life of Don Juan); in 1936, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce began tours by land, water, and air of scenic areas within three hundred miles of Los Angeles that had previously been little seen by the public, including the Grand Canyon and Lake Mead; in 1939, Union Pacific announced it would begin construction of a new art deco railroad station for Las Vegas on September 1; in 1959, as doses of the new Salk polio vaccine were raced around the nation, U.S. Public Health Service figures showed a doubling of new polio cases in a single week to 166 cases, a 1959 high; in 1963, in an effort to prevent the embarrassment of a civil rights march against Las Vegas' segregated casinos, the Sahara broke the solid phalanx among casinos and agreed to talks with the local NAACP chapter headed by Marion Bennett; in 1967, Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane went gold; in 1971, John D. Loudermilk's Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian) by the Raiders hit number one on the Billboard chart and went on to become the biggest selling single in the history of Columbia Records; in 1971, investigative reporter Clark Mollenhoff reported that former Indiana governor Matthew Welsh's attempt to reclaim the governorship could be derailed by an investigation of Welsh's role in the sale of the Aladdin casino in Las Vegas; in 1990, the Judas Priest trial, in which the rock band was sued by the parents of two boys who attempted suicide (one of whom died) got underway in Reno, dominated by junk science and Judge Jerry Whitehead's claim that subliminal messages (in this case, imaginary ones) are not protected by the First Amendment.

Update: Sunday, July 23, 2006, 1:27 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1864, Nevada Territory Supreme Court Justice John North, demonized by rivals on the Comstock, asked President Lincoln for a hearing before the president took action on charges against him; in 1866, Congress enacted legislation creating the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit consisting of California, Oregon, and Nevada (14 STAT. 209); in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing for due process under the law, was ratified; in 1914, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serb assassin; the dispute led to World War I [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 1930, Union Pacific and government officials met about the route of a railroad spur from Black Canyon to Las Vegas for the Boulder Dam project; in 1931, publisher Frederick Girnau went on trial in Los Angeles for publishing articles on actress Clara Bow's love life after federal prosecutors tried for a delay and the defense objected.; in 1934, a Colored Democratic Club was formed in Clark County; in 1934, newspapers began lionizing FBI agent Melvin Purvis after he handled the operation that resulted in the killing of bank robber John Dillinger, resulting in Purvis being forced out of the Bureau by a jealous J. Edgar Hoover; in 1935, Las Vegas and Reno casino operators were hoping they would gain business from southern California after the Mexican government shut down border casinos in Agua Caliente; in 1937, in the wake of the Senate defeat of President Roosevelt's court packing plan, U.S House Democrats were discussing a plan to attach to any court bill a requirement for a two-thirds vote of the Supreme Court to overturn laws; in 1952, with the baby boom in full roar, school officials in the west side of Las Vegas discussed trying for federal funding to nearly double the size of a planned 10-room elementary school to 18 rooms and a multipurpose hall; in 1954, the New York Times reported that the French, preparing to leave Indochina after losing to the Vietminh, expected to evacuate 1,000,000 Vietnamese wanting to flee the communists (the next day, the newspaper revised these estimates downward to 200,00 to 500,000); in 1955, a headline over a story by (the nationally syndicated) Bob Considine in the Charleston, West Virginia, Gazette: "Las Vegas Unmasked/Rich Nevada Oasis Must Be Seen To Be Believed, Newsman Says"; in 1957, at a time when Nevada schools were bulging with baby boomers, Boulder City elementary school enrollments had fallen so far that three classrooms had been eliminated and classes were being consolidated; in 1957, after questioning convict Donald Wedler about his knowledge of the Sheppard murder case for three hours, Cleveland law enforcement officials denounced his confession to Marilyn Sheppard's murder only to have a merchant seaman identify Wedler as a man who gave him a ride near Dr. Sam Sheppard's home on the night of the murder. (The Sheppard case was the inspiration for the fictional television series and later motion picture, The Fugitive.); in 1959, the Federal Communications Commission in Washington approved a change of ownership for Reno's KDOT Radio; in 1959, a Reno plumbers strike entered its fourth week; in 1968, three days after they shut down the Pioneer Club in Las Vegas, state gambling regulators filed charges against the club for allegedly deceiving customers; in 1969, the Beatles recorded the aptly named The End, the last song recorded for the last Beatles album, Abbey Road; in 2003, Josh Byers of Norwalk, California, former student body president at Reed High School in Sparks, died east of Baghdad in Iraq.

Update: Saturday, July 22, 2006, 12:55 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1934, a man identified as bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by federal agents in Chicago. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1847, the first party of Latter Day Saints settlers (143 men, 3 women, and 2 children) entered the Salt Lake valley; in 1915, President Wilson sent a belligerent diplomatic note to Germany, rejecting a German offer of immunity for U.S. ships from submarine warfare, setting off a debate around the country on war (campaigning for entry into the war in San Francisco, Theodore Roosevelt said that "a mother who is not willing to raise her boy to be a soldier is not fit for citizenship"); in 1915, Georgia prison officials said Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew whose dubious murder conviction became a cause celebre, had showed "marked improvement" after his throat was cut by another inmate; in 1922, a bomb was thrown during a "Preparedness Day" parade in San Francisco, killing ten people, for which two anti-war labor leaders would be convicted amid wartime hysteria in spite of exculpatory evidence, including a photograph showing them watching the parade far from the site of the bombing with a street clock in the photo showing the time just before the bombing (the men were later pardoned by the governor on the basis of evidence of perjured testimony); in 1934, Manhattan Melodrama starring Myrna Loy, William Powell and Clark Gable achieved a trivia benchmark when bank robber John Dillinger was shot dead in the street near Chicago's Biograph Theatre after seeing the movie; in 1937, the hottest recorded temperature in the nation, 114 degrees, was at Las Vegas, Nevada; in 1946, Jewish insurgents bombed a wing of Palestine's King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing a hundred people; in 1953 Nevada's first television station, KLAS in Las Vegas, went on the air; in 1959, Las Vegas' new mayor, Oran Gragson, said he would hold weekly news conferences and said he was not crazy about the term "casino center" selected in a Chamber of Commerce contest for the Fremont Street areas because it limited the appeal of the area; in 1963, Vee Jay Records, best known as the Four Seasons' label, probably released the first U.S. Beatles album, Introducing the Beatles which, after the group became famous, would become a subject of legal action; in 1963, African Americans in Las Vegas agreed to call off a march on the strip after the city's casinos agreed to concessions in hiring and training; in 1963, after a seven month battle over the efforts of Reynolds Electrical and Engineering and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to alter pay practices at the Nevada Test Site, a federal court ruled in favor of the labor unions protecting the workers at the site; in 1964, Saigon air commodore Nguyen Cao Ky disclosed at a news conference that sabotage teams had been operating in the north and that Saigon pilots were being trained for future large scale attacks (U.S. officials refuse to confirm Ky's claims and the next day the Saigon defense ministry issued a non-denial denial, denouncing Ky but not denying what he said); in 1968, the Clark County Commission, after hearing that local justices of the peace earned $67,000 a year performing marriages (they were allowed to keep the fees), voted to put them on a straight salary of $15,000 but did allow them to keep their tips; in 1981, former Clark County superintendent of schools Kenny Guinn was selected to serve on the new Metropolitan Police Committee on Fiscal Affairs; in 1983, Reagan administration environmental official Rita LaVelle was convicted of failing to testify before a congressional committee about alleged wrongdoing in her agency after prosecutors showed that she took a trip to Las Vegas during the period she claimed she was too ill to testify.

