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Yesterday, today and tomorrow
NEWS BULLETIN & ALMANIACAL ARCHIVES
Also see NevadaLabor.com's Statewide U-News RoundupClick here to get on our news & bulletins mailing list...
But before you do so, please read this note. —AB
[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of interest to labor in particular and seekers of justice in general. Copyright © 2008 Dennis Myers.]]
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE TUESDAY 4-1-2008, 07:13 a.m. PDT, 14:13 GMT/SUT/CUT —
Reno César Chávez event plays to overflow crowdOn this date in 1869, White Pine County was created with Hamilton as its county seat; in 1881, Ed Vesey gave up his lease on Reno's Lake House (on the site of today's Riverside), possibly to move to Sierra Valley, and Myron Lake took over operation of the property again; in 1894, the town of Greenfield, Nevada, changed its name to Yerington, thirteen years after Henry Yerington's C & C railroad used a route that bypassed the town; in 1896, the Nevada State Journal reported that Mrs. M.C. Lake would move into the Lake mansion; in 1913, Washoe County District Attorney William Woodburn was asked for a legal opinion on whether the new state glove contests law required the $100 fee be paid for a day's fights or for each individual fights, and whether the law limited the number of rounds; in 1914, the streets of the Native American village in Lovelock were being outfitted with electric lights and a pumping plant for irrigation was being considered; in 1930, the U.S. seized a British ship carrying rum off Nassau, and the ship was carrying papers from St. Pierre and Miquelon, a tiny French island colony that is northeast of Maine; in 1952, officials of the Calaveras County Fair came up with a grisly publicity stunt — to prove or disprove stories that frogs had emerged alive from stonemasonry after being inside for years, the fair would entomb a frog in a wall for a year; in 1957, Bye Bye Love by the Everly Brothers was released on Cadence; in 1964, Nevada casinos changed the rules of blackjack to defeat a successful system for beating the house that was then in use; in 1968, the underground newspaper Changing Times began publication in Las Vegas, becoming a target of official harassment and being driven out of business within thirteen weeks; in 1971, the Nevada Senate voted to kill a public vote on whether to make abortion legal; in 1971, the Riverside Hotel in Reno reopened under the ownership of Jessie Beck; in 1987, after years of deaths, President Reagan finally declared AIDS a public health emergency, but "he remained reluctant to use his presidential bully pulpit to send a clear public message about the AIDS epidemic," his biographer Lou Cannon wrote; in 2003, U.S. forces invaded an Iraqi hospital at Nasiriyah to seize Private Jessica Lynch (earlier the Iraqis, who saved Lynch's life, had tried to turn her over to U.S. forces, who refused to accept her).
UPDATE MONDAY 3-31-2008, 05:22 GMT/SUT/CUT — Reno, Sparks and Washoe County, Nevada, declare March 31, 2008, as César Chávez Day
News & Review Blog: Dennis Myers on César Chávez
Robert Kennedy to farm workers at Delano, August 10 1968: And when your children and grandchildren take their place in America, going to high school and college and taking good jobs at good pay — when you look at them, you will say, "I did this. I was there, at the point of difficulty and danger". And though you may be old and bent from many years of labor, no man will stand taller than you when you say, "I marched with César".
On March 31, 1870, Thomas Peterson Mundy of Perth Amboy became the first African-American to vote under the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been ratified the previous day; in 1879, a Carson Reform Club was formed in Carson City to open a club room for local boys in order to keep them out of saloons; in 1900, the Nevada State Journal wrote "The world is fall of material that will be used to make bombs for the destruction of protection to labor. Organized capital, for the illegitimate purpose of enslaving labor in manifold form, is forcing the conflict that will in due time culminate in a severe conflict. Capital at the present time holds the fort and its guns are directed against the rights of labor.; in 1911, after three years of prosecutions by the Roosevelt and Taft administrations of newspapers that reported on tawdry government conduct in the construction of the Panama canal, the cases — which were thrown out by the courts — formally came to an end when a U.S. attorney in New York requested permission to enter a filing called a nolle prosse dropping all criminal libel charges; in 1917, the United States took ownership from Denmark (for $25,000,000) of the Danish West Indies, 50 Caribbean Sea islands in the Lesser Antilles, changed their name to the Virgin Islands and turned them over to the Navy to run (a decision that was a fiasco); in 1927, César Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona; in 1945 at the Ravensbruck women's death camp, a Russian Orthodox nun and poet (see below) named Elizabeta Skobtsova but known as Mother Maria who had aided and rescued Jews in France, was gassed; in 1949, attorney Madison Graves filed charges against Las Vegas police officers after a teenager was beaten in the city jail and then given no medical attention to head injuries for four hours; in 1957, the first and only musical written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for television, Cinderella, was broadcast (performed live!) and introduced the United States to a new performer until then seen only on Broadway — Julie Andrews ("Just before I went on, a very kind soul pointed out to me that more people probably would see me in that single telecast than all the full houses of My Fair Lady for 100 years"), a program not broadcast again until December 9, 2004; in 1961, what was reported to be Reno's first sit-in was staged by African-Americans at the Overland Hotel's café while elsewhere in the downtown a picket line was thrown up at the Nevada Bank of Commerce; in 1965, a massive airborne offensive began in Vietnam, with a hundred U.S. planes pouring tons of napalm, phosphorus bombs and fuel oil on a 19,000-acre section of Vietnam; in 1965, the members of the University of Nevada debate team quit on the eve of a 40-college championship tournament hosted in Reno by the UN and issued a statement saying it was the result of a dispute with the campus hate group Coffin and Keys; in 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to negotiations with the Vietnamese, ordered a partial bombing halt in Vietnam, and withdrew from the presidential race; in 1982, a massive avalanche hit Alpine Meadows ski resort, killing seven and entombing chairlift operator Anna Conrad, who was trapped under a bank of lockers buried in ten feet of snow (she was found alive in a hollowed-out ice cave five days later); in 2006, in the most scientifically exacting investigation of whether prayer can heal illness to date, a study of 1,802 coronary bypass patients in six hospitals published by the American Heart Journal found no difference between patients prayed for by strangers (provided by St. Paul's Monastery in Minnesota, the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Massachusetts, and Silent Unity in Missouri) and those who were not prayed for, and a higher rate of complications among those patients who knew they were being prayed for, which physicians attributed to anxiety (Oklahoma City physician Charles Bethea: "It may have made them uncertain, wondering, Am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?"); in 2008, it will be announced that French architect Jean Nouvel will receive the Pritzker Prize, the most prestigious architecture award; in 2008, there will be 295 days remaining in George Bush's term of office; in 2008, César Chávez Day will be celebrated with a large gathering at the Circus Circus Hotel in Reno.
Israel
by Elizabeta SkobtsovaTwo triangles, a star,
The shield of King David, our forefather.
This is election, not offense.
The great path and not an evil.
Once more in a term fulfilled,
Once more roars the trumpet of the end;
And the fate of a great people
Once more is by the prophet proclaimed.
Thou art persecuted again, O Israel,
But what can human ill will mean to thee,
who have heard the thunder from Sinai?UPDATE SUNDAY 3-30-2008, 11:27 a.m. PDT, 18:27 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1867, a treaty of purchase was signed in Washington, beginning the formal process of U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia, though no one bothered asking the native inhabitants of the region if they wanted their land sold (treatment of the natives became more brutal under U.S. occupation); in 1870, after artificial bans on slavery like the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth, slavery finally became illegal in the United States with ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and celebrations were planned throughout the nation, including at Elko (where it was the occasion for demands for integrated local schools) and Virginia City; in 1900, a traveling man in Reno on business commented on the lack of a public park in a city of seven thousand people and suggested that the city plaza would be a good location for a park; in 1920, officials estimated that U.S. citizens were spending a billion dollars annually (about $10.7 billion in 2005 dollars) in Mexican border towns like Mexicali, Nogales, Juarez and Tijuana where alcohol was legal; in 1923, invitations went out for the wedding in the governor's mansion in Carson City of a University of Nevada Tri-Delt, the fulfillment of an agreement under which Nevada First Lady Julia Scrugham leased the Scrughams' Reno home during the governorship to Delta Delta Delta and the first Tri Delt engaged would agree to be married in the mansion; in 1932, the last concrete was poured for the Cat Creek Dam for the water supply for the Hawthorne army depot; in 1948, on the eve of state takeover of the Basic Magnesium industrial complex in Henderson from the federal government, Governor Vail Pittman and other officials sought to reassure residents of the company town that they would not have to pay higher rates now that the state was operating their power company; in 1963, aeronautical engineer Ed Dwight, an African-American air force test pilot, was admitted to U.S. astronaut training, where — after full public relations mileage was obtained from him — he was harrassed and threatened into quitting (he is now a renowned sculptor); in 1969, twenty year-old Charles Lynn Hodge of Reno, Nevada, died in Tay Ninh province, Vietnam (panel 28w, row 91 of the Vietnam wall); in 2006, Harraj Mann was pulled off an airliner in London and questioned for three hours because a cabdriver told police the man had listened to The Clash's London Calling and Led Zep's Immigrant Song in the cab.
UPDATE SATURDAY 3-29-2008, 10:26 a.m. PDT, 17:26 GMT/SUT/CUT — UAW and other unions protest unfair trade at Reno General Motors warehouse Reno Gazette-Journal 3-29-2008
Update from the morning edition: The union has collected more than 600 signatures thus far. Keep them cards and letters coming in. Thanks!
Sign the petition onlineOn March 29, 1890, the Nevada State Journal reported "There will have to be imitation savages in the circuses this Summer, as the Secretary of the Interior has decided that no more Indians shall be allowed to leave the agencies for this purpose because of the demoralizing effects upon them. Representatives of the various circus companies protest against this order, and they have appealed to the President who, however, sustains Secretary [John] Noble. They explained to the President that they had already advertised their attractions for the coming year, and had gone to great expense in printing show bills and circulars in which they offer as an attraction to the public, scenes in savage life, and that they will be put to a great loss unless they are allowed to carry out their plans. The President [Benjamin Harrison] listened to them patiently, but would not yield, and they will have to find the best possible substitute. As soon as the Indians who are now with Buffalo Bill in Europe return to this country, they will be ordered back to their agencies and will be required to stay there."; in 1920, the Washoe County Bar Association voted to call for rescission of actress Mary Pickford's divorce on grounds of residence fraud, then rescinded the vote and expunged all record of it from the association minutes; in 1926, Washoe County Sheriff John Hillhouse abandoned his search for the Weston Band, a gang of cattle rustlers, but the state police continued the search into Churchill County; in 1934, Renoites lined the Truckee River watching to see if a new island formed in the river between Virginia and Center after the construction of the Center Street Bridge would withstand heavy flows driven by upstream rains; in 1948, residents of an East Liberty Street neighborhood gave a petition to the Reno city council asking for construction of a crossing guard where the Virginia and Truckee railroad crossed Liberty Street; in 1949, Richard Trachok was hired by the Reno School District No. 10 to be head football and track coach at Reno High School at a salary of $2,820 a year; in 1962, Gene Chandler received a gold record for Duke of Earl; in 1967, CBS corporate lawyer Arnold Zenker entered the elite group of principal anchors of the CBS Evening News, replacing Walter Cronkite for 13 days during a strike (Cronkite's open on his first day back: "This is Walter Cronkite sitting in for Arnold Zenker"); in 1973, the United States withdrew ground forces from Vietnam but kept bombing the devil out of the unfortunate nation; in 2007, Rush Limbaugh described the U.S. public as "a bunch of blithering idiots who have no idea what they're talking about"; in 2008, Warren Olsen of Reno was celebrated by his wife, children, grandchildren and friends at Sierra Bible Church.
Time magazine / April 07 1967:
Portrait of the Artists"Direct from our newsroom in New York, in color, this is the CBS Evening for News, with Arnold Zenker substituting for Walter Cronkite and. . ." Arnold Zenker? Across the U.S. last week, televiewers gawked curiously at the unfamiliar faces — balding salesmen, pert secretaries, scrubbed junior executives — telling about "Veet Nom," "Cheeze Juftif Warren," "cloddy skies" and "mosterly easterly winds." All, like 28-year-old Arnold Zenker, manager of program administration for CBS, were filling in — and sometimes falling apart —f or regular newscasters as the result of a strike called by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.
The walkout, the first in the union's 30-year-history, involved announcers, newsmen, disk jockeys and performers working on TV and radio stations owned by CBS, NBC, ABC and the Mutual Broadcasting System. The principal issue in the dispute is a salary increase for 100 newsmen at network-owned stations in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The union was demanding a base salary of $325 plus 50% of the fees earned from sponsored programs; the networks are offering $300 and 25%.
Swallow or Spit? Though lumping all these people in a union of "artists" is a bit like calling a tailback a tap dancer, the performance of some of the pinch newscasters was worthy of an Emmy, or at least a Hammy, for the best comedy show of the season. Scripts rattled, eyes squinted at TelePrompTers.In Chicago, WLS Advertising Director Frank Nardi made his broadcasting debut as a substitute disk jockey, struggled hysterically to keep up the machinegun patter.
Sample: "Hey there! That was the great Ramsey Lewis Duo. . . aah. . .trio. . .whee. . .It's. . .aah. . . . . .three minutes. . .aah. . .I mean twelve minutes after three. . . wheee."
At Chicago's WBBM-TV, Salesman Frank Palmer all but burned up the airways. Winding up the 5 p.m. news, he lit his pipe just like a real Walter Cronkite, burned his fingers, dumped tobacco all over the desk, grinned wanly and shrugged. In Los Angeles, KNBC viewers telephoned the station to complain that Pinch Newscaster Harry Howe was chewing gum while reading the financial news. Not so, Howe later explained. Seems that while struggling with all those Dow-Jones figures, he dislodged a filling in his tooth and, not knowing whether to swallow it or spit it out, bounced it from cheek to cheek between syllables.
Morning, Hugh. On the first day of the strike, Hugh Downs, host of NBC's Today show, arrived live and in color at Manhattan's RCA Building in a pelting rain, disembarked from his NBC-supplied limousine, clapped on his sandwich board, popped open his umbrella, walked the picket line for a while, popped back into his Caddy and drove off. Other familiar pickets, such as Bud Collyer, Edwin Newman and Peter Jennings, were kept busy signing autographs, using the back of each other's signs for support.But whatever frivolity existed on the picket line during the early hours of the strike was later tempered by NBC News caster Chet Huntley's announcement that he would not honor the walkout because A.F.T.R.A. is a union of "singers, actors, jugglers, announcers, entertainers and comedians whose problems have no relation to ours."
