Breaking News, Bulletins & Almanac, March 2007

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[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.       RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006 NEWLY UPLOADED BLAST FROM THE PAST: The reasons behind the failure of Nevada's first non-smoking casino Barbwire 3-2-1990

UPDATE: March 31, 2007, 12:01 a.m PDT, 07:01 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1492, in Granada's Alhambra Palace, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain signed an "edict of expulsion" ordering all Spanish Jews to leave the nation and giving them three months to dispose of their homes, property and assets, usually at a fraction of their value (Isabella said it was not their decision, it was God's); in 1870, Thomas Peterson Mundy of Perth Amboy became the first African-American to vote under the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had been ratified the previous day; in 1898, in an essay by reporter Alf Doten about his recently deceased colleague William Wright aka Dan DeQuille, Doten observed, "Even the Piute Indians along the street heartily enjoyed his efforts to joke with them in their native language, which he sympathetically admired for its natural oddity."; in 1900, renovation of the Steamboat Springs hot springs resort south of Reno was underway, with a hotel and baths planned; in 1900, the Nevada State Journal wrote "Capital at the present time holds the fort and its guns are directed against the rights of labor."; in 1911, after three years of prosecutions by the Roosevelt and Taft administrations of newspapers that reported on tawdry government conduct in the construction of the Panama canal, the cases, which were thrown out by the courts, formally came to an end when a U.S. attorney in New York requested permission to enter a filing called a nolle prosse dropping all criminal libel charges; in 1914, a New York artist named Charlotte von Kuohnan residing in Lucerne was convicted of engaging in secret service work on behalf of Germany and sentenced to two months in jail followed by banishment from Switzerland; in 1927, César Chávez was born near Yuma, Arizona; in 1930, Nevada fish and game chair R.L. Douglass reported the Pyramid Lake tribe to Secretary of the Interior Lyman Wilbur for allegedly slaughtering spawning fish on their reservation and meanwhile a couple of Utah officials were (under what authority is unknown) investigating spawn taking by tribal members at Walker Lake; in 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corps was created to train and aid youth during the Depression; in 1934, a report from a prospector that "some strange things were going on" at abandoned Fort Churchill sent Reno police there looking for vanished federal former Reno city councilmember Roy Frisch, who was the chief witness against Reno's two crime bosses; in 1945, at the Ravensbruck women's death camp, a Russian Orthodox nun and poet (see below) named Elizabeta Skobtsova but known as Mother Maria who had aided and rescued Jews in France, was gassed; in 1949, attorney Madison Graves filed charges against Las Vegas police officers after a teenager was beaten in the city jail and then given no medical attention to head injuries for four hours; in 1957, the first and only musical written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for television, Cinderella, was broadcast (performed live!) and introduced the United States to a new performer until then seen only on Broadway, Julie Andrews ("Just before I went on, a very kind soul pointed out to me that more people probably would see me in that single telecast than all the full houses of My Fair Lady for 100 years"), a program not broadcast again until December 9, 2004; in 1958, Chuck Berry's Johnny B. Goode was released; in 1960, Pope John XXIII appointed Tanganyika [Tanzania] Bishop Laurian Rugambwa the first black Catholic Cardinal; in 1961, there was a vague UPI report that the Secret Service may have increased security around President Kennedy and his family because of a possible plan to kidnap Caroline or harm the family, etc.; in 1961, what was reported to be Reno's first sit-in was staged by African-Americans at the Overland Hotel's café while elsewhere in the downtown a picket line was thrown up at the Nevada Bank of Commerce; in 1965, a massive airborne offensive began in Vietnam, with a hundred U.S. planes pouring tons of napalm, phosphorus bombs and fuel oil on a 19,000-acre section of Vietnam; in 1965, guests at the Tally Ho Hotel Casino on the Las Vegas strip were told to check out because the hotel was preparing to shut down, the second such closure in the hotel's months-long history; in 1965, the members of the University of Nevada debate team quit on the eve of a 40-college championship tournament hosted in Reno by the UN and issued a statement saying it was the result of a dispute with the campus hate group Coffin and Keys; in 1968, Lyndon Johnson agreed to negotiations with the Vietnamese, ordered a partial bombing halt in Vietnam and withdrew from the presidential race; in 1971, a court martial board sentenced Lt. William Calley to life at hard labor for murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai; in 1976, the 25th day of a massive water rights trial in the lawsuit of the Pyramid Lake tribal reservation and the U.S. government against the Truckee Carson Irigation District and 13,000 water rights holders focused on whether the reservation was created primarily as a fishery or for agricultural purposes; in 1982, a massive avalanche hit Alpine Meadows ski resort, killing seven and entombing chairlift operator Anna Conrad, who was trapped under a bank of lockers buried in ten feet of snow (she was found alive in a hollowed-out ice cave five days later); in 1995, Latina star Selena was shot and killed in Corpus Christi; in 2005, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission charged Caesars Palace in Las Vegas with having a workplace climate that allowed repeated, severe and gross sexual harassment, such as a supervisor trying to have forced sex with a worker who was four months pregnant and another supervisor grabbing a worker by the hair and forcing her to perform fellatio and other supervisors exposing themselves to female workers.

Israel
by Elizabeta Skobtsova

Two triangles, a star,
The shield of King David, our forefather.
This is election, not offense.
The great path and not an evil.
Once more in a term fulfilled,
Once more roars the trumpet of the end;
And the fate of a great people
Once more is by the prophet proclaimed.
Thou art persecuted again, O Israel,
But what can human ill will mean to thee,
who have heard the thunder from Sinai?

UPDATE: March 30, 2007, 1:04 a.m. PDT, 08:04 GMT/CUT/SUT — On March 30, 1981, President Reagan was shot and seriously injured outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John W. Hinckley, Jr. Also wounded were White House news secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent and a District of Columbia police officer. [New York Times/AP e-headlines] [EDITORS' NOTE: Why does no one ever seem to mention the names of the latter two men? Didn't they bleed enough? The Secret Service agent was Timothy McCarthy, the DC Police officer was Thomas Delanty.]

On March 30, 1870, slavery was ended in the United States with ratification of the fifteenth amendment and celebrations were planned throughout the nation, including at Elko (where it was the occasion for demands for integrated local schools) and Virginia City; in 1889, fifty leading citizens of Reno and the Bank of Nevada sent a petition to the Southern Pacific: "Your petitioners beg leave to respectfully represent that the present accommodations for the traveling public at the Reno depot of your company are entirely inadequate to the comfort and convenience of the patrons of the road, and that in particular the waiting room at the depot, both in size and for the comfort of the travelers, is a miserable apology for a waiting room for a company like the Southern Pacific, and at a station of the importance of Reno. We urgently request that at your earliest convenience, steps may be taken to provide additional room and facilities conducive to the health and pleasure of the traveling public at this place."; in 1900, a traveling man in Reno on business commented on the lack of a public park in a city of 7,000 people and suggested that the city plaza would be a good location for a park; in 1905, a report was published in Reno that Carson City newspapers were agitating for removal of the university from Reno to Carson, with state controller and Nevada Appeal editor Sam Davis offering free land for the purpose (Reno's Nevada State Journal argued "that if Sam Davis gives a site for a university, it is on land discarded even by the Indians"); in 1915, Abraham Lincoln's son Robert, chair of the Pullman Company, was planning an appearance before the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, which wanted information on the salaries paid and tips earned to African-American porters on Pullman cars (the commission was worried that tips could be having a debasing effect on the porters); in 1920, officials estimated that U.S. citizens were spending a billion dollars annually (about $10.7 billion in 2005 dollars) in Mexican border towns like Mexicali, Nogales, Juarez and Tijuana where alcohol was legal; in 1932, the New York Renaissance, an African-American team, defeated the Boston Celtics, a mostly white team, to win the national basketball championship; in 1945, just days before the Ravensbruck women's death camp was liberated, a group of women attacked their guards as they were being led to the gas chambers (nine escaped but were recaptured and killed); in 1947, plans for the Tucker automobile were announced; in 1948, Frances "Peaches" Browning, whose 1920s marriage on her sixteenth birthday to 51 year-old millionaire Edward "Daddy" Browning and subsequent 1926 divorce action became a New York tabloid sensation (she said he kept a honking African goose in their bedroom), was divorced for the fourth time in Redwood City, California (she had already obtained a Reno divorce); in 1948, on the eve of state takeover of the Basic Magnesium industrial complex in Henderson from the federal government, Governor Vail Pittman and other officials sought to reassure residents of the company town that they would not have to pay higher rates now that the state was operating their power company; in 1960, thirty thousand blacks marched in protest on the South African National Assembly and the government mobilized the home guard; in 1961, two days after his minorities-friendly New China Club in Reno was picketed by civil rights activists for its alleged association with anti-civil rights Senator James Slattery, Club owner Bill Fong took out a full page newspaper ad denying any association with Slattery and reasserting his support for an end to color bars in the casino industry: "And I can assure them now that there is not and never has been one word of truth in the allegations that I am an enemy of civil rights in Nevada. Why I have suffered discrimination myself! Let me put it on the record: I want to see an end to discrimination in Nevada. This is not just sentiment, it is business. I cater to the Negro here and common sense tells me that so long as discrimination exists many Negroes will refuse to come to Reno either as residents or visitors. So I would gain, not lose, by an end to discrimination."; in 1963, aeronautical engineer Ed Dwight, an African-American air force test pilot, was admitted to U.S. astronaut training, where — after full public relations mileage was obtained from him — he was harrassed and threatened into quitting two years later (he is now a renowned sculptor); in 1969, twenty year-old Charles Lynn Hodge of Reno, Nevada, died in Tay Ninh province, Vietnam (panel 28w, row 91); in 1972, at a meeting in Key Biscayne, Nixon campaign manager John Mitchell allegedly approved the break-in at Democratic National headquarters in the Watergate office complex; in 1989, Gladys Knight performed without the Pips for the first time, at a casino in Las Vegas.

UPDATE: March 29, 2007, 7:31 a.m. PDT, 14:31 CUT/SUT/GMT — On this date in 1516, to placate Catholic authorities, the city government of Venice ordered all the city's Jews into Europe's first Jewish ghetto where they continued to live in misery until 1797 when Napoleon 3d conquered the city and liberated the ghetto; in 1886, Coca Cola (laced with cocaine), was introduced, delighting dentists everywhere; in 1888, United Parcel Service founder James Casey was born in Candelaria, Nevada; in 1890, the Nevada State Journal reported "There will have to be imitation savages in the circuses this Summer, as the Secretary of the Interior has decided that no more Indians shall be allowed to leave the agencies for this purpose becanse of the demoralizing effects upon them. Representatives of the various circus companies protest against this order, and they have appealed to the President who, however, sustains Secretary [John] Noble. They explained to the President that they had already advertised their attractions for the coming year, and had gone to great expense in printing show bills and circulars in which they offer as an attraction to the public, scenes in savage life, and that they will be put to a great loss unless they are allowed to carry out their plans. The President [Benjamin Harrison] listened to them patiently, but would not yield, and they will have to find the best possible substitute. As soon as the Indians who are now with Buffalo Bill in Europe return to this country, they will be ordered back to their agencies and will be required to stay there."; in 1923, in the new issue of Fascisti Review Gerarchia, Italian Premier Benito Mussolini said liberalism was a remnant of the nineteenth century and that "men nowadays are tired of liberty"; in 1926, Washoe County Sheriff John Hillhouse abandoned his search for the Weston Band, a gang of cattle rustlers, but the state police continued the search into Churchill County; in 1934, the German government revoked the citizenship of 37 people, including a socialist member of the Reichstag, a labor journal editor and Albert Einstein, who the government said lost his citizenship because his "conduct violated his obligation of fidelity to the reich and its people, thereby harming German interests"; in 1934, the German government also banned boxer Max Baer's MGM movie The Prizefighter and the Lady (Baer, at his Lake Tahoe training camp, responded "They didn't ban the picture because I have Jewish blood, they banned it because I knocked out [German boxer] Max Schmeling); in 1948, residents of an East Liberty Street neighborhood gave a petition to the Reno city council asking for construction of a crossing guard where the Virginia and Truckee railroad crossed Liberty; in 1949, Richard Trachok was hired by the Reno School District No. 10 to be head football and track coach at Reno High School at a salary of $2,820 a year; in 1957, a report on the causes of a February 5 explosion and fire in downtown Reno was released; in 1961, the Kennedy administration was saber-rattling in southeast Asia, threatening to invade Laos; in 1961, Kansas' approval gave final ratification to a U.S. constitutional amendment giving D.C. residents the vote in presidential elections, winning praise from U.S. Senator Alan Bible of Nevada, who called himself the "unofficial mayor of Washington" by virtue of his chairing the Senate District of Columbia Committee; in 1962, Gene Chandler received a gold record for Duke of Earl; in 1967, The Beatles recorded With A Little Help From My Friends (lead vocal: Ringo), the second track of Sgt. Pepper; in 1967, CBS corporate lawyer Arnold Zenker entered the elite group of principal anchors of the CBS Evening News and U.S. folklore, replacing Walter Cronkite for 13 days during a strike (Cronkite's open on his first day back: "This is Walter Cronkite sitting in for Arnold Zenker"); in 1971, Lt. William Calley was convicted of murdering 22 Vietnamese civilians, the only responsible official ever brought to justice for the My Lai massacre; in 1971, production began on The Godfather, partially filmed in Nevada; in 1973, the United States withdrew ground forces from Vietnam but kept bombing the devil out of the unfortunate nation; in 1973, Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, who had a hit with Cover of the Rolling Stone, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone; in 1985, the New York Opera performed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; in 1992, Bill Clinton admitted to an inability to correctly operate a doobie: "I didn't inhale and I didn't try it again".

