On June 12, 1899, the New Richmond tornado killed 117 people and injured 125 others. The tornado nearly destroyed the town of New Richmond, Wisconsin, where the Gollmar Brothers Circus had drawn hundreds of visitors in addition to the town’s 2,500 inhabitants.
The USS Wisconsin was one of four Iowa-class battleships serving in the United States Navy. The others were the USS Missouri (on which the Japanese surrender was signed in Tokyo Bay at the end of World War II), the New Jersey and the Iowa, of course.
The Red Wings, a minor league baseball team in Springfield, Missouri, had three players destined for fame on their 1931 roster, but none for their playing career themselves. Paul Dean was making his first pro ball appearance, and he would go on to win two games in the World Series 1934 win for St. Louis Cardinals, but in the shadow of his Hall of Fame brother, Dizzy Dean… Eddie Dyer was the manager and pitched a few games, after several so-so years in the majors. Johnny Keane was also there, a shortstop who never made it to the majors. But Dyer and Keane would both manage Cardinal championship teams later, Dyer winning the 1946 World Series, and Keane winning the Series in 1964.
Springfield, Massachusetts was founded in 1636 by English Puritan William Pynchon as “Agawam Plantation” under the administration of the Connecticut Colony. In 1641 it was renamed after Pynchon’s hometown of Springfield, Essex, England, following incidents that precipitated the settlement joining the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It is the first and oldest city named “Springfield” in the new world.
Henry Hudson was castaway by his mutinous crew in Hudson Bay in a small shallop in 1611, along with his young teenage son and seven other sailors. Their ultimate fate is unknown.
Hudson’s Bay Company is the oldest private concern in North America, having been established in 1670 as a fur trading enterprise. The company once owned 15% of the land in North America. Today, it is still one of Canada’s largest retailers (commonly known as “The Bay”), and recently bought Sak’s retail stores in the USA for nearly 3-billion dollars.
On October 25, 1616, the Dutch ship Eendracht, captained by Dirk Hartog, arrived at Shark Bay, the westernmost point of Australia. This was to be the first recorded landing on the western coastline by a European and the second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil.
In A Ship of the Line, Hornblower is given command of HMS Sutherland, which the Royal Navy had captured from the Dutch. Its former name when in Dutch service was Eendracht, meaning “unison”.
Saint John, New Brunswick, the home town of actor Donald Sutherland, is famous for its “reversing falls”. You can go and see a waterfall on the river where it passes through the city and then go back that afternoon and it still a waterfall, but it is falling in the opposite direction.
Saint John is always spelled out, to distinguish it from the abbreviated St. John’s, which is in Newfoundland.
Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce was played by Donald Sutherland in the film of MAS*H, though in MAD magazine’s intro to their parody of Trapper John MD, they had Sutherland playing Trapper John Mcintyre, who was played in the movie by Elliot Gould, the only Trapper still alive.
In 1999, Time magazine named Anne Frank among the heroes and icons of the 20th century on their list, “The Most Important People of the Century.” Her entry on that list stated: “With a diary kept in a secret attic, she braved the Nazis and lent a searing voice to the fight for human dignity.”
Robert Duvall, who first played Frank Burns in the movie version of MAS*H is the only Frank Burns still alive.
Horton Foote, who wrote the screenplay for the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird recommended Duvall for the role of the reclusive Boo Radley after seeing him in Foote’s stage play The Midnight Caller. To prepare for the role, his film debut, Duvall stayed out of the sun for six weeks.
Shelby Dade Foote, Jr. was an American historian and novelist who wrote The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume history of the war. Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy.
On October 15, 1764, historian Edward Gibbon observed friars singing Vespers at Rome’s Capitoline Hill, inspiring the Englishman to begin writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Early Chinese writers viewed the “noble” gibbons, gracefully moving high in the treetops, as the “gentlemen” of the forests, in contrast to the greedy macaques, attracted by human food.
Euell Gibbons was an outdoorsman and proponent of natural diets during the 1960s. He was born in 1911, and in the 1930s during the Dust Bowl he was in California and began writing Communist Party leaflets. He died at 64 from an aneurysm.
Many gibbons are hard to identify based on fur coloration, so are identified either by song or genetics. These morphological ambiguities have led to hybrids in zoos. Zoos often receive gibbons of unknown origin, so they rely on morphological variation or labels that are impossible to verify to assign species and subspecies names, so separate species of gibbons commonly are misidentified and housed together. Interspecific hybrids, hybrids within a genus, are also suspected to occur in wild gibbons where their ranges overlap. However, no records exist of fertile hybrids between different gibbon genera, either in the wild or in captivity.
When Edward Gibbon presented a copy of the second volume of Decline and Fall to the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke is reputed to have said: “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?”
Gibbon said that he was never less alone than when he was by himself—that statement stands very high in my estimation, say in company with Hippocrates’ “Life is short, art is long.”