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Yesterday, today and tomorrow
NEWS BULLETIN & ALMANIACAL ARCHIVES
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But before you do so, please read this note. —AB[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. [PDA] Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2007 Dennis Myers.]]
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE: August 31, 2007, 6:39 a.m. PDT, 13:39 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 31, 1777, at Fort Henry on the Ohio frontier, British-allied Native Americans attacked a few men who outside the fort working with horses in an effort to lure additional whites from the fort, and Captain Samuel Mason accommodated them by riding to the rescue with 14 more men, and all the whites except Mason were wiped out; in 1837, in a speech to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke some of the most powerful words ever penned: "They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him."; in 1863, Powhatan Locke was temporarily appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Nevada (the temporary appointment lasted a year, most of the remaining life of the Territory); in 1899, F.O. Stanley drove the Stanley Steamer to the top of Mountain Washington in New Hampshire, a 6288-foot high mountain; in 1919, after being confirmed as President Wilson's attorney general over the opposition of U.S. Senator Joseph Frelinghuysen, Mitchell Palmer called Frelingheysen a German sympathizer; in 1920, Loyd Alvia "Dutch" Myers was born in Cozad, Nebraska; in 1921, the Nevada Board of Regents voted to spend $1,000 to pave the road into the University of Nevada grounds from the gate to the Orr Ditch; in 1936, Asheboro, North Carolina, neighbors of Gus Langley, who was convicted of murder, had his head shaved for electrocution seven times in three years in prison and was reprieved each time, then was proven innocent, petitioned for him to be paid for the labors he performed while in prison, including painting the warden's quarters; in 1939, to provide a rationale for an attack on Poland, SS troops wearing Polish uniforms staged an invasion of Germany and an attack on a radio station at Gleiwitz and left behind several dead Germans in Polish uniforms; in 1939, three days after the Las Vegas Review-Journal carried an editorial headlined "War is not probable", its front page headline was "WAR IS MATTER OF HOURS"; in 1939, in reaction to the general belief that war would be good for Nevada farms and ranches, Nevada Farm Bureau Federation executive secretary Florence Bovett said she did not believe that any kind of war would help Nevada; in 1939, U.S. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a Salt Lake City speech that it would be easier to stay out of the next war than it was to stay out of World War One because recently enacted neutrality legislation abandoned the free shipping rights the U.S. entered the last war to defend; in 1939, the U.S. House Committee on UnAmerican Activities asked the customs service to take "extraordinary precautions" to prevent German American Bund Fuehrer Fritz Kuhn from leaving the country, which he had every right to do; in 1944, as the fifth anniversary of the European war approached, British military officials said they believed the war would end within 35 days, though they expressed nervousness about the then-chic theory that fanatical Nazis would establish a redoubt in the Alps; in 1944, German forces were beginning to abandon some of the coastal rocket bomb sites as Allied forces extended their hold, with most of the bomb launches still coming from sites between Calais and Dunkerque (though a German radio broadcast said the equipment was being made mobile); in 1944, a U.S. soldier named Juan Casas filed in Las Vegas for an annulment from one wife and a divorce from another after learning from the Army that his 1941 Juarez divorce from wife number one was not recognized by the U.S; in 1951, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called for diplomatic recognition of mainland China, setting off an angry debate in Congress (about him, not about his proposal); in 1955, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles endorsed Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem's refusal to hold elections required by the Geneva accords of 1954; in 1964, the U.S. Food Stamp Act was signed into law; in 1980, the Solidarity workers organization was started at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk.
On Aug. 31, 1997, Diana Spencer was killed in a Paris car wreck; in 2005, U.S. Representative James Gibbons of Nevada announced his candidacy for the governorship.
George Bush viewing Hurricane Katrina flood damage from Air Force One / August 31, 2005: It's devastating. It's got to be doubly devastating on the ground.
UPDATE: August 30, 2007, 11:43 a.m. PDT, 18:43 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 30, 1963, the hot-line communications link between Washington, D.C., and Moscow went into operation. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 30, 2000: Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness.
On this date in 1813, after a group of U.S. soldiers from Fort Mims in Alabama ambushed a large party of Creek tribal members, the Creek, believing the whites had declared war, struck back at the fort, killing 400 in the second battle of the Creek War; in 1878, the Territorial Enterprise demanded to know why Nevada Mineralogist (then an elective post) Henry Whitehill was spending time in eastern Nevada and suggested he was in the pay of the Central Pacific Railroad; in 1919, Texas Federal Oil Company was advertising lots for sale in Las Vegas for oil exploration; in 1936, a new Geiger Grade highway to Virginia City was opened to traffic; in 1939, Overton superintendent of schools Paul Thurston said new school buildings in Moapa would be ready by the start of the school year on September 6; in 1944, Anna Lucasta, the first all-black theatrical production with a non-racial story, opened on Broadway where it played for 950 performances; in 1944, the Las Vegas board of education named the Huntridge school building after John Hunt and the Biltmore school building after Helen Stewart; in 1963, the hot line, a teletype line and a product of concern over poor communication during the Cuban missile crisis, was installed between Washington and Moscow to make communication more rapid, with a test message sent to Moscow: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890" (news film was shown of the teletype machines being rolled not into the state department or White House but the Pentagon); in 1968, the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter Than Air Fair began in a pasture near Sultan, Washington, the nation's second outdoor rock concert of the sixties, with Santana, Big Mama Thornton, James Cotton, Country Joe and the Fish, Richard Pryor, Dino Valenti, Byron Pope, It's a Beautiful Day, Peanut Butter Conspiracy, Alice Stuart Thomas, the Youngbloods, New Lost City Ramblers and The Grateful Dead in attendance (the Dead were not scheduled and came on their own initiative); in 1972, John and Yoko staged two concerts in Madison Square Garden that also featured Roberta Flack and Stevie Wonder and raised $1,500,000 for Willowbrook, an institution for mentally disabled children; in 2001, Southern Nevada Community College administrator Mike Meyer resigned after saying of the wife of a state legislator "She's a nigger and niggers are never on time"; in 2004, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported that health care among Native Americans (in the U.S.) had fallen to third-world levels.UPDATE: August 29, 2007, 4:48 a.m. PDT, 11:48 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 29, 1991, the Supreme Soviet, the parliament of the U.S.S.R., suspended all activities of the Communist Party, bringing an end to the institution. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 29, 2002: There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide.
On this date in 1844, Acting President John Tyler, the candidate of the Democratic Republican Party in a three-way election campaign, withdrew from the race and thus assured James Polk's election over Henry Clay (Polk and Tyler shared the same position on statehood for Texas, a dominant issue in the campaign, and Tyler won passage of a Texas statehood bill after the election); in 1910, the Student Record, student newspaper at the University of Nevada in Reno, changed its name to The U. of N. Sagebrush; in 1921, New York City held a farewell-to-Lightnin' parade presided over by Mayor John Hylan, two days after the play (set at the "Calivada Hotel" built astraddle the state line between Nevada and California at Lake Tahoe and at "Superior Court" in Reno) closed with a record-breaking 1,291 performances; in 1921, a committee of the Reno chamber of commerce to support the Victory Highway (a coast to coast highway) was formed; in 1936, a dance was held in Silver City to help pay for renovation of the town school; in 1962, President Kennedy said that as a result of growing public concern over pesticides, which he attributed to "Miss Carson's book", his administration's health and agriculture agencies were taking a closer look at pesticide use; in 1977, the morning New York Daily News refused to publish the day's Doonesbury comic strip, which ridiculed the newspaper's overheated "Son of Sam" coverage and its writer Jimmy Breslin, so when afternoon came the competing New York Post published the strip; in 2006, Cable News Network morning anchor Kyra Phillips was chatting with a friend in the bathroom during a George Bush speech, unaware that the control room had the mike she was wearing open, and her words (praising her husband and calling her sister in law a control freak) were going out over a George Bush speech.
Rachel Carson: For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan, or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. We poison the caddis flies in the stream and the salmon runs dwindle and die. . . . We spray our elms and following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elmleaf-earthworm-robin cycle. These are matters of record, observable, part of the visible world around us. They reflect the web of life-or-death that scientists know as ecology.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE: August 28, 2007, 1:40 a.m. PDT, 08:40 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 28, 1963, 200,000 people participated in a peaceful civil rights rally in Washington, D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1793, President Washington, in a letter to Governor William Moultrie of South Carolina, declined to make war on the Chickamauga nation because it was the exclusive prerogative of Congress to decide on war: "The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure" (Washington had by then already placed information on the issue before Congress and informed its members "It remains to be considered by Congress whether in the present situation of the United States it is advisable or not to pursue any further or other measures than those which have already been adopted" and Congress took no action to declare war); in 1894, the faculty of Nevada State University met with the new president, Joseph Stubbs; in 1913, just weeks after taking office as president, Woodrow Wilson — who invaded Mexico incessantly during his presidency — warned U.S. citizens to leave Mexico in preparation for an invasion; in 1921, federal alcohol prohibition agents traveled 210 miles from Reno to Paradise to bust two saloons that were selling whiskey; in 1936, as former Spanish King Alfonso moved close to the Spanish border, leaders of the fascist forces announced that if they won the civil war, they would set up a military dictatorship allied with the "friendly nations" Germany and Italy that had made their victory possible, followed by reestablishment of Alfonso's monarchy; in 1943, the University of Nevada faculty met and approved a recommended list of graduates to the Board of Regents, a roll that had few men listed in a world at war; in 1953, in a ceremony at the Fifth Street School, three new Carson City schools were dedicated with two Nevada governors in attendence, incumbent Charles Russell and future governor Paul Laxalt, then the school district lawyer; in 1955, fourteen year old African-American Emmitt Till of Chicago who was visiting Money, Mississippi, was lynched by being dragged from his bed, beaten to death, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River, his confessed killers acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury, an event that helped spark the civil rights movement and became a touchstone for a generation of student radicals; in 1963, African-American labor leader A. Phillip Randolph, who first scheduled his March on Washington for July 1, 1941, but cancelled it after President Roosevelt signed an executive order throwing thousands of defense jobs open to previously barred blacks and creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it, finally held the March on this day (this time over the objection of President Kennedy), drawing 200,000 to the nation's capital where they heard Martin King's "dream" speech (see below); in 1968, the year's major student street protests in Warsaw, Rome and Paris were joined by those at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police rioted in the course of quelling the protests, protests that helped shatter the unhealthy bipartisan consensus on U.S. cold war policies since the Truman administration; in 1988, Margaret Wheat, Native American scholar and author of Survival Arts of the Paiutes (the all-time bestseller of the University of Nevada Press) died; in 2006, polygamist Warren Jeffs, reported husband of 40 women and father of 60 children, was arrested in Las Vegas after a year as a fugitive on the FBI most wanted list to face charges involving preying on underage girls in arranging plural marriages.
Martin Luther King / August 28, 1963: This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.UPDATE: August 27, 2007, 1:39 a.m. PDT, 08:39 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 27, 1962, the United States launched the Mariner 2 space probe, which flew past Venus the following December. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
New York Evening Post / August 27, 1921, on Lightnin': There is only one drawback to prolonged runs in the theatre — so many people miss seeing the play. After it has run for a year or two the belief arises that the play will run on forever, until some of us find it is too late.