Update: Friday, July 21, 2006, 12:16 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1925, the ''monkey trial'' ended in Dayton, Tenn., with John T. Scopes convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. (The conviction was later overturned.) [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1878, Denis Kearney, the San Francisco political leader whose populist Workingman's Party movement was spreading around the country, stopped in Reno on the train on his way east and his local followers were prepared with a ceremony for him, but he never emerged from his sleeping car (during the same July, 60 Reno Workingman's Party members were forming a militia company); in 1885, the dime novel Web-Foot Mose, the Tramp Detective; or, The Boy Bear-Slayer of the Sierras by Oll Coomes, a story of highway robberies and vigilantism in Virginia City, Nevada, was published by Beadle's Half Dime Library; in 1918, German submarine U-156, offshore of Orleans, Mississippi, surfaced in view of sunbathers and began shelling a tug and barges, sinking the tug (U.S. planes that arrived on the scene dropped hand tools like screwdrivers and hammers on the sub); in 1928, Aimee Semple McPherson and Charles Lindbergh ended their stays at Lake Tahoe (pilot Lindbergh was vacationing at Rubicon Lodge, McPherson — referred to by one local news report as a "feminine sky-pilot" — was holding revivals at Tahoe Cedars); in 1941, in Minsk, Byelorussia, a group of 30 residents were ordered to bury 45 Jews alive, and when they refused, all 75 were killed by the Nazi einsatzkommandos (mobile killing unit); in 1950, PFC Raymond Yoss of Nelson, Nevada was captured in Korea and held until after the armistice in 1953; in 1954, the Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference was approved providing for reunification of Vietnam and free elections, and U.S. observer Walter Bedell Smith promised the U.S. "declares with regard to the aforesaid agreements and paragraphs that it will refrain from the threat or the use of force to disturb them" (the U.S. then quickly invented the "nation" of South Vietnam to prevent reunification and free elections through the use of force); in 1958, Elvis' Hard Headed Woman, a soundtrack song from King Creole, became his tenth number one hit on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1963, Herbert Brucker, president of the American Society of Newpaper Editors, wrote to President Kennedy to complain about U.S.-employed journalists being attacked and beaten by the U.S.-backed Mat Vu, the secret police in Saigon; in 1968, the anniversary of the 1954 Geneva agreement (which the Saigon regime had made a holiday called National Shame Day) was marked in both Saigon and Hanoi, where Ho Chi Minh called for accelerating the war against the U.S.; in 1972, Pentagon and civilian officials disclosed to the New York Times that the U.S., with the collaboration of U.S. Forest Service experts, had tried creating forest firestorms in Vietnam in 1966-67 and had failed because of the moisture of the tropical forests; in 1973, Jim Croce's Bad Bad Leroy Brown went to number one on the Billboard chart; in 2003, the Nevada Legislature, after a long stalemate in regular session and two special sessions, approved an $836 million tax increase by a 17-2 vote in the Senate and a 28-14 margin in the Assembly.

Update: Thursday, July 20, 2006, 7:49 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1054, Eastern Orthodox Patriarch Michael Cerularius excommunicated Pope Leo IX; in 1878, Boston Corbett, the former soldier who claimed to have killed John Wilkes Booth, was reported to have attended a Pacific Coast Pioneers picnic at Bowers mansion; in 1910, Missouri's Christian Endeavor Society launched a campaign to ban movies containing kisses among non-relatives; in 1926, the case of former Nevada alcohol prohibition director J.P. Donnelly, convicted for covering up the seizure of a truckload of booze, reached the U.S. Supreme Court; in 1933, the Vatican conferred new legitimacy on the Third Reich by signing an agreement with Berlin; in 1944, President Roosevelt was nominated for a third term by the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and Roosevelt made his wartime acceptance speech from his private car on a railroad siding at an undisclosed naval base (it was San Diego); also in 1944, Nevada Lieutenant Governor Vail Pittman, chair of the Nevada delegation at the Chicago convention, said the state's delegates were "not anxious" to caucus on who to support for the vice presidential nomination and that there were not more than two or three votes for renominating Henry Wallace; in 1955, Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem rejected an invitation from Hanoi to open talks on how to conduct nationwide elections required by the 1954 Geneva agreement (former presidential aide Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later claimed, in spite of several such overtures, that Hanoi never showed any interest in holding elections); in 1956, the deadline for elections in Vietnam passed with Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem still unwilling to hold them; in 1963, Surf City by Jan and Dean hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1965, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 1954 Geneva agreement, Ho Chi Minh said his people were prepared to fight for another 20 years; in 1965, Do You Believe In Magic by the Lovin' Spoonful was released; in 1967, the first National Conference on Black Power began in Newark; in 1968, a near riot erupted in Pasco, Washington, when police chief A.L. McKibbin kicked a group of young African Americans out of city hall after they had been invited by police officers; in 1968, Philemon Hou's Grazing In the Grass by Hugh Masekela hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 2000, after blocking her confirmation for five months, Republican leaders finally allowed the U.S. Senate to vote to approve Johnnie Rawlinson of Nevada for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the first African American woman on the court.