Time Magazine 4-7-1967 Portrait of the Artists "Direct from our newsroom in New York — in color — this is the CBS Evening for News, with Arnold Zenker substituting for Walter Cronkite and. . ." Arnold Zenker? Across the U.S. last week, televiewers gawked curiously at the unfamiliar faces — balding salesmen, pert secretaries, scrubbed junior executives — telling about "Veet Nom," "Cheeze Juftif Warren," "cloddy skies" and "mosterly easterly winds." All, like 28-year-old Arnold Zenker, manager of program administration for CBS, were filling in — and sometimes falling apart — for regular newscasters as the result of a strike called by the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. The walkout, the first in the union's 30-year-history, involved announcers, newsmen, disk jockeys and performers working on TV and radio stations owned by CBS, NBC, ABC and the Mutual Broadcasting System. The principal issue in the dispute is a salary increase for 100 newsmen at network-owned stations in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. The union was demanding a base salary of $325 plus 50% of the fees earned from sponsored programs; the networks are offering $300 and 25%. Swallow or Spit? Though lumping all these people in a union of "artists" is a bit like calling a tailback a tap dancer, the performance of some of the pinch newscasters was worthy of an Emmy, or at least a Hammy, for the best comedy show of the season. Scripts rattled, eyes squinted at TelePrompTers. In Chicago, WLS Advertising Director Frank Nardi made his broadcasting debut as a substitute disk jockey, struggled hysterically to keep up the machinegun patter. Sample: "Hey there! That was the great Ramsey Lewis Duo. . . aah. . .trio. . .whee. . .It's. . .aah. . . . . .three minutes. . .aah. . .I mean twelve minutes after three. . . wheee." At Chicago's WBBM-TV, Salesman Frank Palmer all but burned up the airways. Winding up the 5 p.m. news, he lit his pipe just like a real Walter Cronkite, burned his fingers, dumped tobacco all over the desk, grinned wanly and shrugged. In Los Angeles, KNBC viewers telephoned the station to complain that Pinch Newscaster Harry Howe was chewing gum while reading the financial news. Not so, Howe later explained. Seems that while struggling with all those Dow-Jones figures, he dislodged a filling in his tooth and, not knowing whether to swallow it or spit it out, bounced it from cheek to cheek between syllables. Morning, Hugh. On the first day of the strike, Hugh Downs, host of NBC's Today show, arrived live and in color at Manhattan's RCA Building in a pelting rain, disembarked from his NBC-supplied limousine, clapped on his sandwich board, popped open his umbrella, walked the picket line for a while, popped back into his Caddy and drove off. Other familiar pickets, such as Bud Collyer, Edwin Newman and Peter Jennings, were kept busy signing autographs, using the back of each other's signs for support. But whatever frivolity existed on the picket line during the early hours of the strike was later tempered by NBC News caster Chet Huntley's announcement that he would not honor the walkout because A.F.T.R.A. is a union of "singers, actors, jugglers, announcers, entertainers and comedians whose problems have no relation to ours." He sent a telegram to 40 fellow newsmen calling for their support and suggesting that a National Labor Relations Board election be held to decide representation and possible withdrawal of newscasters from the union. Claiming that he had received the approval of 37 of the 40 newsmen, Huntley said: "If I carry the ball, they're completely behind me." Good Night, Chet! NBC Newsmen Frank McGee, Morgan Beatty and Ray Scherer joined Huntley in crossing the picket line. At the other networks, CBS's Cronkite and ABC's Howard K. Smith demurred. Said Cronkite: "I think the time to complain is past. If you don't like the army, you get out before the battle starts." As for David Brinkley, the Washington-based half of the Huntley-Brinkley Report, he stayed out of the controversy and away from the studio. The reaction of some newsmen to the Huntley-Huntley Report was good night, Chet! Snapped NBC's Jack Costello: "Chet Huntley is the biggest liar and scab in the world." But most seemed to agree with ABC's Jules Bergman: "Huntley's stand is valid, but we won't forgive him because he weakened our position." At Hurley's bar in Manhattan, hangout for network staffers, one picketer placed a photograph of Huntley in the window and wreathed it with black crepe paper. Whatever the upshot of the strike, it at least provided the best broadcasting entertainment of the year.

UPDATE: March 28, 2007, 12:01 a.m. PDT, 19:01 CUT/SUT/GMT — On this date in 193, after the death of emperor Pertinax, Didius Julianus became Roman emperor by outbidding Flavius Sulpicianus for the job in an auction, thus providing precedent for U.S. politics; in 1834, by a vote of 26 to 20, the U.S. Senate censured President Jackson for removing the government's deposits without the permission of Congress, causing a business downturn; in 1887, President Cleveland appointed Charles Irish of Iowa City to be U.S. surveyor general in Nevada; in 1900, the Nevada State Journal bragged that its campaign against illegal fishing in the Truckee was making headway and complained about Native Americans: "It is reported that a number of Indians have been infringing the law between here and Langhton's [west of Reno] and it would be well if the offenders were captured and made an example of."; in 1906, the Consolidated Power and Telephone Company was started in southern Nevada; in 1909, Oklahoma Governor Charles Haskell ordered five companies of the state militia into the Hickory Ground (holy ground) to wipe out the Creek Nation, which had long resisted allotment (breaking up tribal lands and distributing them to individual members) and had reestablished the ancient laws and courts recognized by the United States in the treaty of 1825, on grounds that the U.S. had no power to break up the land or disband the government of another nation; in 1912, what a local newspaper called a sure sign of spring — the first circus advance person — arrived in Reno to prepare the way for performances of the 101 Wild West Show north of the Western Gypsum Company plant between Reno and Sparks, and he announced that both whites and Native Americans would be welcome and that the show's performers included members of seven tribes; in 1915, for the first time in the United States, people were told publicly how to use a contraceptive, in remarks by Emma Goldman before a crowd of 600 at New York's Sunrise Club, resulting in her conviction for "inflammatory speech" and a sentence of 15 days in the workhouse, the first of many such court actions (a woman journalist wrote in the Little Review that "Goldman was sent to prison for advocating that women need not always keep their mouths shut and their wombs open"); in 1923, distressed by the behavior of men in the capital, young women in Washington, D.C. formed an Anti-Flirting Club; in 1934, former Nevada boss George Wingfield sold a Las Vegas lot at the corner of Second and Fremont streets that he purchased for $5,000 five years earlier to Ed Von Tobel for $15,750; in 1939, an agent for Argentine meat packers who supplied dog food in the U.S. was quoted by columnist Drew Pearson: "My two best sales areas are Park Avenue and the deep South. On Park Avenue, it is the dogs that eat the dog food, but in the deep South, it is the negroes and the poor whites."; in 1942, attorney Minoru Yasui, a U.S. citizen who had quit a job at a Japanese consulate because of Pearl Harbor, walked the streets of Portland after a curfew imposed only on citizens of Japanese descent in order to provoke his arrest and a court test of the law (the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction); in 1944, the two-day murder of all the Jewish children in Lithuania's Zezmariai death camp was completed; in 1946, a meeting was held at Reno city hall to organize a Sagebrush Baseball League, with possible teams from western Nevada and eastern California communities, including Nixon, Loyalton, Verdi, Yerington, Sparks, the Nevada State Prison and various Reno teams; in 1950, E.R. Fryer of the Carson Indian Agency spoke to Reno's Twentieth Century Club on living conditions among Nevada's Native Americans; in 1953, the Reno Sparks Indian Colony formed a planning board to prepare for release of the colony's residents from wardship and resultant securing of deeds to their properties; in 1961, a day after the Nevada Senate defeated a civil rights measure by one vote, civil rights leaders threw up picket lines at two Reno casinos — one of them the New China Club, which was known as the one casino that welcomed minorities, and owner Bill Fong denied a report that he barred Native Americans and said "I was profoundly disheartened and disillusioned by the picketing this morning by people I had always considered my friends." (Fong's club was apparently targeted because Senator James Slattery, an outspoken opponent of the civil rights measure, was known as a hand puppet for the two casinos targeted); in 1962, public radio reporter Carol Cizauskas was born in Bonn, daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer; in 1979, an accident at Three Mile Island set off the nation's worst nuclear power plant disaster; in 2000, Fellowship of the Rings movie director Peter Jackson told New Zealand's Wellington Evening Post that The Beatles once had plans for production of the Rings trilogy, with John slated to play Gollum, Paul to play Frodo, George to play Gandalf and Ringo to play Sam, but that the project was personally vetoed by J.R.R. Tolkien.

UPDATE: March 27, 2007, 7:12 a.m. PDT, 14:12 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 28, 1883, James Reavis filed his famed "Peralta land grant" with the Surveyor General of the Territory of Arizona claiming a 75 by 250 mile strip in Arizona and New Mexico containing nearly 19,000 square miles of land, a claim that kept the southwest in an uproar for the next eleven years (Reavis had spent years traveling to alter old Spanish and Mexican land records in Madrid, Seville and California to support the fraudulent claim); in 1884, the first long distance call was made between New York and Boston, but the line went dead after an hour and a half and it took two months to repair; in 1886, the Buffalo Bill Dramatic Combination appeared in Reno a day after it was in Carson City and two day after a Virginia City performance (Territorial Enterprise: "The Pawnee Indians — real genuine Indians by the way— performed their parts with eloquent silence, their catlike movements on the stage were very impressive and formed quite an attraction to the general rounding of the performance."); in 1923, San Francisco supervisors named the dam that destroyed the storied Hetch Hetchy Valley for city engineer M.M. O'Shaughnessy; in 1923, after a day of searching, Reno post office officials, who had been informed by Washington of a fourth class post office in a Washoe County town called Diessner of which they had never heard, finally located it twenty miles north of Vya and six miles south of the Oregon border; in 1932, Mayor Edwin Roberts turned Idlewild Park over to Reno children, who searched for thousands of Easter eggs provided by Gray Reid Wright department store and the Nevada State Journal, with 25 golden eggs redeemable for live bunnies; in 1934, following the disappearance of Roy Frisch, chief witness in the federal fraud trial of Reno's crime figures and political bosses William Graham and James MacKay, guards were put on bank assistant cashier Joseph Fuetsch, the next most important witness; in 1946, after a six-week battle with Gen. John Lee over Mail Call, a column in which soldiers aired their grievances, Maj. Hal Kestler, publications officer who oversaw the Rome edition of the U.S. Army newspaper Stars and Stripes, was relieved of duty and requested a court martial, whereupon the entire 51-person staff requested transfers (a mediator was later called in, censorship was ended and Kestler was reinstated with a peacemaker installed between him and Lee); in 1949, engineers said Davis Dam, which would provide a fourth of its power to Nevada, would be complete by August 1, and meanwhile a effort was underway to name the lake created by the dam Mohave after the tribe whose land would be submerged; in 1956, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in her newspaper column "Recently I received a letter from a woman on an Indian reservation. The writer describes to me the unbelievable poverty in which our American Indians live. They were wards of the state. We were supposed to prepare them for citizenship. We have given them neither good education, good economic conditions, nor education for citizenship. When needed for war, we have used their young men, and now we are telling them they should cease to be wards of the state."; in 1961, after a morning in which African-Americans from around Nevada poured into the state capital, a senate committee kept approving a weak civil rights bill and then revoking its approval, finally allowing a full senate vote by which the measure lost 9 to 8; in 1961, casino owner and former lieutenant governor Cliff Jones said the Thunderbird, New Frontier and Dunes hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas strip would be driven out of business by a proposed gambling tax increase on high-gross operators. [EDITORS' NOTE: Click here for more on the neverending litany of that perennial lie.]; in 2000, ABC began broadcasting reports by Diane Sawyer in which she made Elian Gonzalez relive the loss of his mother and rolled around on the floor with him, drawing harsh criticism from fellow journalists and psychiatrists for exploitation and child abuse (and the right wing criticized her for censoring a comment by the boy in which he supposedly said he did not want to go back to Cuba).

UPDATE: March 26, 2007, 5:05 a.m. PDT, 12:05 GMT/CUT/SUT — On March 26, 1979, the Camp David peace treaty was signed by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the White House. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 26, 1860, the Missouri Republican and the New York Herald carried advertisements seeking riders for the short-lived Pony Express (the ad mentioned that the express would travel through Carson City and the Washoe silver mining country, see below); in 1861, the Wilmington Daily Journal in North Carolina reported the creation of the Territory of Nevada by printing the entire congressional act establishing the territory on page 3 (the act was signed by President Buchanan on March 2d in his final week in office); in 1862, President Lincoln forwarded to Congress a request from Governor James Nye of the Territory of Nevada a request for a private secretary and a salary increase for federal officials in the territory; in 1878, a few days after a Native American was murdered in Reno, a procession of tribal family and friends passed through Reno to the hillside cemetery where the body of the victim was exhumed, removed from its coffin, and then reburied as part of tribal rites; in 1885, Eastman manufactured the first motion picture film, which could only be viewed on individual viewers like nickelodeons, because not until March 26, 1895, was the first motion picture projector patented by Charles Francis Jenkins, a resident of Indiana; in 1923, Reno city councilmember Roy Frisch proposed creation of a park in a rock quarry at Stewart and Wheeler streets; in 1929, the current Nevada state flag design was adopted (a minor change was later made); in 1932, United Press sent out a red-baiting report about a demonstration at the Japanese embassy that reported the crowd of protesters included "a substantial sprinkling of women and negroes" which for some reason made it a "communistic" demonstration, but the report never got around to mentioning the reason for the gathering (a UP Chicago report the same day said an anti-Herbert Hoover protest in Chicago was composed of "four hundred communists, including many women and children."); in 1946, Wendell Lattimer, one of the scientists who helped develop the atomic bomb, said that how to apply atomic energy to industrial use had been known for some time and it was "disgraceful" that the U.S. was not closer to atomic power plants; in 1946, the American Legion chartered a Reno post for African-Americans (no explanation was given for why the black veterans were not simply welcomed into the existing Reno post) and it was named for Robert Brooks, an African-American war hero from Kentucky who was killed in the Philippines; in 1955, The Ballad of Davy Crockett became number one on the hit parade; in 1956, with police brutality charges on their way to the Clark County grand jury, Las Vegas Police Chief George Allen said that so far as he could determine, there was no truth to accusations that officers beat two Latino prisoners; in 1956, a Nevada Assembly select committee on taxation issued a report saying the 1955 enactment of a sales tax was unnecessary and could have been prevented if the legislature had been better informed on all possible revenue sources, and the committee said it would gather such information to provide to lawmakers if the sales tax was overturned by voters in the 1956 election; in 1960, under a threat of protest marches organized by Dr. James McMillan, casinos in Clark County, Nevada, desegregated their facilities; in 1960, Elvis taped an appearance with Frank Sinatra at the Fontainbleu Hotel in Miami for later broadcast, helping Sinatra finally break his losing streak as a television ratings performer; in 1964, at the Scala Theatre, The Beatles shot the final concert scene for A Hard Days Night; in 1968, twenty-four year-old Larry Earl Barger of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Binh Dinh province, Vietnam (panel 46e, row 28 of the Vietnam wall); in 1969, twenty-eight year- old Carlos Wilson Rucker of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Khanh Hoa province, Vietnam (panel 28w, row 52); in 1982, ground was broken for the Vietnam veterans memorial wall; in 1997, the Las Vegas Sun disclosed an investigation by the Nevada attorney general's office of state casino regulators.

TO SAN FRANCISCO IN EIGHT DAYS, --BY-- THE CENTRAL OVERLAND CALIFORNIA --AND-- PIKE'S PEAK EXPRESS CO. The first courier of the Pony Express will leave the Missouri River on Tuesday, April 3, at 5 o'clock p. m. and will run regularly weekly thereafter, carrying a letter mail only. The point of departure on the Missouri River, will be in telegraphic connection with the East and will be announced in due time. Telegraphic messages from all parts of the United States and Canada in connection with the point of departure will be received up to 5 o'clock p. m. of the day of leaving, and transmitted over the Placerville and St. Joseph telegraph wire to San Francisco and intermediate points, by the connecting express in eight days. The letter mail will be delivered in San Francisco in ten days from the departure of the express. The Express passes through Forts Kearney, Laramie, and Bridger, Great Salt Lake City, Camp Floyd, Carson City, the Washoe Silver Mines, Placerville, and Sacramento. Letters for Oregon, Washington Territory, British Columbia, the Pacific Mexican ports, Russian Possessions, Sandwich Islands, China, Japan and India, will be mailed in San Francisco. Special messengers, bearers of letters to connect with the Express of the 3d of April, will receive communications for the courier of that day at No. 481 Tenth street, Washington City, up to 2:45 p. m. on Friday, March 30, and in New York at the office of J. B. Simpson, Room No. 8, Continental Bank Building, Nassau street, up to 6:30 a. m. of March 31. Full particulars can be obtained on application at the above place and agents of the company. W. H. RUSSELL, President. Leavenworth City, Kansas, March, 1860. Office in New York, J. B. Simpson, Vice President. Samuel & Allen, Agents, St. Louis. H. J. Spaulding, Agent, Chicago.