On Aug. 27, 1832, Sauk tribal chief Black Hawk, a legendary warrior (because of repeated broken and misrepresented treaties, the Sauk joined the British in the war of 1812 and continued fighting the U.S. after the British sued for peace) surrendered two weeks after the Bad Axe massacre in Wisconsin in which, using cannon and rifles from a ship and using axes, clubs and guns on shore, whites killed hundreds, mainly women and children and the elderly (see below); in 1878, the Territorial Enterprise reported on a split among African-Americans in the state, with a Virginia City group repudiating a Nevada Union Colored League formed by a Carson City group; in 1893, a major hurricane made landfall at Savannah, killing 1,000 to 2,000 people and making 30,000 mostly African-American residents homeless in the region of Sea Islands off South Carolina with Clara Barton on the scene among the relief workers. Another hurricane five weeks later nearly destroyed relief efforts. Most casualty and cost figures are probably understated because many of the losses were among blacks. The hurricane is regarded as the worst in U.S. history, on a par with Katrina; in 1915, newspapers reported „important advantages gained by [Allied] troops‰ in the grisly Gallipoli campaign, which was not true; in 1921, Lightnin', the play set in a Lake Tahoe hotel that had the Nevada/California state line running through it (allowing people to establish their residency for Nevada quickie divorces while getting their mail in California to fool the folks back home) ended its Broadway run with the all time record — 1,291 performances (President Harding sent a letter of congratulations); in 1913 in Topeka, there was a raid where several cigarette dealers were arrested for violating Kansas tobacco prohibition, prompting a lawsuit by a merchant against the Kansas Anti-cigarette League; in 1932, the death of U.S. Senator Charles Waterman of Colorado threatened to create a senate evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, with Senator Henrick Shipstead of Minnesota, a Farmer Labor Party senator, holding the balance of power; in 1936, Utah Democratic Party chair Calvin Rawlins assured Democratic national chair James Farley that his state was safe for President Franklin Roosevelt (who won the state by 39 percentage points) and Nevada Democratic chair Ed Clark gave the same assurance about his state (which Roosevelt won by 46 points); in 1952, Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois, the Democratic presidential nominee, gave a speech (that Lowell Thomas reported "had its turn of courage and boldness") to the national convention of the anti-free expression American Legion: "Too often sinister threats to the bill of rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism."; in 1954, President Eisenhower wired Nevada Governor Charles Russell that he had authorized additional expenditures of emergency funds to speed repairs to the earthquakes-damaged Truckee-Carson Irrigation District system; in 1954, Nevada District Judge John Belford pleaded guilty to failure to file income tax returns for 1951 and 1952 and said he would not resign and would continue his campaign for reelection (he resigned six days later, on September 2d); in 1959, 54 year-old Beatrice Workman of a Chicago suburb, one of a group of women known as the "radium girls" and the "Society of the Living Dead" — workers who painted the radium on watch dials in the 1920s, many of whom died young or suffered if they survived — died in Illinois and an autopsy put the cause of death as radium poisoning; in 1960, the last performance of Shreveport's celebrated Louisiana Hayride took place; in 1971 in Chicago, Lil Hardin Armstrong died as she completed playing St. Louis Blues in memory of her husband Louis in Chicago's Civic Center Plaza; in 2001, Israeli agents murdered Palestinian leader Mustafa Zibri; in 2003, a religious monument was removed from the Supreme Court of Alabama.
Black Hawk: A few summers ago, I was fighting against you. I did wrong, perhaps, but that is past. It is buried. Let it be forgotten. Rock river was beautiful country. I loved my towns, my cornfields, and the home of my people. It is yours now. Keep it as we did.UPDATE: August 26, 2007, 1:06 p.m. PDT, 20:06 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was declared in effect. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On Aug. 26, 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was adopted by the French National Assembly; in 1872, Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald sent a telegram to corporate lawyer John Abbott, which was leaked to the press and seemed to indicate bribery ("I must have another ten thousand; will be the last time of calling; do not fail me; answer today"), causing the government to fall and Macdonald's Conservative Party to lose the impending election (incredibly, Abbott later became prime minister); in 1886, indigenous Argentine Native American Ceferino Namuncura was born in Rio Negro province, later becoming a Catholic student priest who died too young to do very much but became a cult figure and will be beatified by Pope Benedict in November 2007 because a 24-year-old woman with uterine cancer was allegedly instantly cured in 2000 after her family asked for Namuncura's intervention; in 1901, the American Standard Version of the Bible was published by Thomas Nelson and Sons (which would also later publish the Revised Standard Version in 1946-52 and which still exists today as an arm of The Thomson Organization, a communications conglomerate); in 1905, George Washington, son of a slave and the African-American founder of Centralia, Washington, died there at age 88; in 1914, Nevada Attorney General George Thatcher released a legal opinion arguing that the Wadsworth postmaster could legally run for justice of the peace so long as he resigned as postmaster before election day; in 1921, a two-day meeting to organize a Nevada farm cooperative began at the Reno chamber of commerce; in 1936, EPIC (End Poverty In California, founded by Francis Townsend) candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives won 11 nominations out of California's twenty congressional districts; in 1939, the Cincinnati Reds and Brooklyn Dodgers played at Ebbets Field in the first baseball game broadcast on television [EDITOR'S NOTE: Hall of Fame announcer Red Barber, who had previously worked for the Reds but was now the Dodgers' voice, called the game which few saw because few television sets were in use.]; in 1941, the collaborationist Petain government of France appeared on the verge of collapse as a hundred members of Parliament met in an unauthorized session in protest against Petain's increasing close cooperation with the Nazis; in 1941, the Army announced plans to air condition with swamp coolers Camp Sibert in Nevada; in 1968, the Democratic National Convention began in Chicago after presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy asked his supporters to stay away and protesters were gathered in city parks by the tens of thousands; in 1970, on the anniversary of the ratification of suffrage, the Women's Strike for Peace was held around the nation, with tens of thousands of people marching and demanding approval by Congress of the Equal Rights Amendment; in 1978, Albino Luciani of Venice was elected pope, taking the name John Paul I; in 1998, former Nevada assemblymember (1972-76) and senator (1978-82) Jean Ford died.
UPDATE: August 25, 2007, 2:29 p.m. PDT, 21:29 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 25, 1944, Paris was liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1737, British royal appointee James Logan, who was desperate to obtain title to Native American lands that he had already sold to whites, lied to Delaware tribal leaders in presenting them with a fraudulent deed to their land that he claimed had already been purchased by William Penn in 1686 and further presented them with a fraudulent agreement from the Iroquois Confederacy in which that tribal nation surrendered its claims in the area (indicating that the Iroquois would be unlikely to make common cause with the Delaware) and thus convinced the Delaware to sign a surrender of all lands from the present day site of Wrightstown northwest "as far as a man could walk in a day and a half", the walk to be held on September 19, 1737, giving the agreement the name of the Walking Purchase; in 1875, the construction of a flume from Lake Tahoe to the Truckee Meadows was providing temporary prosperity to Reno, with 570 workers employed ("No Chinamen" the Nevada State Journal assured readers) and a $50,000 monthly payroll; in 1883, the French conquest of Vietnam became official with the signing of the Treaty of Hue, after which the French eliminated the nation's name, carved it up into three "protectorates" called Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, all of which prompted China to occupy Tonkin and led to another war; in 1908, the National Association of Colored Nurses was founded; in 1921, Young's Hotel in Sparks was raided by alcohol prohibition agents; in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was organized with A. Philip Randolph as president; in 1933, jazz impresario Wayne Shorter (Native Dancer) was born in Newark; in 1943, a meeting of Reno community leaders voted in favor of parallel parking; in 1944, Paris was liberated from years of Nazi occupation; in 1945, a week after the Vietnamese declared their independence after the end of Japanese occupation, and three weeks before the French with U.S. support reoccupied the nation, tens of thousands of Saigonese marched for nine hours in support of the new Ho Chi Minh government and on the same day Ho convinced French puppet emperor Bao Dai to abdicate; in 1953, the use of radar by police as a speed trap was approved by Municipal Judge Guy Walts in finding two speeders guilty, saying his decision was based in part on the fact that 200 Nevadans had already been cited without objecting to the technology (one prosecution witness was asked why the rader had shown a street sweeper traveling at 60 miles an hour); in 1954, the Reno Evening Gazette endorsed U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey's bill outlawing the Communist Party: "Giving it a tryout for a couple of years will do no harm and might be of great benefit."; in 1966, The Beatles performed at the Seattle Center Coliseum; in 2006, conservative commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan released a column that likened illegal immigrants to the Goths, the Germanic tribes who ravaged the Roman Empire in the centuries preceding the collapse of its western half, which he said would be "how America ends".
UPDATE: August 24, 2007, 12:14 a.m. PDT, 07:14 GMT/SUT/CUT —On Aug. 24, 1992, Hurricane Andrew smashed into Florida, causing record damage; 55 deaths in Florida, Louisiana and the Bahamas were blamed on the storm. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1781, Mohawk warriors led by Chief Joseph Brant ambushed the Pennsylvania militia on the Ohio River in Indiana. Brant routed it, a battle that became known as Lochry's Defeat; in 1807, Chief Joseph Brant died near Lake Ontario; in 1873, William Henry Jackson took the first photographs of Colorado's Mount of the Holy Cross, providing proof of the rumored natural formation that created a cross of snow; in 1896, after an out-of-state magazine reported that the Latter Day Saint vote held the balance of power in Nevada, the Virginia City Evening Chronicle commented "This will be news to the political bosses"; in 1918, the Clark County Review reported that the county was two-thirds of the way to filling its quota of $90,000 in sales of war savings stamps; in 1927, U.S. Secretary of the Navy Curtis Wilbur met with San Francisco officials and then announced formation of a panel to study construction of a bridge over San Francisco bay that would accomodate the needs both of the locals and the navy; in 1933, the Public Works Administration approved $2 million for the Humboldt reclamation project in Nevada; in 1936, at a rally for Republican presidential nominee Alfred Landon in Conneautville, Pennsylvania, a sheriff ran through the crowd firing shots in the air while chasing an alleged pickpocket; in 1936, for the eighth year in a row, children in a Reno Baptist Sunday school mailed off Christmas presents for the children of Holstensborg, Greenland, the native town of Nevada snow scientist James E. Church, with the four cartons costing nearly ten dollars to mail; in 1966, Vu Van Mau, foreign minister of the Saigon regime, resigned in protest against the southern dictatorship's treatment of Buddhists; in 1969, Company A, 3d Battalion, 196th Light Infantry Brigade refused to obey order from its commander, Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr., to continue an attack on well entrenched enemy positions in the Song Chang valley, 30 miles south of Da Nang, the first of a number of combat refusals that joined a growing number of expressions of rage (fraggings, desertions) at the pointless war (see below); in 1982, in a meeting at the Harvard Club in New York City, arbitrageur Ivan Boesky and Kidder, Peabody mergers and acquisitions executive Martin Siegel agreed that Siegel would provide Boesky with inside information on upcoming mergers; in 2006, the International Astronomical Union, which apparently owns the galaxy, demoted Pluto, declaring that it is not a planet (we had nine planets before Bush became president).
RADIO TRAFFIC / SONG CHANG VALLEY / AUGUST 24, 1969:
Lieutenant Eugene Schurtz, Jr.: I am sorry, sir, but my men refused to go . . . We cannot move out.
Lieut. Colonel Robert C. Bacon: Repeat that, please. Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?
Schurtz: I think they understand, but some of them simply had enough — they are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Viet Nam. They want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.UPDATE: August 23, 2007, 8:12 a.m. PDT, 15:12 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 23, 1927, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in Boston for the murders of two men during a 1920 robbery. [New York Times/AP e-headlines] (EDITOR'S NOTE: Death penalty advocates who say there is no record of a U.S. execution of the innocent since the 19th Century, please Google these names.)