He sent a telegram to 40 fellow newsmen calling for their support and suggesting that a National Labor Relations Board election be held to decide representation and possible withdrawal of newscasters from the union. Claiming that he had received the approval of 37 of the 40 newsmen, Huntley said: "If I carry the ball, they're completely behind me."
Good Night, Chet! NBC Newsmen Frank McGee, Morgan Beatty and Ray Scherer joined Huntley in crossing the picket line. At the other networks, CBS's Cronkite and ABC's Howard K. Smith demurred.Said Cronkite: "I think the time to complain is past. If you don't like the army, you get out before the battle starts."
As for David Brinkley, the Washington-based half of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, he stayed out of the controversy and away from the studio.
The reaction of some newsmen to the Huntley-Huntley Report was good night, Chet! Snapped NBC's Jack Costello: "Chet Huntley is the biggest liar and scab in the world."
But most seemed to agree with ABC's Jules Bergman: "Huntley's stand is valid, but we won't forgive him because he weakened our position."
At Hurley's bar in Manhattan, hangout for network staffers, one picketer placed a photograph of Huntley in the window and wreathed it with black crepe paper. Whatever the upshot of the strike, it at least provided the best broadcasting entertainment of the year.
UPDATE FRIDAY 3-28-2008, 1:10 a.m. PDT, 08:10 GMT/SUT/CUT —
George Bush / March 28, 2000: Reading is the basics for all learning.
On this date in 1834, by a vote of 26 to 20 the U.S. Senate censured President Jackson for removing the government's deposits without the permission of Congress, causing a business downturn; in 1862, the civil war battle at La Glorietta Pass in New Mexico was fought, known as the "Gettysburg of the West"; in 1900, the Nevada State Journal bragged that its campaign against illegal fishing in the Truckee was making headway and complained about Native Americans: "It is reported that a number of Indians have been infringing the law between here and Laughton's [west of Reno] and it would be well if the offenders were captured and made an example of."; in 1915, for the first time in the United States people were told publicly how to use a contraceptive, in remarks by Emma Goldman before a crowd of 600 at New York's Sunrise Club, resulting in her conviction for "inflammatory speech" and a sentence of 15 days in the workhouse, the first of many such court actions (a woman journalist wrote in the Little Review that "Goldman was sent to prison for advocating that women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open"); in 1934, unclaimed freight addressed to 44 Ridge Street in Reno (there was no such address) was opened in Los Angeles and found to contain machine guns; in 1944, the two-day murder of all the Jewish children in Lithuania's Zezmariai death camp was completed; in 1953, the greatest U.S. athlete of the 20th century, Jim Thorpe, aka Bright Path of the Sac and Fox Native American Nation, died in Philadelphia (when his native Oklahoma was indifferent to providing him with a resting place, the tiny towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk in Pennsylvania merged and changed their name to Jim Thorpe, all by public vote, and he was buried there in 1954); in 1962, public radio reporter Carol Cizauskas was born in Bonn, daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer; in 2000, Fellowship of the Rings movie director Peter Jackson told New Zealand's Wellington Evening Post that The Beatles once had plans for production of the Rings trilogy, with John slated to play Gollum, Paul to play Frodo, George to play Gandalf, and Ringo to play Sam, but the project was personally vetoed by J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE THURSDAY 3-27-2008, 12:11 a.m. PDT, 07:11 GMT/SUT/CUT —
César Chávez Day brings labor and management together in Reno
Annual event at Circus Circus March 31 will also bring together César Chávez and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.On this date in 1883, James Reavis filed his famed Spanish "Peralta land grant" with the Surveyor General of the Territory of Arizona, claiming a 75 by 250 mile strip in Arizona and New Mexico containing nearly 19,000 square miles of land, a claim that kept the southwest in an uproar for the next eleven years (Reavis had spent years traveling to alter old Spanish and Mexican land records in Madrid, Seville and California to support the fraudulent claim); in 1886, Geronimo surrendered to General George Crook at Cañon de Los Embudos in Sonora (and had second thoughts within hours and escaped, with the result that General Crook was replaced by Nelson Miles); in 1886, the Buffalo Bill Dramatic Combination appeared in Reno a day after it was in Carson City and two days after a Virginia City performance (Territorial Enterprise: "The Pawnee Indians — real genuine Indians by the way — performed their parts with eloquent silence, their catlike movements on the stage were very impressive and formed quite an attraction to the general rounding of the performance."); in 1912, the first of three thousand cherry trees donated to the United States by the Japanese government were planted on the north bank of the tidal basin of the Potomac River; in 1923, after a day of searching, Reno post office officials, who had been informed by Washington of a fourth class post office in a Washoe County town called Diessner of which they had never heard, finally located it twenty miles north of Vya and six miles south of the Oregon border; in 1923, the Literary Digest published a poem written by Nevada's U.S. Senator John Jones (who served in the senate from 1873 to 1903) that he gave to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan (see below); in 1932, Mayor Edwin Roberts turned Idlewild Park over to Reno children, who searched for thousands of Easter eggs provided by Gray Reid Wright department store and the Nevada State Journal, with 25 golden eggs redeemable for live bunnies; in 1948, faced with a dispute over whether a fishing or hunting license was required to catch bull frogs, the Nevada Fish and Game Commission reclassified them from game animals to game fish, prompting the Eureka Sentinel to comment that the commission "accomplished what nature and evolution have been unable to do in the last million years"; in 1949, engineers said Davis Dam, which would provide a fourth of its power to Nevada, would be complete by August 1, and meanwhile a effort was underway to name the lake created by the dam Mohave for the tribe whose land would be submerged; in 1956, the University of Nevada withdrew the expulsions of six students for participating in a demonstration against campus president Minard Stout; in 1961, after a morning in which African-Americans from around Nevada poured into the state capital, a senate committee kept approving a weak civil rights bill and then revoked its approval, finally allowing a full senate vote by which the measure lost 9 to 8; in 1999, over a story in which three international law experts said there was a sound legal basis for criticism that President Clinton's war in Kosovo was illegal under international law, The New York Times placed this headline: "Legal Scholars Support Case for Using Force."
Silver Jack's Religion
By John Jones
I was on the drive in sixty working‚ under Silver Jack,
Which the same is now in Jackson & ain't soon expected back;
There was a chap among us, by the name of Robert Waite,
Who was kinder, slick & tonguey˜I guess he were a graduate.
Bob could gab on any subject, from the Bible down to Hoyle;
And his words flowed out so easy, just as smooth and slick as oil.
He was what they called a "skeptic," & he loved to sit & weave
Highfalutin‚ words together, sayin‚ what he didn't believe.One day as we was waitin‚ for a flood to clear the ground,
We all sat smokin‚ niggerhead, & hearing Bob expound:
"Hell, he said, was a humbug & he proved as clear as day
That the Bible was a fable;" we allowed it looked that way.As for miracles and sich like, 'twas more than he could stan‚;
And for Him they call "The Saviour," he was just a common man.
"'You're a liar,' shouted someone, "& you‚ve got t take that back."
Then ev'ry body started — 'twas the voice of Silver Jack!
Jack clicked his flats together & he shucked his coat & cried,
"'Twas by that thar religion my Mother lived & died:
"And though I haven't always used the Lord exactly right
"When I hear a chump abuse Him, he must eat his words or fight."Now Bob, he war'nt no coward, & he answered bold & free,
"Stack your duds & cut your capers, for you'll find no flies on me."
And they fit for forty minutes, & the boys would hoot & cheer,
When Jack choked up a tooth or two, & Bob he lost an ear.At last, Jack got Bob under, & he slugged him onst or twiced,
The Bob at last admitted the Divinity of Christ.
Still Jack kept reasonin' with him, till the cuss began to yell.
And allowed he'd been mistaken in his views concernin' Hell.Thus that controversy ended, & they ris up from the ground.
And someone found a bottle & kindly passed it round.
And we drak to "Jack‚s Religion," in a quiet sort of way;
So the spread of infidelity was checked in Camp that day.UPDATE WEDNESDAY 3-26-2008, 6:53 a.m. PDT, 13:53 GMT/SUT/CUT —
Rick Williams / American Indian College Fund: Vine Deloria was a wonderfully gifted Lakota man who quite possibly saved Indian people from extinction.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
On this date in 1804, Congress approved legislation providing to the president "a sum not exceeding fifteen thousand dollars...for the purpose of extinguishing Indian claims..."; in 1862, President Lincoln forwarded to Congress a request from Governor James Nye of the Territory of Nevada a request for a private secretary and a salary increase for federal officials in the territory; in 1878, a few days after a Native American was murdered in Reno, a procession of tribal family and friends passed through Reno to the hillside cemetery where the body of the victim was exhumed, removed from its coffin, and then reburied as part of tribal rites; in 1907, a day after he said he would appoint Carson City newspaper publisher and former state controller Sam Davis to be the head of the new Nevada Publicity Commission, Governor John Sparks backed away from the appointment after receiving some complaints; in 1923, the U.S. Post Office informed the Reno postmaster that Washoe County had a new fourth class post office at Diessner, a location of which no one in Reno had ever heard and could not find; in 1923, arriving from San Francisco in Carson City, former Acting Governor Denver Dickerson was sworn into office as state inspector of pharmacies, a newly created post paying $3,000 a year (the equivalent of about $31,545 in 2003 dollars); in 1933, Vine Deloria Jr., historian, author, Episcopal theologian and national leader whose seminal Custer Died For Your Sins and other books educated a generation on Native American history, was born near the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Reservation; in 1942, newspapers carried a photo of a long line of dozens of vehicles crossing the desert near Lone Pine, California, transporting a thousand U.S. citizens from Los Angeles to an internment camp in the Owens Valley; in 1955, The Ballad of Davy Crockett became number one on the hit parade; in 1956, the U.S. Information Agency denounced equality in the Soviet Union, describing jobs to which U.S. women would seek entry fifteen years later: "True to their principle of' 'equality‚' women labor in steel mills, lumber camps and mines, and on railroads, hod carriers on construction jobs, as street cleaners, loggers, stokers, machinists, truck drivers, carpenters, and so on."; in 1956, with police brutality charges on their way to the Clark County grand jury, Las Vegas Police Chief George Allen said that so far as he could determine, there was no truth to accusations that officers beat two Latino prisoners; in 1956, a Nevada Assembly select committee on taxation issued a report saying the 1955 enactment of a sales tax was unnecessary and could have been prevented if the legislature had been better informed on all possible revenue sources, and the committee said it would gather such information to provide to lawmakers if the sales tax was overturned by voters in the 1956 election; in 1960, under a threat of protest marches organized by Dr. James McMillan, casinos in Clark County, Nevada, desegregated their facilities; in 1960, Elvis taped an appearance with Frank Sinatra at the Fontainbleu Hotel in Miami for later broadcast, helping Sinatra finally break his losing streak as a television ratings performer; in 1968, twenty-four year-old Larry Earl Barger of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Binh Dinh province, Vietnam (panel 46e, row 28 of the Vietnam wall); in 1969, twenty-eight year-old Carlos Wilson Rucker of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Khanh Hoa province, Vietnam (panel 28w, row 52); in 1999, in an NPR commentary, war game designer Austin Bay lamented reduced Pentagon budgets (in fact, Pentagon spending was rising, not falling).
UPDATE TUESDAY 3-25-2008, 6:34 a.m. PDT, 13:34 GMT/SUT/CUT —
Allen Ginsberg / Howl: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix; Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
On March 25, 1879, Cheyenne leader Little Wolf, one of the most successful military figures in U.S. history (he participated in the Fetterman battle, Fort Phil Kearney sieges, and Little Bighorn) surrendered his forces to a cavalry unit; in 1896, a measles epidemic in Lincoln County was hitting Native Americans particularly hard, with six of them dead in a week; in 1917 at a rally in New York's Metropolitan Opera House held to celebrate the February revolution, Charles Evans Hughes, Alton Parker, Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root spoke or sent messages expressing pleasure at the entry of Russia into the community of democratic nations and pledging to aid the new nation; in 1917, a representative of a new national organization, the League to Enforce Peace, arrived in Reno to form a local chapter and advance an April speech in Reno by former Minnesota governor Adolph Eberhart (peace organizing was very risky during the world war because the Wilson administration prosecuted it under the Espionage Act); in 1927, U.S. Senator Tasker Oddie of Nevada was throwing a fit after learning that U.S. Interior Secretary Hubert Work had arranged the acquisition of land in Secret Valley in California's Lassen County for a site in competition with Nevada's Hawthorne for a Army ammunition depot; in 1939 with war talk common, the Nevada Bureau of Mines was doing a study of the prospects for development of strategic war minerals in the state; in 1955, customs inspectors seized a shipment of copies of Allan Ginzberg's Howl as they were brought in to the U.S. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco responded by publishing the book in the U.S.); in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's only album, the magnificent Déjà vu (containing Teach Your Children, Helpless, Our House, Woodstock), went gold; in 1975 in a Nevada Assembly judiciary committee hearing on a measure to hike the penalties for marijuana possession, ACLU of Nevada lobbyist Richard Siegel pointed out that jail time for possession in Nevada was already six times longer than the maximum sentence possible for conspiracy to murder (the committee responded by ordering a bill draft to make jail time equal for the two crimes); in 1977, Governor Mike O'Callaghan vetoed Assemblymember Steve Coulter's legislation repealing the mandatory motorcycle helmet law for adults; in 1977, Sid Doan testified in court that in 1973 he had threatened beating city councilmember James Vernon "within an inch of his life" if his Sierra Sid's truck stop was denied a gambling license; in 1992, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returned to a changed world after ten months on the Mir space station (his nation, the Soviet Union, no longer existed).UPDATE MONDAY 3-24-2008, 10:26 a.m. PDT, 17:26 GMT/SUT/CUT —
The labor movement has lost one of our true leaders. It is with deep sadness that I report to you the death of Frank L. Caine. Frank passed away yesterday (March 23) in southern California. As you know, Frank was a longtime president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Southern Nevada and local leader of the Ironworkers Union. Funeral arrangements are not yet final. I am told he will be buried at Forest Lawn near his home in Oceanside, Calif. We will send details as soon as they are available.
UPDATE: Frank Caine's memorial service will be held at 11:00 a.m. on Thursday, March 27, at St. Francis of Assisi, 524 W. Vista Way in Vista, California (92083). Entombment will follow at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, March 28, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, 1712 S. Glendale Ave., Glendale, Calif., 91205. Labor leaders are planning a southern Nevada memorial service at a later date.
UPDATE: The Nevada memorial service for Frank Caine will be held at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 30, at the Culinary Training Academy of Las Vegas, 710 W. Lake Mead Blvd., North Las Vegas, Nev., 89030.