Update: Wednesday, July 19, 2006, 2:18 a.m. PDT — MINIMUM WAGE INTERVIEWS SOUGHT: A Gannett News Service reporter wants to interview people employed at the minimum wage. She is specifically looking for people who work for minimum wage in a state that is set to enact a wage increase, such as Nevada's November ballot measure. In addition, she is looking for information on states where minimum wage increases have recently been enacted. CONTACT: Pamela Brogan; e-mail pbrogan@gns.gannett.com; phone 202-906-8108. Tell her you heard about it at NevadaLabor.com. Please send us a copy of any info you submit. Thanks. Editor.

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2006 Dennis Myers.]]

Update: Wednesday, July 19, 2006, 1:47 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1878, a report in the Territorial Enterprise said that former Comstock millionaire Eilley Orrum Bowers, who reportedly kept a small place on the Bowers mansion grounds to live in when she sold the property, was planning to run a lunch stand at a Pacific Coast Pioneers picnic at the mansion grounds, which prompted the Nevada State Journal to observe: "She has seen the day when she could set out a lunch on a ton of silverplate, but her picnic lunch will be none the less palatable though it may be spread on useful and unassuming tin."; in 1879, Reno's Nevada State Journal and Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise editorialized on the frequency of fires in the snow sheds over the railroad tracks over the Sierra, with the Enterprise proposing the sheds be lined with sheets of zinc like those on the Virginia and Truckee, and the Journal observing that building the sheds of iron would be cheaper than putting out all the fires; in 1899, U.S. Land Commissioner L.H. Wise reported that 788 allotments of 80 acres of farm land or 160 acres of grazing land had been allotted to Native Americans in Nevada, principally in Humboldt, Douglas and Churchill Counties; in 1901, the superintendent of the Comstock Tunnel Company said the mill near the mouth of the Sutro tunnel was processing a daily average of six tons from the tunnel waste tailings and that it was paying well; in 1933, a rookie, Joe DiMaggio, hit three singles for the San Francisco Seals, extending his hitting streak to 55 consecutive games; in 1954, Sun Records released Elvis' first record, That's All Right, Mama b/w Blue Moon of Kentucky; in 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill launched his "V for Victory" campaign in Europe [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 1964, on National Shame Day (a holiday created by the Saigon regime to commemorate the July 21 1954 Geneva agreement that Saigon and the U.S. violated by refusing to hold free elections), Charles de Gaulle and Ho Chi Minh were burned in effigy and a French war memorial was vandalized while at a rally military chief of state Nguyen Khanh called for an invasion of the north, upsetting U.S. officials who thought they had an agreement that Saigon officials would not make such proposals without consulting them (and also because it might blow the cover on U.S. provocations in the north); in 1965, Help! b/w I'm Down by the Beatles was released by Capitol (by Parlophone in Britain on July 23d); in 1980, Billy Joel's It's Still Rock and Roll To Me hit number one on the Billboard chart.

Update: Tuesday, July 18, 2006, 1:52 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1936, the Spanish Civil War began as Gen. Francisco Franco led an uprising of army troops based in North Africa. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1877, the Central Pacific snow sheds between Emigrant Gap and Cisco over the Sierra caught fire in the morning and by the time the fire was put out in the afternoon a third of them had been burned; in 1877, directors of the Meat Shipping Company picked out twenty acres of land near the new Reno state prison site for the location of their new operation; in 1901, the Washoe County Commission, sitting as the Reno Town Board, voted to pave the town's streets; in 1901, the Washoe County Commission sent former Comstock millionaire Eilley Orrum Bowers to the county poor house (Nevada State Journal: "She will not be a charge upon the county for long. The icy hands of death are already outstretched above her face. Where are the people who enjoyed the hospitality of the Seeress in the good old days, that she has been left to bee in a poor house and be buried in the Potters field?" ); in 1933, Broadway actor Hannah Williams and boxer Jack Dempsey married in Elko, then departed for Dempsey's Reno home; in 1936, fascist Francisco Franco launched a military uprising, starting the Spanish civil war; in 1952, after the U.S. Supreme Court cancelled President Truman's illegal takeover of the steel industry, reports circulated that he had directed the Justice Department to draft legislation reviving his 1946 idea (first threatened against rail workers) to allow him to draft striking workers; in 1952, legal experts and delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago debated whether U.S. Representative Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., could be nominated for vice-president given his birth on Campobello Island, New Brunswick; in 1953, a young truck driver, Elvis Presley, went to the Memphis Recording Service (an arm of Sun Records) which made personal records for individuals, families, churches, and he made a record of the Ink Spots tune My Happiness as a gift for his mother, bringing himself to the attention of Sun Records which launched his career; in 1957, a year after Ngo Dinh Diem in Saigon refused to hold elections required by the 1954 Geneva convention, Vietnamese foreign minister Pham Van Dong in Hanoi again proposed elections and restoration of postal delivery between the two nations as a step toward reunification, and Diem rejected the overture; in 1960, Ronnie Self and Dub Albritton's I'm Sorry by Brenda Lee hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1968, President Johnson and Saigon dictator Nguyen Van Thieu met in Honolulu where Thieu accepted the principle of "Vietnamizing" the war; in 1970, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson published a column on north Lake Tahoe casino owner Nate Jacobsen's unhappiness that his casino had been bypassed by a new four lane highway and his suspicion that Ponderosa Ranch owners Bill and Joyce Anderson used their connections with the Laxalt administration to make it happen (Joyce Anderson was a Republican Party official); in 2004, with the pungent scent of sagebrush (brought from Carson City) permeating the church during mass, Washington National Cathedral held a Nevada State Day.

Update: Monday, July 17, 2006, 1:49 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1505, Martin Luther entered a monastery at Erfurt, Germany; in 1862, the U.S. Army began accepting enlistments by African Americans — to serve as laborers; in 1914, the Irwin Brothers wild west show began two days of performances in Reno; in 1935, former gangster Joseph "Fatso" Negri said that at the insistence of his wife he had dropped his plans to open a swanky San Francisco night club adorned with photos of the Dillinger gang and instead would become a farmer; in 1935, Governor Richard Kirman said he had no authority under state law to offer rewards from state funds but was offering a $300 reward for information on the fate of former Reno city councilmember Roy Frisch contingent on the Nevada Legislature's approval; in 1935, three contests were filed in probate court in Los Angeles over two wills of former Nevada Assemblymember (1928-1930) Albert Duffill, one filed in Clark County, the other reportedly lost; in 1935, Nevada Indian Affairs superintendent Alida Bowler presented to "sportsmen" fish hatchery plans for Pyramid Lake; in 1953, Stanley David Osborne of Reno died in Korea; in 1965, the FBI said it would send an agent to Winnemucca to advise local detectives but that the agency could not formally enter the case of missing Native American leader Delbert Howard because there was no evidence of a violation of federal law; in 1966, Gomer and Sergeant Carter went to Las Vegas on the latest episode of Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C; in 1968, the Beatles attended the premiere of their film Yellow Submarine at the London Palladium; in 2004, after she expressed support for Michael Moore and his film Fahrenheit 9/11 during her show at the Aladdin Casino, the management had singer Linda Ronstadt escorted off the property.