On this date in 1784, settlers in western North Carolina, after the legislature ceded their territory to the federal government, declared independence and petitioned for statehood (after it was refused, the area became a nation, Franklin, that functioned for about four years with its own chief of state and legislature, treaties and courts, and it later added additional territory before finally reuniting with North Carolina to make common defense against local tribes); in 1873, it was reported in Reno that the Western Union office had begun staying open all night; in 1874, the Reno band traveled to Poe City on Peavine Mountain where it played several selections and were well treated by the Poe City band; in 1913, cars were allowed to enter Yosemite National Park for the first time, marking a basic change in federal policy that eventually took an enormous toll on national parks and changed the design of their trappings thereafter; in 1919, Pacific Coast Shipbuilding Company in Suisun Bay launched a merchant ship, the Lavada, named for Las Vegas, Nevada, in honor of the city's highest-city status for the fourth liberty loan (the ship was christenened by Nevada first lady Vida Boyle); in 1919, after a meeting between company officials and Governor Emmet Boyle, striking workers on the Nevada Northern Railway agreed to accept $6.50 a day and to await a court ruling on a public service commissioner's order to the company to resume service and pay the workers their full demands; in 1963, side by side on its front page, The New York Times ran two stories flatly contradicting each other preceded by an editor's note acknowledging the contradiction, both stories giving accounts of a Saigon crackdown on Buddhists, representing a slap at the Times' reporter on the scene that was unprecedented (the accurate story, smuggled out of Vietnam during a government blackout, credited the invasions of Buddhist pagodas and executions of leading monks to Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem, was written by David Halberstam and came from his sources there, and the inaccurate story, which said the Saigon military was behind the crackdown, was written by Ted Szulc and came from Washington sources); in 1966, U.S. Senator Stephen Young of Ohio called for the dismissal of Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who Young called the "supreme war hawk"; in 1966, New York City Mayor John Lindsay apologized to residents for a VFW parade with 30,000 marchers that began in early evening and lasted until after midnight (the VFW said Lindsay should reprimand the unhappy residents); in 1968, halfway through a recording session, Ringo Starr, feeling he was no longer doing good work, resigned from The Beatles (after a week with his wife and children, he agreed to return and found his drums decorated with flowers); in 1983, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington appointed Fred Rice as the city's first African American police superintendent.
UPDATE: August 22, 2007, 10:59 p.m. PDT, 05:59 Aug. 23 GMT/SUT/CUT — BREAKING NEWS —
TWO AND TWO TOGETHER DEPT. — Dubai World, part of the same Arab oil money which once proposed to manage several major U.S. ports until Americans complained, today announced a $5 billion CASH investment in MGM-Mirage. Does this diminish the chances of a Culinary Union strike on the Las Vegas Strip? Some wise guys are saying don't bet against it. Stay tuned. And remember, you heard it here first.Marketwatch.com today reported that "Dubai World will ultimately acquire a 9.5% stake in MGM and partial ownership of a massive real-estate project. Under the terms of the pact, Dubai World, a holding company for the Persian Gulf state, will pay $2.7 billion for a half-interest in MGM-Mirage's CityCenter, a gambling, hotel, condominium and retail complex set to open in 2009. At $7 billion and change, it is the largest privately funded real-estate development in history."
MGM-Mirage's refusal to allow the Culinary Union access to the City Center project was the issue which caused negotiations to break down and strike preparations to begin.
2+2= ?
Be well. Raise hell.TOLJASO DEPT: The following was posted at the Las Vegas Review-Journal's website when the paper's web edition uploaded around 3:00 a.m. PDT on Aug. 23 — Mirage, Culinary land deal
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE: August 22, 2007, 12:46 a.m. PDT, 09:46 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 22, 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first United States chief executive to ride in an automobile. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 22, 2002: President Musharraf, he's still tight with us on the war against terror, and that's what I appreciate. He's a — he understands that we've got to keep Al Qaeda on the run, and that by keeping him on the run, it's more likely we will bring him to justice.
On this date in 565, Celtic missionary Columba supposedly confronted the Loch Ness monster, who had been disturbed by the swimming of a man named Lugne mocu-Min, and scared the monster off by telling him/her "You will go no further. Do not touch the man. Turn back speedily" (the tale, however, did not surface until a century after Columba's death); in 1789, the U.S. Senate, with President Washington in attendance at the senators' request to obtain their advice, listened to a reading of an Indian treaty and then received Washington's questions which it decided to consider and deliberate on before answering, whereupon Washington said of the delay "This defeats every purpose of my being here" and departed; in 1860, census takers were working in Gold Hill, Territory of Utah; in 1872, a fire destroyed the county treasurer's building in Unionville, Nevada, and damaged the sheriff/treasurer's building; in 1911, painter Louis Béroud entered the Louvre and walked to the salon that held the Mona Lisa, only to find the painting missing (painter Pablo Picasso and poet Guillaume Apollinaire were both suspected of the theft but were cleared and it was later discovered that Italian patriot Vincenzo Peruggia had returned the painting to Italy, where it had been created); in 1920, independent U.S. Senate candidate Anne Martin spoke from her automobile to a street gathering in Las Vegas, giving an address titled "Profiteers of the People"; in 1925, President Coolidge appointed Ku Klux Klan official Marion Dunning to be collector of customs in Savannah; in 1927, three red police alert lights were in operation at the Masonic temple, the band stand and the alley behind the bank in Sparks; in 1936, the Nevada State Journal reported that Herbert Hoover, U.S. Representative James Scrugham of Nevada and Dr. Bart Hood of Reno all were taking an interest in Nevada's new Jumbo mining district (in Humboldt County, not to be confused with the early 1900s Jumbo district in Washoe County); in 1956, at the first nationally televised presidential news conference in history, President Eisenhower — shortly before his renomination for president — announced that deputy secretary of state Harold Stassen had dropped his effort to dump Richard Nixon from the Republican ticket in favor of Governor Christian Herter of Massachusetts; in 1959, at a "fly-in" in Reno of sheriff's aero squadrons from around the west, Miss Nevada Dawn Wells greeted the arrivals; in 2003, Alabama's chief justice Roy Moore was suspended from office for breaking the law in refusing to obey a court order to remove a religious marker from the rotunda of the public's court house.
Nevada State Journal / August 30, 1891 / "The Dutch Flat Girls Strike.": A correspondent of the Placer Republican, writing from the classic precinct of Dutch Flat, discourses as follows: "During the Summer the young ladies of Sacramento who are spending their vacation here have attended the many dances and social events and their city ways have made them favorites with the young men, much to the disgust of our country belles. At last Saturday [August 22d] night's dance our town girls treated the boys to a genuine surprise, as when invited to dance they positively refused and gave the young men to understand that they did not play 'second fiddle.' This move put things at a standstill, but after talking the matter over and with a promise from the boys that they would pay more attention to home, the hatchet was buried, the cigarette of peace was smoked, and all went merry for the balance of the evening."UPDATE: August 21, 2007, 12:55 a.m. PDT, 09:55 GMT/SUT/CUT — LAME EXCUSES DEPT. — Sens. Chris Dodd and Hillary Clinton both backed out of their commitments to address the Nevada State AFL-CIO convention in Reno today. This round goes to Dodd, who came up with the superior lame excuse. MORE>
UPDATE: August 21, 2007, 12:50 a.m. PDT, 09:50 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 21, 1956, President Eisenhower signed an executive order proclaiming Hawaii the 50th state of the union. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
UPDATE: August 20, 2007, 11:29 a.m. PDT, 18:29 GMT/SUT/CUT —
BREAKING NEWS — Culinary union sets Aug. 30 for strike vote against Reno hotel-casinosALMANAC — On Aug. 20, 1968, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the ''Prague Spring'' liberalization drive of Alexander Dubcek's regime. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
UPDATE: August 19, 2007, 1:29 a.m. PDT, 08:29 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 19, 1934, a plebiscite in Germany approved the vesting of sole executive power in Adolf Hitler as Fuhrer. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
John Tyndall / August 19, 1874: It is as fatal as it is cowardly to blink facts because they are not to our taste.
On this date in 1782, nearly a year after the French won the American Revolution for the colonials at Yorktown, the last battle of the war was fought in Kentucky at the Licking River (the British force of 350, made up mostly of Native American allies of the British, won against the colonials); in 1866, Brigham Young declared: "The only men who become Gods, even the Sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy."; in 1870, U.S. census takers found 93 residents, all white and all but one (a laundress) male, living in a mining camp in Egan Canyon, White Pine County; in 1900, silent movie star Colleen Moore, who made The Sky Pilot in Truckee (see below), was born in Port Huron, Michigan; in 1911, a drilling rig headed for Carson City from Reno on the Virginia and Truckee Railroad would not fit through the Lakeview tunnel and had to be taken off the train; in 1927, six members of the 1926 University of Nevada football squad — Max Larsen, Jim Bailey, Max Lawlor, Reynold Hansen, Max Allen and Robert Cooley — were featured in Spalding's Official Football Guide 1927; in 1940, a Portuguese cargo ship, the Quanza, arrived in New York with 317 refugees from the European war but only the non-Jewish passengers were allowed to disembark, 21 Jews being sent away (86 were later accepted by Mexico and as the ship's captain prepared to take them back to Europe where they might well have died in the death camps, Eleanor Roosevelt learned of their plight and prevailed on the U.S. State Department to issue them visas); in 1943, Nevada highway engineer Robert Allen said two new highways that would speed up war industry travel in the state were completed and open (one was from Reno to Gabbs Valley and the new route was 33 miles shorter, and the other was the Basic Magnesium plant near Las Vegas to the Three Kids Manganese plant to Lake Mead); in 1953, the United States and Britain engineered a coup d'etat against the elected government of Iran, overthrowing Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installing Reza Pahlavi, who for a quarter- century then presided over one of the world's horrific dictatorships; in 1953, the Nevada Tax Commission approved Clark County Assemblymember William Byrne for a gambling license to operate "Johnnie Lane's Race Book Sports Pool"; in 1960, federal, state and local officials (including Governor Grant Sawyer, State Controller Keith Lee, Attorney General Roger Foley and U.S Representative Walter Baring) met in the Las Vegas city council hall on the Eisenhower administration's cancellation of the Gass/Alta freeway interchange, which sparked anger in both Clark County and the state capital, and the city hall meeting with federal highway officials left the Nevada folks still unhappy and dissatisfied; in 1961, FBI agents were reported to be gathering a report on mob infiltration of Nevada casinos for U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy; in 1966, at Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, a packed crowd cheered The Beatles hysterically, refuting Klansmen and others who had predicted that John's "more popular than Jesus" comment would hurt their popularity, though a firecracker made the band members look around to see which of them had been shot (and the group decided to complete the current tour and then stop performing live); in 1989, in international waters, the British and Dutch governments illegally boarded the Ross Revenge, home of popular pirate stations Radio Caroline and Radio Monique, destroying or stealing broadcasting equipment (part of the raid was carried live until the destruction ended operations); in 1997, Teamsters locals approved an agreement with United Parcel, ending a 15-day nationwide strike.
Movie director King Vidor: Across the railroad tracks from the village of Truckee [California] we had constructed the main street of a frontier town, complete with saloons and gambling dens. We had both summer and winter scenes to film. We had arrived in late fall, and the non-snow scenes had progressed as scheduled, though we still had two days of shooting without snow. The next morning, I was shocked to find it had been snowing all night with little sign of letting up for a day or two. Then panic overtook me. The end of the script called for the buildings to be burned down while deep snow covered the ground. We obviously could not set fire to them during the present snowfall because they were background for summer scenes still be to photographed.