UPDATE MONDAY 3-24-2008, 2:32 a.m. PDT, 09:32 GMT/SUT/CUT —
EXCLUSIVE BREAKING NEWS
Week of the Giants Begins
United Auto Workers demonstrate while Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and César Chávez offer advice
Barbwire/ Daily Sparks Tribune / 3-23-2008
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2008 07:16:00
On this date in 1886 the Reese River Reveille said that lobbyists were costing the state of Nevada thousands of 1886 dollars: „If such a thing were possible there are at least half a dozen men in Nevada who should be quarantined for sixty days every two years.‰; in 1890 in a railroad case, Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railroad vs. Minnesota, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a corporation is a person within the meaning of the 14th amendment to the Constitution; in 1923 the University of Nevada freshman class performed its semiannual task of painting the block N on Peavine Mountain; in 1934 people crowded into Reno‚s civic auditorium for Governor Fred Balzar‚s funeral (work on the Boulder Dam project was halted for three minutes at 2 p.m., the start time of the funeral), and a major topic of conversation at the funeral was the disappearance of former Reno City Councilmember Roy Frisch, chief prosecution witness in the federal bunco trial of Reno political/crime bosses James „Cinch‰ McKay and William Graham; in 1956 U.S. Navy officials confronted Lt. Thomas Dooley with the results of an investigation into his sexuality and forced him to resign his commission; in 1960 Harold‚s Club general manager Raymond I. Smith resigned as secretary treasurer of the All American Society, a group he founded to warn against „creeping communism‰ whose officers included American Legion official Thomas Miller and former U.S. representative Cliff Young; in 1965 with the support of 200 professors and over the opposition of Governor George Romney and the Michigan Senate, the first Vietnam teach-in was held at the University of Michigan, an action that spread across the nation (Michigan Supreme Court Justice Paul Adams attended, calling the teach-in „a vital service...in promoting debate on the question of U.S. policy in Vietnam‰); in 1980 during a U.S. funded war by the El Salvador government against its own people that claimed 3,000 lives a month, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while he said mass, shortly after he unsuccessfully begged President Carter to stop financing the slaughter, and a United Nations investigation later concluded that the murder had been ordered by Salvadoran Major Roberto D'Aubuisson; in 1980 ABC News, which had promised to keep airing its late night news program America Held Hostage until the Iran hostages were freed, changed the name of the program to Nightline; in 1996 the Las Vegas movie Showgirls starring Elizabeth Berkley won the 16th annual Golden Raspberry Award; in 1999 the Clinton/NATO bombing war against Kosovo began, eventually involving 38,000 bombing missions and drawing harsh criticism from U.S. Republican leaders and even the American Legion; in 2002 Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the best acting Oscars; in 2008 there are 302 days left in George Bush's term of office.
Seymour Hersh: You have to give Bill Clinton his due —when he bombed Kosovo in 1999, he became the first president since World War Two to bomb white people.
CNN News anchor/March 24 1999: Let's bring in our Pentagon spokesman — excuse me, our Pentagon correspondent.
Date: Sun, 23 Mar 2008 12:43:42
On this date in 1806 the Lewis and Clark expedition began its return trip out of Fort Clatsop in the Oregon country to St. Louis after failing to find a northwest passage; in 1874 President Grant issued an executive order affirming the existence „for the Pah-Ute and other Indians residing thereon‰ of the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, which had existed uncertainly since 1859; in 1877 Mormon leader John Lee, a former U.S. Indian agent and Utah state legislator, was executed by firing squad for leading the Mountain Meadows massacre; in 1918 Lithuania‚s independence was recognized by German emperor Wilhelm II; in 1923 Chollar Mine worker Andy Antunovich lost an arm on the job as rumors circulated of a miners strike on the Comstock; in 1932 Nevada State Journal: „A life of enforced idleness, huddled on a narrow parcel of barren land, wind-swept in winter and sun-scorched in summer, with the dingiest of shanties and Œdog houses‚ as homes, is rapidly causing the deterioration of the Indians on the Reno reservation between here and Sparks. The United States senate Indian affairs committee promised the Indians the aid of the federal government in providing them some means of earning a livelihood˜perhaps an industry of some small nature, a few dairy cows to give milk for the young, water to grow small quantities of truck crops. The committee left here May 26, 1931, and disappeared as completely as if it never existed. Ý The people in Reno and other cities do not want to employ Indians, according to Meredith Crooks, Indian officer in charge of the reservation.‰; in 1942 Evacuation of U.S. citizens from their homes to internment camps began (see below); in 1954 French Chief of Staff General Paul Ely and U.S. Joint Chiefs chair Admiral Arthur Radford concocted a plan called Operation Vulture (Opération Vautour) to use an atom bomb in Vietnam to rescue the besiged French at Dien Bien Phu (both Vulture and other plans for U.S. involvement died when the Eisenhower administration was unable to lure British Prime Minister Winston Churchill into the scheme); in 1954 former cowboy actor Rex Bell of Las Vegas, who lost a congressional race in 1944, announced that he would oppose Reno Mayor Francis „Tank‰ Smith and White Pine County Assemblymember George Hawes in the Republican primary for lieutenant governor; in 1956 in her newspaper column, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, „There must be great pride, not only among the Negroes but among white people all over the country, in the remarkable restraint and courage shown by the Negroes in their struggle for their rights in Montgomery, Ala., and other places in the South. Never before has such a peaceful but determined movement taken place. It is inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi and his followers in India and calls for remarkable fortitude and perseverance. Dr. Luther King, in his insistence that there be no hatred in this struggle, is asking almost more than human beings can achieve. Yet there has not been one single word of praise from any member of the [Eisenhower] administration.‰; in 1956 Nevada labor commissioner D.W. Everett reminded employers that adult women workers must be paid the minimum wage, $1 an hour, and that women under 18 must be paid a minimum of 87.5 cents an hour; in 1960 after Nevada District Judge Richard Hanna declared Joe Conforte‚s Triangle Ranch brothel a public nuisance, Storey County Sheriff Cecil Morrison burned it down (meanwhile, a few hundred yards away in Lyon County, another branch of the brothel continued doing business); in 1963 „Surfin‚ U.S.A.‰ by the Beach Boys was released; in 2002 Rex Daniels, who took the first master‚s degree in journalism from the University of Nevada, died in Reno; in 2003 Donald John Cline Jr.of Sparks, Nevada and Frederick Pokorney Jr. of Nye County, Nevada died in Nasiriyah, Iraq; in 2003 the Institute for Policy Studies in D.C. reported that, according to the U.S. State Department's own human rights survey, many of the members of the Bush administration's Iraq "coalition of the willing" were themselves terrorist states (Albania, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Macedonia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey, and Uzbekistan); in 2003 Michael Williams of Yuma, who was born in Reno, died in Nasiriyah, Iraq
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
San Francisco News
March 23, 1942
MASS EXODUS OF JAPS BEGUN
Motorcade Starts Trek from L.A.
BY E.A. EVANS
Scripps-Howard staff writer
LOS ANGELES, March 23.˜Large-scale evacuation Japanese aliens and their American-born children from strategic Pacific Coast military and industrial areas began today as a caravan of 350 autos and trucks left Pasadena for the Army‚s new reception center east of the Sierra Nevadas.
More than 600 aliens and American citizens of Japanese descent assembled before dawn at Pasadena‚s Rose Bowl, scene of the annual New Years‚ Day football classic in pre-war years.
In scenes reminiscent of the flight of Oklahoma and Texas dust bowl refugees to California a few years ago, the Japanese piled their household belongings on their autos and trucks, many of them ready for the junkyard.
Each evacuee wore an identifying card on his lapel and carried a ditty bag stuffed with personal effects. Many of the American-born youths wore sweaters indicating recent participation in high school and college sports.
Dozens of added travelers dashed up to the assembly point in taxicabs at the last moment. There were brief family reunions with wives and children who had come to the Rose Bowl to see their menfolk off for the camp at Manzanar, in the Owens Valley, 230 miles north of Los Angeles.
Then Major C.V. Caldwell, provost general for the sector, gave the order to start. There were grinds of self-starters, a few orders from officers, and the long parade began.
Nearly 200 of the vehicles were operated by the evacuees. They represented all types of jalopies˜dilapidated pickup trucks, open touring cars, „cut-downs‰ in collegiate style, and one Model T Ford.
Army ŒJeeps‚ in Line
Three large trucks loaded with baggage led the motorcade as it headed north through San Fernando Valley, making a parade between five and six miles long. Interspersed after every 10th car was an Army „jeep‰ carrying military police.
The procession helds its speed to about 30 miles an hour because of the questionable endurance of some of the conveyances. Army ambulances, tow cars, a water car and a field kitchen accompanied the motorcade.
Evacuees leaving today were largely carpenters and other skilled workmen sent to assist in final construction phases of the reception center.
Japanese will do most of their own policing and governing under Army supervision.
Two Simple Orders
Clayton E. Triggs, camp administrator and former Los Angeles County WPA head, said two simple orders would apply at the camp: All persons registered there must remain there unless special orders were issued, and no liquor would be allowed.
Barber shops, the hospital, beauty parlors, tobacco stores and similar establishments will be functioning by the end of the week, officials said, with each of the 48 blocks to have its own recreation center.
Japanese-American leaders proposed erection of a defense industry on the reservation for manufacture of nonvital parts of military airplanes. They mentioned articles, such as instrument panels and metal fittings, not capable of being sabotaged.
Security Wages
Workers chosen to remain at the reception center will be paid security wages ranging from $50 a month for unskilled labor to $94 for skilled, with $15 a month deducted for subsistence.
Scores of other Japanese left from the Union Railroad Station and bus depots in Los Angeles.
By nightfall between 1000 and 1500 are expected to reach Manzanar.
A visitor from the East, watching this start of what will become a vast hegira˜quite in the booster spirit of Southern California it is referred to here as „the greatest orderly mass movement of civilians in history‰˜is impressed by two queerly contradictory facts.
First, about 90 per cent of the people of Los Angeles seem to be profoundly relieved that the Army-directed evacuation of Japanese is at last getting under way.
Second, about 90 per cent of them also seem to feel deep regret that this job has to be done on so wholesale a scale.
Teachers Would Follow
Teachers in the Los Angeles schools are offering to follow their 9300 Japanese pupils to new settlements. Federal agencies are working to protect the property rights of the exiles. At San Francisco, the other day, the sophomore class at St. Ignatius High School chipped in to buy a watch for Bill Morizumi, an honor member of the ROTC, who was "going away." But severe hardships undoubtedly will be unavoidable. The great evacuation involves unprecedented problems, many of them not solved. Some 94,000 Japanese must go from California alone, about two-thirds of them citizens by birth, and 20,000 more from Oregon and Washington.
WASHINGTON, March 23.˜Henry J. Ennis, Department of Justice official, told the Senate immigration committee today that Japanese nationals are co-operating with the War Department in leaving strategic Pacific Coast zones.
Otherwise, the removal plans would require employment of all Army troops now on the West Coast, with a consequent neglect of their military duties.
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 19:53:45
Edmund Burke/speech supporting the appeasement of America/March 22d 1775: I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. The natural rights of mankind are indeed sacred things, and if any public measure is proved mischievously to affect them, the objection ought to be fatal to that measure, even if no charter at all could be set up against it. Only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legislation and administration, should dictate.
On this date in 1861 President Lincoln appointed James Nye of New York as governor of the new Territory of Nevada, and Orion Clemens of Iowa as territorial secretary; in 1903 a commission appointed by President Roosevelt to end a nationwide United Mine Workers strike issued its report calling for a wage hike, fewer hours, corporation recognition of the union, and an open shop; in 1923 Two instances of claim jumping in Elko county oil fields were reported; in 1934 former U.S. Representative Samuel Arentz of Nevada was reported recovered after hospitalization in Salt Lake City as a result of exposure to mercury at his mine and mill in Manning, Utah; in 1949 Nevada Governor Vail Pittman vetoed a bill making prostitution legal if localities consented, calling on legislators „to protect the name of Nevada˜to keep it synonymous with personal liberty but not with licentiousness‰; in 1951 Carson City March of Dimes chair Paul Laxalt reported that a house to house solicitation had produced $849.53 for the anti-polio campaign; in 1954 The headline on the cover of the new issue of Newsweek (postdated March 29) asked in the wake of See It Now‚s McCarthy broadcast, „Should television take sides?‰; in 1956 „MONTGOMERY, Ala., March 22. - (UP) - A circuit court judge found a young Negro minister guilty of conspiring to boycott segregated city buses and sentenced him to a $500 fine or 140 days at hard labor. The trials of 89 other Negroes on the same charge were continued until a higher court rules on the first case, that of the Rev. Martin Luther King, 27. ݉; in 1961 a tobacco industry scientific advisory board announced that after six years of work it had found no evidence of a link between smoking and lung cancer; in 1961 a Clark County grand jury convened to investigate local police was dismissed after filing a report calling officers „burglars behind badges‰ but also saying that the police department was making progress in reforming itself; in 1965 Bob Dylan's album Bringing It All Back Home was released; in 1971 the captain commanding 53 armored cavalry troopers who refused to obey orders to protect a damaged helicopter and their commanding officer‚s vehicle at Khe Sanh was relieved of his command but Gen. John Hill said he would take no action against the other men; in 1971 Governor Mike O‚Callaghan said he would comply with a federal court order reinstating welfare recipients who had been thrown off the welfare rolls by his administration; in 1980 Dark Side of the Moon broke Tapestry's record for longest stay on the Billboard top 100 album chart; in 2003 a group of about 300 (including Lt. Jim Ballard and Washoe County Deputy District Attorneys Jim Shewan and Roger Whomes) left the site of a pro-war demonstration in downtown Reno and walked to the site of an antiwar protest in a different part of downtown Reno and overran the peace vigil, tearing signs from protesters‚ hands, yelling to drown out hymns, and spitting on protesters while police stood by observing and doing nothing (the antiwar group had altered the plans for their protest at the request of police in order to avoid interacting with the prowar group).