Update: Sunday, July 16, 2006, 3:24 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1918, Russia's Czar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1862, Ida B. Wells, newspaper publisher/editor who editorialized against lynching until she was forced to leave her state of Tennessee and wrote the anti-lynching book A Red Record, was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi; in 1926, in Ohio, Canton Daily News editor Donald Mellett, who was investigating corruption and underworld influence in the local police department, was assassinated; in 1938, Mildred Bray filed her candidacy for state superintendent of schools, the post to which she was appointed on the previous December 8 by Governor Richard Kirman after the death of Chauncey Smith; in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 8821, reserving public land in Nevada for the use of the Department of the Navy for naval aviation purposes; in 1942, French police rounded up 12,884 Jews, including 4,501 children and 5,802 women, in Paris (they were sent first to Drancy, then Auschwitz) in what became known as La Grande Rafle — the big sweep (in 1995 a French official, Jacques Chirac, finally admitted official France's responsibility for the sweep); in 1945, New York Times reporter William L. Laurence was the only reporter permitted to be present at the explosion of the first atomic device in Alamogordo (on September 12, 1945, Laurence wrote a story misrepresenting the event in order to help the U.S. government counter reports of radiation sickness at Hiroshima: "This historic ground in New Mexico, scene of the first atomic explosion on earth and cradle of a new era in civilization, gave the most effective answer today to Japanese propaganda that radiations were responsible for deaths even after the day of the explosion, Aug. 6, and that persons entering Hiroshima had contracted mysterious maladies due to persistent radioactivity."); in 1947, two men were arrested for the July 4 dynamiting of the Overton, Nevada jail; in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was published; in 1952, The Captive City starring John Forsythe, filmed in Carson City and Reno and endorsed by U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver, opened at the Fremont Theatre in Las Vegas; in 1962, Assemblymember Maude Frazier of Clark County resigned from the Nevada Legislature to become lieutenant governor of Nevada, appointed by Governor Grant Sawyer after the death of Lieutenant Governor Rex Bell; in 1966, Summer In The City by the Lovin' Spoonful was released and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich's Hanky Panky by Tommy James and the Shondells hit number one on the Billboard chart (Tommy James: "I don"t think anybody can record a song that bad and make it sound good."); in 1970, U.S. Representative William Anderson of Tennessee, who previously threw a spotlight on the Saigon regime's "tiger cages" prison on Con Son Island, reported evidence of a second torture prison; in 1970, Governor Paul Laxalt, invited by a labor leader on July 13 to intervene in a strike at the atomic test site, announced that members of Operating Engineers Local 12 would return to work; in 1971, McCarran Airport in Clark County became McCarran International Airport when it was made a customs port of entry; in 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq; in 1985, Rock Hudson participated in a news conference to promote the cable show of his friend Doris Day and his emaciated appearance shocked both Day and the public, and within days speculative stories about Hudson and AIDS began to appear; in 1992, in one of the most deft political maneuvers in many years, Ross Perot withdrew from the presidential race, then spent several weeks reorganizing his campaign, selecting state presidential electors, and qualifying for all 50 state ballots, and then re-entered the race on October 1, avoiding two and a half months of scrutiny because the press treated him all that time as if he were not a candidate; in 1992, after an acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention whose principal device — the "New Covenant" — fell flat and was quickly forgotten, Bill Clinton's presidential nomination was celebrated in the convention hall (Madison Square Garden) not to the traditional Happy Days Are Here Again but to Fleetwood Mac's Don't Stop.

Update: Saturday, July 15, 2006, 12:56 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1918, the Second Battle of the Marne began during World War I. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1205, in a letter to the archbishop of Sens, Pope Innocent 3d decreed that Jews, as crucifiers of Christ, are doomed to perpetual punishment and labor (Innocent's fourth Lateran council ruled that Jews and Sarazens had to differentiate themselves from the rest of the population by wearing distinguishing clothing marks, a technique later adopted by the Nazis); In 1606, Rembrandt was born in Leyden [Leiden] in the Netherlands; in 1870, Georgia was readmitted to the union, the last state in the Confederacy to be readmitted; in 1929, the Southern Pacific discontinued its morning bus service between Truckee and Reno; in 1933, in Clark County, the U.S. Forest Service gave its approval for a highway into Charleston Park; in 1947, the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company, tracking the beginning of the baby boom, reported that seven children were being born every minute in the United States; in 1964, Barry Goldwater of Arizona won the Republican presidential nomination; in 1966, When A Man Loves A Woman by Percy Sledge went gold; in 1970, a bill returning land to the Washoe Tribe in Woodfords received final congressional approval; in 1979, President Carter made a nationally televised speech on what he called the U.S. "crisis of confidence", an address the press called the "malaise" speech (a term Carter did not use); in 1996, Microsoft and NBC launched MSNBC, immediately lowering the tone of political coverage with its emphasis on food fight political chat shows (and making news coverage of Microsoft by NBC News suspect); in 2004, the Las Vegas monorail began operation.