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]

UPDATE: March 25, 2007, 9:44 a.m. PDT, 16:44 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 25, 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., led 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Allen Ginsberg/Howl: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix; Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

On March 25, 1885, Beadle's New York Dime Library released Flash Dan, the Nabob; or The Blades of Bowie Bar. A Story of the Gold Lands by Howard Holmes, a dime novel set in northern California and near Carson City, Nevada in 1869; in 1896, a measles epidemic in Lincoln County was hitting Native Americans particularly hard, with six Indians dead in a week; in 1911, a fire broke out in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, killing 146, 132 of them girls (the lack of safety exits and fire escapes and the condition of the building galvanized the union movement and led to legal reforms in working conditons and the conviction on manslaughter charges of the owners); in 1917, at a rally in New York's Metropolitan Opera House held to celebrate the February revolution, Charles Evans Hughes, Alton Parker, Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root spoke or sent messages expressing pleasure at the entry of Russia into the community of democratic nations and pledging to aid the new nation; in 1917, a representative of a new national organization, the League to Enforce Peace, arrived in Reno to form a local chapter and advance an April speech in Reno by former Minnesota governor Adolph Eberhart (peace activity was very risky during the world war because the Wilson administration prosecuted it under the Espionage Act); in 1939, with war talk common, the Nevada Bureau of Mines was doing a study of the prospects for development of strategic war minerals in the state; in 1947, President Truman issued executive order 9835, creating a program to adjudge the "loyalty" of civil service employees and empowering the U.S. attorney general to compile a "list of subversive organizations"; in 1955, customs inspectors seized a shipment of copies of Allan Ginsberg's Howl as they were brought in to the U.S. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco responded by publishing a U.S. edition); in 1958, John Ensign, now U.S. senator from Nevada, was born in Roseville, California; in 1961, Elvis performed at Pearl Harbor to raise money for the U.S.S. Arizona memorial (it was his last public performance for nine years); in 1963, the Nevada Legislature ratified the 24th amendment to the United States Constitution (outlawing the poll tax); in 1966, the fab four posed for the "butcher cover" of their Yesterday and Today album; in 1968, KLVX television in Las Vegas began operation; in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's only album, the magnificent Déjà Vu (containing Teach Your Children, Helpless, Our House, Woodstock), went gold; in 1971, Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan, though it took a day to become known to the public; in 1972, America's A Horse With No Name, written by Dewey Bunnel as a accolade to the desert he missed, hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1975, Sparks city councilmember Pete Lemberes, who was being investigated by a county grand jury, read a public statement in which he criticized the grand jury, Sparks city attorney Paul Freitag, two of his fellow councilmembers, and Sparks Nugget owner John Ascuaga; in 1976, Jackson Browne's wife, Phyllis, took her own life; in 1977, Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan vetoed Assemblymember Steve Coulter's, D-Reno, legislation repealing the mandatory motorcycle helmet law for adults; in 1977, former Washoe County superintendent of schools Earl Wooster, who counted the 1944 shutdown of the Washoe Indian school and integration of Native Americans into the white Orvis Ring School among his most important achievements, died in Reno; in 1977, Sid Doan testified in court that in 1973 he had threatened beating Sparks city councilmember James Vernon "within an inch of his life" if his Sierra Sid's truck stop was denied a gambling license; in 1992, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returned to a changed world after ten months on the Mir space station (his nation, the Soviet Union, no longer existed).

UPDATE: March 24, 2007, 2:19 a.m. PDT, 09:19 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 24, 1989, the nation's worst oil spill occurred as the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound and began leaking 11 million gallons of crude. [New York Times/AP e-headlines] A new study revealed that an estimated 26,600 gallons of oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill continues to pollute Prince William Sound in Alaska. [Harper's Magazine, April, 2007, page 108]

Robert Kennedy/March 24, 1968: Our brave young men are dying in the swamps of Southeast Asia. Which of them might have written a poem? Which of them might have cured cancer? Which of them might have played in a World Series or given us the gift of laughter from the stage or helped build a bridge or a university? Which of them would have taught a child to read? It is our responsibility to let these men live.... It is indecent if they die because of the empty vanity of their country.

On March 24, 1886, the Reese River Reveille said that lobbyists were costing the state of Nevada thousands of 1886 dollars: "If such a thing were possible there are at least half a dozen men in Nevada who should be quarantined for sixty days every two years."; in 1923, Elko County Sheriff Joe Harris said that rumors he was being considered for appointment as state prison warden came "like a bolt from a clear sky" and Governor James Scrugham, who was in Elko, apparently said he had no intention of removing Warden Rufe Henrichs; in 1923, miner and rancher William McGill, for whom the town of McGill is named, died in Ely; in 1934, people crowded into Reno's civic auditorium for Governor Fred Balzar's funeral (work on the Boulder Dam project was halted for three minutes at 2 p.m., the start time of the funeral), and a major topic of conversation at the funeral was the disappearance of former Reno City Councilmember Roy Frisch, chief prosecution witness in the federal bunco trial of Reno political/crime bosses James "Cinch" McKay and William Graham; in 1944, in reprisal for an attack by Italian patriot forces on German occupation troops, the Nazis executed 335 civilians, mostly Italians, in the Ardeatine caves near Rome; THE GREAT ESCAPE — in 1944, in Poland, Allied airmen began escaping through a tunnel 30 feet deep and 300 feet long from the German prison camp Stalag Luft III, continuing into the early morning hours of March 25, 76 men eventually escaping, 73 being recaptured, 50 executed, and three avoiding recapture to reach freedom; in 1955, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof opened on Broadway; in 1956, U.S. Navy officials confronted Lt. Thomas Dooley, a physician who had become famous for his work among Indochina refugees, with the results of an investigation into his sexuality and forced him to resign his commission; in 1956, in Washington, Captain Walter Newton, Jr., commander of the Fallon Naval Air Station, was criticized by members of a congressional committee for lobbying local Nevada businesses and civic groups to support the Navy's plan to withdraw two million acres of land in northeast Nevada from public use for a gunnery range; in 1959, The Drifters' There Goes My Baby was released; in 1960, Harold's Club general manager Raymond I. Smith resigned as secretary-treasurer of the All American Society, a group he founded to warn against "creeping communism" whose officers included American Legion official Thomas Miller and former U.S. Representative Cliff Young, R-Nev.; in 1963, Patti Homer of Bijou Pines, California, who was a dealer at a Stateline, Nevada, casino, appeared on the television show What's My Line?; in 1964, four months after the assassination, the first Kennedy half dollars were released to the public (so many of them were hoarded that the half dollar declined as a commonly used coin); in 1965, with the support of 200 professors and over the opposition of Governor George Romney and the Michigan Senate, the first Vietnam teach-in was held at the University of Michigan, an action that spread across the nation (Michigan Supreme Court Justice Paul Adams attended, calling the teach-in "a vital service...in promoting debate on the question of U.S. policy in Vietnam"); in 1975, two years after U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, the Hanoi government launched the Ho Chi Minh campaign that closed in on Saigon and ended the war; in 1977, on the anniversary of the coup that brought the military dictatorship to power, Argentine investigative journalist Rodolfo Walsh published Open Letter From A Writer To The Military Junta on the torture, disappearance and murder of thousands of Argentinians, and was assassinated the next day; in 1980, during a U.S.-funded war by the El Salvador government against its own people that claimed 3,000 lives a month, Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated while he said mass, shortly after he unsuccessfully begged President Carter to stop financing the slaughter and a United Nations investigation later concluded that the murder had been ordered by Salvadoran Major Roberto D'Aubuisson; in 1980, ABC News, which had promised to keep airing its late night news program America Held Hostage until the Iran hostages were freed, changed the name of the program to Nightline (the program, which generally focused on a single topic each night, lasted until November 28, 2005, when it retained the name but changed to a multi-subject format heavy on celebrity news and entertainment); in 1996, the Las Vegas movie Showgirls starring Elizabeth Berkley won the 16th annual Golden Raspberry Award; in 2002, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington won the best acting Oscars.

UPDATE: March 23, 2007, 1:05 a.m. PDT, 8:05 CUT/SUT/GMT — On March 23, 1965, America's first two-person space flight began as Gemini 3 blasted off from Cape Kennedy with astronauts Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young aboard. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.       RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006 NEWLY UPLOADED BLAST FROM THE PAST: The reasons behind the failure of Nevada's first non-smoking casino Barbwire 3-2-1990

On March 23, 1842, Whig U.S. Rep. Joshua Giddings of Ohio was censured for mentioning slavery in violation of the House's "Gag Rule" (he defended slave mutineers on board the Creole, an incident similar to the Amistad case), after which he resigned and was then reelected; in 1874, President Grant signed an executive order reserving land in the Pyramid Lake region "for the Pah-Ute and other Indians residing thereon"; in 1918, Lithuania's independence was recognized by German emperor Wilhelm II; in 1918, trial began of 101 labor leaders indicted for "espionage" for (opposing U.S. participation in World War One), among them Bill Haywood, who at age 15 worked in a mine in Nevada's Humboldt County; in 1921, the War Resisters League International was founded in the Netherlands; in 1922 in Belfast, Ulster police sledgehammered open the door to a family home, lined up a Catholic father, his five sons and a boarder, and opened fire, killing all but one child in retaliation for the killings of two police auxiliaries; in 1923, Albert Einstein resigned from a League of Nations panel because he had concluded the league was powerless and "as a convinced pacifist it does not seem well to me to have any relation with the league whatever"; in 1923, Chollar Mine worker Andy Antunovich lost an arm on the job as rumors circulated of a miners strike on the Comstock; in 1932, the Nevada State Journal wrote "A life of enforced idleness, huddled on a narrow parcel of barren land, wind-swept in winter and sun-scorched in summer, with the dingiest of shanties and dog houses‚ as homes, is rapidly causing the deterioration of the Indians on the Reno reservation between here and Sparks. The United States senate Indian affairs committee promised the Indians the aid of the federal government in providing them some means of earning a livelihood — perhaps an industry of some small nature, a few dairy cows to give milk for the young, water to grow small quantities of truck crops. The committee left here May 26, 1931, and disappeared as completely as if it never existed. The people in Reno and other cities do not want to employ Indians, according to Meredith Crooks, Indian officer in charge of the reservation."; in 1933, the Reichstag enacted the Ermächtigungagesetz, making Adolf Hitler a dictator; in 1942, the U.S. began interning U.S. citizens in camps around the west, eventually imprisoning citizens of Japanese, German, Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Romanian and Czech descent; in 1943, twenty-nine Jewish children from the La Rose Orphanage in France, and their adult caretaker, were gassed at Sobibor death camp; in 1950, All the King's Men won the best picture Oscar; in 1954, former cowboy actor Rex Bell of Las Vegas, who lost a congressional race in 1944, announced that he would oppose Reno Mayor Francis "Tank" Smith and White Pine County Assemblymember George Hawes in the Republican primary for lieutenant governor; in 1956, in her newspaper column, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote "There must be great pride, not only among the Negroes but among white people all over the country, in the remarkable restraint and courage shown by the Negroes in their struggle for their rights in Montgomery, Ala., and other places in the South. Never before has such a peaceful but determined movement taken place. It is inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi and his followers in India and calls for remarkable fortitude and perseverance. Dr. Luther King, in his insistence that there be no hatred in this struggle, is asking almost more than human beings can achieve. Yet there has not been one single word of praise from any member of the [Eisenhower] administration."; in 1956, Nevada labor commissioner D.W. Everett reminded employers that adult women workers must be paid the minimum wage, $1 an hour, and that women under 18 must be paid a minimum of 87.5 cents an hour; in 1960, after Nevada District Judge Richard Hanna declared Joe Conforte's Triangle Ranch brothel a public nuisance, Storey County Sheriff Cecil Morrison burned it down (meanwhile, a few hundred yards away in Lyon County, another branch of the brothel continued doing business); in 1963, Surfin‚ U.S.A. by The Beach Boys was released; in 1964, John Lennon's In His Own Write was published; in 1976, former Chilean Ambassador to the U.S. Orlando Letelier was assassinated in Washington, DC, by two Cuban exiles hired by the U.S.-supported regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. [EDITORS' NOTE: The correct date is 21 Sept 1976. Letelier's aide, American Ronni Karpen Moffitt, was also killed in the car bomb murder. Her widowed husband still grieves and sends letters to newspapers calling for justice for his wife.]; in 2002, Rex Daniels, who took the first master's degree in journalism from the University of Nevada, died in Reno; in 2003, Donald John Cline, Jr., of Sparks, Nevada, Frederick Pokorney, Jr., of Nye County, Nevada, and Michael Williams of Yuma (who was born in Reno), all died in Nasiriyah, Iraq.