UPDATE: August 18, 2007, 12:16 a.m. PDT, 09:16 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 18, 1963, James Meredith became the first black to graduate from the University of Mississippi. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1856, Congress enacted legislation providing for a postal route from Placerville, California to Genoa, Utah Territory, that would ultimately be worked by John "Snowshoe" Thompson, who traveled the route through the mountains on skis; in 1872, Washoe County Deputy Sheriff James Kinkead brought two men suspected of robbing the Susanville stage from Virginia City to Reno; in 1889, people in Pioche were drinking mine water from the Raymond and Ely claims because heavy rains broke pipelines leading to town and swept the broken sections away; in 1910, fifteen U.S. florists agreed to accept wired orders from each other, the beginning of FTD — Florists‚ Telegraph Delivery; in 1917, William Townsend received a deferment from war service and went to South America to sell Bibles, an experience that inspired him to create an organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, that has translated the Bible into thousands of local dialects around the world, sometimes creating written forms for languages in order to do it; in 1920, in a speech at Butte, Montana, Democratic vice presidential nominee Franklin Roosevelt claimed that as assistant Navy secretary he had written the Haitian constitution and had run "a couple of little republics", none of which was true (he later denied making the statements, but 31 Butte residents signed an affidavit supporting the Associated Press stringer's account); in 1927, the body of Stanislaus Mitchell, former private secretary to Nevada political boss George Wingfield, was found in a San Francisco hotel, an apparent suicide, with a note reading: "If any Reno National bank checks have been returned since August 1 it is due to the failure of [name not released] to deposit to my account two thirds of a $225 draft which should be in the bank"; in 1936, in a Reno municipal bond election which required a dual majority of both property and non-property owning voters, five of eight bond issues were defeated, with bonds for bridges on Sierra and Lake streets and a municipal swimming pool approved; in 1954, at a Mapes Hotel kickoff event for the year's March of Dimes fund raising, Renoites were told that the discovery of the Salk vaccine did not eliminate the need for fund raising since 40,000 people were expected to contract polio before the vaccine's full impact took effect and because the charity was still responsible for 67,000 pre-vaccine victims; in 1960, Las Vegas Mayor Oran Gragson called for the firing of just-indicted City Manager Al Kennedy and Police Chief Ray Sheffer, but City Commissioner Reed Whipple said the two men were entitled to a presumption of innocence (Whipple prevailed, with the two men suspended until their court fate was resolved); in 2006, a column by Princeton economist Paul Krugman in The New York Times triggered a widespread debate among economists about the growing squeeze on the middle class and the gap between rich and poor (Krugman, disagreeing with Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's claim that "rising inequality is mainly a story about rising wages for the highly educated" and that "nothing can be done about this trend" [these are Krugman paraphrases of Paulson, not direct quotes], argues that "it seems likely that government policies have played a big role in America's growing economic polarization" and that "it matters a lot which party is in power ˜ and more important, which ideology".
UPDATE: August 17, 2007, 11:53 a.m. PDT, 18:53 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 17, 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair concluded near Bethel, N.Y. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1780, Viceroy Jose de Galvez urged that northern residents of New Spain (what is now the U.S. southwest and northern Mexico) donate money to help the revolution by the Atlantic coast colonies against England; in 1887, Fred Fray, later a Nevada labor leader and then doorkeeper of the United States Senate, was born in Virginia City, Nevada; in 1894, Texas College, an African-American institution, was founded in Tyler; in 1906, on the second day of the second national conference of the Niagara Movement at Harper's Ferry, women were admitted as full and voting members (the Niagara Movement, formed as an alternative to the Booker T. Washington accommodationist approach to race relations, became the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People); in 1907, a public market came into being in Seattle more or less by happenstance when some peddlers and farmers congregated at Pike Place and First Avenue (Pike Place Market still exists and was given protection in 1971 by voters who approved an initiative petition); in 1915, Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew convicted of murder in a prosecution so dubious that the governor of Georgia commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, was removed from a prison camp by a mob and lynched at Frey's Mill in Georgia (the Frank case led to the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union and of the 20th century Ku Klux Klan); in 1918, sheet music was being sold for When Sammy Comes Home, lyrics by Reverend W. H. Rogers of Las Vegas, who was active in homefront war work; in 1940, the last presidential nomination notification ceremony in U.S. history was held for Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential nominee, in Elwood, Indiana (for many years, presidential candidates did not accept their nominations at the party conventions but instead were "notified" of their nominations in ceremonies weeks after the conventions, a tradition broken by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 when he flew to Chicago to accept his nomination in front of the convention); in 1951, after Pioche bar owner William Rayburn, accused of killing his wife's brother, hired a four-lawyer legal team, tiny Lincoln County hired former Clark County district attorney Robert Jones to assist with the prosecution; in 1954, Cleveland public safety commissioner John McCormick publicly reprimanded police officials who threatened to halt an investigation of the death of Marilyn Sheppard to show their displeasure with the granting of bail to her husband, Bay Village osteopath Samuel Sheppard; in 1954, another sign of the times: Sears Roebuck in Reno staged an exhibit of "radioactive minerals and geiger counters" borrowed from the university school of mines to promote its line of geiger counters, for sale from $19.95 to $1,995; in 1960, Las Vegas Chief of Police Ray Sheffer and City Manager Al Kennedy were arrested by Clark County Sheriff Butch Leypoldt after their indictment for malfeasance in office; in 1962, seventeen year-old Peter Fechter was cut down by gunfire when he ran from east to west Berlin, screamed for help and then bled to death at the foot of the wall after citizens in the west were prevented from rescuing him by guards brandishing weapons (two eastern guards were charged with manslaughter in 1997; a London performance artist is planning a reenactment of the killing at a secret location tomorrow); in 1977, President Carter said "Elvis Presley's death deprives our country of a part of itself. He was unique and irreplaceable. More than twenty years ago, he burst upon the scene with an impact that was unprecedented and will probably never be equaled. His music and his personality, fusing the styles of white country and black rhythm and blues, permanently changed the face of American popular culture. His following was immense and he was a symbol to people the world over, of the vitality, rebelliousness and good humor of his country."; in 1980, the Detroit Tigers retired Al Kaline's number 6.
UPDATE: August 16, 2007, 12:21 a.m. PDT, 07:21 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 16, 1977, singer Elvis Presley died at Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tenn., at age 42. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1868, U.S. Representative Charles David Carter, a Choctaw who served ten terms in the U.S. House from 1907 to 1927, was born near Boggy Depot, Oklahoma; in 1906, the second national conference of the Niagara Movement, formed by African-American leaders the previous year in Ontario to break away from Booker T. Washington's accommodationist approach toward whites, took place at Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, site of John Brown's raid at the federal arsenal (see below); in 1919, the Clark County Review reported that large Nevada water users who had for six years been frustrating implementation of state water law by getting local court injunctions were finally trumped by the Nevada water engineer and state attorney general, who won an order from the Nevada Supreme Court telling district judge Thomas Hart to stop issuing such injunctions or appear before the justices on September 1 to explain himself, a procedure that also faced other local judges; in 1927, buses backed up at the state line near Verdi, drivers refusing to enter Nevada after state police increased permit inspections; in 1939, New York's legendary Hippodrome theatre was closed for the last time and later demolished; in 1940, Sebasteon and Frank Mikulich, owners of Las Vegas, Tonopah and Reno Stage Line, left for Ohio to take delivery on new air conditioned buses for use on the Reno/Las Vegas route; in 1951, North Las Vegas City Attorney George Franklin told the city council that he had the authority under new state law to shut down Roxie's, a well known brothel, but that Nellis air base officers "want it open"; in 1953, a sign of the times: Las Vegas meat market owner William Bernard, just returned from a two week vacation around the west, woke early in the morning stricken by something, was checked into the hospital at 6:30 a.m., diagnosed with polio by noon, placed in an iron lung, and died about four in the afternoon; in 1954, federal "trust" supervision of the Klamath tribe of Oregon ended; in 1954, San Francisco superintendent of schools Herbert Clish, hospitalized in Carson City after he and a young woman were pulled from his exploded and burning car trailer, denied an earlier statement he allegedly made to the San Francisco district attorney that he and the woman decided to kill themselves after deciding marriage between them was impossible; in 1960, one day after marking his 12th anniversary as a member of the Las Vegas Police Department, police chief Ray Sheffer said in response to a demand by Mayor Oran Gragson that Sheffer "must go" (provoked by the indictment of two police officers) that he was already looking for another job; in 1970, former U.S. cabinet member John Gardner formed the political reform group Common Cause; in 1977, Elvis died; in 2003, as a section of the Hood Canal Bridge between Kitsap Peninsula with the Olympic Peninsula was being rebuilt in Washington, workers came across a tribal midden, which led to discovery of human remains and artifacts and the mostly intact Klallam village of Tse-whit-zen beneath decades of industrial rubble, one of the most significant finds Native American archeological finds in history (Tse-whit-zen had existed at the site for 2,700 years until white "civilization" intruded).
W. E. B. DuBois/August 16, 1906: The men of the Niagara Movement coming from the toil of the year's hard work and pausing a moment from the earning of their daily bread turn toward the nation and again ask again, in the name of ten million, the privilege of a hearing. In the past year the work of the Negro-hater has flourished in the land. Step by step the defenders of the rights of American citizens have retreated. The work of stealing the black man's ballot has progressed and the fifty and more representatives of stolen votes still sit in the nation's capital. Discrimination in travel and public accommodation has so spread that some of our weaker brethren are actually afraid to thunder against color discrimination as such and are simply whispering for ordinary decencies. Against this the Niagara Movement eternally protests. We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights! We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American, political, civil and social; and until we get these rights we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America! The battle we wage is not for ourselves alone but for all true Americans. It is a fight for ideals, lest this, our common fatherland, false to its founding, become in truth, the land of the thief and the home of the slave, a byword and a hissing among the nations for its sounding pretensions and pitiful accomplishments. Never before in the modern age has a great and civilized folk threatened to adopt so cowardly a creed in the treatment of its fellow citizens born and bred on it soil. Stripped of verbiage and subterfuge and in its naked nastiness, the new American creed says: "Fear to let black men even try to rise lest they become the equals of the white." And this is the land that professes to follow Jesus Christ! The blasphemy of such a course is only matched by its cowardice. In detail, our demands are clear and unequivocal. First, we would vote; with the right to vote goes everything: freedom, manhood, the honor of your wives, the chastity of your daughters, the right to work, and the chance to rise, and let no man listen to those who deny this. We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now, henceforth and forever!UPDATE: August 15, 2007, 12:14 a.m. PDT, 07:14 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 15, 1947, India and Pakistan became independent after some 200 years of British rule. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 15, 2001: The suicide bombings have increased. There's too many of them.
George Bush / August 15, 2006: The United States of America is engaged in a war against an extremist group of folks.
On this date in 1057, King MacBeth, last Celtic king of Scotland, was killed in at a battle near Lumphanan; in 1812, William Wells, who lived alternately with an adopted tribal family and his white birth family and had difficulty sorting out his loyalties, was killed by Potawatomi tribal warriors while he was dressed as a Miami tribal warrior; in 1855, Ira Kent, Churchill County recorder, treasurer and district attorney who founded the I.H Kent Co. (now called Kent's Supply Center and 113 years old), was born in Millersburg, Pennsylvania; in 1872, a Greeley and Brown Club was formed in Carson City to support presidential candidate Horace Greeley and his running mate Gratz Brown, the nominees of the coalition party of Democrats and liberal Republicans; in 1904, John Kinkead, treasurer of the Territory of Nevada, governor of the State of Nevada and governor of the District of Alaska, died in Carson City; in 1935, actress Abby Dalton (Hennesey, The Joey Bishop Show, Falcon Crest) was born Marlene Wasden in Las Vegas; in 1940, fourteen people were left homeless on Las Vegas' west side when their home burned to the ground; in 1945, the crew of a U.S. B-29 bomber on its way to bomb Kumagaya, Japan, listened to a radio report of President Truman's announcement of the Japanese surrender followed by news coverage of street celebrations in San Francisco and hoped for orders to return to base, but no such orders were received and they were forced to complete the bomb run (a New York Herald Tribune report of the mission by Homer Bigart, who was on board the plane, won the Pulitzer prize); in 1958, a groundbreaking interracial marriage: Maria Elena Santiago and Buddy Holly were married in Lubbock; in 1960, the Henderson city council voted 3 to 2 to allow gambling and liquor sales in all commercially zoned areas of the town; in 1969, the Woodstock festival began in Bethel, New York; in 2001, scientists announced the first discovery of another solar system.UPDATE: August 14, 2007, 1:08 a.m. PDT, 08:08 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 14, 1945, President Truman announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush/August 14, 2001: One of the interesting initiatives we've taken in Washington, D.C., is we've got these vampire-busting devices. A vampire is a cell deal you can plug in the wall to charge your cell phone.
George Bush/August 14, 2002: I love the idea of a school in which people come to get educated and stay in the state in which they're educated.