Update: Friday, July 14, 2006, 5:58 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1965, the American space probe Mariner 4 flew by Mars, sending back photographs of the planet. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1798, the U.S. Sedition Act was enacted, one of four laws designed to use state power to destroy Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party by making "malicious" criticism of the state a crime, essentially voiding the First Amendment (after President John Adams was defeated for reelection in part on the sedition issue, the Sedition Act was allowed to expire and his successor President Jefferson pardoned its victims; it was reenacted in 1918); in 1862, 18,325 square miles of the Territory of Utah were shifted to the Territory of Nevada; in 1875, as the Virginia and Truckee's train number eleven passed Silver City switch, sparks from the train set the station house on fire, destroying the platform and one end of the depot; in 1891, the Syrup of Figs Company held its annual meeting in Reno (Syrup of Figs was a popular patent medicine, a laxative that was used as part of the ritual at "psychic" Edgar Cayce's readings); in 1906, Secretary of the Interior Ethan Hitchcock increased appropriations for the first federal reclamation projects (Klamath, Oregon; Hondo, New Mexico; Minidoka, Idaho; Truckee/Carson, Nevada; Payette, Idaho; Lower Yellowstone, Montana), adding $700,000 to the previous $3,000,000 funding for the Nevada project; in 1914, in Tokyo, British journalist Andrew M. Pooley was sentenced to two years in prison for receiving stolen documents in connection with a Japanese naval scandal; in 1936, an El Dorado County forest ranger spotted a "wild man" at Lake Tahoe, generating speculation that he was either a missing Homewood caretaker or an escaped inmate from the Nevada State Prison; in 1947, acting on a motion by U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada, the senate judiciary committee on a 7 to 6 vote killed an inquiry into the U.S. justice department's investigation of voting fraud in President Truman's home congressional district after a preliminary probe showed no reason to proceed; in 1965, the U.S. House voted to remove silver from quarters and dimes and to reduce the silver content of half dollars (U.S. Representative Walter Baring of Nevada voted against the change); in 1965, police said they had run out of clues on the fate of vanished Winnemucca Indian Colony leader Delbert Howard since someone tried to use his identification at a Las Vegas bank; in 1966, Paperback Writer by the Beatles went gold; in 1970, a U.S. House armed forces subcommittee made up entirely of outspoken supporters of the war in Vietnam, issued a report harshly critical of what it called the deliberate murder of noncombatants at My Lai and a "concerted" coverup of the crime; in 1970 (in an all-star game), Cleveland Indians — and former Reno Silver Sox — catcher Ray Fosse was bowled over by Cincinnati's Pete Rose, who was racing to beat a ball home (Fosse was taken to the hospital for examination of his shoulder); in 1971, Shiloh House, a religious crash pad in Reno, was closed and police said it left a void because there were few facilities for homeless single women, family groups, and children; in 1989, in South Carolina, 432 guitarists played Louie Louie in unison for thirty minutes; in 2003, columnist Robert Novak outed CIA officer Valerie Plame.

On July 13, 2006, Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, Ambassador Joseph L. Wilson IV, sued Vice-President Cheney, his indicted aide, Scooter Libby and Bush's Brain Karl Rove, "charging they had conspired to violate their constitutional rights." [New York Times 7-14-2006, free registration may be required.]

UPDATE: THURSDAY, JULY 13, 2006, 1:24 A.M PDT — Fallon area communications contract announced.

Update: Thursday, July 13, 2006, 12:48 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1912, the U.S. Senate, finding "that corrupt methods and practices were employed in his election, and that the election, therefore, was invalid", unseated Senator William Lorimer of Illinois; in 1917, three children in Fatima, Portugal, reported having visions of a woman; in 1918, twenty weeks after independence, in an effort to stave off annexation to Prussia or Saxony, the Lithuanian State Council declared a constitutional monarchy with Duke William von Urach of Wittenberg declared King Mindaugas II (the declaration was later revoked in favor of a proclamation of constitutional government); in 1933, Nevada labor leader and Democratic Party figure A.V. Dalrymple was appointed deputy prohibition administrator for the Nevada district — five months before prohibition was repealed; in 1952, before the Las Vegas Westside Elks Club, Los Angeles attorney Hugh MacBeth (who was about to serve as a California delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago), "instigator" — as the Las Vegas Review Journal described him — of the planned Inter-racial Village in Clark County, gave the first of three speeches during the week before service groups in Las Vegas; in 1960, U.S. Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts was nominated for president by the Democratic National Convention meeting in Los Angeles; in 1968, Born To Be Wild by Steppenwolf was released; in 1970, Miners Local 872 business manager James Ryan asked Governor Paul Laxalt to step into a strike of Nevada atomic testing workers and mediate an agreement; in 1970, former KCRL (now KRNV) television news director and anchorman Nick Lauri of Reno filed his candidacy for the Nevada Assembly; in 1970, Cherry Creek, Nevada, poet Hugo Ralph Frank died in Ely; in 1970, Nevada Assembly speaker Howard McKissick, a Washoe County Republican, called Nevada's $24 million surplus too high and proposed that the state "either knock off the sales tax or start paying state employees and state teachers living wages"; in 1973, in room G-334 of the Dirsken Senate Office Building, Alexander Butterfield told four senate staffers that President Nixon had installed taping systems in all presidential offices of the White House and the Executive Office Building, lighting a fuse that led to Nixon's resignation; SPEAKING OF BLOWING FUSES: in 1977, a 25-hour blackout hit the New York City area after lightning struck upstate power lines [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 2000, at First Avenue and 44th Street in New York City, a peace sculpture to John Lennon's memory was unveiled.

Update: Wednesday, July 12, 2006, 1:43 p.m. PDT — On July 12, 1984, Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale named New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferraro his running mate, making her the first woman to run on a major party ticket. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On July 12, 1917, Arizona vigilantes hauled more than a thousand striking copper miners from their beds, loaded them into a railroad car, shipped them across the border to New Mexico, and abandoned them in the desert; in 1933, a Las Vegas chamber of commerce delegation departed for Carson City to lobby state highway engineer S.C. Durkee for completion of the Beatty/Las Vegas highway; in 1947, an investment group headed by the El Rancho Vegas' Sanford Adler purchased the Flamingo Casino Hotel; in 1951, a mob tried to keep an African American family from moving into their home in Cicero, Illinois, sparking rioting. The Cicero police did nothing and Governor Adlai Stevenson called in the national guard; in 1966, the Nevada State Journal began publication of a six part series on the Reno Sparks Indian Colony; in 1967, billionaire Howard Hughes bought the New Frontier hotel casino in Clark County; in 1972, U.S. Senator George McGovern was nominated for president by the Democratic National Convention; in 1977, President Carter said of court decisions limiting access of the poor to health payments for abortion "There are many things in life that are not fair" (Ms. magazine put a pregnant Carter on its cover next to the headline "Life is unfair"); in 1984, probable Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale announced he had selected U.S. Representative Geraldine Ferraro of Queens to be the first woman vice-presidential candidate on a major party ticket.