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:51:49
On this date in 1857 Australian journalist, trade union activist, and anti-imperialist Alice Henry, who started Chicago‚s Women‚s Trade Union League, was born in Richmond, Tasmania; in 1864 President Lincoln approved legislation allowing the people of Nevada for write a constitution and form a state government and allowing the president to declare Nevada a state when the prep work was finished; in 1871 famed stalker Henry Stanley began his search for David Livingstone in Zanzibar; in 1907 the United States attacked Honduras, one of at least seven U.S. invasions of that nation; in 1923 the first charges (against two men arrested in a Taylor Street home in Reno) were filed under Nevada‚s state alcohol prohibition law, setting the stage for a court test of the law, which state Attorney General Michael Diskin contended was unconstitutional; in 1935 the Nevada Senate approved an Assembly bill to hire one staff person to care for the untended Nevada Historical Society collection in the basement of the State Building in Reno; in 1938 in their ongoing fight against Senator Pat McCarran‚s bill perennial measures to force the Pyramid Lake tribe to sell part of the reservation to whites who had been squatting for decades, the tribal council asked President Roosevelt to veto the measure if it passed, and also appealed to the public for support in defeating the bill; in 1939 Billie Holliday recorded „Long Gone Blues‰ on the Columbia label; in 1950 after being acquitted of all fraud charges brought against him by federal prosecutors, car manufacturer Preston Tucker filed suit against the prosecutors; in 1952 in Cleveland, Alan Freed's Moondog Coronation Ball, a rhythm and blues show, was shut down by police after fans who could not get in (Freed had wildly oversold tickets) rioted and beat down the doors; in 1953 President Eisenhower endorsed construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, which obliterated a river canyon some considered another Grand Canyon (an effort is now underway to remove the dam and restore the canyon); in 1954 the National Security Council approved joint chiefs chairman Arthur Radford‚s plan to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam to reverse the recent victory of the Vietnamese over the French; in 1956 „Robert Rich‰ won the Oscar for best writing of a motion picture story for The Brave One but he failed to appear to claim the statuette and the audience was told that he was at his wife‚s side as she gave birth (the screenplay was actually written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo; a public ceremony was finally held on May 2 1975 at which the Oscar was presented to him); in 1960 at Sharpeville, South African officers raked a crowd of protesters with machine gun fire, killing 69 people and provoking young attorney Nelson Mandela's abandonment of nonviolence; in 1961 the Beatles appeared in the Cavern Club for the first time; in 1966 the U.S. Supreme Court, acting on a prosecution launched by the Kennedy administration and personally approved by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, upheld the obscenity conviction of Ralph Ginsburg for marketing or distributing a magazine called Eros, a newsletter called Liaison, and a book titled The Housewife‚s Handbook on Selective Promiscuity; in 1985 at a march in Langa, South Africa to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre (see 1960), police again opened fire on protesters, killing at least 21; in 2002 veteran Nevada journalist Lee Adler, a skilled reporter and writer, died in Carson City.
Guy Clifton/Reno Gazette Journal/March 29 2002: PASSAGE: Lee Adler was a New York City boy who found a home in the high desert of Nevada. He died in Carson City last week at age 65. Adler covered Carson City for several of the state‚s newspapers for parts of four decades ˜ working at a famously messy desk in the basement of the Capitol. The late Guy Shipler, legendary dean of the Capitol press corps, wrote of Adler in 1985: „During the 1981 session of the legislature, Adler could cover three committee meetings at once. He managed this feat by using three tape recorders, two of them borrowed, scurrying from one meeting to the other to make sure the tapes had not run out. No other inhabitants of our basement burrow have shown that much ingenuity or energy. He alone among us could somehow accomplish this juggling act flawlessly enough to come up with three authoritative and informative stories."
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:00:29
Benjamin Franklin, proposing a plan for colonial governance that drew on tribal practices/March 20 1751: It would be a strange thing if Six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted agrees and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary and must be more advantageous, and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests.
On this date in 1549, Thomas Seymour, younger brother of the third wife of Henry 8th and fourth husband of the sixth wife of Henry 8th, was beheaded for treason; in 1841 Poe's „The Murders in the Rue Morgue‰ was published, introducing the detective story; in 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in protest against the fugitive slave laws, was published, spreading anti-slavery sentiment (in the novel, Tom is an African American who is portrayed as a noble, courageous, and self sacrificing figure, so naturally when white playwrights got ahold of the story they changed the character into a groveling, submissive figure); in 1854 a group of former Whigs met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to start the Republican Party; in 1863 President Lincoln offered the land in western Washington of the Cowlitz tribe for public sale˜without, of course, bothering to ask the permission of the Cowlitz (in 1951, the tribe filed a claim with the U.S. Indian Claims Commission, which 22 years later ruled that the U.S. had deprived the Cowlitz „of its aboriginal Indian titleÝwithout payment of any compensation therefore‰ and the tribe was later offered compensation of fifty cents an acre); in 1903 the Reno Evening Gazette: „J. Pierpont Morgan was in Washington the other day. He visited the President and also saw Senator Gorman and Senator Hanna. We will now hear that the trusts have ordered the removal of the capitol to Wall Street.‰; in 1903 the Washoe County library board advertised for architects to submit plans for the county‚s first library at a cost of no more than $15,000; in 1903 Carson City‚s Ormsby House was sold and the new owners planned to renovate the hotel; in 1916 African pygmy Ota Benga, who was brought to the U.S. for a world's fair and then put on exhibit in a monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, committed suicide; in 1923 in Blanding, San Juan County, Utah, Sheriff W.E. Aliver was pistol whipping a Native American in the jail when another tribal member grabbed his gun and the two Paiutes disarmed him, locked him in the cell, and escaped (newspaper reports referred to the two as „young bucks‰); in 1928 the installation of dial telephones began in Reno, though they were not yet functional for dial calls; in 1935 at a funeral for his friend Grant Rice at Reno‚s Ross-Burke funeral home, amateur songwriter Raymond Penry spoke the words of a song he wrote for the deceased˜„Softly Now the Light of Day, Fades Upon My Sight Away‰˜and then died himself; in 1939 the German reich was in negotiations with Lithuania over the fate of Memel, which had been administered by France under a League of Nations mandate since the end of the world war; in 1940 University of Nevada freshman halfback Marion Motley killed an elderly Japanese man in a car accident and was charged with negligent homicide; in 1945 Governor Edward Carville had on his desk awaiting signature measures sponsored by Senator Kenneth Johnson of Ormsby County to ratify under white law marriages performed under tribal law and to appropriate $1,500 ($16,613.29 in 2006 dollars) for state acquisition of Dat So La Lee‚s renowned woven baskets; in 1949 Gentleman's Agreement, an indictment of anti-Semitism in the U.S., won the Academy Award for best picture of the year; in 1953 in New Orleans T Bone Walker recorded „Long Distance Blues‰; in 1954 in the Indiana high school basketball finals in Indianapolis, the Milan High School Indians defeated the powerhouse Muncie Central team with an epic last minute shot by Bobby Plump, a thrilling David over Goliath win that became legendary, inspiring the Gene Hackman/Barbara Hershey movie Hoosiers, placing the 1954 Indians on the Sports Illustrated list of the twenty best teams of the 20th century, and electrifying Indiana (two days later the line of cars following the team back to Milan for welcoming ceremonies was thirteen miles long and swelled the town‚s population temporarily from 1,150 to 40,000); in 1954 official Washington coped with a shocking turn of events, the apparent victory of the Vietnamese over the French at Dien Bien Phu, as French General Paul Ely arrived to seek U.S. help (the chair of the U.S. joint chiefs would propose using nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese); in 1988 over a park in Mountain View, California, a passing aircraft snagged the tail of a kite, lifting 8-year old DeAndra Anrig off the ground and carrying her 100 feet, when she let go (she was not seriously injured); in 1999 Las Vegas civil rights pioneer James McMillan died.
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 08:10:15
On this date in 624 Muhammed proclaimed the „Day of Deliverance‰; in 1799 Napoleon laid seige to Acre, Palestine; in 1907 Chattanooga African American Ed Johnson was lynched just hours after the U.S. Supreme Court stayed his execution and granted him an appeal hearing, leading to a remarkable federal intervention˜the Secret Service investigated the lynching and filed a report implicating 21 members of the mob and local officials including Sheriff Joseph Shipp, who were hailed before the Supreme Court in Washington for a two day hearing with the officials found guilty of contempt of court and slapped with jail sentences; in 1917 in Wilson vs. New, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the eight hour day and minimum wages by approving the Adamson act of 1916, enacted to cover railroad workers; in 1914 the U.S. Senate voted for a women‚s suffrage constitutional amendment, though not by the majority needed for passage, after Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi was defeated in his effort to tie repeal of the 15th amendment (guaranteeing the African American right to vote) to passage of women‚s suffrage and most southern Democrats voted against it without the Vardaman attachment (Senator Charles Townsend of Michigan said it was unnecessary to do injustice to blacks in order to do justice to women, and white supremacist Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada said he favored making the U.S. a white man‚s nation but said women‚s suffrage was not the vehicle for it); in 1918 Iowa farmer Raymond Hall of Minerva, who had just been exempted from the draft on an agricultural exemption, was dragged from his home by a group of eight me, driven eight miles into the country, painted head to toe in yellow and black, and left to walk home (Hall attributed the action not to resentment of his exemption but to jealousy for his recent marriage to Miss Grace Jones); in 1919 Leo Henrikson, later a labor leader in Las Vegas, was born in Charleston, South Carolina; in 1926 Genovaite Cizauskas, matriarch of the Cizauskas clan that has included a diplomat, NPR reporter, hangliding instructor, brewing exec, and Fannie Mae exec, was born Genovaite Ambraziejus in Brooklyn (<http://www.cizauskas.net/gac.html>www.cizauskas.net/gac.html); in 1931 gambling was made legal again in Nevada; in 1943 the Reno USO Council held a meeting to decide what to do after the owner of a building rented for a USO center for African American soldiers cancelled the rental agreement, returned the rent check, and told Mayor Froehlich he had received complaints from nearby property owners; in 1960 during campaigning in the Wisconsin presidential primary, which was being contested by senators John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, an estimated 5,000 anti-Catholic letters were mailed around the state from a post office in Hutchinson, Minnesota; in 1968 a group of „wise men‰ presidential advisors convened by President Johnson, many of whom had supported getting into Vietnam, advised Johnson to get out of Vietnam; in 1991 Phoenix lost the right to host the 1993 Super Bowl because of the behavior of state political leaders in denigrating Martin Luther King Jr; in 1997 President Clinton named George Tenet as CIA director; in 2003 the United States government launched a preemptive attack on Iraq, prompting a wave of protests around the world and in the U.S., some of which gridlocked urban areas; in 2003 U.S. State Department official Ann Wright (a thirty-year Army veteran) resigned in protest against the war; in 2006 in an essay published by the New York Times, retired major general Paul Eaton, who had spent two years training Iraqi forces, wrote that „Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead our armed forces. First, his failure to build coalitions with our allies from what he dismissively called Œold Europe‚ has imposed far greater demands and risks on our soldiers in Iraq than necessary. Second, he alienated his allies in our own military, ignoring the advice of seasoned officers and denying subordinates any chance for input. In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq.‰ (Eaton also criticized Rumsfeld for muscling General Eric Shinseki out of the service for disageeing with Rumsfeld‚s policies).
Addendum: I've noticed confusion in some commentaries about the date of the start of the war. That's because it started on different dates. Where it actually happened, it started at approximately 5:32 am Baghdad time on March 20. But in the United States it started at 9:32 pm EST on March 19.
Sun Tzu [aka Sun Wu], Chinese general (6th century BCE): There is no instance of a nation benefiting from prolonged warfare.
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2008 07:46:25
Robert Kennedy/University of Kansas/Lawrence, Kansas/March 18 1968: Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
On this date in 1834 six members of a farmworkers union in Tolpuddle, England, were sentenced to banishment on the penal colony of Australia, prompting widespread anger and helping bestow legitimacy on the trade union movement; in 1849 on his first day at sea after sailing from Massachusetts for the California gold fields, nineteen year old Alf Doten began the diary that he would keep all his life (including his years as a Nevada editor), eventually stretching to 79 volumes that would be edited by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and published in three mammoth volumes by the University of Nevada Press seventy years after his death; in 1852 Wells and Fargo Company was formed in New York to provide cross country shipping during the California gold rushes; in 1881 With the construction of an insane asylum in Washoe County impending, the Reno Evening Gazette reprinted an essay from the Eureka Leader calling for decent treatment for the mentally disabled; in 1897 a day after their heavyweight championship fight in Carson City, new champion Robert Fitzsimmons was still in the capital and former champ James Corbett was in San Francisco getting a tooth repaired and showing himself in the streets to quash a rumor that he was dead; in 1932 traveling to San Francisco to embark on a ship to Hawai`i to handle the Fortescue Massie case, Clarence Darrow was interviewed while his train was standing in Reno and predicted that President Hoover would be swept out of office in November by an „astounding‰ vote; in 1936 as Boulder Lake behind Hoover Dam slowly spread, filling valleys and canyons, a National Geographic Society bulletin said, „Originally planned for power, irrigation, and flood control, Boulder Lake also is developing into a scenic gem of first rank.‰; in 1942 the U.S. War Relocation Authority was created to handle the internment around the nation of U.S. citizens of Italian, German, Japanese, Romanian, and miscellaneous other descents; in 1950 with the support of the United States, Taiwan (Formosa) invaded China with thousands of soldiers and sailors, establishing a toehold for a few weeks and then being driven back into the sea, an incident that caused serious diplomatic difficulties for the U.S.; in 1954 Las Vegas school officials said construction of Rancho High School would begin within a month; in 1969 the illegal bombing of Cambodia began at the order of President Nixon, a bombing campaign that was kept secret from the Congress and the U.S. public; in 1971 California Assemblymember Gene Chappie said he did not expect problems in the state for his bill, already approved by the assembly, to turn Coso Hot Springs over to the Paiute/Shoshone of Inyo County; in 1972 Neil Young‚s „Heart of Gold‰ (with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor on background vocals) hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1979 U.S. feminist Kate Millett was arrested in Iran for aiding the Persian women's movement; in 1991 silent film star Vilma Banky, who starred in The Winning of Barbara Worth, filmed in Pershing County in 1926, died in Los Angeles.