On this date in 1861, Major General John C. Fremont declared martial law in the city and county of St. Louis (and within a week extended it to the rest of the state); in 1869, the White Pine Water Company's three mile pipeline to bring a water supply to Hamilton from Illipah Springs began operation; in 1935, the Social Security Act became law; in 1935 in justice court, John McGuire of Las Vegas was ordered to repay $15 to Esther Underhill after he sold three of her small buildings to E.O. Cook, who moved them to another location; in 1940, conservative leader Robert Taft, U.S. senator from Ohio, blasted supporters of a draft law for generating hysteria in order to create an unnecessary large standing army; in 1940, California Attorney General Earl Warren announced that a conference of Arizona, Nevada and California would be held August 16-17 on apportionment of Colorado River water; in 1941, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame laureate David Crosby was born in Los Angeles; in 1945, World War Two ended; in 1947, the Reno Evening Gazette editorialized on the subject of President Truman's appointment of James Forrestal as the first secretary of defense: "The same capacity for adapting himself to new problems should prove useful to Mr. Forrestal in his new post" (two years later in his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, Forrestal copied a chorus from Sophocles' poem Ajax and then jumped out the window to his death); in 1947, Reno's second annual Jamb-o-Reno began, with parade, stage shows featuring movie and radio stars, street dancing, horse racing and fireworks; in 1950, an Edward R. Murrow program from Korea warning that the war would be longer that the public had been told and was being handled disastrously by the U.S. was suppressed by CBS management and never aired; in 1954, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported claims by mining companies that if President Eisenhower signed legislation granting price supports to lead and zinc it would result in the reopening of a Pioche mine; in 1954, Reno political figure John Mueller denied that the 201 room, eight-story hotel project he and political boss Norman Biltz were planning for the corner of Mill and Center streets in downtown Reno had been abandoned (it beame the Holiday Hotel and is now the Siena); in 1973, President Nixon's illegal bombing of Cambodia ended; in 1974, Willy Russell's play about The Beatles, John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert, opened at the Lyric Theatre in London after a hugely successful run at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre; in 1991, attorney Tom Wright was appointed to the Nevada Parole Board by Nevada Governor Robert Miller, who would use him as a scapegoat for state parole policies when Sparks police officer Larry Johnson was murdered by a parolee in 1995.UPDATE: August 13, 2007, 9:49 a.m. PDT, 16:49 GMT/SUT/CUT — BARBWIRE BULLETIN
On Aug. 13, 1961, Berlin was divided as East Germany sealed off the border between the city's eastern and western sectors in order to halt the flight of refugees. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush/August 13 2001: My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen.
George Bush/August 13 2001: There's a lot of people in the Middle East who are desirous to get into the Mitchell process. And - but first things first. The - these terrorist acts and, you know, the responses have got to end in order for us to get the framework - the groundwork - not framework, the groundwork to discuss a framework for peace, to lay the - all right. [discussing George Mitchell's peace shuttle in the Middle East]
George Bush/August 13 2002: I firmly believe the death tax is good for people from all walks of life all throughout our society.
George Bush/August 13 2002: The trial lawyers are very politically powerful. But here in Texas we took them on and got some good medical malpractice.
George Bush/August 13 2002:There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again.
George Bush/August 13 2002: Tommy (Thompson) is a good listener, and he's a pretty good actor, too. [confusing his cabinet member with Sen. Fred Thompson]
George Bush/August 13 2002: I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here.
George Bush/August 13 2004: I hope you leave here and walk out and say, What did he say?
On August 13, 1864, news reports were circulated that President Lincoln had been killed by poisoning; in 1869, John Wesley Powell and his exploring party completed a trip by boat down the Green River to the Colorado and through the Grand Canyon; in 1908, the Churchill County Eagle reported that W.W. Williams had contracted for construction of a new home that he intended to give his daughter and son in law as a wedding gift; in 1935, former Las Vegas casino dealer John Geraci was wanted for questioning in the murders of the "two Tonys" — mob figures Anthony Brancato and Anthony Tombino, who were killed on August 6 after Brancato made an overture to the FBI; in 1946, President Truman signed the Indian Claims Commission Act, passed by Congress because of the uncomfortable parallel between U.S. extermination of Native Americans and German genocide of the Jews, but also allowing the federal government to retroactively buy already expropriated tribal lands at prices set by the purchaser, not the unwilling sellers; in 1947, vandals cut down or damaged some of the Japanese cherry trees that lined the Truckee River along Riverside Drive in Reno; in 1954, the U.S. Coast Guard station at Lake Tahoe ordered a halt to Lake Tahoe swims that had lately become trendy (the Guard acted after an abortive 33-minute attempt to swim the 23-mile length of Lake Tahoe by 20 year old Dominic Sposeto of Oakland); in 1966 Longview, Texas, radio station KLUE announced a bonfire of Beatles albums in reaction to John Lennon's "more popular than Jesus" comment, and that night its transmission tower was struck by lightning; in 1973, Reno police chief James Parker fired Captain Don McKillip for allegedly accepting improper loans and using city property for personal purposes; in 1982, the bull market of the Reagan years, fueled by deficit spending, began with a stock market uptick that would eventually raise the Dow from 776.92 to more than 3,000 before the 500-point crash of October 1987 ended it (the deficits were paid off after Reagan left office, mostly during the Clinton years); in 1998 in Las Vegas, Garth Brooks began four concerts over four days, each sold out and with a cumulative audience of 72,076.UPDATE: August 12, 2007, 10:17 p.m. PDT, 05:17 Aug. 13 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 12, 1898, the peace protocol ending the Spanish-American War was signed. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1676, Native American leader Metacom, known to whites as "King Philip", was assassinated by a "Praying Indian" (Christianized Native American) who was a member of a white vigilante group headed by Captain Benjamin Church, and was rewarded for the murder by Plymouth colony officials who then sold Metacom's wife and eight-year-old child into slavery; in 1863, Nevada Territorial Supreme Court Justice Gordon Mott wrote to President Lincoln about his resignation from the court; in 1906, future Nevada assemblymember, assembly speaker, U.S. senator, and U.S. representative Berkeley Bunker was born in Clark County; in 1925, Nevada won the San Francisco Diamond Jubilee baby contest, a competition for the greatest number of entrants born to pioneers crossing the nation to reach the California gold fields (13 Nevadans entered the contest); in 1933, famed bank robber and prison escapee Harvey Bailey, who had shown up at a criminal hideout ranch near Paradise, Texas, at the same time it was being used by George "Machine Gun" Kelly's gang after their kidnapping of Oklahoma oil executive Charles Urschel, was arrested along with them when the FBI tracked the kidnappers to the ranch and sent to prison for the crime, though he had nothing to do with it; in 1940, six highways through Nevada were designated as being of "strategic importance" in national defense, which meant they could be in line for improvement; in 1942, Wycliffe Bible Translators was incorporated in Glendale, California; in 1944, Joseph Kennedy, Jr., was flying a dangerous mission for the British Naval Command (piloting a radio-controllable Liberator bomber loaded with 21,000 pounds of explosives until two control planes took remote control of it, then bailing out) when his plane exploded; in 1947, the postwar economy was in full bloom: The House of Commons empowered Prime Minister Clement Attlee's government to marshal all the resources of the nation to avoid bankruptcy of Britain and U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark ordered an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department antitrust division to determine whether price conspiracies existed in food, clothing and housing industries, and Clark said any cases would be prosecuted criminally; in 1947, residents of the Pyramid Apartments protested to the Sparks City Council after the U.S. Office of Price Administration lifted price controls on the apartments and the landlady went to higher daily rents than the monthly rents had been; in 1947, wealthy Nevada tax residents of Lake Tahoe between south shore and Zephyr Cove, including Will Bliss, Sam Platt and Max Fleischmann, were agitating for secession from Douglas County to join Ormsby County; in 1954, the Las Vegas building department conducted a raid of a corrugated tin building being used as a flophouse at Fifth and Linden and condemned it, chasing off aged pensioners who were sleeping on old mattresses in stalls; in 1981, the IBM personal computer was introduced, selling 136,000 machines its first year, though it was quickly eclipsed by newer companies.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE: August 11, 2007, 12:59 a.m. PDT, 07:59 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 11, 1965, deadly rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1492, Roderic Borgia (father of Lucrezia) was elected Pope Alexander VI, setting off a period of renowned Catholic debauchery and providing a model for Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince; in 1900, four- or five-year-old Edna Purviance, later silent movie star and Charles Chaplin's leading lady in thirty films, sang a duet with Helen Smith at the Ladies‚ Aid Society in Lovelock; in 1906, Bat (Battling) Nelson arrived in Goldfield for his September 3d fight with Joe Gans for the lightweight or welterweight championship (boxing historians differ); in 1911, in Honolulu Harbor, Native Hawaiian Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku astonished the swimming world by swimming the 100 yard freestyle in 55.4 seconds, beating the existing world record by 4.6 seconds (he went on to compete in several Olympics, winning three gold medals, and became known as the father of modern surfing); in 1944, there was a Reno newspaper reported published that actress Frances Farmer was staying with her aunt Mrs. Alex Castaing for a month at Nevada Hot Springs in Lyon County (her biographer wrote that she was actually there for six months, though she made attempts to escape from her family); in 1940, an army airplane — a Vultee BT13 — crashed into Boulder Lake, killing pilot Laurence Wernberg; in 1947, Bonanza Airlines was advertising flights from Hawthorne to Tonopah for $5.75, from Reno to Las Vegas for $22.50 (a flight took about two hours), from Reno to Hawthorne for $5.88, from Las Vegas to Hawthorne for $16.63, from Reno to Tonopah for $11.63, and from Las Vegas to Tonopah for $10,87; in 1947, a Catholic couple sued to overturn California's law prohibiting racially mixed marriages; in 1954, peace came to Vietnam, after a century of French colonization and repeated insurgencies, with the 8:00 a.m. cessation of hostilities between the Vietnamese and the defeated French (war would soon return under U.S. sponsorship); in 1956, Don't Be Cruel by Elvis was released; in 1978, under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, it became "the policy of the United States to protect and preserve for American Indians their inherent right of freedom to believe, express, and exercise the traditional religions of the American Indian, Eskimo, Aleut, and Native Hawaiians, including but not limited to access to sites, use and possession of sacred objects, and the freedom to worship through ceremonials and traditional rites".
UPDATE: August 10, 2007, 12:58 a.m. PDT, 07:58 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 10, 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as the second female Supreme Court justice. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Thomas Jefferson to his nephew Peter Carr / August 10, 1787: Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
On this date in 70, the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by Roman soldiers led by Titus, a month before the city itself was destroyed; in 1628, the Swedish ship Vasa, a gunship carrying 64 guns and ornately outfitted with luxurious furnishings, was launched near Stockholm, sailed for a mile and sank (the ship was excavated largely intact from the harbor bed in 1961 and is now on display in a museum built for the purpose); in 1776, word reached London that the Atlantic coast colonies had declared independence on July 2d; in 1872, Nevada's Republican Party was holding a primary election but permitting party members to vote only if they agreed to swear loyalty to the party's convention-nominated candidates; in 1879, the Central Pacific Railroad informed a restaurant at Colfax that it could stop preparing breakfasts on October 15, apparently because the railroad was planning to switch its schedule and that the breakfast stop would become Reno; in 1901, the Nevada Board of Regents authorized University of Nevada President Joseph Stubbs to request the Washoe County Commission to appoint a special police officer for the University; in 1905, Marion Clawson, author (Economics of Outdoor Recreation, Forests for Whom and for What?) and director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in the Truman administration, was born in Elko; in 1918, the Clark County Review gave front page play to the text of a letter signed by Republican U.S. senate candidate Walter Lamb of Tonopah attacking Nevada's antiwar U.S. Representative Edwin Roberts for causing the nation to doubt "the character of Nevada for loyalty and patriotism..." (Roberts trounced Lamb in the GOP senate primary); in 1918, more than two months after his death, Clark County residents learned that Frank Fuller had died in France on June 5th, the second county casualty of World War One and the first from Las Vegas; in 1939, President Roosevelt vetoed U.S. Senator Key Pittman's bill to grant 8,000 acres, including the Las Vegas wash and adjacent areas, to Nevada for a state park and signed a bill to create a museum at the Custer battlefield in Montana; in 1960, Nevada Controller Keith Lee warned that rampant growth was putting such a strain on services that the state's $8 million surplus was rapidly being used up; in 1962, at a meeting of the secret White House Special Group on Cuba, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed the "liquidation of leaders", prompting fierce objections from CIA Director John McCone, who said he could be excommunicated from the Catholic Church for participating in murder; in 1985, for $47.5 million, Michael Jackson purchased the music publishing rights held by the estate of Sir Lew Grade, including many Lennon/McCartney songs, half of which he sold to Sony in 1991 when he was desperate for money.UPDATE: August 9, 2007, 1:27 a.m. PDT, 08:27 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 9, 1945, the United States exploded a nuclear device over Nagasaki, Japan, instantly killing an estimated 39,000 people. The explosion came three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 9, 2004: Let me put it to you bluntly. In a changing world, we want more people to have control over your own life.