Update: Tuesday, July 11, 2006, 12:53 p.m. PDT — On July 11, 1899, E.B. White, author of Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpet of the Swan, The Elements of Style and The Elements of Editing was born in Mount Vernon; in 1905, the Niagara Movement, a gathering of 29 influential African American leaders, met secretly in Ontario to draft a manifesto denouncing Booker T. Washington's "accommodation" approach to black rights; in 1947, Nevada Governor Edward Carville resigned and was appointed to the U.S. Senate by Lieutenant Governor Vail Pittman (he is one of three U.S. governors who appointed themselves to the senate, and all three were defeated in the next election); in 1947, what was reportedly the first armed robbery in Boulder City occurred on Cherry Street when two men with a gun took a purse from a church organist and bureau of reclamation employee; in 1949, after the first trial of Alger Hiss, which ended in a hung jury, Hearst's New York Journal American reported that the jurors who voted for acquittal had received threats — and then accommodatingly published the home addresses of two of the jurors; in 1959, at the Newport Folk Festival folk singer Bob Gibson called Joan Baez out of the audience to sing on stage and the performance became Baez's first recording; in 1970, Saigon police fired tear gas to break up a march by 1,000 Vietnamese demanding an end to the Vietnam war; in 1974, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee released 4,133 pages of evidence against President Nixon in the House impeachment inquiry.

Update: Monday, July 10, 2006, 12:28 a.m. PDT — On July 10, 1940, during World War II, the 114-day Battle of Britain began as Nazi forces began attacking southern England by air. By late October, Britain managed to repel the Luftwaffe, which suffered heavy losses. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On this date in 1874, plans were being made to mark the 25th anniversary of the schooner Alexander von Humboldt in San Francisco on August 30, 1849, with hopes that surviving passengers and crew would attend; in 1875, it was reported that the New York Herald, using a Vanderbilt train leaving the city at 2:30 a.m., was planning to deliver its Sunday edition in Chicago by Monday morning, 24 hours ahead of any other New York newspaper; in 1875, according to the Nevada State Journal "The Grass Valley Union published a two-column Fourth of July poem and every able-bodied man in town is out with a club looking for the poet. The guilty editor has barricaded the door, and spends his time drilling the printers."; in 1877, as the Sutro tunnel neared completion, the New York Engineering and Mining Journal praised Adolph Sutro and denounced the mining corporation executives who opposed him; in 1879, in Reno's effort to have a library, temperance supporters were "arranging to build a suitable edifice" for their reading room and billiard room near the Episcopal Church; in 1943, Soviet military forces were told to stand or die in clashes with German storm troops in the Belgorod Oblast region; in 1951, mystery author Dashiell Hammett was jailed for contempt of Congress after refusing to tell who furnished bond for four fugitive communist leaders, and U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada said the senate internal security committee had subpoenaed Frederick Field and his bank records to be questioned about his supposed involvement with the four communists; in 1957, Arlo Guthrie was born; in 1959, longtime U.S. State Department staffer Helen Batjer of Smith Valley was assigned to the U.S. embassy in Belgrade; in 1964, the single Things We Said Today b/w A Hard Day's Night by the Beatles was released in Britain by Parlophone (by Capitol on July 13 in the U.S., but with I Should Have Known Better instead of Things); the (motion picture) soundtrack album for A Hard Day's Night was also released in Britain two weeks after the U.S. release (which was also a different version from the British one), and Liverpool hosted the second premiere of the film, drawing hundreds of thousands of fans who greeted the fab four on their return to their home town; in 1985, responding to a flurry of bad publicity about New Coke, the Coca Cola Company said it would restore the original recipe, though since the recipe is a secret, it's not confirmable that it did so (the leader of the anti-New Coke campaign, when given a taste test by a newspaper, was unable to distinguish between the old and new Coca Cola).

Update: Sunday, July 9, 2006, 2:46 a.m. PDT — NevadaLabor.com announces the frontrunner for morally obtuse labor lyncher of the year: "When I was starting out in practice, I had to choose which side of the fence to be on," he said. "I came to the conclusion that if you can represent a good employer, you can do a lot more for the workers than you can by representing unions. My parents were both working people and union members. I wanted to do something that would have a positive impact on people's lives." — Gregory Kamer, former National Labor Relations Board attorney named one of the 12 best lawyers in the state in the July, 2006, edition of Nevada Business Journal magazine (at pp. 19-20). If this guy ever wants to return to government service, he would be well-suited to join the administration of Nevada Gov. Dudley Do-Right who has turned the Nevada labor commissioner into the anti-labor commissioner. Alas and alack, Mr. Kamer is merely the latest in an endless line of examples of someone launched into the upper middle class by union wages and benefits who has made it his life's work to make sure no one else has that opportunity. I pity people who are ashamed of who they really are. Self-loathing is so loathsome to behold. If anyone knows the address of Mr. Kamer's parents, I'd like to get a statement as to their opinions about their son's sanctimonious self-perception as representing the holy of holies for workers. Call me. BARBWIRE