Robert Kennedy/March 18 1968/Kansas State University/Manhattan, Kansas: I am concerned -- as I believe most Americans are concerned -- that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: „They made a desert, and called it peace.‰ And I do not think that is what the American spirit is really all about.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:43:56
On this date in 1812 U.S. troops invaded Florida‚s panhandle in an effort to seize the territory from Spain, which took it from the inhabitants; in 1871 the republican Paris Commune, the first government of the working class, was formed; in 1897 after the Nevada Legislature hastily made boxing legal, a heavyweight title fight between Bob Fitzsimmons and Jim Corbett was held in Carson City (as late as 1999 the film of the fight received a vote in a Village Voice poll of film critics as the best film of its decade); in 1923 Governor James Scrugham vetoed senate bill 148, which designated the Lincoln Highway as the primary highway route across the state, a veto that had been urged by the Humboldt County Chamber of Commerce; in 1928 Knights of Columbus official Joseph Becker said in Salt Lake City that being raised by mothers and being taught in school and church by female teachers were making boys effeminate; in 1932 tribal police and federal narcs raided an alleged Carson City opium den at 425 East 3d Street that also reportedly served whisky; in 1932 New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt moved into the lead over U.S. Speaker John Garner for the first time in a crude public opinion survey being conducted by the Nevada State Journal, Elko Free Press, and Las Vegas Review Journal; in 1939 the Nevada Legislature was trying to wrap up business for the year, and the clock had been stopped at midnight on March 16; in 1957 President Magsaysay of the Philippines died in a plane crash; in 1957 the cornerstone was laid for the first building of Nevada Southern University; in 1959 the fourteenth Dalai Lama vanished from public view in Tibet, being given up for dead at the hands of Chinese occupation forces but actually eventually escaping across the Khenzimana Pass into India; in 1960 President Eisenhower approved a covert paramilitary plan, illegal under international law, to overthrow the government of Cuba; in 1960 Las Vegas dentist and civil rights leader James McMillan, who on March 11 gave the city‚s whites-only casinos until the 26th to integrate or face protest marches, sent a formal request to Mayor Oran Gragson seeking a meeting among city officials, the NAACP, and civic leaders and also said that if the casinos did not meet the deadline, protests would include passive resistance; in 1960 the Washoe County sheriff and Reno and Sparks police chiefs announced a crackdown on „obsenity‰˜comic books and magazines depicting „criminal news, police reports, accounts of criminal deeds, drawings and photos of deeds of blood shed, lust‰ and other crimes; in 1965 the Beatles announced the title of their next movie would be Eight Arms To Hold On To You (it was released as Help!); in 1966 farm workers led by Cesar Chavez began a march from Delano to Sacramento; in 1990 Lithuania rejected a Soviet demand that it revoke its March 11 declaration of independence and the New York Times ran an editorial praising the Bush I administration for not recognizing Lithuania and leaving the matter to the U.S.S.R and Lithuania (the Soviet occupied Vilnius and in January launched a general attack on Lithuania); in 2003 the contributions of U.S. socialists were finally recognized on a coin when the Alabama quarter was released with socialist and IWW leader Helen Keller featured.
Helen Keller/November 3d 1912: If I ever contribute to the Socialist movement the book that I sometimes dream of, I know what I shall name it: Industrial Blindness and Social Deafness.
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 2008 13:08:22
On this date in 1875 a Nevada District Judge charged a Eureka County grand jury to take special note of those trying to buy elections because such practices put the public „at the mercy of men whose means and lack of conscience, and fearlessness of the laws, shall enable them to control the election of men to office who will be their tools and minions, ending in overthrowing republican government and erecting in its stead an incompetent and wicked monarchy, presided over by these alleged corruptionists‰; in 1907 mine owners in Goldfield issued a joint announcement saying that they had all agreed not to hire members of the Industrial Workers of the World; in 1912 former first lady Patricia Ryan (Nixon) was born in Ely, Nevada; in 1926 the eternal rest of revolutionary war hero Margaret Corbin was disturbed by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who dug up her bones from her gravesite and reburied them on the grounds of West Point (in a battle at Fort Washington, Corbin had taken her husband‚s place on the battle line after he was killed, taking three wounds herself and losing the use of one arm); in 1936 the New Deal project of constructing Rye Patch Dam in Pershing County, Nevada, was hit with a fire that destroyed a machine shop; in 1939 the Nevada Assembly defeated a last ditch attempt to approve a state constitutional amendment legalizing a lottery that had already been approved by the 1937 legislature and the Nevada Senate in 1939; in 1942 Fats Waller recorded „Jitterbug Waltz‰ for Bluebird Records; in 1953 the Nevada Assembly killed a civil rights bill not by a straight vote but by „indefinite postponement‰; in 1963 the Peter, Paul, and Mary song „Puff the Magic Dragon‰ was released (a rumor attributed by PP&M to Time magazine claimed it was a drug song); in 1967 Pink Floyd began work on Piper at the Gates of Dawn at Abbey Road studios; in 1968 over a period of four hours, four hundred Vietnamese were murdered in two sections of Son My village in Quang Ngai province, the My Lai massacre becoming famous after a coverup and the My Khe massacre remaining little known because news outlets didn‚t have photos (the Pentagon has asked journalists to discontinue the use of the term „massacre‰ in favor of „incident‰, and many journalists have complied); in 1968 U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for president; in 1997 Nevada's first professional historian, Russell Elliott, died after a distinguished career that produced a half dozen books on Nevada, including the standard History of Nevada (Elliott was hired on September 1 1949 by the University of Nevada as an assistant professor of history and political science at a salary of $3,600 a year); in 1984 Jesse Jackson won the Mississippi Democratic caucuses, the first instance in U.S. history of an African American candidate winning a presidential preference contest.UPDATE SATURDAY 3-15-2008, 1:15 p.m. PDT, 20:15 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1867, the first special session of the Nevada Legislature began, lasting three weeks, to deal with a state revenue shortfall; in 1877, the Reno Evening Gazette quoted a threatening letter sent to a witness in a local trial by a 601 committee (vigilante committee) and observed "We believe the law strong enough and entirely sufficient to maintain public peace and afford protection to our citizens. We deprecate the policy of taking the administration of justice out of rightful hands, and private citizens themselves summarily judging a man's case. Due provision has been made for meting out justice, and our little town does not need a "601‚ organization."; in 1886, President Cleveland nominated Miles Goodwin to be postmaster of Virginia City; in 1907, Senator Wilson Locklin of Storey County introduced legislation to repeal the just-passed appropriation to build a governor's mansion; in 1915, sixteen cartons of ore specimens were ready for shipment to the St. Louis world's fair as part of Nevada's exhibit; in 1928, with all roads to Lake Tahoe closed except Kingsbury Grade, plans were being made to open the Kings Canyon grade west of Carson City and an appeal went out to Renoites with homes at Tahoe to bring their snow shovels and help; in 1939, Jim Thorpe of the Sac and Fox tribe, 1912 Olympic decathlon and pentathlon winner, football great and professional baseball player who also excelled in hockey, basketball, golf , lacrosse, baseball, swimming, rowing and boxing, and is generally considered the athlete of the century, spoke to an assembly at Sparks High School "in full Indian regalia"; in 1954, The Chords (one of the "hallway groups" that harmonized in school, on streetcorners, or in the subway) recorded Sh-boom as the B side of a 78-rpm record on the Cat label, setting off the doo-wop era (unfortunately, a white group called The Crew Cuts quickly covered The Chords' version, draining away the Chords' earnings and their hit); in 1954, the NAACP launched a boycott of Las Vegas after African-American delegates to the convention of the American Public Welfare Association were denied lodging in the city's large hotels; in 1954, the main Las Vegas office of the U.S. Bureau of Internal Revenue closed at 5 p.m., but a branch office at the War Memorial Building stayed open until 9 p.m. to accept late filers (the filing deadline was then March 15); in 1955, Elvis unfortunately took on Tom Parker as his manager; in 1957, the Atomic Energy Commission revealed that an atomic reactor at Los Alamos had exploded on February 12, but gave no explanation for the delay in the announcement; in 1963, the University of Nevada in Reno took possession, after removal of graves, of a former cemetery parcel, now the site of the Nye Hall dormitory (approximate date); in 1988, a four-day battle began in the area of Halabja on the Iran/Iraq border during which the city was gassed by what the Reagan administration said was an Iranian attack (fourteen years later, the second Bush administration changed that story as part of its campaign for war, claiming the attack was launched by Saddam Hussein's forces, and charging that "he gassed his own people"). [EDITOR'S NOTE: The Army War College analyzed the incident and concluded that the deaths did not occur as reported. The story appeared as an investigative report by the San Francisco Chronicle in early 1991, but was lost in the Gulf War hysteria jinned up by Bush the Elder and his oil warriors. Ironically, the Chron reported the Bush spin as fact in the 2002 runup to Oil War II. Reader comments herewith totally debunk the paper's coverage.]
UPDATE FRIDAY 3-14-2008, 6:16 a.m. PDT, 13:16 GMT/SUT/CUT — Workers protest sales tax revenue being redirected to non-responsible contractors
SPARKS, Nev. — Local construction workers and their families will conduct picketing at the "Legends at Sparks Marina" project on Friday, March 14, 2008. Protesters will gather at the entrance to the Scheels store at the end of Lincoln Way west of Sparks Blvd.
"In this day of tax revenue shortages and governmental budget cuts, it is not right to redirect tax revenues to contractors who are not responsible." stated Russ James, organizer for Local Union 567 of District Council 16 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.
"We are here protesting Custom Painting and Decorating today because they are one of the non-responsible contractors working on the Scheels store. A responsible contractor is one that pays its workers a fair wage and fair benefits such as employer-paid family health care coverage, pension benefits and apprenticeship programs.
"Custom Painting provides none of these benefits to its employees." James added.
"Construction records provided to us by the City of Sparks show at least eight out-of-state contractors who don’t utilize local labor performing work at the Scheels store. These contractors and their employees are taking our money and running." James stated.
"While we understand that the construction created by sales tax anticipation revenue (STAR) bonds can benefit our city when performed by responsible contractors, this for the most part has not been the case at the Scheels store. Now is the perfect time for the City of Sparks to fix this issue, as they are currently drafting an amendment for additional public funding for this project. Responsible contractor language in this amendment would insure the best investment of public funds for the local economy," James asserted.
Local Union 567, located in Sparks, has been chartered for over 100 years and currently has over 500 members.
Russ James has resided in Sparks for over 15 years.UPDATE: City won't touch "responsible contractors" issue / Daily Sparks Tribune 3-15-2008
Sparks City Hall was warned —
UPDATE: In the RED
First of a long series of wage complaints filed against Sparks Marina project
Labor commissioner gives City of Sparks 30 days to investigate
2-21-2009
NevadaLabor.com corporate welfare war room
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
On March 14, 1881, Assemblymember James Adams of Eureka County was shot in a saloon fight and was not expected to live; in 1904 in Hawthorne, Abe Summerfield pleaded guilty to stealing a truck full of opium and $500 in gold coin from a Chinese man and was sentenced to five years in prison; in 1913, Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey became president of the United States, beginning an era of white supremacy, militarism and repression never equaled in a single presidency; in 1915, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln by painter Charles Shean, purchased by the State of Nevada to hang in the Nevada Assembly, was unveiled; in 1921, police in the city of Elko, claiming that there were more than a hundred drug users in the tiny town, were conducting a "war on drugs" to rid the city of this "class of undesirables"; in 1928m Oklahoma's Quapaw tribe, drawn into the Teapot Dome scandal, was in court trying to recover their lead and zinc mines from which they had earned $2,000,000 a year until President Harding's corrupt interior secretary Albert Fall transferred them to the Eagle Picher Corporation; in 1939, the Nevada Assembly voted to shut down the Nevada Historical Society and create a Nevada Museum and Art Institute by passing legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Peter Amodei of Ormsby County; in 1954, United Press reported that there was danger of a negotiated settlement between France and Indochina, which the news service called "an unsure peace of appeasement in Indochina"; in 1959, a new First National Bank of Nevada branch building in Carson City was opened at a ceremony attended by Governor Grant Sawyer (the building is now a Nevada State Museum annex); in 1961, attorney and former Cuban consul (at the San Francisco embassy) to the U.S. Rodrige Parajon was working at Harrah's at Lake Tahoe as a busboy; in 1964, The Beatles performed in Washington, D.C., a concert carried by closed circuit to sold out houses and stadiums in Cleveland, El Monte and Oak Park, Illinois; in 1980, international liberal leader, former U.S. Representative, and organizer of the successful Democratic Party "Dump Johnson" movement Allard Lowenstein was murdered by civil rights activist Dennis Sweeney; in 1989, Edward Abbey, the Thoreau of the desert who worked to redefine the west and especially the desert from a movie stereotype to a besieged region victimized by corporate greed and government exploitation, died in Arizona; in 1998, beat generation poet, painter, publisher and co-founder of the legendary independent City Lights book store Lawrence Ferlinghetti spoke at the 3d Annual Anarchist Book Fair in San Francisco.