George Bush / August 9, 2004: As you know, we don't have relationships with Iran. I mean, that's — ever since the late '70s, we have no contacts with them, and we've totally sanctioned them. In other words, there's no sanctions — you can't — we're out of sanctions.
On this date in 1814, the Creek war ended after eleven months when Major General Andrew Jackson signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson forcing the tribe to surrender twenty-three million acres of Creek land to the United States (a Continental Congress report had warned in 1787 that war might come: "[T]hose tribes do not complain altogether without cause. An avaricious disposition in some of our people to acquire large tracts of land, and often by unfair means, appears to be the principal source of difficulties with the Indians."); in 1919, the new issue of All Story Weekly magazine carried the story The Curse of Capistrano by Johnston McCulley, introducing the characters of Don Diego de la Vega and El Zorro; in 1919, it was reported in Las Vegas that Pioche mill worker William Garrison, who received the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross for bravery in action in France during World War One, was being sought by the French government, which wished to bestow the Croix de Guerre on him; in 1920, another effort was underway to formally end the world war and repeal wartime legislation over President Wilson's opposition, and this time 22 Democrats, including former speaker Champ Clark, voted for the peace resolution; in 1936, four years after Edward Tolin won two gold medals at the Olympics, the first won by an African-American, Jesse Owens won four at an Olympics in an era when racial supremacy was at issue; in 1946, Marion Motley (former University of Nevada fullback) and Bill Willis joined the Cleveland Browns, two of four players who in 1946 ended pro football's color line (the other two were Kenny Washington and [future actor] Woody Strode who signed with the Los Angeles Rams); in 1947, Judge Clark Guild held a Saturday session to hear the final arguments against the Tonopah and Goldfield Railroad's application to shut down; in 1960, the University of Nevada's Agricultural Extension Service gave a dire report to Governor Grant Sawyer and his drought committee on the impact of the drought on the hay crop and other agricultural production; in 1964 on Face the Nation, two days after he voted to authorize war in Vietnam, U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy, D-Minn., was asked by Robert Pierpoint why a Vietnamese patrol boat would take on the U.S. Navy, as claimed by the U.S. in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and McCarthy replied, "Maybe they were bored."; in 1968, Nevada Republican chair George Abbott, under fire from Nevada Republicans for having nominated George Romney against Spiro Agnew for the GOP vice-presidential nomination at the Republican national convention in Miami, was defended by Romney who said the effort helped produce party unity.UPDATE: August 8, 2007, 2:35 a.m. PDT, 09:35 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon announced he would resign following damaging revelations in the Watergate scandal. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1870, in a liberal radical uprising against Prince Carol of Romania, the Republic of Ploiesti was declared (and survived for one day); in 1898, the United States government deposed the Hawaiian monarchy and "annexed" Hawaii (with the approval of United States Public Law 103-15 on November 23, 1993, the U.S. government apologized to Hawaiians for the coup); in 1925, with the power of the Ku Klux Klan at its height, 40,000 members of the Klan marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in D.C.; in 1940 in Washington, the FBI reported that it was being deluged by reports from people around the country reporting their fellow citizens as spies — including four reports from Las Vegas; in 1942, fueled by resentment that Britain had entered India into World War Two without Indian consent, the All India Congress Committee approved the Quit India Resolution, sparking civil disobedience across the nation as the Japanese army approached the India/Burma border, prompting the British imperialists to order mass detentions of tens of thousands and imprison the entire Congress Party leadership for three years; in 1951, Randy Shilts, journalist (Conduct Unbecoming, And the Band Played On, Mayor of Castro Street) and San Francisco community leader, was born in Davenport, Iowa; in 1954, a twelve-day period of meetings began during which the National Security Council and President Eisenhower decided (while publicly promising to respect the Geneva agreement providing for restoration of Vietnam as one nation, free elections, and a prohibition on foreign intervention) to invent a nation in the southern region of Vietnam and then, through a U.S.-created collaborationist regime in Saigon, defend that "nation" against alleged aggression — by its own people; in 1960, Paul Vance and Lee Pockriss' novelty song Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, which they claimed was written about two year old Paula Vance, hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart, as recorded by Brian Hyland; in 1966, Revolver by The Beatles was released in the United States; in 1973, KCIA agents kidnapped Kim Dae Jung (a critic of the South Korean dictatorship and later president of South Korea and the 2000 Nobel peace prize recipient) from the Hotel Grand Palace in Tokyo, drugged him and took him to Korea where he was first released and then imprisoned; in 1988, lights were used for the first time at Wrigley Field, the last (baseball) park to go to lighting; in 2007, a two day African-American History and Heritage Tour will begin in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the Central High School National Historic Site, Philander Smith College and Arkansas Baptist College, the Daisy Bates House, Taborian Hall, and Clinton Presidential Center and Park included on the tour.
UPDATE: August 7, 2007, 1:52 a.m. PDT, 08:52 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 7, 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, giving President Johnson broad powers in dealing with reported North Vietnamese attacks on United States forces. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1409, the Council of Pisa, called to mend the "great schism" in the Catholic Church which left the church with two popes, ended after further complicating things by electing a third pope; in 1844, explorer John Fremont arrived in St. Louis after a long trip during which he left his imprint on the west by naming everything he encountered, including Pyramid Lake, Carson Valley and the Great Basin itself; in 1907, an oil discovery near Reno prompted an editorial suggestion that "Standard Oil should be kept out of the district" and the Commercial League of Reno was seeking information from Spokane about that city's fight against the predatory policies of the Southern Pacific Railroad for use in Reno (and there was another editorial suggestion that a monument to "Reno's appreciation of the Southern Pacific railroad's friendship and generosity towards the city might with entire propriety be modeled in the form of a Black Hand."); in 1918, at a time when many African-Americans were fighting as French soldiers because they were unwelcome in the U.S. forces, U.S. European commander John Pershing issued a document titled "Secret Information Concerning Black-American Troops" that warned French military officials of the "menace of degeneracy which had to be prevented by the gulf established between the two races ... because of the fact that they were given to the loathsome vice of criminally assaulting women" (the French ignored the advice but did suggest to their officers that they not praise the blacks too highly in the presence of white U.S. soldiers to avoid inflaming them); in 1919, Helen Keller, writer and actress in the movie Deliverance (which portrayed her life of blindness), skipped the New York premiere of her own film because she was unwilling to cross a union picket line against the Broadway producers who owned the Lyric Theatre where Deliverance was showing, and she instead joined strikers at the Lexington Theatre; in 1919 about a hundred actors in twelve Broadway plays walked off the job in the first strike on the great white way to try to limit unpaid rehearsals — which then could go on for months — to four weeks (strikers Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Eddie Cantor, Marie Dressler, Lillian Russell, W.C. Fields and others put on a show at the Lexington Theatre, and Ed Wynn — legally enjoined from performing in the show — and Keller were in the audience); in 1919, the first Broadway play ever struck and shut down was Lightin', a comedy about a fellow who with his wife — Mother Jones! — runs a Lake Tahoe hotel straddling the Nevada/California border that allowed people to establish their divorce residencies in Nevada while getting their letters home postmarked from California; in 1931, a strike at Boulder Dam, led by the Industrial Workers of the World, began; in 1940, in an effort to stamp out the belief that Boulder Dam had been closed to tourists, Los Angeles radio station KNX agreed to a request from the Las Vegas chamber of commerce that Boulder Dam tours be mentioned at every station ID for two days, August 6 and 7; in 1941, a wage agreement was reached between workers and the William P. Neil Company, which was constructing buildings at the Hawthorne naval ammunition depot; in 1954, Brit Roger Bannister and Australian John Landy, the first and second runners to break the four minute mile, faced each other in Vancouver, a race that took on a legendary quality in sports and pop culture (it was a plot point in an episode of Lou Grant and subject of the Neal Bascomb book The Perfect Mile); in 1964 (stop me if you've heard this one) Congress approved a resolution authorizing war after being fed a bunch of false information by the President of the United States; in 1974, high wire stuntman Philippe Petit strung a line between the World Trade Center towers (still under construction) and then walked across it; in 2001, Henrietta Holsman Fore was sworn in as director of the U.S. Mint, the second Nevadan to hold that post (on May 10, 2005, George Bush nominated her to be an undersecretary of state and she was confirmed by the Senate on August 29).
UPDATE: August 6, 2007, 1:03 a.m. PDT, 08:03 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, that instantly killed an estimated 66,000 people in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 6, 2004: We actually misnamed the war on terror. It ought to be the Struggle Against Ideological Extremists Who Do Not Believe in Free Societies Who Happen to Use Terror as a Weapon to Try to Shake the Conscience of the Free World.
George Bush / August 6, 2004: Tribal sovereignty means that; it's sovereign. I mean, you're a — you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And therefore the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.
On this date in 1806, after 844 years, the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist when Francis von Hapsburg abdicated as emperor; in 1835, Jewett Adams, lieutenant governor and governor of Nevada and superintendent of the branch United States Mint in Carson City, was born in South Hero, Vermont; in 1863, a Storey County Miner's Union was organized; in 1887, the Nevada State Journal wrote "If fifty new homes could be built in Reno within the next thirty days there would be no trouble about tenants. There are not only a number of persons who cannot get any place in which to live, but there are a great many families who are living in old houses who would gladly remove into something new and decent."; in 1919, a new Reno city gambling ordinance took effect, requiring a license payment of $150 for every table on which poker, stud poker, solo, or five hundred were played; in 1926, the final location shooting for the silent movie The Winning of Barbara Worth took place at St. Paul's Church in Winnemucca; in 1935, the San Diego Sun reported that the Boulder Dam display was winning "public favor" at the California Pacific International Exposition; in 1940, William Hawkins, who came to Las Vegas in 1905, lived in a tent in Old Town (now the west side), and in the railroad auction of townsite lots purchased a lot on Fremont Street where he opened a mercantile, died at age 77; in 1942, on the day that German troops began massacring three thousand Jews in Dyatlovo, Byelorussia, 600 Jews (using plans prepared by partisan Jewish leader Alter Dvoretski, who had been murdered by anti-Semitic Russian partisans who were unwilling to fight the Germans) escaped into the Lipiczany Forest where they joined the partisans who became the third Jewish company in the Soviet Orlianski-Borba Battalion; in 1960, the Clark County sheriff's office got its first female captain, Ann Moore Chilimpis; in 1968, in Missouri, U.S. Senator Edward Long, dogged by his association with mob lawyer Morris Shenker (later a Las Vegas casino figure), lost renomination in the Democratic primary election to Lt. Governor Thomas Eagleton; in 1970 after an Oklahoma firm laid claim to 400,000 acres of Nevada land as part of a scheme of locating mining claims for customers who paid the filing fee, Washoe County Senator Cliff Young called it the latest evidence of the need for reform of the Mining Law of 1872; in 1970, the new freeway through Washoe Valley between Washoe City and Carson City was opened at 4:03 p.m. after a troubled construction period during which an overpass collapsed and there was difficulty working with damp ground (the new freeway, which ran alongside the stone Ophir Mill building, rapidly accelerated its deterioration); in 1988, the astonishing supergroup The Traveling Wilburys (Jeff Lynne, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, went on tour; in 2001 at his Texas ranch five weeks before September 11, George Bush was given a briefing paper entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.UPDATE: August 5, 2007, 6:10 p.m. PDT, 01:10 8-6-2007 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 5, 1963, the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in Moscow banning nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space and underwater. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush / August 5, 2004: Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we
.