On July 9, 1868, ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing equal protection under the law and extending the protection of the Bill of Rights to the states, was completed; in 1879, Secretary of the Senate John Burch said that if U.S. Senator William Sharon of California (elected from Nevada) tried to claim his salary then he (Burch) would submit the case to the controller of the U.S. Treasury (Sharon had shown up for work for only two months of his four years in office); in 1898, U.S. Representative Ebenezer Hill of Connecticut said in Seattle that he supported moving the Carson City branch of the U.S. Mint to Seattle; in 1906, U.S. Senator William Clark (for whom Clark County, Nevada, is named) of Montana endorsed William Jennings Bryan for a third Democratic presidential nomination; in 1925, the Scopes evolution trial began in Dayton, Tennessee, with Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution; in 1926, former Nebraska governor and Democratic vice presidential nominee Charles Bryan (brother of William Jennings Bryan) announced he would run again for governor (he lost but then was elected again in 1930); in 1926, the Southern Pacific Railroad filed a petition with the Nevada pubic service commission to abandon its station in Wadsworth, once a division point and the site of the railroad's shops and roundhouse; in 1931, after a news story appeared reporting that President Hoover suddenly departed the presidential retreat Rapidan Camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, leaving his secret service agents and reporters behind, Hoover ordered an investigation of press leaks and said he did not want news stories appearing on himself or the White House unless they came from official sources; in 1943, in what army officials said might have been a record for rapid advancement, actor Melvyn Douglas was promoted from private to captain six months after he entered the service; in 1947, the Las Vegas school board called for bids on the construction of ten more classrooms for two North Las Vegas schools and partitioning of the high school study hall into six classrooms; in 1955, faced with a strike by every unionist in Milwaukee if an unloading permit were issued for the Norwegian freighter Fossum's cargo (intended for the struck Kohler Company), socialist Mayor Frank Zeidler suggested the ship unload at Sheboygan and the harbor commission denied the permit (and Sheboygan's mayor said he wouldn't let the cargo be unloaded there, either); in 1959, a federal magistrate ordered that Edward Hay be returned from New Jersey to Nevada where he was under indictment for stealing the Krupp diamond ring, a 33.19 carat gem belonging to Vera Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, former wife of German munitions executive Alfred Krupp (after Ms. Krupp's death, the diamond was purchased by Elizabeth Taylor on May 16 1968 for $305,000); in 1971, Gary Sheerin was named Nevada's first state public defender; in 1984, Carolyn Anne Olsen was born at St. Mary's Hospital in Reno; in 1995, the last concert of the Grateful Dead was staged at Soldier Field in Chicago; in 2004, a Senate Intelligence Committee report found that the Central Intelligence Agency had supplied unfounded claims of the threat presented by Iraq.

Belle Livingston (Notorious NY/SFO/Reno Prohibition-era speakeasy operator):

• Men are nicer to the women they don't marry.
  
• I looked always outside of myself to see what I could make the world give me, instead of looking within myself to see what was there.

Update: Saturday, July 8, 2006, 10:46 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1863, the Collins House hotel opened in Virginia City, Nevada, with remarks at the opening by some of the Comstock's great orators — Tom Fitch, Rollin M. Daggett, Mark Twain, Colonel Turner, Judge Ferris and others, which remarks unfortunately have not survived (Virginia City Evening Bulletin: "Perhaps the speech of the evening was made by Sam Clemens. He almost brought the house to tears by his touching simple pathos."); in 1885, a fire in Carson City destroyed everything within two square blocks; in 1905, the Las Vegas Land and Water Company signed a contract with a Los Angeles firm for "extensive street improvements" costing $50,000; in 1919, the county attorney in Douglas, Arizona, announced that a hundred arrest warrants would be issued against people involved in the Bisbee deportation (in which vigilantes on July 12, 1917, hauled 2,000 striking copper miners from their beds, loaded 1,186 of them into a railroad car, shipped them across the border to New Mexico, and abandoned them in the desert) and that an additional 200 people would eventually also be arrested; in 1919, President Wilson arrived back in the United States from the European treaty conference to be greeted by cheering crowds in New Jersey and New York, while in Washington, Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois introduced a measure hostile to Wilson's League of Nations; in 1919, the Nevada governor's office received a telegram from the U.S. war trade industries board that said the English government was asking the U.S. treasury for a hundred million ounces of silver; in 1933, Adolf Hitler declared "The party has now become the state," six days before German law outlawed all political parties other than the Nazis; in 1936, four inmates sawed through bars across a prison hospital window and escaped from the Nevada State Prison hospital in Carson City in the dead of night; in 1936, Frank Ingram, state director of the national emergency council (a depression agency), said Nevada had an excess of hay in Lovelock, Fallon and Yerington and could accept 50,000 cattle from the drought stricken midwest; in 1966, the album Yesterday and Today by the Beatles went gold; in 1975, Judge John Sexton, who over the years had been the subject of removal or disbarment proceedings in the Nevada Legislature, the Nevada Supreme Court, and the state bar, who once went on strike for a week, and who sat on a strike injunction case in Las Vegas when he should have been appeared on a driving under the influence charge, died at St. Mary's Hospital in Reno; in 1999, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration reclassified Marinol, a synthetic form of tetra-hydro-cannabinol (the active ingredient found in cannabis), from Schedule II to Schedule III; in 1999, a desert storm dumped three inches of rain on Las Vegas, causing two deaths and the closure of 40 roads and intersections.

Update: Friday, July 7, 2006, 1:08 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1981, President Reagan announced he was nominating Arizona Judge Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female justice on the United States Supreme Court. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On July 7, 1930, construction began on Boulder Dam, since renamed Hoover Dam, on the Nevada/Arizona border. It has since been called one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

Television critic John Crosby/New York Herald Tribune: There have some dull See It Now shows, and some have been better than others, but it is by every criterion television's most brilliant, most decorated, most imaginative, most courageous and most important program. The fact that CBS cannot afford it but can afford Beat the Clock is shocking. (See below.)

On this date in 1865, four alleged conspirators in the Lincoln assassination, Mary Surratt, Lewis Paine, David Herold and George Atzerodt were hanged at the Washington Arsenal, now a part of Fort McNair (Surratt was the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government); in 1871, the Washoe County commissioners voted to purchase land south of the Truckee River for a county courthouse from Myron Lake, provoking angry protests over the decision to build outside of town instead of in a more central location north of the river; in 1913, piano blues great Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins was born in Belzoni in the Mississippi Delta; in 1922, former U.S. Senator Charles Henderson's federal libel suit against the Nevada State Journal, an outgrowth of the 1920 campaign, saw the introduction in evidence of several editorials to demonstrate animus; in 1940, Richard Starkey was born in the Dingle neighborhood of Liverpool; in 1946, Bob Stoddard's radio station KATO (later KBET) began broadcasting from offices in the Elks Club at Sierra and First Streets in Reno; in 1954, Elvis' voice was heard on the radio for the first time when deejay Dewey Phillips played That's All Right, Mama on WHBQ in Memphis (Elvis was hiding in a movie theatre, and his parents found him there and told him the song had drawn phone calls and was being played over and over on the radio station); in 1956, a congressional committee met at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas about the June 30 midair collision over the Grand Canyon of TWA and United airliners and how to prevent such events (the tragedy led to the creation of the air traffic control system); in 1956, Nellis air base pilot Ralph Detwiler was flying over the Nevada desert and approaching the speed of sound when his canopy burst off (he was able to land safely); in 1958, See It Now, the distinguished news program produced by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, was taken off the air by CBS chair William Paley; in 1963, the Mat Vu (secret police of the U.S.-backed south Vietnamese dictatorship) attacked and beat reporter Peter Arnett, who was covering a Buddhist anti-government protest; in 1967, All You Need Is Love b/w Baby You're A Rich Man by the Beatles was released in Britain by Parlophone (by Capitol on July 17 in the U.S.); in 1970, University of Nevada regent Tom Bell, finding himself more in the glare of the spotlight after becoming an attorney for billionaire Howard Hughes, announced he would not run for reelection; in 1970, the Nevada Public Service Commission held a hearing on an application for "J.C. Bus Lines Ltd." — a proposed city bus service for Reno owned by brothel owner Joe Conforte; in 1999, President Clinton visited the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