UPDATE FRIDAY 3-13-2008, 11:08 a.m. PDT, 18:08 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1865 at Robert E. Lee's request, the Confederate Congress approved the use of African-American troops against the north; in 1867 in Galaxy magazine there appeared in the fiction short story Captain Tom's Fright the first known instance in the U.S. of someone being described as tied hand and foot and left on a railroad tracks, a story that subsequently was copied by other dramatists and then in real life (honest! it really happened); in 1897, the gloves to be used in the Fitzsimmons/Corbett heavyweight championship fight in Carson City on St. Patrick's Day were delivered, weighed and accepted, and a bell that previously was used in a Virginia City mine to signal raising and lowering the hoist was installed as the fight bell; in 1913, a California state senator introduced a resolution declaring Lake Tahoe to be a California asset, objecting to federal reclamation drainage of the lake for Nevada farming, and instructing the state attorney general to sue Nevada to determine rights to the lake's water, prompting Nevada state legislators to table a resolution providing $100,000 for the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco; in 1913, the Wadsworth Club of Sparks sent a letter to Nevada Assembly Speaker Thomas Brandon objecting to the revival of gambling in Nevada; in 1917, the U.S. Surpeme Court upheld the Adamson Act, which was enacted in September 1916 to avert a national railroad strike by limiting workdays to eight hours; in 1924, a day after U.S. senators Key Pittman and Tasker Oddie told a federal reclamation fact finding commission that the Newlands project had been neglected, Oddie met with President Coolidge to lobby for plans to turn the Spanish Springs Valley north of Sparks into a reservoir; in 1928, Herbert Hoover and Al Smith won the New Hampshire presidential primary; in 1928, Nancy Ann Miller of Seattle coverted to Hinduism so she could become the third wife of the maharajah of Indore; in 1939, Ellen Holmsen, who had earlier been barred from a Reno courtroom and thrown out of a restaurant in Reno for wearing pants, was "deported" from her New Jersey home town for the same reason; in 1947, The Best Years Of Our Lives won the Academy Award for best picture of the year; in 1954, after building a military base on a flat plain surrounded by supposedly impassable mountainous terrain and daring the Viet Minh to attack, the French at Dien Bien Phu received a terrible shock: Over many months 50,000 Vietnamese had hauled 200 heavy artillery pieces, anti-aircraft guns, huge supplies of ammunitions, and four rocket systems up the steep mountains, surrounding the French in a deadly trap — one of the legendary logistical achievements of military history; in 1956, the album Elvis Presley was released by RCA and went straight to number eleven on the Billboard chart, becoming the first million-selling album; in 1961, Nevada state highway engineer Otis Wright announced that the construction of the Third Street route of the Interstate 80 freeway through Reno (which would never be built) would begin June 30 in spite of U.S. Representative Walter Baring's objections to the route; in 1965, a rally organized by religious leaders was held in front of Nevada capitol building in support of civil rights legislation (the measure won final legislative approval on March 30); in 1980, the Ford Motor Company was acquitted of murder in its intentionally faulty manufacture of the Pinto; in 1980, word of an investigation by Clark County District Attorney Robert Miller of charges that a Sunrise Hospital nurse had been betting on the death dates of terminally ill patients and improving the odds by unplugging patients from life sustaining equipment leaked to the press and set off a worldwide media firestorm that came to nothing — the case was thrown out of court — except for destroying the nurse's reputation (she was dubbed "Death's Angel" by journalists) on the basis of an overheard conversation and an overactive imagination; in 2001, U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis of Colorado introduced legislation "To provide permanent appropriations to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Trust Fund" to compensate without more delay victims of U.S. nuclear testing in Nevada.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE FRIDAY 3-12-2008, 7:48 a.m. PDT, 14:48 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1873, President Grant signed an executive order reserving land in Nevada's Moapa Valley "for the Indians of that locality"; in 1928, during the day Los Angeles water czar William Mulholland inspected the Saint Francis Dam and pronounced it sound and in the evening the dam gave way, the water behind it destroying numerous communities on its way to the sea (the Los Angeles water department tried to acquire all extant photographs of the disaster to prevent any loss of confidence in dam building); in 1928, a joint army/navy board recommended to Congress that a munitions depot be established at Hawthorne, Nevada; in 1943, Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man was performed for the first time, by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; in 1952, U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver shocked the nation by defeating President Truman in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary election, leading to Truman's withdrawal from the race on March 31 (the same date on which Lyndon Johnson withdrew from his reelection race after nearly losing the 1968 New Hampshire primary); in 1954, a film crew was in Las Vegas (downtown and the strip, including the Desert Inn) shooting scenes for Cinerama Holiday, a tale of a Swiss couple touring the U.S. and a Kansas City couple touring Europe, which would become the highest grossing film of 1955; in 1957, word reached Reno that Renoite Dawn Wells had been elected to student body office at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, running on a slogan of "Not day, not dusk — Dawn for treasurer"; in 1961, Miss Nevada 1959 Dawn Wells appeared as "Caprice Rambeau" on The Deadly Image, a fourth season episode of Maverick; in 1968, Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy took 42.2 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary away from incumbent Lyndon Johnson, who received 49.4 percent, demonstrating divisions in the Democratic Party (uncounted McCarthy write-ins in the Republican side of the primary raised the possibility that McCarthy outpolled Johnson in total votes); in 1971, nineteen year- old Joseph James Gomez of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Dinh Tuong province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 87); in 2000, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the first of two reports revealing that 60 Minutes producer Don Hewitt of CBS, supplied with leaked material on two celebrity gynecologists accused of malpractice, took the material and gave it to one of the accused doctors who happened to be his wife's doctor.
UPDATE MONDAY 3-11-2008, 8:32 a.m. PDT, 15:32 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1302, Romeo and Juliet were married, fictitiously; in 1649, the Frondeurs (French rebels opposed to the policies of cardinals Mazarin and Richelieu) signed a peace accord with the French government; in 1811, Ned Ludd led workers who were being thrown out of work by mechanization in breaking the textile machines that were costing them jobs, a movement that was spread across England by "Luddites"; in 1824, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs was unfortunately created; in 1871, the Nevada State Journal wrote: "BIDDING FOR VOTES — The colored military organization of San Francisco have been invited to take part in the celebration of St. Patrick's Day in San Francisco. If the negroes of San Francisco are verdant enough to allow themselves to fall into this Democratic trap, they ought to be deprived of the ballot and sent to Liberia. Late intelligence says that they refuse to take the bait."; in 1880 as Adolph Sutro, his Nevada tunnel completed (the water level in Comstock mines fell by a hundred feet), quietly sold his stock in the tunnel company through New York broker Edward Adams before his investors found out, the Reno Evening Gazette reported "Adolph Sutro has purchased a $150,000 house near McAllister street, San Francisco, where he will reside in the future. He is also said to have purchased a handsome country seat on the Hudson river, N.Y."; in 1880, the Reno Evening Gazette reported "A pioneer tom-cat died at Winnemucca the other day, and over his grave a monument has been erected. The deceased had resided continuously in Humboldt county for over 18 years, and was a model of all the feline virtues."; in 1907, Nevada newspapers declared that miners in Goldfield were withdrawing from the Industrial Workers of the World, which wasn't true, and were pointing an editorial finger at labor leader Joseph Smith in the street killing of Goldfield restaurant owner John Silva though Smith was elsewhere at the time of the shooting; in 1927, Alameda County (California) District Attorney Earl Warren was conducting a campaign to wipe out a "love cult" called the "Sacred School of the White Brotherhood" to which he said a hundred men and women belonged; in 1927, an old fashioned mining rush was on to the gold camp of Weepah, Nevada, with a new fashioned twist — newsreel and movie studio cameras on hand to record it or use it as a dramatic setting; in 1939, a bill empowering the Washoe county commission to operate recreational facilities built by the WPA like Virginia Lake, a golf course and Galena Creek ski grounds was vetoed by Governor Edward Carville and reenacted by the legislature the same day to satisfy Carville's objections; in 1950, the Confederated Tribes of Nevada began a conference in Nixon to discuss the impending withdrawal of federal guardianship over Native Americans and other issues; in 1954, Nevada Attorney General William Mathews released a legal opinion that said taking Latter Day Saints students from study hall during the school day at Bunkerville and Overton schools and sending them for religious instruction at nearby churches was a violation of the Nevada Constitution; in 1958, a U.S. Air Force plane accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on a homesite in South Carolina and the thousands of pounds of conventional explosives it contained exploded (it had not been armed with fissionable material, which is kept separate from the bomb in the plane until it is supposed to be dropped), damaging a nearby home; in 1960, Dr. James McMillan of Las Vegas threatened street protests unless Clark County casinos integrated by March 26; in 1968, a gold record was posthumously awarded to Otis Redding for Dock of the Bay; in 1969, Levi's started selling bell bottoms; in 1985, following the death of Konstantin Chernenko, Mikhail Gorbachev became the new general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, leading the Soviet Union through six remarkable years of reform; in 2002, two powerful blue beams of light were sent into the sky in New York City from the site of the missing World Trade Center towers; in 2005, Donald Griffith, Jr., of North Las Vegas died in Tal Afar, Iraq.
UPDATE MONDAY 3-10-2008, 12:01 a.m. PDT, 07:01 GMT/SUT/CUT — Barbano on Nevada Newsmakers Monday with radio/TV/web/podcast re-runs statewide thereafter
Click above for complete guest list and scheduleOn March 10, 1867, after the legislature adjourned for the year, Nevada Governor Henry Blasdel vetoed a bill making gambling legal (the next legislature approved a new bill and passed it over Blasdel's veto); in 1906 merchants along Commercial Row in Reno, the city's main street, were reporting counterfeit state bank notes, and a thousand dollars ($21,638.58 in 2006 dollars) in currency from a closed bank was flooding the state's financial markets; in 1909, the Nevada Assembly approved legislation providing graduated licensing for prizefights — $1,000 for an unlimited-rounds fight, $500 for 25 rounds, $250 for 20 rounds; in 1912, E.J. Freeman of Fallon made the newspapers by driving the 68 miles from Fallon to Reno in a Lozier Briarcliff in two hours and five minutes, leaving Fallon at 2:40 p and arrving in Reno at 4:45, defying Churchill County Senator R.L. Douglass' claim that the trip could not be made under 2:30; in 1919, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, upheld the Espionage Act conviction of socialist leader Eugene Debs, who was convicted for expressing his opinion of the world war in public, which the court called "obstructing and attempting to obstruct the recruiting service of the United States"; in 1925, Vice-President Charles Dawes left the debate on senate confirmation of President Coolidge's nominee for attorney general and went to the New Willard Hotel for a nap and slept through the vote, missing an opportunity to break a tie in favor of Coolidge, whose nominee was rejected by the senators; in 1928, some former Nevada suffrage leaders disagreed with Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, that suffrage had failed to empower women (see below); in 1929, tired of the damage inflicted on the U.S. family unit by alcohol prohibition, the founder of the Women's National Republican Club, Pauline Sabin, shocked the group by announcing she was breaking with Prohibition forces and resigning from the club to lead the fight for repeal; in 1954, Albert Einstein, who arrived in the United States in 1933 as a refuge from Nazi Germany, released an open letter from his Princeton home warning of the "far reaching analogy" between the 1950s U.S. and the 1930s Germany: "I must think of the Germany of 1932, whose democratic community, through similar means, was so deeply undermined that Hitler could quite easily deal it a deathblow. I am firmly convinced that the same thing will happen here if those who are clear-sighted and capable of self-sacrifice do not resist."; in 1954, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph applied for a building permit in Clark County to construct one of a series of microwave transmitting stations between Las Vegas and Los Angeles to carry live television signals; in 1958, in a labor dispute among two teachers associations and the Clark County School Board, attorney George Rudiak told teachers that their fears of hiring out of state teachers were unfounded because state law forbade it unless current employees were first informed of the action, and the Las Vegas Classroom Teachers Association advised teachers to sit on their new contracts until a better salary schedule ($600 more a year) was agreed on; in 1959, with Chinese occupation troops planning to take the Dalai Lama prisoner, Tibetans revolted against the occupation; in 1968, Robert Kennedy and César Chávez met in Delano, California, for the breaking of Chávez's anti-violence fast (Chávez's physicians had contacted Kennedy to ask for his help in convincing Chavez to end his fast before it did more damage to his health); in 1975, John Lennon's recording of Ben E. King's Stand By Me was released; in 1986, Newsweek ran a quote from anti-drug activist Arnold Washton that cocaine is "almost instantly addicting" without checking its accuracy and set off a national hysteria that affected public policy and created a powerful myth that is still widely accepted today — and is false; in 1995, the Hard Rock Cafe opened in Las Vegas.
Eleanor Roosevelt / Redbook magazine article: Women have been voting for ten years. But have they achieved actual political equality with men? No. They go through the gesture of going to the polls, their votes are solicited by politicians and they possess the external aspect of equal rights. But it is mostly a gesture without real power. With some outstanding exceptions, women who have gone into politics are refused serious consideration by the men leaders. Generally they are treated most courteously, to be sure, but what they want, what they have to say, is regarded as of little weight. In fact, they have no actual influence or say at all in the consequential councils of their parties. Politically, as a sex, women are generally "frozen out" from any intrinsic share of influence in their parties.
Mrs. O.H. Mack / Reno Evening Gazette: Suffrage is not a failure in Nevada but it may be in New York state as Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt has said. From my experiences on Republican county, state, and platform committees, I have found the men of the party to be willing and ready to consider the requests of the women. As a member of political groups during campaigns, the men have sought advice and help form the women in solving their problems. It may be true that in Tammany-controlled New York state, the women may be experiencing some difficulty in gaining recognition. I am glad that I live in Nevada where the men granted suffrage to women in seven years instead of waiting seventy years as in New York state. In fact, I feel quite like Carrie Chapman Catt who said that "the women have so many privileges now that I feel like turning in and helping the men."UPDATE SUNDAY 3-9-2008, 12:48 a.m. PST, 08:48 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions and ordered that the survivors of the voyage of La Amistad be set free (thanks to the donations of Christian anti-slavery groups, they were able to return to Sierra Leone, though the leader of the Amistad mutiny, Joseph Cinque, never found his family); in 1863, John Mosby and his rangers went behind Union lines to northern-held Fairfax Court House, captured General Edwin Stoughton, 32 other prisoners and 58 horses, and made their way safely back to Confederate lines. (President Lincoln reportedly said he could always make another general, but he couldn't afford the loss of all those horses); in 1866, a new Nevada law restricted election to statewide offices to those 25 years of age and older, a provision still in effect that has been criticized in a United Nations human rights report because it overrides the Nevada Constitution (which does not contain the restriction); in 1876, the Nevada State Journal reported "Figures show that each Indian costs the government about $2,000 a year to keep him alive, but then figures also show that to kill the Indians all off would cost about $1,000,000 for each Indian. It is cheaper to let them live."; in 1905, plans for the new $25,000 state park to be created between Reno and Sparks were put on display at the Overland Hotel in Reno; in 1912, a man named John Maher began serving a one year prison sentence in the Nevada State Prison for running a gambling game in Elko; in 1933, the first New Deal measure, the Emergency Banking Act (a conservative measure drawn up for President Roosevelt by Hoover administration holdovers) was introduced in Congress and enacted without being read, winning the support of bankers across the nation for FDR (during the debate over the act, Senator Huey Long, D-La., insisted on asking what was in the bill, prompting Senator Carter Class to snarl "You damn son of a bitch!"); in 1940, the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency, provided $24,578 for street improvements throughout Tonopah; in 1945, the United States began a bombing campaign against Tokyo, dropped 2,000 tons of incendiaries on the city in two days, incinerating 16 square miles and perhaps 100,000 civilians; in 1956, MGM's Meet Me In Las Vegas starring Cyd Charisse, Jim Backus, Dan Dailey, Lili Darvas and Agnes Moorehead, was released; in 1969, nineteen year-old Rodney Lane Crane of McGill, Nevada, died in Binh Duong province, Vietnam (panel 30w line 86 of the Vietnam wall) and twenty year-old Ronald Eugene Dedman of Wells, Nevada, died in Quang Ngai province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 87); in 1969, CBS cancelled the antiwar Smothers Comedy Brothers Hour; in 2005, a statue of author and Native American leader Sarah Winnemucca was unveiled in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.