The day Pinochet's boy came to Reno

UPDATE: March 22, 2007, 12:01 a.m. PDT, 7:01 CUT/GMT/SUT — On March 22, 1972, Congress sent the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution to the states for ratification. It fell short of the three-fourths approval needed. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 22, 1638, Anne Hutchinson was exiled from Massachusetts Bay Colony for heresy (church and state were so tightly bound that her questioning of doctrine was seen as questioning the authority of the state) and she, her husband and her allies went south where they helped found Rhode Island as a refuge from religious power and from civil enforcement of religious views (her heresy conviction was posthumously reversed in 1987 by Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis); in 1861, President Lincoln appointed James Nye of New York as governor of the new Territory of Nevada, and Orion Clemens of Iowa as territorial secretary; in 1895, at the Utah constitutional convention, it was expected that the document would be silent on gender in voting, effectively making women's suffrage legal from the beginning of statehood; in 1912, with the bunk house in the Southern Pacific railroad preserve in Sparks abolished, Sparks boarding houses were gaining new customers and some workers were living in Reno and riding the train to Sparks; in 1923, the Elko Independent reported that "an army of hoboes" was invading the town, "traveling to and fro in search of warmer climes and easy living. The youths are apparently heeding Horace Greely's [sic] adminition, 'Go west, young man,' but few are lingering to grow up with the country" (Greeley always denied saying "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country"; the adage actually originated with Terre Haute [Indiana] Express editor John Soule); in 1923, two instances of claim jumping in Elko county oil fields were reported; in 1922, Nevada state water engineer James Scrugham returned from California and Arizona meetings of the Colorado River Commission with U.S. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover and said Hoover had, after viewing the Boulder Canyon site, committed himself fully to construction of a dam; in 1923, the annual women-edited issue of the University of Nevada Sagebrush carried an editorial on the role of women (see below); in 1934, as part of a bet, George Gallo and "Young" Firpo of Reno ate 14 pounds of spaghetti in an hour and ten minutes (after eating some sandwiches) at Colombo's; in 1947, long before Senator Joseph McCarthy came on the scene, President Truman ordered loyalty investigations of every federal worker in the United States; in 1949, Nevada Governor Vail Pittman vetoed a bill making prostitution legal if localities consented, calling on legislators "to protect the name of Nevada, to keep it synonymous with personal liberty but not with licentiousness"; in 1951, a committee of the Argentine Congress created to take over and investigate the newspaper La Prensa said officials had been unable to locate and jail its editor, Alberto Gainza Paz, and declared him a fugitive from justice (Gainza Paz was in Uruguay and was not able to reclaim his newspaper until the overthrow of Juan Peron in 1955; on April 16 1957, NBC's Armstrong Circle Theatre presented a docudrama Slow Assassination/Peron vs. La Prensa); in 1951, Carson City March of Dimes chair Paul Laxalt reported that a house to house solicitation had produced $849.53 for the anti-polio campaign; in 1954, the headline on the cover of the new issue of Newsweek (postdated March 29) asked in the wake of See It Now's McCarthy broadcast "Should television take sides?"; in 1954, syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, using material from the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada, ran an innuendo-filled column attacking Edward R. Murrow; in 1954, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a speculative story on the meaning of new 500-foot atomic test towers on Frenchman Flat, with a reference to "the highly accurate information" the Atomic Energy Commission had released in the past; in 1956: "MONTGOMERY, Ala., March 22. — (UP) — A circuit court judge found a young Negro minister guilty of conspiring to boycott segregated city buses and sentenced him to a $500 fine or 140 days at hard labor. The trials of 89 other Negroes on the same charge were continued until a higher court rules on the first case, that of the Rev. Martin Luther King, 27. "; in 1956, U.S. Senator Richard Neuberger criticized his fellow Oregonian, Interior Secretary Douglas McKay, for cronyism for McKay's appointment of his campaign manager in the upcoming U.S. senate campaign to supervise distribution of the assets of the state's Klamath tribe (Senator Joseph McCarthy accused Neuberger of a "completely unfair and unwarranted attack"); in 1961, a tobacco industry scientific advisory board announced that after six years of work it had found no evidence of a link between smoking and lung cancer; in 1961, a Clark County grand jury convened to investigate local police was dismissed after filing a report calling officers "burglars behind badges" but also saying that the police department was making progress in reforming itself; in 1963, Please Please Me, the first Beatles album, was released in Britain; in 1965, Bob Dylan's album Bringing It All Back Home was released; in 1971, the captain commanding 53 armored cavalry troopers who refused to obey orders to protect a damaged helicopter and their commanding officer's vehicle at Khe Sanh was relieved of his command and Gen. John Hill said he would take no action against the other men; in 1971, Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan said he would comply with a federal court order reinstating welfare recipients who had been thrown off the welfare rolls by his administration; in 1971, Latter Day Saints Church members in Reno said they were being encouraged by Salt Lake City church officials to get involved in the Nevada Legislature debates over abortion reform; in 1974, Sam Donahue, leader of the Tommy Dorsey Band since Dorsey‚s death in 1956, died in Reno; in 1980, Dark Side of the Moon broke Tapestry's record for longest stay on the Billboard top 100 album chart; in 2003, a group of about 300 (including Lt. Jim Ballard and Washoe County deputy district attorneys Jim Shewan and Roger Whomes) left the site of a pro-Iraq war demonstration in downtown Reno and walked to the site of an antiwar protest in a different part of downtown Reno and overran the peace vigil, tearing signs from protesters' hands, yelling to drown out hymns and spitting on protesters while at least 16 police officers stood by observing and did nothing (the antiwar group had altered the plans and route for their protest at the request of police in order to avoid interacting with the prowar group); in 2004, using a missile, Israel murdered Sheik Ahmed Yassin and seven other people standing near the wheelchair-bound sheik.

UPDATE: March 21, 2007, 4:31 p.m. PDT, 23:31 GMT/SUT/CUT — KRNV TV-4 reported on its noon newscast today about a mass-firing without notice at a telemarketing firm affiliated with Walley's Hot Springs in Genoa, Douglas County, Nev., southeast of Lake Tahoe. The sudden terminations may have violated the federal WARN Act, as did the firings at the Riverboat Casino in Reno in 1998. UPDATE 3-26-2007: Boomtown's recent firing and subcontracting of its housekeepers may fall into the same category. Stay tuned. Be well. Raise hell.

UPDATE: March 21, 2007, 2:35 a.m. PDT, 9:35 GMT/SUT/CUT — On March 21, 1965, more than 3,000 civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., began their march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 21, 1685, Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach, Germany; in 1857, Australian journalist, trade union activist, and anti-imperialist Alice Henry, who started Chicago's Women's Trade Union League, was born in Richmond, Tasmania; in 1864, President Lincoln approved An Act to enable the people of Nevada to form a Constitution and State Government, and for the admission of such State into the Union on an equal footing with the original States.; in 1907, the United States attacked Honduras, one of at least seven U.S. invasions of that nation; in 1923, Idaho Senator William Borah hinted in an Akron speech that he and other Republicans might bolt the party and form a third party rather than support President Harding for reelection; in 1923, the first charges (against two men arrested in a Taylor Street home in Reno) were filed under Nevada's state alcohol prohibition law, setting the stage for a court test of the law, which state Attorney General Michael Diskin contended was unconstitutional; in 1929, the Nevada Legislature completed its business for the year, with one of the last pieces of business dealing with a state flag bill; in 1930, President Hoover nominated racist John J. Parker to the U.S. Supreme Court, drawing NAACP opposition (the nomination was rejected by the Senate); in 1934, Nevada Governor Fred Balzar died at the governor's mansion in Carson City and Lieutenant Governor Morley Griswold became acting governor; in 1935, the Nevada Senate approved an Assembly bill to hire one staff person to care for the untended Nevada Historical Society collection in the basement of the State Building in Reno; in 1939, Billie Holliday recorded Long Gone Blues on the Columbia label; in 1950, after being acquitted of all fraud charges brought against him by federal prosecutors, car manufacturer Preston Tucker filed suit against the prosecutors; in 1953, President Eisenhower endorsed construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, which obliterated a river canyon some considered another Grand Canyon (an effort is now underway to remove the dam and restore the canyon); in 1953, Las Vegas Elks Lodge officials reported that a Cleveland Indians/New York Giants exhibition game at Cashman Field on March 19 attracted 9,088 people and would probably be repeated; in 1954, the National Security Council approved joint chiefs chairman Arthur Radford's plan to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam to reverse the recent victory of the Vietnamese over the French; in 1956, "Robert Rich" won the Oscar for best writing of a motion picture story for The Brave One but he failed to appear to claim the statuette and the audience was told that he was at his wife's side as she gave birth (the screenplay was actually written by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo; a public ceremony was finally held on May 2, 1975, at which the Oscar was presented to him); in 1960, at Sharpeville, South African officers raked a crowd of protesters with machine gun fire, killing 69 people and provoking young attorney Nelson Mandela's abandonment of nonviolence; in 1963, the last inmates departed Alcatraz after Attorney General Kennedy ordered the shutdown of the island prison; in 1961, The Beatles appeared in the Cavern Club for the first time; in 1965, voting rights marchers escorted by federal troops finally made it across Edmund Pettus Bridge near Selma, Ala., on the third attempt in a month; in 1985, at a march in Langa, South Africa, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre, police again opened fire on protesters, killing at least 21; in 1994, The Grateful Dead played in concert for the last time with Jerry Garcia; in 2002, Veteran Nevada journalist Lee Adler, a skilled reporter and writer, died in Carson City.

Guy Clifton/Reno Gazette-Journal/March 29, 2002: PASSAGE: Lee Adler was a New York City boy who found a home in the high desert of Nevada. He died in Carson City last week at age 65. Adler covered Carson City for several of the state's newspapers for parts four decades, working at a famously messy desk in the basement of the Capitol. The late Guy Shipler, legendary dean of the Capitol press corps, wrote of Adler in 1985: "During the 1981 session of the legislature, Adler could cover three committee meetings at once. He managed this feat by using three tape recorders, two of them borrowed, scurrying from one meeting to the other to make sure the tapes had not run out. No other inhabitants of our basement burrow have shown that much ingenuity or energy. He alone among us could somehow accomplish this juggling act flawlessly enough to come up with three authoritative and informative stories."

UPDATE: March 20, 2007, 8:01 a.m. PDT, 15:01 SUT/GMT — On March 20, 1841, Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue was published, considered by some to be the first detective story; in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in protest against the fugitive slave laws, was published, spreading anti-slavery sentiment (in the novel, Tom is an African-American who is portrayed as a noble, courageous and self sacrificing figure, so naturally when white playwrights got ahold of the story they changed the character into a groveling, submissive figure); in 1854, a group of former Whigs met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to start the Republican Party; in 1879, the Nevada State Journal wrote "American commerce must be a miserable affair if it cannot be maintained without sacrificing the rights of the American people."; in 1896, the United States attacked Nicaragua, one of many U.S. invasions of that nation; in 1898, thirteen wagonloads of Latter Day Saints settlers from Moroni, Utah, arrived in White Pine County, Nevada, where they established the hamlet of Preston; in 1903, the Washoe County library board advertised for architects to submit plans for the county's first library at a cost of no more than $15,000; in 1916, African Ota Benga, who was kidnapped and brought to the U.S. for a world's fair and then put on exhibit in a monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, committed suicide; in 1917, the sagebrush was "hereby adopted as the state emblem of the State of Nevada"; in 1919, a Navy official in Washington, Lieutenant Commander S.C. Hooper, said officials in the United States could have spoken by wireless telephone with President Wilson if needed at any time during Wilson's stay at the Versailles conference; in 1919, distillers said they were circulating anti-alcohol prohibition initiative petitions in twelve states, including Nevada; in 1923, a day after Utah Governor Charles Mabey, Nevada Governor James Scrugham and California highway commissioner Harvey Toy were invited to speak at a meeting of the Overland Trail Club in Elko on the importance of completing the Victory highway across their states, Scrugham said he would attend (the next day the Reno chamber of commerce board voted to send its president Charles Knight to the meeting); in 1923, in Blanding, San Juan County, Utah, Sheriff W.E. Aliver was pistol whipping a Native American in the jail when another one grabbed his gun and the two Paiute Indians disarmed him, locked him in the cell, and escaped (newspaper reports referred to the two as "young bucks"); in 1928, U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California called for approval of legislation to construct Boulder Dam; in 1935, at a funeral for his friend Grant Rice at Reno's Ross-Burke funeral home, amateur songwriter Raymond Penry spoke the words of a song he wrote for the deceased, "Softly Now the Light of Day, Fades Upon My Sight Away," and then died himself; in 1939, the German reich was in negotiations with Lithuania over the fate of Memel, which had been administered by France under a League of Nations mandate since the end of the world war; in 1940, University of Nevada freshman halfback Marion Motleykilled an elderly Japanese man in a car accident and was charged with negligent homicide; in 1945, Governor Edward Carville had on his desk awaiting signature measures sponsored by Senator Kenneth Johnson of Ormsby County to ratify under white law marriages performed under tribal law and to appropriate $1,500 ($16,613.29 in 2006 dollars) for state acquisition of Dat So La Lee's woven baskets; in 1947, Acting Georgia Governor Melvin Thompson, finally installed in the governor's office by the state supreme court after a mammoth political battle, called his ousted predecessor Herman Talmadge and said he might veto a whites-only primary election bill that Talmadge had already signed during his weeks as governor (Eugene Talmadge had won the governor's office, then died before taking office, the legislature had ignored the lieutenant governor-elect and appointed Talmadge's son Herman to be governor, and outgoing Governor Ellis Arnell had refused to leave office until the matter was settled, giving the state three governors); in 1949, Gentleman's Agreement, an indictment of anti-Semitism in the U.S., won the Academy Award for best picture of the year; in 1953, in New Orleans, T Bone Walker recorded Long Distance Blues; in 1954, in the Indiana high school basketball finals in Indianapolis, the Milan High School Indians defeated the powerhouse Muncie Central team with an epic last minute shot by Bobby Plump, a thrilling David over Goliath win that became legendary, inspiring the Gene Hackman/ Barbara Hershey movie Hoosiers, placing the 1954 Indians on the Sports Illustrated list of the twenty best teams of the 20th century, and electrifying Indiana (two days later the line of cars following the team back to Milan for welcoming ceremonies was thirteen miles long and swelled the town's population temporarily from 1,150 to 40,000); in 1954, Las Vegas Sun reporter Ed Reid (later author of The Green Felt Jungle) was beaten in the lobby of the Desert Inn; in 1959, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor arrived in Las Vegas in a station wagon after a sightseeing trip to the Grand Canyon; in 1969, in Gibraltar, John and Yoko were married; in 1971, Army Secretary Stanley Resor announced reforms to deal with treatment of African-Americans, particularly at U.S. posts in Germany where they received fewer promotions and harsher punishments than whites, and where they faced discrimination in off-base housing rentals; in 1971, the University of Nevada-Reno student government was considering changing its allocation of student fees from basketball and football to basketball only; in 1988, over a park in Mountain View, California, a passing aircraft snagged the tail of a kite, lifting 8-year old DeAndra Anrig off the ground and carrying her 100 feet, when she let go (she was not seriously injured); in 1992, President Bush the Elder vetoed a tax cut for middle income taxpayers; in 1999, Las Vegas civil rights pioneer James McMillan died.