George Bush / August 5, 2004: We stand for things.
On this date in 1735, departing New York after his successful defense of John Peter Zenger, attorney Andrew Hamilton was honored with a "grand salute of cannon"; in 1865, the Nye County News reported "Those of our citizens who retain fond memories of the piscatorial delights of long ago, will be happy to learn that a renewal of those pleasant days is easily attainable. About fifteen miles easterly from this City [Ione], in the Toiyabe range, a few miles from the head waters of the Reese River, countless hundreds of speckled trout disport themselves in the romantic brook, in a manner decidedly tempting to a disciple of old Isaac [Izaak] Walton."; in 1924, Little Orphan Annie, a comic strip drawn by Harold Gray whose main character was created by newspaper publisher Joseph Medill Patterson appeared for the first time in the New York Daily News pink section; in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed that both Congress and the state legislatures enact subversive activities and seditious acts laws; in 1944, plans by McClatchy radio station KOH in Reno to broadcast a program called Nevada Legend from Piper's Opera House in Virginia City were abandoned because of bad acoustics and Reno's Twentieth Century Club in Reno was chosen as the new site; in 1957, American Bandstand, a local dance show in Philadelphia, was picked up for national telecast on the ABC network; in 1963, photographer Marilyn Newton joined the Reno Gazette Journal; in 1965, the Vietnam era, as defined by federal law for the purpose of veteran's benefits, began (August 5, 1964, to May 7, 1975); in 1981, President Reagan fired all 11,359 striking air traffic controllers.UPDATE: August 4, 2007, 12:02 a.m. PDT, 07:02 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Aug. 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany while the United States proclaimed its neutrality. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Frederick Douglass / August 4, 1857: Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle! Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
On this date in 1790, Congress created the Revenue Cutter Service (now called the Coast Guard) to enforce the tariff and all other maritime laws, as well as attending to emergency lifesaving duties (it now operates not just on the seacoasts but on inland lakes as well); in 1875, a spelling match at the Mormon church in Franktown drew
"woodchoppers, railroad men, ranchers, schoolmasters, together with a plentiful sprinkling of the fair sex" (there were two "spelldowns" and Mrs. Nat. Holmes won one and her daughter Miss Lizzie Holmes won the other); in 1882, President Rutherford Hayes issued an executive order taking back land that President Grant had reserved for the Ute tribe in his order of November 22, 1875; in 1903, actress Clara Peller ("Where's the beef?") was born to parents who immigrated to the U.S. from Czarist Russia; in 1904, Julia McCann married future Nevada state engineer, governor, U.S. representative, U.S. senator and newspaper publisher James Scrugham; in 1920, Marianne Williamson married Morley Griswold, later lieutenant governor and acting governor of Nevada; in 1931, Six Companies Inc., the conglomerate formed to build Boulder Dam, reported that 26 people had so far died within the project since its start in July 1930 (none of them, contrary to myth, from being entombed in the concrete dam); in 1934, two Reno boys built their own car, took it out on the road, and got in an accident with another driver at Sixth and Sierra streets; in 1944, after 25 months in hiding, the eight members of the Frank family of Amsterdam were hauled out of the secret annex, a hiding place in a building behind Prinsengracht 263 and sent to Westerbork transit camp, then to Auschwitz (a family friend retrieved Anne's famous diary from the annex after the police departed and gave it to her father after the war); in 1945, with baseball talent at a premium during World War Two, Bert Shepard, a one-legged minor league player (his right leg was amputated after his fighter plane crashed in Germany) pitched five major league innings for the Senators against the Red Sox; in 1947, San Francisco Library Commission President Steve Coulter, a former four-term member of the Nevada Assembly, was born in Los Angeles; in 1947, the White House in Carson City, a former stage stop and rooming house near the Capitol that sometimes was used to house legislators when the legislature was in session, was sold by Lillian Bonafous (sister of former state printer Joe Farnsworth) to Alf Hanna; in 1952, a landmark in cardiac history was reached as the first Kentucky Fried Chicken stand opened in Utah (the historic building was demolished on April 20, 2004, to make way for a KFC museum, a case of destroying the past in order to save it); in 1958, Sharon Sheeley's Poor Little Fool by Ricky Nelson hit number one on the Billboard magazine chart; in 1964, the bodies of three lynching victims — civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman — were found in an earthen dam on the Old Jolly Farm near Philadelphia, Mississippi, 44 days after they vanished, events fictionalized in the deceitful film Mississippi Burning; in 1980, John and Yoko began working on Double Fantasy.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE: August 3, 2007, 1:22 p.m. PDT, 20:22 GMT/SUT/CUT — BREAKING NEWS: Laborers Union Local 169 schedules Aug. 4 demonstration at Atlantis Hotel-Casino in Reno
On Aug. 3, 1958, the nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the North Pole underwater. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
UPDATE: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 15:18:36 PDT, 23:18:36 CUT/SUT/GMT — On this date in 1546, French printer Etienne Doletis was hanged and burned at the stake because he printed reformist material; in 1795, the Treaty of Greenville was signed at Fort Greenville, Ohio, ending the Northwest Indian War between an alliance of tribes and the United States, forcing the tribes to surrender much of Ohio, Illinois and Michigan in exchange for blankets, animals and other materials; in 1878, Anna Mills Johnston climbed Mt. Whitney (Mt. Anna Mills was named for her in 1984); in 1901, William Clagett, two-term member of the House of Representatives of Nevada Territory and (after statehood) member of the Nevada Senate and congressional delegate of the Territory of Montana (and son of abolitionist editor Thomas William Clagett), died at his daughter's home in Spokane; in 1901, a post office was opened in Culverwell, also known as Calientes (today as Caliente); in 1931, the Hobart Estate, which held the Hobart Lumber Company, which in turn owned Independence Lake, authorized the lake's gates be opened and some water sent downstream to relieve drought stricken western Nevada; in 1931 in Las Vegas, it was reported that pilot H.K. Linn was taking passengers up in his plane from the Meadows airport over Las Vegas ($2.50) and Boulder Dam ($10); in 1963 , Surfer Girl by The Beach Boys was released; in 1965, a report by Morley Safer of CBS was broadcast showing GIs using a flamethrower and Zippo lighters to burn down homes in the Vietnamese town of Cam Ne after opposing soldiers had already fled the area, starting a huge controversy during which President Johnson said CBS had "shat on the flag" and threatened to go public with alleged FBI files on Safer's "communist ties" unless he was fired (it was later learned that the U.S. attack on the town had been ordered by a Vietnamese official to punish its residents for failing to pay their taxes); in 1975, in a weird throwback to the private filibustering expeditions of the 1800s, French mercenary Bob Denard and a small force overthrew the government of the Comoro Islands, a nation off the east coast of Africa, one of four coups d'état he led there in the 1970s, '80s, and '90s during which two chiefs of state were murdered; in 1992, for the second time, Jackie Joyner-Kersee won the gold in the seven-event olympic heptathlon; in 2002, George Bush signed legislation to revoke foreign assistance from nations that support the creation of a war crimes tribunal, restrict U.S. participation in U.N. peacekeeping unless U.S. soldiers were exempted from prosecution for war crimes, and authorize an invasion of Holland to retrieve U.S. officials or soldiers put on trial at the Hague for war crimes (which can only happen if the U.S. itself failed to prosecute).UPDATE: August 2, 2007, 12:22 a.m. PDT, 09:22 GMT/SUT/CUT — On August 2, 1923, the 29th president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, died in San Francisco. Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office as president. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1776, signing began of the declaration of independence of the British colonies in the Americas; in 1832, after white forces pursued the Fox and Sauk tribes through several states, they attacked tribal members who were attempting to ford a river, using cannon and rifles from a ship and using axes, clubs and guns on shore to kill hundreds, including women and children in what became known as the massacre of Bad; in 1865, a three-day convention of African-Americans was held in newly conquered Virginia and adopted an appeal to the federal government not to lose politically what it gained militarily (see below); in 1876, New Jersey resident Edmund Hill visited the U.S. centennial exposition and later wrote in his diary "Went all around just where I felt like it and enjoyed myself hugely. Spent the morning in the machinery building. Saw the Nevada quartz mill."; in 1927, President Calvin Coolidge issued a statement on his reelection intentions that said "I do not choose to run" (some historians believe that by using the word "choose" Coolidge meant to telegraph his unwillingness to ask for renomination but his willingness to be drafted, a message his party missed entirely, turning to Herbert Hoover for a candidate); in 1943, Hawthorne, Nevada, real estate dealer William Merchant, monitoring short wave radio, heard a Tokyo broadcast about U.S. prisoners of war on which four prisoners spoke, including former Nevada senator Fred Fall, the first word of Fall's whereabouts since he was taken prisoner on Guam shortly after the start of the war (Merchant wrote a letter to Fall's wife, but the letter was returned unclaimed); in 1948, speaking before an American Legion meeting while campaigning for a seat in the Georgia Legislature, candidate Harrold Carswell pledged himself to lifelong advocacy of white supremancy, words that damaged him in 1970 when he was nominated for the U.S. Supreme Court by President Nixon; in 1960, North Las Vegas building inspector Roland Tate announced that the city council had approved a seventh residential fallout shelter building permit; in 1961, The Beatles appeared for the first time at Liverpool's Cavern Club; in 1964, President Johnson reported that the U.S. destroyer Maddox had been attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin and that the attack was "unprovoked" (the attack was provoked by secret U.S.-sponsored attacks on a radar station and a port in the north of Vietnam); in 1964 on Face the Nation, U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey dismissed a claim by a Saigon official that U.S. combat troops would be needed in Vietnam, saying that it was "an effort to bolster their own peoples' morale."; in 1971, a U.S. government document was drafted documenting a 30,000-soldier army the CIA was secretly funding in Laos; in 1990, after learning of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush said he was not considering military action (the next day at Aspen, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher browbeat him into changing his mind).
Appeal by a convention of former slaves / Alexandria, Virginia: When the contest waxed long, and the result hung doubtfully, you appealed to us for help, and how well we answered is written in the rosters of the two hundred thousand colored troops now enrolled in your service; and as to our undying devotion to your cause, let the uniform acclamation of escaped prisoners, "whenever we saw a black face we felt sure of a friend," answer. Well, the war is over, the rebellion is "put down," and we are declared free! Four fifths of our enemies are paroled or amnestied, and the other fifth are being pardoned, and the President has, in his efforts at the reconstruction of the civil government of the States, late in rebellion, left us entirely at the mercy of these subjugated but unconverted rebels, in everything save the privilege of bringing us, our wives and little ones, to the auction block. . . . We know these men — know them well — and we assure you that, with the majority of them, loyalty is only "lip deep," and that their professions of loyalty are used as a cover to the cherished design of getting restored to their former relations with the Federal Government, and then, by all sorts of "unfriendly legislation," to render the freedom you have given us more intolerable than the slavery they intended for us.[[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: August 1, 2007, 6:17 a.m. PDT, 13:17 GMT/SUT/CUT — On August 1, 1936, 100,000 saluted Adolf Hitler on his entrance at the opening of the Berlin Olympics. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Nevada State Journal / August 1, 1874: We agree with the Oakland Tribune, the editor saying: "It is a relic of the barbarous ages; it partakes of the nature of the Spanish inquisition; it is closely allied to the old Council of Ten, which perpetuated its outrages upon the citizens of the Republic of Venice, in the fourteenth century, and was an instrument of tyranny in the hands of the Doges; it is an exparte inquisitorial assemblage, with unlimited power for evil, and irresponsible in character. The evils of the system are, that it is open to conspiracies against the character of any citizen, without giving the person attacked a chance to defend himself, or rebut the charges of an enemy. He may clear himself in court, but the stigma of being indicted by a Grand Jury will forever stick to him."