UPDATE SATURDAY 3-8-2008, 11:50 am. PST, 19:50 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1904, U.S. Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada spoke in the senate about his bill to guarantee an uninterrupted vista from the Capitol to the Washington monument; in 1908, Schurz was enjoying an economic boom with about a hundred miners in the town awaiting transportation to the new boom camp of Rawhide (contracts were signed on March 7 for the construction of a railroad to Rawhide); in 1926, U.S. Senator Tasker Oddie criticized federal actions toward white settlers on the Walker River and proposed construction of a dam near Schurz; in 1933, with wealthy people hoarding gold and thus draining capital from the banking system, President Roosevelt told the Federal Reserve to announce that on March 13 it would publish a list of all those who had withdrawn bullion or gold coins before the Roosevelt inauguration and had not yet returned it, whereupon the hoarders lined up to redeposit hundreds of millions of dollars; in 1939 in Salt Lake City, a Works Progress Administration educator who spent six months living with Native Americans described what the Associated Press called the tribe's "weird ceremony," a "strange and secret semi-Christian rite known as the narcotic "dance of the peyote"; in 1946, W.E. Travis, who was once a stagecoach driver, became chairman of the board of the Pacific Greyhound Bus Lines (he died six years later and left a will that provided money to the University of Nevada for construction of a student union); in 1951, the popular Marilyn Maxwell/Bob Hope movie remake of the Damon Runyon short story The Lemon Drop Kid was released, and it included a new kind of Christmas song, Silver Bells, an urban song by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, set in the city rather than a rural site, which became a huge hit in 1952 and has since been recorded by hundreds of artists from Henry Mancini to Regis Philbin; in 1956, a U.S. Navy investigation was completed into the sexuality of Navy physician Thomas Dooley (who would later be proposed for Catholic sainthood) and the results of the investigation were used later in the month to force Dooley out of the service; in 1957, a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted Confidential magazine and its distributor on charges of sending "obscene" or crime- inciting material and information on abortion through the mail; in 1961, senate liberals led by Wayne Morse of Oregon were unable to block President Kennedy's nomination of segregationist Charles Meriwether, former campaign manager of Alabama's Klan-supported governor John Patterson, to be a director of the Export-Import Bank (the vote was 66-18); in 1968, twenty year-old Danny Lee Smothers of Carson City, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 61 of the Vietnam wall); in 1969, twenty year-old Larry Donald Brown of Caliente, Nevada, died in Kien Hoa province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 72); in 1970, twenty one year-old William Robert Rogne of Fallon, Nevada, died in Quang Duc province, Vietnam (panel 13w, row 98); in 1992, The New York Times invented the Whitewater "scandal" with a story by Jeff Gerth that withheld exculpatory information and used emotionally loaded language, setting off almost a decade of prosecutorial and journalistic tail-chasing.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE FRIDAY 3-7-2008, 10:55 am. PST, 18:55 GMT/SUT/CUT —
Ray Charles: Can you imagine the whole Georgia Legislature standing up for me? I cried. ... That's how much it meant to me. I felt kind of stupid standing there crying, but I couldn't help it.
On March 7, 1799, President John Adams declared April 25 a national day of fasting and repentance (an action so sharply at odds with the founding generation's concept of church and state that one clergyman [a cousin of James Madison] distributed a prayer calling for fasting to protest the abandonment of Christian liberty); Adams received three written threats to burn Philadelphia (then the national capital and the location of the president's home); on April 25 thousands of Philadelphians marched to protest in the streets against the breach of church/state separation; and Governor Thomas Mifflin called out the cavalry to protect Adams; in 1850, in his famous Seventh of March speech in the senate, U.S. Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts urged abolitionists in the north to let go of the hope of enacting anti-slavery legislation and warned the south that the nation could not be split in two without war; in 1875, folks at Virginia City's St. Paul Church sent seven cases of clothing and $140 for relief of Kansans, where crops had been decimated by grasshoppers; in 1878, the Washoe County Commission published a defense of its expenditure of $50 ($913.59 in 2006 dollars) to aid Native Americans during heavy winter snows, which had been criticized by the county grand jury; in 1908, federal troops sent by President Roosevelt left Goldfield after they broke the mining unions, and a second detachment of the new state police force formed to replace the troops departed for Goldfield; in 1917, RCA Victor recorded The Dixie Jazz Band One Step by Nick La Rocca and his Dixieland Jazz Band, considered by some to be the first jazz record; in 1921, Nevada political boss George Wingfield sent a letter to U.S. Senator Tasker Oddie, the letter containing "a check together with a blank draft for $1,500" and then in the next paragraph an instruction that Oddie nominate Washoe County Republican Louis Spellier to be U.S. marshal; in 1923, the New Republic published Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On a Summer Evening, which became one of the most beloved of U.S. poems; in 1932 in freezing weather, Ford Motor Company goon squads used fire hoses on protesters in a "march on hunger" at Ford's River Rouge plant; in 1937, this photo caption appeared in the Nevada State Journal: "Pretty Gene Wines caused quite a furor in the forging laboratory of the college of engineering at the University of Nevada when she signed up for forging, the first co-ed to invade the hitherto male sanctuary. ... A sophomore student, Miss Wines hopes some day to become an architectural engineer but is determined to master mechanical engineering, including forging, first." (Gene Wines Segerblom was a Boulder city councilmember from 1979 to 1983 and a member of the Nevada Legislature from 1992 to 2000); in 1939, Clark Gable received a divorce in Las Vegas from Ria Langham; in 1944, 3,800 Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, with resisters driven back by flame throwers and eleven pairs of twins spared to become subjects for Joseph Mengele's "scientific" experiments; in 1949, University of Pennsylvania radiology "expert" Eugene Pendergras said the notion of danger in the area where an atomic bomb is exploded was "thoroughly disproved"; in 1960, on the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primary election, Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts seemed to be holding his own against ball point pen manufacturer Paul Fisher of Nevada, the only other candidate running actively in New Hampshire; in 1962, Nevada Attorney General Roger Foley informed Governor Grant Sawyer that he would not represent state gambling regulators in court in their effort to desegregate casinos; in 1962, Manogue High School first-year student April Kestell won the Reno Arch Lions Club speech contest and qualified for the zone finals; in 1965, in full view of television cameras, Alabama state troopers and other officers attacked and beat and gassed 600 peaceful voting rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma (Pettus was a Confederate general and U.S. Senator), an attack so brutal that the public reaction helped pass the Voting Rights Act through Congress; in 1968, nineteen year-old Sterling Price Johnson of Carlin, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 45 of the Vietnam wall); in 1969, twenty-one year old John Ira Aleck, of Reno, Nevada died in Quang Nam province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 62); in 1968, Robert Kennedy made his last comments in the U.S. Senate on Vietnam (see below); in 1979, Ray Charles performed Georgia On My Mind.
U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy / March 7, 1968: Are we like the God of the Old Testament that we can decide in Washington, D.C., what cities, what towns, what hamlets in Vietnam are to be destroyed? Is it because we think it may possibly protect the people of Thailand, the people of Malaysia, the people of Hawaii, or keep certain people out of Texas or California or Massachusetts or New York? Or do we have that authority to kill tens and tens of thousands of people because we say we have a commitment to the South Vietnamese people? But have they been consulted, in Hue, in Ben Tre, or in the other [south Vietnamese] towns that have been destroyed? Do we have that authority? As to our own interests in Vietnam, could not the Germans have argued the same thing before the beginning of World War Two — that they had the right to go into Poland, into Estonia, into Latvia, into Lithuania, because they needed them as a buffer? I question whether we have that right in this country...What we have been doing is not the answer, it is not suitable, and it is immoral and intolerable to continue it.UPDATE THURSDAY 3-6-2008, 9:38 am. PST, 17:38 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1836, in a ninety-minute early morning battle, Santa Anna's forces defeated the forces inside the Alamo, killing 200 defenders with David Crocket and a half-dozen others taken prisoner and then executed by being hacked to death with swords; in 1879, the Nevada Legislature approved a bill allowing scientists to take "any bird, fowl, fish, or animal" out of season; in 1926, Las Vegas pioneer Helen Stewart died; in 1928, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia (his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude was described by novelist William Kennedy in the New York Times Book Review as "the first piece of literature since the book of Genesis that should be required for the entire human race"); in 1930, 100,000 people demonstrated in New York City, demanding jobs; in 1939, U.S. Senator Key Pittman's bill to ease the way for a Nevada state park at Lake Mead was sidelined by the Senate Public Lands Committee after objections by Pittman's colleague Senator Pat McCarran (at the same time, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes objected to a park because he had heard "rumors" that gamblers recently driven out of Los Angeles wanted the park for unregulated gambling and drinking); in 1939, the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York upheld the mail fraud convictions of Reno political/crime bosses William Graham and James McKay; in 1946, France recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a state within the French union, with Ho Chi Minh as its chief of state (the French violated the agreement twelve weeks later); in 1946, in a speech to the American Veterans Committee, former U.S. representative Will Rogers, Jr., newly discharged from military service, recommended that African-Americans be admitted to military service as "free and complete equals", that enlisted men sit on courts martial, that officers be required to attend all company or mass formations, that officers and enlisted men wear the same uniforms, eat in the same mess halls, and share the same living quarters; in 1964, The Civil Aeronautics Board fined Riddle Airlines for providing a free flight for 30 people to Las Vegas for a fund raiser for U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada (but the fine was only $750); in 1968, 21 year-old Jere Douglas Farnow of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in action in Quang Tin province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 18); in 1968, 21 year-old James Herbert Smith, Jr., of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam panel 43e, row 35); in 1970, The Beatles' Let it Be b/w You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) was released in England; in 1998 in Aleman vs. Judges of the [county] circuit court, et al., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld an unusual conviction, reportedly the only valid conviction of a man previously acquitted on the same charge, on ground that because the judge had been bribed to grant the acquittal, the prisoner (Chicago hit man Harry Aleman) had never actually been in jeopardy in the first trial and therefore double jeopardy did not apply; in 1999, The New York Times began publication of a startling series of reports that claimed espionage had been committed at the Los Alamos atomic laboratories and that a U.S. citizen of Chinese descent was a suspect, setting off a spy hysteria that prompted anti-Clinton Republicans to call congressional hearings and the FBI and U.S. Justice Department to persecute scientist Wen Ho Lee, though investigations by other newspapers could find no substantiation for the Times reports (Wen Ho Lee was eventually cleared of all espionage charges, a federal judge apologized to him and castigated federal investigators, and the Times retracted its reporting, though Lee was forced to plead guilty to a technical violation).
UPDATE WEDNESDAY 3-5-2008, 10:39 am. PST, 18:39 GMT/SUT/CUT —
Communications workers to picket subcontractor in downtown Reno at noon today
RENO – Members of Communications Workers of America Local 9413 will lead informational picketing of a Northstar Communications jobsite in downtown Reno on Wednesday, March 5.
The demonstration is scheduled from 12 noon to 1:00 p.m. at 195 E. First Street.
Local 9413 won an election last June to represent 25 Northstar workers.
(Photo courtesy of Sister Marilyn Vermillion/CWA 9413.)LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF NEVADALABOR.COM
Dear Andrew:
I used to belong to the CWA having worked at Western Union (1973 - 1986). If it had not been for the union and that job, my children would have starved to death. Being a single parent of 3 with no child support trying to battle these greedy landlords, Sierra Pacific etc., I would not have been able to support my family. These are very dark days — I just hope the Union can hang in there and prevail.
Keep the hammer swinging.
Sincerely,
Laura"Since the election, they have laid off 20 of the 25 employees and have not made significant progress toward an agreement," stated Chuck Benway, president of the statewide labor organization.
"They have signaled their true intentions by bringing in as their negotiator a senior partner of the union-busting California law firm of Jackson and Lewis," Benway added.
"The company's layoffs and stonewalling are a sadly all-too-familiar technique to erode union support even after the workers have voted democratically to organize for group representation," he noted.
"The employees expressed their will in an honest election and deserve a fair contract," Benway concluded.
Northstar subcontracts to install power and data lines in telecommunication switching centers. The company has a dispatching office in Sparks but one of its most frequent jobsites is 195 E. First St. in downtown Reno, site of the demonstration.
CWA Local 9413/AFL-CIO is the oldest continuously operating union in Nevada, beginning as the Washoe Typographical Union in the days of the Comstock Lode. It once counted Mark Twain among its members and now represents about 4,500 workers statewide.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
On March 5, 1868, the Virginia and Truckee Railroad was incorporated; in 1885, Assemblymember David Allen of Washoe County introduced legislation providing for the appointment of "state detectives", which, after the bill was enacted, were paid by commercial interests like the mining and cattle industries and empowered with deputy's powers to serve those interests, often being employed against labor; in 1901, a committee of the Nevada Legislature was preparing to travel to San Francisco, where President Hayes was expected, to present him with "Nevada's grievances"; in 1923, Montana and Nevada adopted legislation providing for the first state-funded old age pension programs; in 1924, the name of Hiram Johnston of Zilwaukee township, which had been filed to appear on the Michigan presidential primary ballot along with that of U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California, was stricken from the ballot when it was determined that he was buried in a Bay City cemetery; in 1938, Nevada Governor Richard Kirman appointed Margaret Brodigan to be clerk of the Nevada Supreme Court (then an elective post), replacing her husband who died in office; in 1946, in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill used a phrase that entered the language: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent."; in 1951, the song Rocket 88 was recorded by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (who were in fact Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm, though Brenston sang lead) for Sun Records, a benchmark in the Sun catalog and considered by some to be the first rock and roll record; in 1962, George C. Scott declined his Academy Award nomination for The Hustler; in 1963, Wham-O patented the hula hoop; in 1968, eighteen year-old David Louis Bidart of Reno, Nevada, died in Phuoc Long province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 3 of the Vietnam wall); in 1969, Jim Morrison was charged with lewd behavior for allegedly exposing himself on stage at a Miami concert (when the trial took place, the only complaining witnesses were people connected to the police or prosecutor, and there was substantial doubt that the supposed lewd act actually happened, so the prosecutor offered a plea bargain that Morrison rejected — only to be convicted); in 1971, at Ulster Hall in Belfast, Led Zeppelin played the immortal Stairway to Heaven for the first time, drawing long applause from the audience (the song, released on Led Zeppelin IV on November 8, 1971, became and remains the most requested song on FM radio stations in the United States [even though the band never authorized a shortened version for radio play], is the best selling sheet music in U.S. history, and an Australian comedy television program had a different artist each week perform it, releasing 25 versions on the videotape The Money or the Gun/Stairways to Heaven); in 1973, in what was billed as the trade of the year, New York Yankee pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson announced they were trading wives, with Peterson asking reporters "Don't make anything sordid out of this" (the trade was named by the New York Daily News as one of "100 Classic Yankee Moments"; Mike Kekich and Marilyn Peterson did not last, but Fritz Peterson and Suzanne Kekich are still together); in 1999, Joan Kerschner stepped down as acting administrator of the Nevada State Archives and Library to become director of the Henderson Public Library.
UPDATE WEDNESDAY 3-5-2008, 10:16 am. PST, 18:16 GMT/SUT/CUT — Paycheck Perdition is back!
March 5, 2008
MEMO TO ALL AFFILIATES
FROM: Danny L. Thompson
RE: Paycheck Deception InitiativesAn initiative for paycheck deception was filed against us yesterday. In fact, two different versions were filed with the secretary of state. I have our lawyers preparing a challenge. We will be discussing these at upcoming meetings.
Déjà vu all over again
And we thought we put the stake through this vampire's heart 10 years ago.