UPDATE: March 19, 2007, 3:58 a.m. PDT, 10:58 GMT/SUT — On March 19, 1920, the United States Senate rejected for the second time the Treaty of Versailles by a vote of 49-35, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for approval. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 19, 624, Muhammed proclaimed the "Day of Deliverance"; in 1848, Wyatt Earp, who closed out his career as a lawman in Tonopah, Nevada, was born in Warren County, Illinois; in 1879, Paiute leader Johnson Sides stopped in at a Reno newspaper office to find out if anything was known of the rumored killing of three Native Americans in the Honey Lake Valley; in 1902, a letter to the editor from Washo leader Captain Jim was published in Reno about the loss of tribal lands: "Now on account of not having homes the Washoe Indians wander from place to place and learn these destructive habits which the white people have introduced. Some white men says that we have no business to drink whisky if we know it to be dangerous but they do the very same thing yet they are supposed to be civilized men."; in 1908, after a Center Party deputy in the German Reichstag observed that "a negro also has immortal soul", reporters in the press gallery were heard to make joking remarks, whereupon the Centrists rose to their feet and the Center floor leader pointed a finger at the press and shouted "Swine!" after which the offended reporters sent word to the Reichstag president that they might strike unless an apology was forthcoming, and the day's newspapers ended their account of the session at the dispute; in 1908, Southern Pacific Railroad officials from throughout the nation met briefly in Sparks, though whether they were actually meeting or passing each other while waiting for east- and westbound trains was not clear (a Nevada State Journal headline said "No labor troubles involved" but the subject was not even mentioned in the story); in 1910, the coroner in Marion, Arkansas, ruled that the lynchings of Robert Austin and Charles Richardson were suicides; in 1917, in Wilson vs. New, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the eight-hour day and minimum wages by approving the Adamson Act of 1916, enacted to cover railroad workers; in 1914, the U.S. Senate voted for a women's suffrage constitutional amendment, though not by the majority needed for passage, after Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi was defeated in his effort to tie repeal of the 15th amendment (guaranteeing the African-American right to vote) to passage of women's suffrage and most southern Democrats voted against it without the Vardaman attachment (Senator Charles Townsend of Michigan said it was unnecessary to do injustice to blacks in order to do justice to women, and white supremacist Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada said he favored making the U.S. a white man's nation but said women's suffrage was not the vehicle for it); in 1914 mine owners in the Colorado coalfield war said they would sue union officials for $4,000,000 ($78,703,571.94 in 2006 dollars) for strike-related losses (one month later the Rockefeller interests launched the Ludlow massacre, burning miners and their families alive while machine guns raked the worker encampment at Ludlow, Colorado); in 1918, Iowa farmer Raymond Hall of Minerva, who had just been exempted from the draft on an agricultural exemption, was dragged from his home by a group of eight men, driven eight miles into the country, painted head to toe in yellow and black, and left to walk home (Hall attributed the action not to resentment of his exemption but to jealousy for his recent marriage to Miss Grace Jones); in 1919, Leo Henrikson, later a labor leader in Las Vegas, was born in Charleston, South Carolina; in 1925, Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, was made a bishop; in 1926 Genovaite Cizauskas, matriarch of the Cizauskas clan that has included a diplomat, NPR reporter, hangliding instructor, brewing exec and Fannie Mae exec, was born Genovaite Ambraziejus in Brooklyn; in 1928, Hans Kung, a Swiss Catholic priest and theologian who is a critic of the doctrine of papal infallibility and so was stripped in 1979 of his authority to teach Catholic theology, and who wrote the Declaration of the Religions for a Global Ethic that was adopted by the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1993, was born in Sursee, Canton of Lucerne; in 1928, U.S. court watermaster Harry Dukes filed a report with the federal court in Carson City on the division of waters from natural storage and artificial storage in Lake Tahoe; in 1931, gambling was made legal again in Nevada; in 1939, Langston Hughes established the New Negro Theatre in Los Angeles; in 1943, the Reno USO Council held a meeting to decide what to do after the owner of a building rented for a USO center for African-American soldiers cancelled the rental agreement, returned the rent check, and told Mayor Froehlich he had received complaints from nearby property owners; in 1943, after the Nevada Senate failed to authorize money for the paving of Wells Avenue in Reno, city officials said they were not giving up on the project; in 1954, Catholic Bishop Thomas Gorman announced the early start on construction of a new Catholic high school in Clark County to be named Santa Maria de Las Vegas (St. Mary of the Meadows), now called Gorman High School; in 1954, U.S. Representative Kenneth Keating introduced legislation designed to curb the Nevada gambling industry by banning casino advertising over state lines, prohibiting the shipment of gambling equipment into the state, and block collection of gambling debts with bank checks (the Las Vegas Review-Journal referred to him as Emmett Keating); in 1960, actor William Talman, who had been arrested a few days earlier on drug charges, threatened legal action against CBS for using a "morals" clause in his contract to fire him from his role as the district attorney on Perry Mason (Talman was later cleared of the drug charges and his fellow cast members demanded that CBS rehire him, which it did); in 1960, actor James Garner, who was being paid $1,500 a week by Warner Brothers, said he was a free agent and was leaving the Maverick television series, but a Warner Brothers spokesperson said the company still considered Garner under contract; in 1968, a group of "wise men" presidential advisors convened by President Johnson, many of whom supported getting into Vietnam, advised Johnson to get out of Vietnam; in 1969, the Chicago 8 were indicted; in 1971, National Welfare Rights Organization leader George Wiley praised Gloria Steinem and Flo Kennedy for coming to Reno for protest marches on the Mustang Ranch brothel and Reno casinos, but those marches were cancelled and the group flew to Las Vegas because of a shift in emphasis in the NWRO's Nevada campaign to the southern city (the Nevada State Journal referred to Steinem and Kennedy as "the Misses Steinem and Kennedy" and to Steinem as "a chic blonde"); in 1984, Kate and Allie debuted on CBS; in 1991, Phoenix lost the right to host the 1993 Super Bowl because of the behavior of state political leaders in denigrating Martin Luther King, Jr.; in 1996, a new Beatles song Real Love (created by adding the voices of George, Ringo and Paul to a recording made by John) was released as part of The Beatles Anthology; in 1997, President Clinton named George Tenet as CIA director.

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]

UPDATE: March 18, 2007, 2:28 p.m. PDT, 21:28 GMT/SUT —

On March 18, 1832, several British citizens were sentenced to seven years on the Australia penal colony for trade union organizing; in 1849, on his first day at sea after sailing from Massachusetts for the California gold fields, nineteen year-old Alf Doten began the diary that he would keep all his life (including his years as a Nevada editor), eventually stretching to 79 volumes, and would be edited by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and published in three mammoth volumes by the University of Nevada Press 70 years after his death; in 1879, African-Americans from Vickburg and other parts of Mississippi and Louisiana were for some reason arriving by the hundreds in St. Louis, alarming the populace (Mayor Henry Overstolz warned anyone against coming to the city without means) since there were few jobs, and a news report said "The negroes express the utmost horror at the thought of returning South, where they say their condition is utterly unbearable. They claim that all the ills of the old time slavery are inflicted on them upon the plantations, and say they would rather starve than return."; in 1907, during flooding in western Nevada, dozens of buildings in Reno were destroyed, 200 yards of railroad track at Floriston was swept away, Reno's Chinatown was underwater, the Verdi steel bridge went under, the Floriston dam was blown up to save the paper mills, sending logs into the river where they destroyed the Mayberry Bridge, and the Reno Evening Gazette got out a one-sheet edition; in 1908, in an era of frequent illegal U.S. interventions in Latin American and the Caribbean, Reno's Nevada State Journal approved: "We have no patience with the complacent ignorance of the people and newspapers of this country, that persist in regarding Haiti as a nation of cultured negroes. Haiti is a land of savage beasts, who cannot be called men by anyone familiar with their history."; in 1922, after a nonviolent public protest he led resulted in violence, Mahatma Gandhi pleaded guilty to "bringing or attempting to excite disaffection towards His Majesty's Government established by law in British India" by publishing three articles in Young India (see below); in 1926, whites (whose construction of Derby Dam on the Truckee impeded the spawn of trout from Pyramid Lake), reacting to rumors that Pyramid tribal members were slaughtering tons of trout to harvest the spawn, were demanding that the U.S. attorney or Congress or someone do something about the (possible) problem, but Pyramid Superindentent Snyder said the spawn harvesting was done by James Vogt of the state hatchery and Snyder also called for diverting all water in the Truckee from the Newlands Project to Pyramid for two weeks; in 1926, in keeping with a call by U.S. secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, a group of Nevadans was formed to study means to eliminate waste in Nevada industry; in 1932, final congressional approval was given to U.S. Senator George Norris' bill shielding workers from unrestricted federal court injunctions against strikes [EDITOR'S NOTE: The Norris-LaGuardia Act remains a towering landmark in U.S. labor law.]; in 1932, modification of the abatement order on the Sunset club on the Boulder Dam highway about eight miles east of Las Vegas was denied in federal court in Carson City, and three other clubs, the Mecca club at 29 Douglas Alley, the Atlas at 28 Douglas Alley in Reno and the Blue Goose in Las Vegas were abated (padlocked) for one year under the alcohol prohibition laws; in 1932, traveling to San Francisco to embark on a ship to Hawaii to handle the Fortescue Massie case, Clarence Darrow was interviewed while his train was standing in Reno and predicted that President Hoover would be swept out of office in November by an "astounding" vote; in 1932, the national "commander" of the American Legion arrived in Reno for a two-day visit and said he did not support making beer legal; in 1942, an internment program was established to imprison U.S. citizens in camps throughout the west (eventually, citizens of Japanese, German, Italian and Romanian descent were interned); in 1949, the publicity committee (chaired by an H.G. Wells!) of the Reno Chamber of Commerce, which had 100 "You'll like Reno" and 34 "Fly to Reno" signs around every section of the U.S. except the Pacific northwest, decided to add that section to the campaign; in 1954, former Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Constance Heehn was interviewed by her former newspaper on her efforts to save Utah death row inmate Don Neal from a firing squad; in 1954, a funeral was held for murdered Las Vegas labor figure James Hartley (24 years later, one of his pallbearers, Tom Hanley, was convicted of murdering another labor leader, Al Bramlet); in 1954, Las Vegas school officials said construction of Rancho High School would begin within a month; in 1961, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that non-whites made up about 7% per cent of Nevada's population of 285,278 persons — 21,835 persons, with 13,484 African-Americans, 6,681 Native Americans, 572 Chinese, 544 Japanese and 286 Filipinos, the black population mostly in Reno and Las Vegas and the Indian population mostly in rural areas; in 1967, Penny Lane hit number one; in 1969, Richard Nixon secretly and illegally ordered the bombing of neutral Cambodia; in 1970, in Worcester, Massachusetts, Country Joe McDonald was fined $500 for obscenity for leading a concert audience in his famous Gimme an F! cheer; in 1971, California Assemblymember Gene Chappie said he did not expect problems in the state for his bill, already approved by the assembly, to turn Coso Hot Springs over to the Paiute/Shoshone of Inyo County; in 1972, Neil Young's Heart of Gold (with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor on background vocals) hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1991, silent film star Vilma Banky, who starred in The Winning of Barbara Worth, filmed in Pershing County in 1926, died in Los Angeles.

Mahatma Gandhi/March 18, 1922: I wanted to avoid violence. Non-violence is the first article of my faith. It is the last article of my faith. But I had to make my choice. I had either to submit to a system which I considered has done an irreparable harm to my country or incur the risk of the mad fury of my people bursting forth when they understood the truth from my lips. I know that my people have sometimes gone mad. I am deeply sorry for it; and I am, therefore, here to submit not to a light penalty but to the highest penalty. I do not ask for mercy. I do not plead any extenuating act. I am here, therefore, to invite and submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of a citizen. The only course open to you, Mr. Judge, is, as I am just going to say in my statement, either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty if you believe that the system and law you are assisting to administer are good for the people.

UPDATE: March 17, 2007, 10:56 a.m. PDT, 17:56 GMT/SUT — Erin go braghless! — Betty J. Barbano, c. 1978, as quoted by the late, great Reno Gazette-Journal columnist Guy Richardson.

Nevada Regent Silas Ross on Nevada Southern University (now UNLV)/March 17, 1957: Our course is charted and if we steer an even course, the university will continue to grow in strength, value, and influence.

On March 17, 1875, the Territorial Enterprise reported that there were twenty dollar gold pieces circulating that had been split and gold gouged from the center, leaving them $5 to $6 short; in 1875, the Washoe Club in Virginia City moved to the Reynolds building on B Street just north of the courthouse; in 1876, in a search for Crazy Horse, the U.S. Army accidentally attacked the wrong Lakota village in South Dakota; in 1897, after the Nevada Legislature hastily made boxing legal, a heavyweight title fight between ("Ruby Bob") Bob Fitzsimmons and ("Gentleman") 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 1899, the Nevada State Journal wrote: "Nevada has about the same need for a Lieutenant Governor as for a Board of Harbor Commissioners."; in 1922, on the first St. Patrick's Day since part of Ireland was liberated from England, green neckties were worn and the tricolor was raised and blessed at Marlborough Hall, which had been transferred from crown forces to the Irish Republican Army; in 1922, in Washington green ties worn on the floor of the House of Representatives created such a sensation that the house was temporarily adjourned; in 1922, in New York a parade celebrated the liberation of most of Ireland but one sign carried by a women's society read "We know no south, we know no north, we know only Ireland"; in 1923, the Associated Press reported that France was considering turning the French West Indies over to the U.S. in payment of war debts; 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 and that left intact a previous law declaring the Victory highway the primary route; in 1923, $4,000 ($46,590.30 in 2006 dollars) in grazing fees from leases to ranchers of tribal land was being distributed to members of the Washo tribe in the Gardnerville area; in 1926, Reno Mayor Edwin Roberts and City Clerk J.B. Reese signed an agreement with owners of a twenty-foot strip of land on the Majestic Theatre property providing for appraisal of the property and negotiation of the purchase price between owners representative Richard Kirman and city representative Roy Frisch, a step toward construction of a Center Street bridge across the Truckee; in 1932, tribal police and federal narcs raided an alleged Carson City opium den at 425 East 3d Street that also reportedly served alcohol; in 1932, former Nevada assemblymember, state supreme court justice and Nye county district attorney Patrick McCarran announced his candidacy for United States senator and began his campaign by trying to straddle the prohibition issue; 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 (results were posted daily); in 1932, the search for the Lindbergh baby moved to Denver when New Jersey state police superintendent H. Norman Schwartzkopf asked Denver police to investigate whether Colorado gangsters were involved in the kidnapping; in 1934, thirty African-American students were ejected from the U.S. House of Representatives dining room when they sought service as a protest against the firing of a waiter who tried to serve blacks, with police shoving the students out of the restaurant, down the hallway and outdoors, fists swinging and blows landing; in 1934, Akron, Ohio, merchant Howard Gross, who threw his two year old son into a fiery furnace "because the Lord told me to do it", was declared insane; in 1950, U.S. secretary of defense Louis Johnson said the U.S. was developing terrible weapons — hydrogen bombs and chemical, biological and radiological weapons — that would make all others obsolete, while Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron accused Johnson of withholding from municipal governments information needed to plan defenses against atomic attack; in 1950, at least fifty businesspeople, private pilots and other citizens of the small town of Farmington, New Mexico, reported seeing unidentified flying objects doing acrobatic aerial maneuvers at midday; in 1955, Dick Graves opened the Sparks Nugget; in 1957, President Magsaysay of the Phillippines died in a plane crash; in 1957, the cornerstone was laid for the first building at Nevada Southern University; in 1960, the Eisenhower administration formed an anti-Castro paramilitary unit in preparation for an illegal invasion 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 Democratic Party old guard, trying to retake control of the county organization, announced a set of precinct meetings to compete with those held by the new reform leaders, and reform leader Charles Springer said some of the old guard meetings were scheduled for cow pastures and nonexistent addresses; 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 César Chávez began a march from Delano to Sacramento; in 1970, U.S. postal workers struck; in 1970, Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska defended President Nixon's right to appoint mediocre judges to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that "there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers [and] they are entitled to a little representation, aren't they...?"

UPDATE: March 16, 2007, 3:42 a.m. PDT, 10:42 GMT/SUT — On March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War, the My Lai Massacre was carried out by United States troops under the command of Lt. William L. Calley Jr. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Freedom's Journal/first issue: We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.

Heinrich Heine/March 16, 1822: Religion cannot sink lower than when somehow it is raised to a state religion. It becomes then an avowed mistress.