Update: Thursday, July 6, 2006, 1:22 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1957, Althea Gibson became the first black tennis player to win a Wimbledon singles title, defeating fellow American Darlene Hard 6-3, 6-2. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

The great composer and vocalist Tom Lehrer once said that satire died the day that Henry Kissinger, who prolonged the Vietnam War by almost a decade, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. All that's left is the unintentional howler, a sterling example of which comes from today's New York Times:

NEWS ANALYSIS By DAVID E. SANGER, 7-6-2006
Few Good Choices in North Korean Standoff (Free registration may be required.)
The choices have to do with the bigger question of whether President Bush is prepared to leave office in 2009 without constraining an unpredictable dictator.

BARBWIRE: Unless he stages an overt rather than another covert coup d'etat, the unpredictable dictator will be forced to retire in 2009. I don't know about Kim Jong Il.

On July 6, 1868, the South Carolina House convened with the only African American majority in a state legislature in U.S. history (this majority sought reforms in education, jury trials, local government, and land ownership), though tales of irresponsible post-civil war black legislatures abound in fiction, including some textbooks; in 1926, at a labor meeting in Ely, congressional candidates discussed their positions on the world court and alcohol prohibition; in 1926, during a boxing match in Lovelock, referee Fred Preston (a local businessperson) was trying to break a clinch when he got in the way of a right uppercut that knocked him out; in 1926, the syndicated cartoon Out Our Way showed a group of hobos alighting in Las Vegas and commenting on the local police; in 1937, the U.S. Public Works Administration, a New Deal agency, reported in Washington that it had declared twelve Nevada projects (including a Las Vegas electric plant, a Fallon courthouse, a Lund waterworks, education projects in Clark County and Ely and Elko, and street projects in Sparks and Las Vegas) eligible for $1,193,818 in federal funds; in 1955, in a radio speech to Vietnamese, Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem said he would not abide by the Geneva accords and made it plain that he would not hold the elections guaranteed by those accords; in 1957, John Lennon's Quarry Men played in a Woolton parade and at a gathering in St. Peter's churchyard where Lennon was introduced to Paul McCartney; in 1966, during a Beatles trip to the Phillippines, first lady Imelda Marcos threw a party for them but neglected to confirm their attendance, then when they failed to appear she told the newspapers that she had been snubbed; in 1981, a federal court overturned a Texas law prohibiting cross dressing.

Update: Wednesday, July 5, 2006, 1:17 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1975, Arthur Ashe became the first black man to win a Wimbledon singles title as he defeated Jimmy Connors. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On July 5, 1915, William Jennings Bryan spoke for peace at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (and outdrew the pro-war Theodore Roosevelt); in 1933, an expedition headed by former Antarctica explorer J.M. Mackenzie was being planned in London to search for the lost continent of Lemuria; in 1933, a former Carnegie Museum fossil expert found a burial site of Pliocene era mammals (including camelops, or humpless camels) north of Las Vegas and shipped a thousand pounds of fossilized hones to the American Museum of Natural History in New York; in 1933, because of the falling level of the Truckee River, users with water rights dating after 1900 were cut off for any purposes other than watering stock; in 1935, the National Labor Relations Act was signed into law; in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt signed executive order 8819, excluding Nevada public land from the Humboldt National Forest and reserving it for townsite purposes; in 1946, Larry Doby became the first African American baseball player in the American League when he signed with Cleveland; in 1947, Hollywood producer Mike Todd married actress Joan Blondell in Las Vegas; in 1954, Elvis recorded his first song for Sun Records — That's All Right, Mama — an event that is listed at number one in Rolling Stone's "50 moments that changed the history of rock 'n' roll"; in 1956, it was reported that John Graham, a Colorado death row inmate, had offered his eyes to labor columnist Victor Riesel, who was blinded by acid thrown in his face after he wrote about mob influence in some unions (the offer was declined because a cornea transplant would not restore Riesel's sight); in 1956, at Cedar Breaks National Monument in Utah, a uranium hunter got out of his jeep and walked away and it rolled forward over a cliff into a 475 foot canyon, taking his equipment, drilling rig, and trailer with it; in 1961, Las Vegas desk clerk Forrest MacMullen, who once went hunting with Ernest Hemingway, departed the Nevada city for Ketchum to be a pallbearer at Hemingway's funeral; in 1968, Bill Graham opened Fillmore West; in 2003, on the air, MSNBC talk show host Michael Savage told a gay listener to die of AIDS ("Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it."), a tirade that resulted in his firing — "the decision was an easy one," said a network spokesperson.

On July 4, 1976, the United States celebrated its Bicentential (sic — If the Associated Press and New York Times say there's such a thing as a "Bicentential," who are we to argue? Maybe it applies to people who always speak in two sentences. Or who have done two stretches in the pen.) In 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

On July 4, 1910, undefeated former heavyweight champion James J. Jefferies came out of retirement to face champion Jack Johnson in the "Fight of the Century" in Reno at what is today the corner to E. 4th and Toano Streets. Former champion Jess Willard, interviewed in 1967 by Guy LeBow (who died in New York last week) on the computerized fantasy all-time heavyweight elimination radio series, said that Jefferies was "sick" and never should have attempted the comeback. Willard would inherit the mantle of "Great White Hope" and defeat an overconfident Johnson in the heat of Havana in 1915. Johnson, arguably the best fighter of the first half of the 20th Century and Muhammad Ali's idol, was never allowed another title fight. Read Guy Rocha's latest lookback at the Johnson/Jefferies bout.

Frederick Douglass/Fourth of July address/1852: "Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival..."

On this date in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was approved, though the signing was not until August 2d; in 1824, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died; in 1831, James Monroe died; in 1854, in Framingham, Massachusetts, abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the United States Constitution; in 1864, the s