A quick primer on union-busting "paycheck protection" strategies
BARBWIRE: Complaints from the living and the dead
Daily Sparks Tribune 2-8-1998
BARBWIRE: Beware the answer to the unasked question
Daily Sparks Tribune 2-1-1998
UPDATE TUESDAY 3-4-2008, 7:51 am. PST, 15:51 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1789, the U.S. Articles of Confederation lapsed and the U.S. Constitution took effect; in 1904, in San Francisco, Call reporter Jack O'Brien of Carson City, Nevada, was following police officer Daniel Keohane, who chased and caught a burglar when the burglar put a gun to his chest and O'Brien knocked the gun away from the officer and took the bullet in his own leg (San Francisco Police Chief George Wittman later presented O'Brien with a gold watch); in 1911, the Nevada Legislature was debating what constituted residence for divorce purposes; in 1914, the new $110,000 University of Nevada library was dedicated; in 1922, a quarantine ordered by Nevada Governor Emmet Boyle took effect, with livestock coming into the state kept isolated until inspected and shown to be free of disease; in 1925, angry crowds gathered in the streets in Elko around the jail where the accused killer of a deputy sheriff was held, but law officers mingled with the citizens to calm them down; in 1931, bids on the Boulder Dam project were opened in Denver and the contract for the project was awarded to a corporate consortium of companies (Six Companies Inc.) that was formed for the purpose and that bid $48,890,995; in 1933, with the nation's banking system in collapse (most states had shut down all their banks) and everyone from Walter Lippman to William Randolph Hearst urging him to seize power as a dictator, Franklin Roosevelt gave an inaugural speech designed to prepare the public for the possibility that he might do so (see below); in 1960, senators were sleeping in the old supreme court hall in the U.S. capitol to stay handy for quorum calls during a record setting filibuster against a civil rights measure, some of the lawmakers going onto the senate floor in bedroom slippers for a 4:06 a.m. call; in 1960, the Washoe County Democratic Party blew apart into two factions, holding two different county conventions representing an old guard and a younger group of allies of Governor Grant Sawyer; in 1960 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Leonard Warren sang the line "He is saved, he is saved, oh joy!" in Verdi's La Forza del Destino and dropped dead; in 1963, Atomic Energy Commission officials said it appeared that a four day wildcat strike at the Nevada Test Site was over; in 2002, Matthew A. Commons of Boulder City died near Gardez, Afghanistan; in 2007, the Associated Press reported that U.S. troops threatened the lives of Afghan reporters unless those reporters erased digital images of a U.S. attack on civilians: "Delete them or we'll delete you."
Franklin D. Roosevelt / inaugural address / March 4, 1933: It is to be hoped that the normal balance of executive and legislative authority may be wholly adequate to meet the unprecedented task before us. But it may be that an unprecedented demand and need for undelayed action may call for temporary departure from that normal balance of public procedure. I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption. But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take one of these two courses, and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
UPDATE MONDAY 3-3-2008, 12:01 am. PST, 08:01 GMT/SUT/CUT —
George W. Bush, mistaking Pakistan for an Arab nation / Islamabad / March 3, 2006: I believe that a prosperous, democratic Pakistan will be a steadfast partner for America, a peaceful neighbor for India, and a force for freedom and moderation in the Arab world.
On March 3, 1817, Congress approved a petition from a group of Napoleonic military officers and their families who were exiled or escaped from France after Waterloo and from St. Domingue after a slave rebellion, granting 92,000 acres of Creek and Choctaw territory (four adjoining townships) on the Tombigbee and Warrior Rivers in Alabama for $2 an acre, the present site of Demopolis (lively French culture flourished at the site for many years but wine and olive enterprises did not, and when it was discovered that the colony had settled on the wrong site, most of the French moved away); in 1819, the U.S. government created a "Civilization Fund" to "stimulate and promote...activities of benevolent societies in providing schools for the Indians..."; in 1845, Florida became the 27th state (though the votes on statehood from West Palm Beach have not yet been counted); in 1863, U.S. Representative Aaron Sargent of California introduced legislation providing for the appointment of Indian agents in Nevada; in 1887, Congress enacted the Edmunds/Tucker Act in an effort to destroy the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints by disincorporating both the church and its emigration fund, confiscating all church property worth more than $50,000, outlawing polygamy, stripping Utah women of the right to vote, and many other provisions; in 1905, a huge fire destroyed the structures on an entire city block of Gardnerville; in 1913, Woodrow Wilson's arrival in D.C. for his inauguration was upstaged and nearly ignored when a parade of between five and eight thousand women marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, the opening of Alice Paul's more militant campaign for suffrage (dramatized in the Hilary Swank film Iron Jawed Angels), and were attacked by some onlookers (when the D.C. police failed to protect the marchers, troops were called from Fort Myer for the purpose and the police chief was later fired); in 1918, the Lenin government, after watching Alexander Kerensky's post-czarist government fall because of public weariness with the war, made a separate peace with Germany and withdrew from World War One; in 1931, President Hoover signed legislation making Defence of Fort McHenry (aka The Star Spangled Banner), written by anti-war lawyer Francis Scott Key and set to the music of the British drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven (aka The Anacreontic Song), as the national anthem; in 1933, the U.S. Senate approved a study of the proposed All-American Canal, a part of the Hoover Dam project system that carries water from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley; in 1933, the Jade Room Club at 112 North Center Street in Reno (later Dutch Myers' State Barber Shop), across the street from city hall and about a hundred feet from U.S. prohibition enforcement offices, was raided three days after its opening by federal agents who claimed it was a speakeasy; in 1939 in Washington, Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Julian Steward discussed the high degree of political organization among northern Shoshone and Ute in the Great Basin; in 1944, the protest resignation of Reno health officer A.R. DaCosta was withdrawn after a secret meeting of the city council where councilmembers agreed to fund upgrading of the health department; in 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law barring communists from teaching (the decision was overruled in 1967); in 1991, a group of Los Angeles Police Department officers were videotaped by George Holliday beating African-American Rodney King (in his 1997 book Official Negligence, journalist Lou Cannon argued that journalism's failures — editing the tape down to the most lurid section and failing to provide fuller context such as King's provocations — contributed to the tragedies that followed); in 2003 at a food court in Crossgates Mall near Albany, New York, where he was having lunch with his son, attorney Stephen Downs was ordered by security guards to remove the "Give peace a chance" shirt he had purchased at the mall and was arrested and charged with trespass when he refused (the mall later backed down and asked that the charge against Downs be dropped after about a hundred people wearing peace shirts entered the mall and refused to leave until the complaint against Down was withdrawn); in 2008, a traveling exhibit sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia, Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, will open in Medan, capital of the province of North Sumatra, after stops in Jakarta and Bandung.UPDATE SUNDAY 3-2-2008, 10:53 am. PST, 18:53 GMT/SUT/CUT —
George W. Bush / oath-taking for agriculture secretary Ann Veneman / March 2, 2001: Ann and I will carry out this equivocal message to the world: Markets must be open.
Bill O' Reilly / March 2, 2003: Instead, I will call those who publicly criticize our country in a time of military crisis, which this is, bad Americans.
On this date in 1807, federal legislation was approved outlawing the importation of slaves into the United States and allowing and regulating the continued slave trade within the country; in 1836, northern Mexicans meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos, outraged that the nation's new constitution outlawed slavery, declared their independence from Mexico, elected David Burnet as their president, Sam Houston as their commander in chief, and adopted a constitution that protected slavery; in 1861, President Buchanan signed legislation creating the U.S. Territory of Nevada; in 1899, President McKinley signed legislation making Tahoma a national park, though under a white name (Mt. Rainier National Park) instead of its Native American name, giving an indication of how far whites will go to avoid tribal recognition — the park is now named after a British military officer who fought to keep the United States from coming into being, Peter Rainier (an effort in the nineteen-teens to get the name changed back failed); in 1909, a justice department official said a warrant would be served on Joseph Pulitzer in the criminal libel case ordered by President Theodore Roosevelt after the New York World called for an investigation of the financing of the Panama canal and called Roosevelt a liar; in 1909, the San Francisco Aero Club was planning a balloon race between Berkeley and Reno; in 1929, Congress approved the usual remedy for an unworkable law, increasing the penalties for bootlegging; in 1936, Chicago switched to eastern standard time, though some entities like the stockyards resisted the change and remained on central; in 1939, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was named pope and took the name Pius XII (he was born in Rome on the same date in 1876); in 1960, protests against the U.S. during President Eisenhower's visit to Uruguay were broken up by government forces using fire hoses and tear gas; in 1960, Elvis left Germany for the United States and discharge from the Army; in 1961, Reno Mayor Bud Baker, whose critics failed to get a recall onto the ballot, testified at the Nevada Legislature that a bill to invest the city manager with broad administrative powers was a "hidden form of recall"; in 1962, Philadelphia Warriors center Wilt Chamberlain, in a game against the New York Knicks, scored 100 points, beating his own previous record of 78; in 1964, a makeshift morgue was set up in Minden to received 85 bodies as they were brought down from the site between Genoa and Zephyr Cove of a Paradise Airlines crash; in 1965, 160 U.S. and Saigon government bombers were sent against two targets in north Vietnam, marking the start of the U.S. bombing campaign; in 1967, U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy of New York gave a 6,000 word speech in the Senate on the war in Vietnam, calling for a halt to the bombing, United Nations peacekeepers to gradually replace U.S. troops, and a coalition government; in 1967, President Johnson, in an effort to distract attention from RFK's scheduled speech, went into a sudden newsmaking flurry of activity, holding an unscheduled news conference to announce arms control talks, asking conservative senators to speak at length in the senate to push Kennedy's speech past the evening news, giving unscheduled speeches at the U.S. Office of Education and Howard University, and announcing that his daughter Luci was pregnant; in 1989, a sculpture in tribute to the Dineh (Navajo) code talkers was dedicated in Phoenix.UPDATE SATURDAY 3-1-2008, 10:35 am. PST, 18:35 GMT/SUT/CUT —
George W. Bush / New Orleans / March 1, 2007: I'm a strong proponent of the restoration of the wetlands, for a lot of reasons. There's a practical reason, though, when it comes to hurricanes: The stronger the wetlands, the more likely the damage of the hurricane.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
On March 1, 1692, Salem authorities interrogated Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Native American slave Tituba as a result of charges of witchcraft, marking the start of the Salem witch hysteria; in 1781, four years after they were submitted to the states, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union were ratified; in 1867, Nebraska entered the union; in 1873, Eureka County, Nevada, was created; in 1905, there was a press report that Nona, an attractive Native American in the Quincy, California, area northwest of Reno, had survived a poisoning attempt on her life from other tribal women who were jealous of her beauty: "Nona is quite popular; in fact, looked up to by the Indian men of the tribe. It is thought envy on the part of her less fortunate sisters has led to the attempt on her life. No arrests have been made."; in 1906, the first issue of Emma Goldman's newspaper Mother Earth was published; in 1917, the Zimmerman telegram, an offer from Germany to Mexico of restoration of its stolen lands in the western United States if it joined Germany in the world war, was published in the U.S.; in 1921, E.M. Forster departed on his second visit to India, which led to his A Passage to India, the novel set against British racism and the Indian independence movement of the 1920s; in 1926, Hogan's Heroes actor Robert Clary was born in Paris; in 1933, the Mineral County Independent in Hawthorne, Nevada, published its first issue; in 1940, Native Son by Richard Wright was published; in 1947, the new and mob-owned Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas reopened, three months before its front man Benjamin Siegel was murdered; in 1954, several Puerto Rican nationalists protested congressional interference in island affairs by firing shots from the gallery in the U.S. House of Representatives, hitting five congressmembers; in 1965, sixteen weeks after winning election on a "no wider war" promise, President Lyndon Johnson informed the Saigon government of his intention to send 3,500 Marines to Vietnam; in 1964, Fred Gale (later Nevada's first state archivist) started work as a library collections assistant at the University of Nevada-Reno library at a salary of $375 a month; in 1968, nineteen year-old Michael Kenneth Hastings of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 42e, row 18); in 1969, a jury found playwright and former New Orleans world trade center manager Clay Shaw not guilty of conspiring to murder President John Kennedy and the New Orleans States-Item called for the resignation of District Attorney Jim Garrison and the president of the American Bar Association said his group would open an investigation of Garrison; in 1971, a bomb planted by the Weather Underground in a U.S. Capitol senate wing restroom exploded; in 1973, University of New Mexico students Larry Casuse and Robert Nakaidene abducted Gallup mayor Emmett Garcia because of their outrage over his alcoholic exploitation of Native Americans at his saloon in Tse Bonito while he was chairman of an anti-alcoholism project; Casuse was killed during the events as Garcia escaped out a window (Casuse, testifying against Garcia's appointment to the state board of regents, told the legislature "The man is an owner of the Navaho Inn, where numerous alcoholics are born, yet he ironically is chairman of the alcohol-abuse rehabilitation committee. Does he not abuse alcohol? Does he not abuse it by selling it to intoxicated persons who often end up in jail or a morgue from over-exposure?" but the nomination was confirmed by lawmakers); in 1973, the Honda Civic debuted, becoming a huge success several months later after the October 17, 1973, cutoff of oil by OPEC to Israel-supporting nations and concurrent OPEC plans to raise oil prices; in 1981, imprisoned Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands began a hunger strike that would last 65 days (during which he was elected to the British Parliament) and end in his death; in 1983, 1940s Nevada newspaper columnist Gladys Rowley died in Reno; in 2005, the Nevada Commission on Tourism discussed a bill draft proposal allowing the commission to keep some records private in order to shield them from tourism officials in other states.
Nevada State Journal / March 1, 1883: "A Fish Story. The old Pyramid serpent story has been revived, and is going the rounds of the papers. It was a belief of the Piutes that an immense serpent made the waters of Pyramid Lake its home, and it was almost impossible to persuade the Indians to go out on the Lake over a few hundred yards. As whites began to visit the Lake the serpent theory was exploded and what seemed to be a serpent was nothing more than the whirling of the water by wind. The Truckee Republican has the following to say regarding the story: 'There is a monster in Pyramid Lake, so both Indian and white fishermen say, that is doing a great deal of mischief among the blockaded fish at the mouth of the Truckee. It is described as having the body and tail of an alligator, with the flippers of a seal, and, according to the stories told by those who have seen it, varies from six to twenty feet in length, having a mouth like a frog, which enables the animal to scoop in a wide streak of fish when he strikes a school. Sherman, the well known fisherman, says his habitat is along the shore of Goat Island, where he is frequently seen sunning himself on the beach after a good 'fill' of trout. 'Cliff the Spider' and several others, propose to go on a hunt for the monster and capture it if possible."
[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of interest to labor in particular and seekers of justice in general. Copyright © 2008 Dennis Myers.]]
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