On March 16, 1827, Freedom's Journal, the first African-American newspaper in the United States, was published for the first time by free blacks to provide an alternative to racist coverage in the mainstream press (it was succeeded in 1829 by The Rights of All); in 1892, the Nevada State Journal ran a melancholy report from the fading mining camp of Pioche: "The furnaces were shut down Monday, February 29th, at 5:30, and the employes (sic) at the smelter and upon the Pioche and Jack Rabbit railroad were given their time. About fifty men altogether were laid off from the smelter and railroad. They are making arrangements to leave camp. Our streets are nearly deserted now. Thus doth our glory fade."; in 1910, Reno-s African Methodist Episcopal Church received a permit to build a church on 220 Bell Street; in 1939, in Oklahoma City, Mary Hill filed for divorce from her husband, who abandoned her 29 years earlier; in 1940, a group of movie stars including Errol Flynn, Alan Hale, Humphrey Bogart, Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan arrived in Reno on the train for the premiere in Virginia City of the movie Virginia City, which also premiered at the Majestic, Granada and Wigwam theatres in Reno; 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 1954, in Los Angeles, a jury was deliberating on the case against Jimmy Frattianno, Dominic Raspona and James Modica, accused of threatening the lives of Terry Oil Company executives (including Nevada Lieutenant Governor Cliff Jones); 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 1964, with Beatlemania still in full throat, Can't Buy Me Love (Capitol 5150) went straight to number one the instant it was released on the strength of a million and a half advance orders; 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, 400 Vietnamese were murdered in two sections (including My Lai 4) of Son My village in Quang Ngai province (the Pentagon asked journalists to discontinue the use of the term "massacre" in favor of "incident", and journalists have generally complied); in 1968, U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for president; in 1972, Yoko and John were served with deportation papers by the Nixon administration; 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: THE IDES OF MARCH, 2007, 3:33 a.m. PST, 10:33 GMT-SUT — On March 15, 1965, addressing a joint session of Congress, President Johnson called for new legislation to guarantee every American's right to vote. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.       RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006 NEWLY UPLOADED BLAST FROM THE PAST: The reasons behind the failure of Nevada's first non-smoking casino Barbwire 3-2-1990

On March 15, 44 BC, Roman military dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated; in 1493, Christopher Columbus wrote a letter describing Native Americans as "men of great deference and kindness" (which did not prevent him from cutting off their arms if they failed to mine enough gold to meet his quota); in 1848, the Texas Legislature created Santa Fe County in New Mexico (I know it makes no sense, but that's really what happened); in 1867, the first special session of the Nevada Legislature began, called by Governor Henry Blasdel, lasting three weeks and dealing with revenue matters; 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 1907, the Nevada Senate killed a proposed state-funded old miner's home; 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 1927, the Nevada Senate voted in the morning to reject without consideration a bill already passed by the Assembly allowing wide open gambling in the state, then voted in the afternoon to give the bill a hearing; 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 1940, the NBC Radio program Death Valley Days broadcast a radio play titled Abe Curry, The Father Of Carson; in 1945, the King Cole Trio was number one in the first Billboard magazine albums chart (Nat Cole later abandoned jazz for MOR ballad singing, but his trio's recordings are still widely admired); 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 record on the Cat label, setting off the doo-wop era (unfortunately, a white group called The Crew Cuts recorded a cover version, draining away the Chords' earnings and their hit, a common practice in the 1950s); 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. (Income tax day was a month earlier in those days); in 1955, in a fateful and ultimately disastrous decision, Elvis took on Tom Parker as his manager; in 1956, My Fair Lady opened on Broadway; 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 1957, a one-day delay in delivery of a gambling regulation bill to Governor Russell six days before the end of the 1957 legislature raised questions of whether the governor had to act on it before the end of the session or could wait until after the lawmakers went home, which would determine whether the '57 or '59 legislature would vote on overriding a veto; in 1962, reporters and photographers laid siege to the Washoe County courthouse, but Mary Rockefeller, wife of the New York governor, failed to appear for her divorce; 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); on the Ides of March, 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 (14 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, the basis for the Bush claim that "he gassed his own people"). [[EDITOR'S NOTE: In early 1991, with the fires of Kuwait still burning, the San Francisco Chronicle enterprised a report, based on an analysis by the Army War College, that whatever caused the deaths could not have been poison gas. The story's subsequent invisibility has been remarkable. A Google search for "Chronicle Halabja deaths not caused by poison gas 1988 war college" generated 740 returns, so at least some people have written of this oft-stated reason for war. Alas and alack, a spot check reveals that most merely repeat the lie. The classical gas story is similar to the debunked report that Saddam tried to have Bush the Elder assassinated during a trip to Kuwait. Dubya hisself has often given credibility to what's little more than a glorified urban legend. The tipping point for public support of Gulf War I involved marketing of a recycled lie from World War I. (Barbwire 11-11-2001) As a wise man once said, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Lush Rambo and Dubya's true believers have all gotten rich by exploiting a fatal flaw in the character of this monster mannukind — a blind willingness to believe the sensational, never letting facts get in the way of a good story. Which is pretty much how we started this war in the first place. — AB]]

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]

UPDATE: March 14, 2007, 3:38 a.m. PDT, 11:38 GMT/SUT— UNDERBRUSH! LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL: In-depth statewide poll says Gov. Gibbons @ 29%, Dubya @ 34%. Hillary and Rudy would win presidential primaries today. Nevadans pessimistic about direction of state. Heavy stuff. TOLJASO ABOUT JIM THE DIM. CAN YOU SAY ONE-TERMER?

UPDATE: March 14, 2007, 1:53 a.m. PDT, 08:53 GMT/SUT — On March 14, 1900, Congress ratified the Gold Standard Act. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 14, 1903, painter Adolph Gottlieb, who won a 1939 competition to paint a mural in the post office at Yerington, Nevada, and later was appointed to the New York City Art Commission, was born in New York; in 1879, Albert Einstein (named "person of the 20th century" by Time magazine) was born in Ulm, Bavaria; in 1881, Assemblymember James Adams of Eureka County was shot in a saloon fight and was not expected to live; in 1896, Sutro Baths opened in the Bay area; in 1912, the Carroll County Courthouse Shooting in Hillsville, Virginia, a gunfight between defendants and law officers in a crowded courtroom after a guilty verdict was read, left five people dead and seven wounded and made headlines across the nation; in 1921, the Nevada Senate voted 9 to 8 to remove Nevada District Judge Frank Langan from office, falling short of the two thirds margin needed for removal; 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 1928, 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 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 1939, U.S. Senators Key Pittman and Patrick McCarran of Nevada sharply criticized Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes for setting up a community, Boulder City, as a federal reservation "in opposition" to existing communities in Nevada; in 1943, Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man debuted at the Cincinnati Symphony, conducted by Eugene Goossens, who commissioned the piece as a tribute to U.S. servicepeople (Copland: "The challenge was to compose a traditional fanfare, direct and powerful, yet with a contemporary sound. I think Goosens was rather puzzled by the title I chose. He [Goossens] wrote, "Its title is as original as its music, and I think it deserves a special occasion for its performance. If it is agreeable to you, we will premiere it at income tax time.‚ [Income taxes were filed earlier then.] I was all for honoring the common man at income tax time."); 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 1960, Martin and Lewis reunited in Las Vegas and did some on-stage routines, but press reports said the reconciliation was temporary because the two men were making more money separately than they did as a team; in 1961, former vice-president Nixon joined the Los Angeles law firm Adams, Duque and Hazeltine; in 1961, two days after U.S. Representative Alfred Santangelo called for a boycott of sponsors of ABC's The Untouchables because of its portrayals of Italo-Americans, Liggett and Myers Tobacco dropped its sponsorship of the program; 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 1961, The University of Nevada purchased the diaries of pioneer editor Alf Doten from John Howell Books of San Francisco for $55,000; in 1961, the Reno city council sold the town's brick clock tower city hall to First National Bank to be torn down and replaced with a parking garage, generating outrage in the community; 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: March 13, 2007, 7:08 a.m. PDT, 14:08 GMT/SUT — On March 13, 1804, the House of Representatives approved a committee report recommending the impeachment of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase and appointed a committee to draft articles of impeachment; in 1868, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began in the U.S. Senate; 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 1903, the Nevada Assembly approved an amended version of Assemblymember H.R. Cooke's Reno incorporation bill, already passed by the senate; in 1913, a silent film of The Little Minister, starring former Goldfield, Tonopah and Reno resident Clara Kimball, finished its run at Reno's Grand Theatre (the story, by Peter Pan author James Barrie, is one of the most filmed in movie history — 1913, 1915, 1921, 1922, 1934); 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 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 1924, an attempt to broadcast a radio program around the world from London was made (it could not be picked up in Reno); in 1925, the Tennessee Legislature outlawed teaching evolution; in 1928, Nancy Ann Miller of Seattle coverted to Hinduism so she could become the third wife of the maharajah of Indore; in 1928, Frank Edwards, who campaigned for Seattle mayor on the argument that "the mayoralty could be satisfactorily filled only by a man" and refused to debate because he said "you know it's useless to argue with a woman", defeated the reelection bid of Bertha Landes, the first woman mayor of a metropolitan U.S. city; in 1936, the Civilian Conservation Corps boys at Camp Reno held a dance for themselves and the people of the town before they ended their work and returned to their homes in the east; in 1936 Lovelock formed a 69-person national guard company; in 1939, a special committee of the Nevada Senate set up to investigate the state highway department reported back to the senate that it was impossible to do the investigation in the time available, that is, before the end of the legislative session; in 1943, the Clark County delegation at the Nevada Legislature introduced legislation providing for Las Vegans to vote on whether to adopt the city manager form of government; in 1947, Brigadoon opened on Broadway; in 1947, The Best Years Of Our Lives won the Academy Award for best picture of the year; in 1948, Governor Vail Pittman asked Nevada communities to begin daylight saving time on March 14, and mayors Vern Hurst of Sparks and Francis Smith of Reno said they would comply; 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 encampment and placing 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 1957, the Georgia General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for the impeachment of U.S. Supreme Court justices Earl Warren, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Thomas Clark, Felix Frankfurter and Stanley Reed; in 1961, Nevada state highway engineer Otis Wright announced that the construction of the Third Street route of the Interstate 80 freeway through Reno would begin June 30 in spite of U.S. Representative Walter Baring's objections to the route (it was never built on that 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 1965, The Kinks' So Tired of Waiting For You was released; in 1971, a National Welfare Rights Organization organizer said plans were being laid for the second welfare rights march on the Las Vegas strip, including entering the Sands casino and sitting in on the casino floor; in 1971, in a heavy wind, a steel girder fell from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas humanities building (which was under construction) , missed the Moyer Buildng where the Nevada Board of Regents was meeting, and crushed four cars parked in front of the building; in 1975, Same Time Next Year debuted on Broadway and ran for 1,425 performances; in 1977, newspapers around the nation that participated in The Arizona Project, an investigative reporting project designed to complete the work of assassinated reporter Don Bolles, began publication of the series of articles containing the project's findings (the Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal were among the papers that were part of the project); 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), all 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.

UPDATE: March 12, 2007, 6:35 a.m. PDT, 13:35 GMT/SUT — On March 12, 1873, President Grant signed an executive order reserving land in the Moapa Valley "for the Indians of that locality"; in 1927, Photographer Rolly Ham, who with his camera chronicled the early 20th century history of Fallon, Nevada, died at age 45; in 1928, during the day, Los Angeles water director 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 1928, trial was set for violation of the federal alcohol prohibition law for 12 businesses in Reno, one in Sparks, one in Black Springs, one in Yerington, one in Verdi, one in Carlin and one in Lovelock; in 1930, Gandhi and almost 80 satyagrahis (non-violent fighters) started walking on the 240 mile "Salt March" to protest the British monopoly on salt and the salt tax, encouraging the illegal manufacture of salt, demonstrating the power of satyagraha (see below), giving millions a sense of empowerment, and taking a major step toward Indian independence; in 1935, Lyon County Republican Senator George Friedhoff resigned from the Nevada Senate to become Federal Housing Administrator in the state; in 1946, Nevada Governor Vail Pittman was back in the capital after meeting with a group of Boulder Dam power users in Las Vegas and before flying to Los Angeles with state water engineer Alfred Merritt Smith and Attorney General Alan Bible for a meeting of the Colorado River Commission; in 1947, President Truman announced the influential Truman doctrine that in the short run led the U.S. to intervene in the Greek civil war on the side of the neo-fascist governing forces and in the long run led to U.S. interventions in Iran, Vietnam, Guatemala and innumerable other places, in the name of anti-communism; in 1948, Attorney General Alan Bible advised the Nevada Tax Commission that state law says "Separate property of either spouse owned prior to the marriage does not become community property by reason of the marriage and their living and cohabiting together"; 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; in 1954, U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada said he had been in touch with the Bureau of Internal Revenue in Washington and obtained assurances that income tax collectors would take the word of casino dealers about how much they made in tips unless the amount was "clearly out of line"; 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 1955, jazz great Charlie Parker died in New York; in 1963, Bob Dylan cancelled an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show after CBS censors refused to let him sing his song Talkin' John Birch Society Blues; in 1963, The Beatles appeared on a weekly taped rock program in Manchester, England, called Here We Go and sang three songs (Do You Want To Know A Secret?, Misery, and Please Please Me); in 1971, 19 year-old Joseph James Gomez of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Dinh Tuong province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 87); in 1997, ABC News' Prime Time Live broadcast a report on a dispute between Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa and state gambling regulator Bill Bible.

Gandhi: Truth (Satya) implies Love, and Firmness (Agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force ... that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or Non-violence.... [If] we are Satyagrahis and offer Satyagraha, believing ourselves to be strong ... we grow stronger and stronger everyday. With our increase in strength, our Satyagraha too becomes more effective, and we would never be casting about for an opportunity to give it up.

UPDATE: March 11, 2007, 5:29 a.m. PDT, 12:29 GMT/SUT — On March 11, 1941, President Roosevelt signed into law the Lend-Lease Bill, providing war supplies to countries fighting the Axis. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 11, 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 1810, a Louisiana court ruled in Adelle vs. Beauregard that a person "of color" is assumed to be free unless a slaveowner could prove otherwise, but it also distinguished between persons of African heritage and other persons of color; 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 1818, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley was published (the story was written on a remarkable overnight ghost story-writing contest proposed by Lord Byron at Lake Geneva in 1816 which produced both Frankenstein and John Polidori's pioneering The Vampyre, the first modern vampire story); 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, 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 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 1931, the U.S. government awarded the contract for construction of Boulder Dam to Six Companies, Inc.; in 1937, the Nevada State Journal printed this photo caption: "The universal fingerprinting program of the federal bureau of investigation is meeting with plenty of cooperation from local law enforcement agencies, especially when it give the officers a change to hold a pretty girl's hand, and Officer Richard Heap of the Reno police department was all smiles yesterday when Miss. Isabelle Hislop asked to be fingerprinted in line with the campaign. The Junior Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring the program in Reno, and the identification bureau at the sheriff's office is also co-operating."; in 1933, German minister Hermann Goring announced that large Jewish businesses did not enjoy police protection: "I will ruthlessly set the police at work whenever harm is being done to the German people. But I refuse to make the police the guardians of Jewish department stores."; 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 1948, Columnist Drew Pearson reported that the U.S. House Appropriations Committee had voted on "the dynamite laden subject of barring federal money" to segregated universities and hospitals, and that the record of the vote had been burned and the members of the committee sworn to secrecy; in 1950, the Confederated Tribes of Nevada began a conference in Nixon to discuss the pending withdrawal of federal guardianship over Native Americans and other issues; in 1953, an atomic bomb accidentally dropped on South Carolina by a U.S. bomber failed to explode, although it was a close call — five out of six safety catches on the device opened; 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, Atomic Energy Commission officials took reporters and photographers deep into a tunnel where a 1.7 kiloton September 19 atomic test had been detonated and told them that the test, the first underground one, had shown that tests could be conducted without fallout and would lead to about half of the Nevada tests being conducted underground; in 1958, Dr. F.A. Arnold, chief of a federal dental research program, said he was mystified why fluoridating public water supplies was still a controversial issue in hundreds of U.S. communities: "Continuing scientific studies have demonstrated beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt that fluoridation is a completely safe, inexpensive and very effective method of preventing tooth decay. I know of no other public health measure which is backed up by such an overwhelming body of proof. This is not a matter on which we have to make carefully hedged, qualified statements. Every scintilla of evidence points the same way."; in 1958, Carmen Lombardo and John Loeb, seeking more royalties from Arthur Godfrey's theme song Seems Like Old Times, lost a ruling in a New York state court (Godfrey played parts of the song a dozen times a day on his various shows, which was assessed for royalties as only one play); in 1958, oil drilling was going on all over Nevada, in White Pine County, in Pine Valley (an old mining district in Eureka County), and in Paradise Valley near Las Vegas; in 1960, Dr. James McMillan of Las Vegas threatened street protests unless Clark County casinos integrated by March 26; in 1960, California Governor Pat Brown, whose term of office had been wracked by public tumult over the death sentence imposed on convicted killer Caryl Chessman and who had given Chessman a reprieve while he unsuccessfully asked the legislature to abolish the death penalty, said his involvement in the case was at an end (the Vatican made a plea for Chessman's life the same day).; in 1960, Nevada Lt. Governor Rex Bell said Republican state chair Emery Graunke was out of line when he criticized Governor Grant Sawyer's use of Nevada air guard planes, saying that GOP Governor Charles Russell and state lawmakers of both parties did the same thing; 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 1973, in a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the Nevada congressional delegation, U.S. senators Howard Cannon and Paul Laxalt and U.S. Representative James Santini, complained that the EPA had been dilatory in approving sewer plant design for Reno/Sparks, leading to a sewer capacity crisis; 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 2000, eight people were killed when a van carrying 11 skidded off the road and rolled down a hill on Interstate 15 in what may have been the worst single-vehicle accident in Nevada history; 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: March 10, 2007, 12:01 a.m. PST, 8:01 GMT/SUT — On March 10, 1985, Konstantin U. Chernenko, Soviet leader for just 13 months, died at age 73. His death was announced on March 11th. Politburo member Mikhail S. Gorbachev was chosen to succeed him. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 10, 1848, the United States Senate ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the fruit of U.S. aggression against Mexico, ending the disreputable Mexican invasion and bringing the territory that became Nevada into the union (the treaty was signed February 2 and was "formally proclaimed" on July 4); in 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 1875, a first anniversary ball of the Silver City Miners Union was held at Armory Hall; in 1893, the Nevada State Journal reprinted a report from the Galveston News: "On Tuesday, at the residence of Mr. William Early at Pine Valley, was found an egg having the following in raised letters on the shell: 'The judgment day is now at hand. All ye take warning.' The news soon spread over the entire community and created intense excitement, especially among the children and negroes. Some were crying, some were singing, some praying, and all were repenting. The egg was laid by the favorite hen and under the front doorstep, and there was to be a dance that night, and Mr Early's wife and daughter were the two most popular dancers in the community, while he was the violinist for the occasion, but the finding of this egg broke up the pleasures of the evening."; in 1906, a huge explosion in a coal mine in northern France (an elevator was blown to the surface) caused a terrible disaster with the number of dead originally announced as 1,193 and 1,219 and later set at 1,099 including many children, the worst mine disaster in history and one that generated pressure for greater worker safety and against child labor; 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, after refusing for seven years to reveal the information, the U.S. Treasury finally disclosed the expenditures made from a July 1 1902 congressional appropriation of $45,000 for expenses associated with the aftermath of President McKinley's assassination and it came to $37,591.13 for medical bills and undertaking costs; in 1910, Big Springs, Texas, which had already driven all African-Americans out of Howard County, voted in a landslide to outlaw alcohol, leading to fulfillment of a local slogan, "No niggers and no booze"; 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 arriving in Reno at 4:45, defying Churchill County Senator R.L. Douglass' claim that the trip could not be made under 2:30; 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 1929, weary 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 1937, managers of rival cemeteries Inglewood Park and Forest Lawn, who were in a fierce advertising and sales campaign against each other, got into a fist fight in Los Angeles city hall; in 1943, the SS demanded that Bulgaria (a Third Reich ally) deport its Jews to Poland but objections by farmers, clergy and scholars convinced the Bulgarian government to refuse and no Jews were ever deported (Bulgarian-Americans, on the other hand, were interned by the United States); 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 1958, Fancy Eagle, also called Rush Roberts, reportedly the last of Pawnee scouts for the U.S. Army, died in Pawnee, Oklahoma; in 1959, Elvis' new single went gold the instant it was released, as a result of advance orders (A Fool Such As I b/w I Need Your Love Tonight); in 1960, the Judiciary Committee of the California Senate ended a marathon session in the early morning hours after killing on an 8 to 7 vote Governor Edmund Brown's proposal to outlaw the death penalty, apparently clearing the way for the execution of alleged killer Caryl Chessman (Brown, at the suggestion of his son Jerry, had called the legislature into special session and given a reprieve to Chessman while the lawmakers considered the death penalty ban); 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 Chávez to end his fast before it did more damage to his health); in 1973, Nevada District Judge James Santini testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Las Vegas needed a third justice of the peace to alleviate an "almost nightmarish" caseload that forced the two justices to "cram stuff through", making their courts "a turnstile affair"; in 1975, John Lennon's recording of Ben E. King's Stand By Me was released; in 1977, with Time magazine reporting that vanished Las Vegas union leader Al Bramlet had run afoul of the mob over the use of the Culinary Union pension fund, Las Vegas police said they would search for Bramlet "from dawn to dusk" indefinitely, though Lt. Beecher Avants said "We ain't got nothing. What do you want me to say, that we found another beer bottle today?"; in 1995, the Hard Rock Cafe opened in Las Vegas.

UPDATE: March 9, 2007, 12:37 a.m. PST, 8:37 GMT/SUT — On March 9, 1862, during the Civil War, the ironclads Monitor and Virginia (formerly Merrimac) clashed for five hours to a draw at Hampton Roads, Va. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 9, 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 1872, in Washington, D.C., federal engineers G.K. Gilbert and George Wheeler filed a report on their explorations of Arizona and Nevada; in 1876, the Nevada State Journal wrote that "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, the 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 1910, the state asylum board (the governor, treasurer and controller) began an investigation of a dispute between the hospital director and a hospital physician with "the outcome of the case being watched with considerable interest by no less than eight physicians who hope to land Dr. Gibson's place in event he is removed"; in 1910, the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor asked the American Federation of Labor to call a nationwide strike on behalf of street car workers in Philadelphia; in 1912, the Reno chapter of the International Concatenated Order of Hoo Hoo (I'm not making this up) initiated 20 new members; in 1933, a two-day wave of anti-Jewish riots began in Germany, conducted by a veterans organization, Stahlhelm, and the SA; in 1939, a letter from U.S. Senator Key Pittman to Nevada Lieutenant Governor Maurice Sullivan was made public, and it denounced U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes' administration of the Hoover Dam area as dictatorial; in 1940, the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal agency, provided $24,578 for street improvements throughout Tonopah; in 1940, Reno police got new seven-pointed badges; in 1944, in a report on a congressionally-sponsored survey of higher education for African-Americans, the U.S. Office of Education called on white educational institutions in the south to open their doors to blacks and urged Congress to establish university education for blacks and whites where it was not available; in 1944, the Gallup survey found respondents supported drafting women rather than calling more fathers into the service; in 1956, MGM's Meet Me In Las Vegas, starring Cyd Charisse, Jim Backus, Dan Dailey, Lili Darvas and Agnes Moorehead, was released; in 1964, the epic battle began in the U.S. Senate over the 1964 civil rights bill, leading to a filibuster that lasted 57 days (including six Saturdays); in 1964, the first Ford Mustang was manufactured; in 1969, 19 year-old Rodney Lane Crane of McGill, Nevada, died in Binh Duong province, Vietnam (panel 30w line 86 of the Vietnam wall) and 20 yea-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.

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.       RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006 NEWLY UPLOADED BLAST FROM THE PAST: The reasons behind the failure of Nevada's first non-smoking casino Barbwire 3-2-1990

UPDATE: March 8, 2007, 3:29 a.m. PST,11:29 GMT/SUT — NEWS BULLETINS: ALTERNET reports that former Sen. John Edwards will not participate in the Nevada Democratic presidential candidates debate co-sponsored by Lord Rupert Murdoch's FOX Noise Network, headed by Richard Nixon's media guru Roger Ailes. This news comes while Nevada Donkeykong leaders were issuing lame and timid rationales and apologies for doing a deal with the devil. KUDOS AND ROSES TO THE MAN FROM NAWCARLINA. [[UPDATE: The FOX fiasco has been cancelled.]]...RAW STORY reports via Alternet on the location of a U.S. gulag in Poland at the site of a former Soviet/NAZI compound...Be well. Raise hell.

FROM POOR DENNY'S ALMANAC — On March 8, 1882, the Reno Evening Gazette reported "There is a movement on foot to kill polygamy by the emigration of Gentiles to Utah."; 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, Nevada 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 1913, a mistrial was declared in the trial of defense attorney Clarence Darrow for suborning perjury in the trial of the McNamara brothers, who were accused of blowing up The Los Angeles Times building; in 1939, the AFL and the CIO held the first session of a peace conference in hopes of ending their war, but the AFL rejected John L. Lewis' proposal for combining all major labor groups into one big union; in 1952, two hundred newsboys were guests at a free movie at the Crest Theatre in recognition of their maintaining delivery of the Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal during heavy snowstorms; 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 1957, former Nevada surveyor general Wayne "Red" McLeod testified before a Nevada Legislature committee investigating whether Surveyor General Louis Ferrari should be impeached for corrupt land dealings; in 1961, U.S. 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 1961, a joint hearing of the budget committees of the Nevada Assembly and Senate on whether the state could provide more funding to county school districts erupted in snapping and snarling between Assemblymember Ray Knisley of Pershing County and Clark County Commissioner Harley Harmon, who also pounded his fist on the table; in 1968, 20 year- old Danny Lee Smothers of Carson City, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 61); in 1969, 20 year-old Larry Donald Brown of Caliente, Nevada, died in Kien Hoa province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 72); in 1970, 21 year-old William Robert Rogne of Fallon, Nevada, died in Quang Duc province, Vietnam (panel 13w, row 98); in 1992, The New York Times created the Whitewater scandal with a story by Jeff Gerth that used emotionally loaded language and withheld exculpatory information, setting off almost a decade of prosecutorial and journalistic tail-chasing.

UPDATE: March 7, 2007, 12:07 a.m. PST, 8:07 GMT/SUT — On March 7, 1965, a march by civil rights demonstrators was broken up in Selma, Ala., by state troopers and a sheriff's posse. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 7, 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, Reno's city government was considering installing clocks on the city hall tower; in 1913, legislation was introduced in the Nevada Legislature to extend the north and south ends of the capitol; 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, the Nevada Assembly approved and sent to the governor a women's wage act setting an eighteen dollar weekly minimum wage for women and providing that split shifts worked by women could not extend over more than twelve hours; in 1939, Clark Gable received a divorce in Las Vegas from Ria Langham; in 1943, in Radoszkowice, Byelorussia, a Jewish community established in the 16th century was liquidated; 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, on the same day that Anne Frank wrote in her journal that "he who has courage and faith will never perish in misery!"; 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 1949, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee was busily processing a secret bill giving U.S. intelligence agents new powers, and committee chair Carl Vinson said no details of the bill would be given to Congress, no record of the committee hearing was kept, debate on the bill would be limited, amendments would not be permitted, and little time would be provided on the floor for questions before the vote; in 1952, it was reported that Rev. Fred Busher, former pastor of Reno's First Methodist Church, faced down a hostile crowd of 130 people in his new pastorate in San Pablo, California, the crowd objecting to the family of an African-American contractor moving into the house they bought (Busher planted a U.S. flag between the mob and the besieged home and started reciting the declaration of independence); in 1952, 250 officers and airmen were scheduled to begin arriving to staff the headquarters of the new Stead Air Base north of Reno, most of them with families in need of two- and three-bedroom homes and apartments in Reno; in 1952, fifty-five Nevadans died of tuberculosis in 1951 compared to 29 in 1959, according to state health officials; in 1959, the Reno Chamber of Commerce and Reno's Nevada State Journal were calling for renaming Slide Mountain as Mt. Reno; 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, his only opponent; 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 1968, nineteen year-old Sterling Price Johnson of Carlin, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 45 on the Vietnam wall; in 1969, 21 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 1971, the Nevada State Journal published a book review by Don Lynch of Buffalo Hearts by Sun Bear, a Chippewa who lived in Reno, and an unsigned review of Dee Brown's Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

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.

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]

UPDATE: March 6, 2007, 12:01 a.m. PST, 8:01 GMT/SUT— On March 6, 1836, in a ninety-minute early morning battle, Santa Anna's troops defeated the force inside the Alamo, killing the 200 defenders with David Crockett and a half-dozen others taken prisoner and then executed by being hacked to death with swords; in 1857, in its Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court held that Scott, a slave, could not sue for his freedom in a federal court [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; 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 1931, Time magazine's radio dramatizations of the news, The March of Time, went on the air; in 1937, Idaho Governor Barzilla Clark signed a bill reducing the divorce residency requirement to six weeks, part of an effort to make the new Union Pacific resort area of Sun Valley into a divorce Mecca like Reno and Las Vegas; 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 12 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 1959, Fats Domino sang When the Saints Go Marching In on American Bandstand; in 1961, Reno labor union leaders were furious with U.S. Representative Walter Baring of Nevada for trying to divert what would become the Interstate 80 freeway route from downtown Reno to a bypass route north of town, thus interfering with construction of some housing developments; in 1962, Governor Grant Sawyer appointed attorney Procter Hug, Jr., to the Nevada Board of Regents to replace casino owner Newt Crumley, who had died in a plane crash; 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 1967, Muhammad Ali's 1-A draft classification was upheld and he was ordered inducted into the military; 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 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 and convicted only of a technical violation, a federal judge apologized to him and castigated federal investigators, and the Times retracted its reporting).

UPDATE: March 5, 2007, 3:31 p.m. PST, 23:31 GMT/SUT — On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 5, 1770, eight British soldiers goaded by a crowd of colonists panicked and fired into the crowd, killing five men (the soldiers were charged with murder and defended by John Adams, and exaggerated accounts of the incident were used to whip up anti-British sentiment throughout the colonies); in 1824, Napoleon, exiled by the British for life to the tiny island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic, died after six years there; in 1849, a convention of Latter Day Saints settlers was held at Salt Lake City to organize a government for a "State of Deseret" (which, as Utah Territory, would initially contain much of present day Nevada); in 1869, Elko County, Nevada, was created (no verifiable explanation for the name is known); in 1875, the first grand ball of Silver State Grove No. 1 of the United Ancient Order of Druids was held at the National Guard Hall on the Comstock; in 1877, after the appointment of Rutherford B. Hayes as president following his defeat in both the election and the electoral vote (which provoked widespread anger), rumors swept the nation that Samuel Tilden, who actually won the election, would take the oath of office in New York and then go to Washington; in 1901, U.S. Rep. George White of North Carolina, a minister, former slave and opponent of Jim Crow (and author of A Brief Account of the Life, Experience, Travels, and Gospel Labours of George White, an African) ended his congressional service, the last African-American to serve in Congress for 20 years; in 1903, a state legislative act was approved making Fallon, Nevada, the seat of Churchill County; in 1911, the Nevada State Journal wrote that "It is a reproach on civilization that these young Indians should be in the condition of close cousins to savage wildcats."; in 1910, during a strike on the Tonopah and Goldfield Railroad, railroad officials were arrested for posing as law officers, a strikebreaker was rotten-egged by citizens as he left a barber shop, and a performance of The Gingerbread Man at the Majestic Theatre in Reno was cancelled when the troup of performers were delayed by the interruption in rail service; in 1924, President Coolidge declared an amnesty for all U.S. deserters in the world war who had deserted after the armistice, about a hundred men (those who deserted before the armistice had been amnestied by President Harding); 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 1924, in response to a plea from the Philippine legislature, President Coolidge said he did not believe the time for independence of the Philippines, seized by the U.S. in 1899-1902, had come: "The government of the United States would not feel that it had performed its full duty by the Filipino people or discharged all of its obligations to civilization if it would yield at this time to your aspiration for national independence."; in 1911, registered nurse Frances Dunn was being called a heroine after traveling around a Ute reservation in Utah in a blizzard and frigid temperatures innoculating more than a hundred tribal members during an epidemic; in 1960, Elvis was discharged from the Army at Fort Dix; in 1961, construction was underway on 500 homes in Hidden Valley Estates south of Sparks, a development that would become one of the Truckee Meadows' swankiest and most troublesome areas; in 1963, singers Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins died in a plane crash; in 1967, Persian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who was overthrown and replaced by Reza Pahlavi in a 1953 CIA-engineered coup that ushered in Pahlavi's quarter-century tyranny, died in Ahmad Abad, Iran; in 1968, 18 year-old David Louis Bidart of Reno, Nevada, died in Phuoc Long province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 3 of the Vietnam wall); in 1968, at an appearance in Hampton, New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon made some comments about Vietnam that some journalists interpreted to mean that Nixon said he had a "secret plan" to end the war, and the term became a chronic problem for him as president even though he never spoke it; in 1969, the first issue of the rock magazine Creem was published; in 1981, President Reagan called for an end to legal aid for the poor; in 1992, U.S. Senator Robert Kerrey of Nebraska withdrew from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, singing Eric Bogle's And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, a haunting antiwar song that laments the criminal sacrifice of soldiers by their commanders at Gallipoli and the loss of public awareness of that sacrifice [Click here for the lyrics of And The Band Played "Waltzing Matilda" and historical bytes]; in 1999, Joan Kerschner stepped down as acting administrator of the Nevada State Archives and Library to become director of the Henderson Public Library; in 2004, former Nevada governor Mike O'Callaghan died at age 74.

Recent BARBWIRE Media Hits and Ego Trips    The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.       RENO NEWS & REVIEW, 11-9-2006 "Our long national nightmare is over." Did I say that a dozen years ago? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 11-10-2006 BARBANO: Nevada's newly-hiked minimum wage is nowhere near enough Reno Gazette-Journal, 11-11-2006 Oregon State U. minimum wage deflator Time to bring back NAGPAC? CORY FARLEY, RGJ, 8-1-2006 NEWLY UPLOADED BLAST FROM THE PAST: The reasons behind the failure of Nevada's first non-smoking casino Barbwire 3-2-1990

UPDATE: March 4, 2007, 12:48 a.m. PST, 0:48 GMT/SUT — On March 4, 1933, the start of President Roosevelt's first administration brought with it the first woman to serve in the Cabinet: Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

UPDATE: March 3, 2007, 3:55 a.m PST, 11:55 GMT/SUT — On March 3, 1991, in a case that sparked a national outcry, motorist Rodney King was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in a scene captured on amateur video. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 3, 1791, Congress established the United States Mint; in 1835, Congress approved legislation establishing a branch U.S. Mint in New Orleans; in 1845, Congress overrode a president's veto for the first time when Acting President John Tyler vetoed a tariff bill; in 1849, the U.S. Home Department (now the Interior Department) was established; in 1855, Congress appropriated $30,000 for Secretary of War Jefferson Davis' plan for a camel corps operating in western states (the program was abandoned in 1861, the camels turned loose in the deserts of the west and there were sightings of them for years afterward; Nevada's Legislature in 1875 prohibited camels from state thoroughfares); in 1863, Congress approved legislation authorizing gold-backed currency and establishing a branch United States Mint in the Territory of Nevada (it operated at Carson City from 1870 to 1893, minting over $49 million in coins); in 1863, Congress enacted a class-based military draft under which the wealthy could opt out, provoking rioting in New York City against the unfair measure; in 1866, the Nevada Legislature enacted a measure providing for registration of water diversions, ditches and flumes to try to get a handle on the practice in the state; in 1869, the Nevada Legislature approved legislation creating a state orphanage; in 1883, the Nevada State Journal reported that the Washoe tribe had joined Eilley Bowers in predicting an incoming storm; 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 1914, U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan called his office and the White House to tell them he would be late to work, missing a cabinet meeting and a meeting with the English ambassador because his daughter had delivered a granddaughter; 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 1920, Jules "Nicky" Arnstein, suspected of being the mastermind in a theft of five million dollars in bonds from Wall Street firms, seemed to have vanished after his attorneys had offered assurances of his surrender, and three detectives were in the west searching for him (Arnstein was portrayed by Omar Sharif in Funny Girl); 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 1933, at the start of a bank holiday ordered by Nevada Governor Fred Balzar, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported "All was quiet in Las Vegas financial circles today, nothing of a sensational nature occurring to mar the peace and happiness of the community. Both banks, which announced yesterday that they would not close, opened their doors as usual this morning. [L]ittle, if anything, was said about banks, bankers or the so-called depression."; in 1934, using a wooden gun, bank robber John Dillinger escaped from the Crown Point, Indiana, jail, stole the sheriff's car, and vanished, a sensational escapade that appeared on front pages from coast to coast and made him a national figure — but also led to the FBI entering the Dillinger case because he drove the car across the state line into Illinois; in 1934, the discovery of a radio in a cave overlooking California's golden gate whose wires ran to a nearby Japanese restaurant freaked out federal and local officials until they found out it was owned by a U.S.-born journalist who used it to gather news from overseas Oriental broadcasts for Japanese-American newspapers; 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, efforts were underway to recruit farm workers in Nevada to work on ranches during the wartime worker shortage ("Approximately fourteen hundred high school students, Mexicans, Indians, and transients aided in relieving the manpower shortage last year."); in 1945, 2,059 Jews who had first survived Auschwitz and then had survived Gross-Rosen arrived by train at Ebensee where they were exterminated eight weeks before the camp was liberated; in 1955, Elvis appeared on the Louisiana Hayride, his first television appearance; in 1960, during lunch counter sit-ins across the south, Alabama's governor and state board of education expelled nine students of Alabama State College for trying to integrate a courthouse lunch counter, prompting a thousand students to boycott classes, and in Columbia, South Carolina, a waitress by accident or intention served several African-American students at a lunch counter in a variety store, causing the management to shut down the entire store; in 1960, a group of Democrats, apparently supporters of Governor Grant Sawyer, called a meeting of the Washoe County Democratic Central Committee without the consent of the committee's officers, in an attempt to take the party away from conservative leaders; in 1967, on the day Robert Kennedy was scheduled to give a senate speech representing his sharpest break with the Johnson administration's Vietnam policy, President Johnson went into a sudden newsmaking flurry of activity, holding a sudden 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 1985, Luciano Pavarotti appeared in concert at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas; in 1994, Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa issued a legal opinion saying that the county supremancy movement's "Plan for Public Land" (which argues that Nevada holds title to federally managed lands within the state) does not have a "theory with any measure of respect in the legitimate legal community".

UPDATE: March 2, 2007, 8:50 a.m PST, 16:50 GMT/SUT — On March 2, 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was declared the winner of the 1876 presidential election over Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, even though Tilden had won the popular vote. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 2, 1805, in his farewell remarks as presiding officer of the United States Senate, Vice-President Aaron Burr ended his troubled term of office with a moving speech that left senators drained and in tears: "...this House, I need not remind you, is a sanctuary, a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here - it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political frenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor."; in 1836, northern Mexicans, protesting Mexico's new anti-slavery constitution, declared independence to form a Republic of Texas and adopted a constitution protecting the "right" to slavery; in 1861, President Buchanan, as one of his last acts in office, signed legislation creating the U.S. Territory of Nevada; in 1862, Frederick Lander, who had been stationed as an Indian agent in Nevada, had charted an overland route for emigrants, and for whom Lander County is named, died of a "mortal chill" at Paw Paw tunnel, Virginia (West Virginia) while leading Union forces as a brigadier; in 1870, Comstock editor Joseph Goodman wrote of the tycoons who mined Nevada and shipped the profits out of state, "They may take the gold and silver from our hills, and bind us in vassalage to the caprices of their stock boards, but the pure water that comes from Lake Tahoe, that drives our mills and makes glad our waste places, is God's exhaustless gift, and the hand of man cannot deprive us of it"; in 1879, for the second time in six years, central Reno was destroyed by fire; in 1902, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) was born in Springfield, Massachusetts ("I'd rather write for kids. They're more appreciative. Adults are obsolete children, and the hell with them."); in 1902, Harry Longbaugh and Etta Place sailed from Argentina for New York aboard the SS Soldier Prince; in 1904, former president Grover Cleveland wrote a letter to U.S. Representative E.Y. Webb of North Carolina denying a report that he had allowed an African-American to dine in the White House during his presidency; in 1908, after an Episcopal pastor in Walla Walla made the news by saying there is no hell, a Reno newspaper surveyed local clergymembers and found that all but one agreed; in 1909, a debate was held in the Nevada Senate, meeting as a committee, on an anti-gambling bill, with Nevada supreme court justice William Massey and state district judge George Brown arguing against gambling and Storey County district attorney ___________ Noel (Author's note: A century ago it was common in the press to identify public figures with only their last names, particularly with local officials. Stay tuned.) and Andy Fessler of Elko County supporting gambling; in 1912, what the Reno Evening Gazette called "the $20 grab" was being made an issue by the newspaper — a vote during a special session of the legislature (which was called to keep state schools operating on a cash basis) allowing legislators to draw $20 for stationary that they did not actually have to purchase; in 1922, U.S. attorney for Nevada William Woodburn wrote a letter of resignation before his term ended, to allow his designated successor George Springmeyer to take office early; in 1923, the first issue of Time magazine was published; in 1929, Congress increased the penalties for violating alcohol prohibition; in 1933, Nevada Governor Fred Balzar declared a bank holiday in the state as a depression measure, a technique first used in Michigan and also used a few days after Balzar by President Roosevelt; in 1933, Las Vegas city commissioners outlawed keno on the grounds that it was a lottery and thus illegal under the Nevada constitution; in 1934, what was being reported as the largest congress ever convened began in Rapid City, South Dakota, as 35,000 Blackfeet, Chippewas, Crows, Flatheads, Dakotas, Shoshone and Sioux met to decided what to do about the Wheeler/Howard Bill, which would repeal the Allotment Law of 1887 (under which Native Americans lost two thirds of their land to whites), restoring vast tracts of land to tribes and giving them home rule; in 1934, Tom Mix, Wallace Beery and other movie stars having lunch at the Brown Derby failed to get their food when the restaurant's 27 waiters walked out in a pay dispute; in 1936, the Coptic Christian archbishop of Ethiopia ordered church members to adopt a bread and water diet for eight days to free up provisions for Ethiopian defenders against Mussolini's invasion; in 1939, the Massachusetts Legislature ratified the Bill of Rights; in 1942, How Green Was My Valley received the Academy award for best picture of the year; in 1944, Casablanca received the Academy award for best picture of the year; in 1946, the National Assembly named Ho Chi Minh president of Vietnam; in 1955, Bo Diddley recorded Bo Diddley; in 1958, on See It Now, Edward R. Murrow quoted U.S. Senator George Malone of Nevada on why statehood should not be granted to Hawaii and Alaska: "They have no direct knowledge of life in the United States and are different from us."; 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 1960, California Governor Pat Brown asked the legislature to abolish the death penalty: "Beyond its horror and incivility, it has neither protected the innocent nor deterred the wicked."; in 1960, after getting an agreement for an eventual endorsement from Governor Brown, Senator John Kennedy announced he would not enter the California presidential primary election against favorite son Brown so long as other candidates also stayed out; in 1960, the Reno Evening Gazette and Nevada State Journal began moving from their offices on Center Street to a new building on Stevenson Street; 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, D-NY, called for an end to U.S. bombing in Vietnam and negotiatons on a coalition government; in 1969, French postal officials reported Las Vegas junior high school student Charline Mitchell to the U.S. Post Office for sending money through the mails without certifying the mailing after Mitchell sent some cash to La Parisian with a request for a copy of the paper; in 1969, the short-lived (seven months) supergroup Blind Faith — Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Stevie Winwood — had a recording session at Morgan Studios in London; in 1983, the last episode of M*A*S*H was broadcast on CBS; in 1989, a sculpture in tribute to the Dineh (Navajo) code talkers was dedicated in Phoenix; in 1997, former Sparks mayor and Nevada assembly speaker Chet Christensen, the first Nevada speaker known to have acted as governor, died.

UPDATE: March 1, 2007, 9:05 a.m PST, 17:05 GMT/SUT — On March 1, 1932, the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh was kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, N.J. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]

On March 1, 1788, the Rhode Island Legislature broke from the practice being followed by other states and decided not to call a state convention to consider ratification of the proposed Constitution, instead submitting it directly to the voters; in 1792, U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson informed state governors of enactment of a fisheries regulation act, establishment of the post office and post roads in the nation and ratification of ten of the twelve amendments to the constitution sent to the states; in 1869, the Nevada Legislature approved the 15th amendment (guaranteeing the right to vote to former slaves and prohibiting denial of the right to vote on grounds of race or color) to the U.S. Constitution; in 1910, the worst avalanche in U.S. history swept two Great Northern trains off the tracks at Wellington, Washington, killing 93 to 96 people (the town later changed its name to Tye to escape the negative publicity and was abandoned altogether when the second Cascade tunnel was constructed); in 1922, Mad magazine founder William Gaines was born; in 1928, Paul Robeson recorded Old Man River, backed by Paul Whiteman's orchestra; in 1931, paving of the Boulder Highway between Boulder City and Las Vegas, in preparation for construction of Boulder Dam, got underway; in 1940, Native Son by Richard Wright was published; in 1942, a citizens' committee complained about the brutality of riot police who arrested 101 African-Americans and three whites after white pickets prevented black families from moving into the newly completed Sojourner Truth defense workers housing project; in 1946, the first African-Americans to play major league ball, pitcher John Wright and shortstop Jackie Robinson, arrived at Brooklyn Dodgers training camp in Sanford, Florida; in 1957, Muddy Waters' I Got My Mojo Working was released; in 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps until Congress could do so by statute (Kennedy's view that the Corps could teach citizens of other countries received a jolt when Indian Prime Minister Nehru told him it was a good way for those citizens to teach affluent young U.S. citizens about the world); 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 1968, 19 year-old Michael Kenneth Hastings of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 42e, row 18); in 1969, Sgt. Pepper finally ended its stay on the charts after 88 weeks; in 1969, Verdi residents were organizing to oppose an Army Corps of Engineers plan to build a dam that would flood half the 500-person town; in 1969, Nixon administration supporters were working to dump U.S. Mint director Eva Adams of Nevada, who for some reason declined to submit her resignation, as is customary at the start of a new administration; in 1973, the Joffrey Ballet performed Deuce Coupe Ballet, which took its inspiration from Beach Boys music; in 1974, a federal grand jury secretly named Richard Nixon as a Watergate co-conspirator but did not indict him; in 1977, Las Vegas police were getting calls from all over the nation from people who said they had seen vanished Culinary Workers Union leader Al Bramlet; in 1977, Pyramid Lake tribal chair James Vidovich and a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation lawyer met with river conservation and Sierra Pacific Power Company (which owned Reno's municipal water company) officials about water stored in Stampede Dam, the viability of the spawn for the lake's fish, and drought reserve; in 1999, a groundbreaking ceremony was held for a visitor's center for the McCaw School of Mines in Clark County, Nevada.

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]

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