On this date in 1715, the Riot Act, an English measure intended to control public disturbances that added a phrase to the language, took effect, requiring that at such events alleged offenders could be required to disperse or be arrested, provided that provisions of the act were read out "with a loud voice" first, and though the law was not often a success, its provisions spread throughout the English-speaking world and still survive in many places today (including the U.S.) though it was repealed in England in 1973; in 1863, Nevada Territorial Supreme Court Justice Horatio McClean Jones resigned (on this date or July 30); in 1873, the first cable car in San Francisco, invented by Andrew Hallidie and engineered by William Eppelsheimer, was successfully tested by Hallidie on Clay Street (one account says it happened on August 2d, but the franchise required a run by August 1); in 1887, the county seat of White Pine County was transferred from Hamilton to Ely; in 1899, Samuel Doten began work as University of Nevada meteorologist and assistant to the Botany and Entomology Department in the Experiment Station at a salary of $600 a year; in 1906, bribes were paid to San Francisco supervisors by political fixer Abe Ruef from United Railroads for their votes on a trolley franchise; in 1908, Nevada Democratic chair John Considine launched an initiative petition drive to abolish the state police, formed to crack down on workers; in 1908, William Randolph Hearst traveled through Reno and declined an interview with local reporters; in 1915, Reno lawyer Samuel Platt, former and future Republcan candidate for the United States Senate, took possession of the Reno Gazette for a rumored $75,000- $85,000, not counting the physical plant; in 1920, 25,000 African-Americans rallied at Madison Square Garden in support of Marcus Garvey's vision of racial pride and a return to Africa, (and during August a provisional government and a flag were adopted); in 1931 in Washington, the U.S. Treasury Department awarded the contract for construction of a federal building in Las Vegas to Plains Construction Company of Pampa, Texas, on its bid of $337,000; in 1942, Jerry Garcia was born; in 1944, Goldfield and Tonopah, crowded during World War Two as a consequence of the workforce at Tonopah Army Air Base, were put under federal rent control; in 1953, groups of people gathered in downtown Reno, watching what was described as a "pinprick of silver" high in the sky, prompting speculation about flying saucers (the weather station at Hubbard Field suggested it might be a balloon launched from the bay area to collect weather data); in 1962, President Kennedy urged women to check their medicine cabinets for baby-deforming thalidomide and to turn in any supplies they found, and he urged Congress to enact pending legislation that "will allow for immediate removal from the market of a new drug where there is an immediate hazard to public health"; in 1962, Republican candidate for governor Hank Greenspun attacked his opponent in the Republican primary, Oran Gragson, and lieutenant governor candidate Paul Laxalt mistook it as an attack on himself and he lashed out at Greenspun; in 1971, the concerts for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison were held at Madison Square Garden; in 1975, Connecticut Governor Ella Grasso, given her governor's license plates, said she would not be using a car and would put them on her bicycle instead; in 2003, fifth-year drought conservation measures ordered by the Clark County commission took effect.UPDATE: July 31, 2007, 12:51 a.m. PDT, 07:51 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1964, the American space probe Ranger 7 transmitted pictures of the moon's surface. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1684 by some accounts, a conference was held in Albany to negotiate differences between whites and Cayugas, Oniedas, Mohawks and others about white intrustions into Native lands; in 1875, U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, former president of the United States, died at Carter Station, Tennessee; in 1905, a "phenomenal find", "easily the richest gold strike ever made in the state of Nevada, and one the story of which reads like a tale of the Arabian nights" was made in Olinghouse canyon; in 1912, unable to stomach the distribution of more films of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson beating white boxers, Congress outlawed the interstate shipment of fight films; in 1915, former U.S. Representative A. Mitchell Palmer, appointed to a judgeship by President Wilson, refused the appointment (and later became U.S. attorney general, launching the brutal "red raids" after World War One while Wilson was bedridden); in 1916, African-American archivist Warren Marr II, co-founder of the Amistad Research Center and editor of the NAACP's Crisis, was born in Pittsburgh; in 1922, the Nevada Board of Regents appointed Laura Ambler to be an English instructor, in which position she launched the University of Nevada's first journalism instruction; in 1922, Nevada state water engineer James Scrugham announced that he would run for governor; in 1943, deaf U.S. infantry private Rodger Young was killed while single-handedly knocking out a Japanese machine gun emplacement as his unit retreated, an action for which he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor (in Robert Heinlein's statist science fiction novel Starship Troopers, Young is a frequent plot point: Frank Loesser's The Ballad of Rodger Young is referenced, there is a troop transport TFCT Rodger Young, Young appears to the novel's dying hero, and Young's Medal of Honor citation is printed at the end of the novel); in 1971, Carole King's You've Got A Friend by James Taylor hit number one on the Billboard chart, becoming his only number one hit; in 1972, vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the Democratic ticket after disclosures that he had undergone psychiatric treatment, including shock treatment, and had failed to disclose the treatment to his running mate, George McGovern.
UPDATE: July 30, 2007, 12:07 a.m. PDT, 07:07 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1619, twenty two burgesses met at Jamestown, Virginia, a meeting generally regarded as the first representative legislative assembly in the colonies; in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon and his followers took over Jamestown as part of the rebellion over the colonial government's refusal to allow attacks on local tribes and institute reforms in the government (they eventually burned the town); in 1863, the Treaty of Box Elder was signed between the Shoshone and the United States (several years later, the U.S. encouraged the tribe to move onto the Fort Hall reservation in violation of an 1869 treaty reserving it to the Bannocks); in 1866, while a New Orleans convention of black and white delegates peacefully debated enfranchisement of blacks and former Confederates, rioting whites including police attacked the convention, murdering at least 48 blacks and pro-Union whites, an event that — portrayed by cartoonist Thomas Nast and taken together with other similar events across the south — inflamed opinion in the north, becoming an issue in President Johnson's impeachment trial and convincing northerners that white rule in the south could not be trusted (some sources say the convention was a Republican convention, others that it was a state constitutional convention); in 1869, President Grant issued an executive order providing that the already established Fort Hall reservation was "a reservation provided for the Bannocks by the second article of the treaty with said tribe of 3d July, 1868"; in 1901, the Virginia and Truckee Railroad was constructing a building to hold dairy products of the Douglas County Creamery where they could be kept cold until being shipped; in 1931, United Press reported that Howard Hughes' effort to make a movie of the anti-Semitic novel Queer People was facing refusals of help from Hollywood writers and directors; in 1931, several days after Murch Brothers Construction of St. Louis made the low bid on a contract for construction of a federal building in Las Vegas, another bid which had been postmarked by the deadline but long delayed in the mail arrived from Plains Construction Company of Pampa, Texas; in 1932, the olympic games in Los Angeles began with 1912's sensational athlete Jim Thorpe, who had fallen on hard times and could not afford tickets, watching from the presidential box; in 1944, the 370th Regimental Combat Team, an African-American unit, disembarked at Naples, Italy; in 1951, the Colorado River Commission, asserting that the Henderson townsite was part of the Basic Magnesium plant, ordered the eviction of 50 residents who did not work in the plant to make room for those who did; in 1960, the Nevada Board of Regents created a committee to study how to centralize university library services; in 1967, six months before Tet, the Gallup poll reported that 52 percent of the American people disapproved of President Johnson's handling of the war and that 41 percent thought it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam; in 1967, Catholic bishop/broadcaster Fulton Sheen called for the U.S. to withdraw from Vietnam; in 1968, after the recording of the seventh take of Hey Jude, Paul began singing a ditty called Las Vegas Tune (The two songs appeared as a single cut on the bootleg Unsurpassed Masters Vol. 4 released by Yellow Dog); in 1975, Jimmy Hoffa left the Machus Red Fox restaurant near Detroit and was never seen again; in 1990, at a Nevada Board of Regents meeting, after the regents approved leasing 493 acres of university land in Churchill County to the Fallong Mining Company for mining, UNR student president Jason Geddes asked that the money earned be used for internships for mining students.
On July 30, 1945, the USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. Only 316 out of 1,196 men survived the sinking and shark-infested waters. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
UPDATE: July 29, 2007, 8:24 a.m. PDT, 15:24 GMT/SUT/CUT — On this date in 1794, African-Americans founded the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in a Philadelphia church building (converted from a former blacksmith shop) as a Methodist alternative to a Philadelphia Episcopal congregation; in 1874, a meeting was held in Reno to plan local relief efforts for the people of Eureka, Nevada, devastated by a flood; $300 was raised for Eureka in Elko, and in Eureka itself Charles DeLong of Virginia City, former U.S. minister [ambassador] to Japan and son in law of former governor Lewis Bradley, gave a benefit lecture in the court house; in 1878, newspaperman Don Marquis, who created "archy", the newspaper office cockroach who used the typewriter to write poetry after hours (but wrote all in lower case because he could not operate the shift key) and "mehitabel", an alley cat who was Cleopatra in a past life, was born in Walnut, Illinois; in 1901, the Washoe County Medical Association was founded; in 1907, Reno Athletic Club president Jim May said that Reno had won a new Gans/Nelson lightweight championship fight: "This means that Reno will get the big fight for Labor Day. Nothing can stop it." (the fight never took place); in 1912, Latter Day Saints from the mountain colonies of Mexico abandoned their homes and fled the country amid revolution, most of them crossing into the United States at El Paso; in 1914, U.S. Secretary of War Lindley Garrison ordered the deportation of Newspaper Enterprise Association reporter Fred L. Boalt, who had reported that a U.S. naval officer had employed the "law of flight" to Mexican prisoners, which the army claimed was inaccurate; in 1914, Austrian Fritz Wessley of Reno was notified by the Austrian vice consul in San Francisco to report for duty in the war against Serbia; in 1917, Associated Press was ensnarled in a dispute over its transmission of a story about U.S. troops landing in Europe that had been approved by European censors but that the U.S. war department asked to have killed that AP sent anyway; in 1919, at McGill and Ruth, Nevada, members of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Western Federation of Miners struck the mines; in 1921, Sacramento newspaper publisher V.S. McClatchy denied that his Chinese Exclusion League of California was responsible for the deportation of Japanese workers at Turlock; in 1921, a Yellowstone bear known as Jesse James had revived his habit of sitting in the middle of a road and preventing cars from passing until he was fed; in 1929, George Wingfield announced that forty rooms would be added to Reno's Golden Hotel; in 1930, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ray Wilbur said he would ignore Arizona's court action to stop the construction of Boulder Dam and continue arrangements for the dam building; in 1932, the first of two rallies was held in Minneapolis by the fascist Silver Shirts of America, at which fascist leader Roy Zachary called for an attack on Teamsters Local 544, which immediately organized an unarmed defense guard (the police being considered sympathetic to the Silver Shirts); in 1934, the Willows night club on South Main Street near Fifth in Las Vegas was destroyed by fire; in 1944, after a night in jail in Antioch, California, where she was arrested for "hanging around" town, actress Frances Farmer departed with her father for Nevada Hot Springs in Lyon County, Nevada; in 1951, an agreement was reached under which the Las Vegas Valley Water District acquired the Lake Mead pipeline and pumping facilities from the Colorado River Commission; in 1952, the U.S. Army announced that because Reno businesses refused to serve African-American soldiers stationed at Stead Air Force Base, the army was starting bus service between Stead and Sacramento for black soldiers to use for R&R; in 1952, in Henderson, angry Pittman residents held a public meeting at the former Midway Casino to demand the area's water problems (low supplies, faulty pipelines) be solved; in 1963, Blowin' In The Wind by Peter, Paul and Mary was released; in 1963, the Dunes and Sands casinos joined the Sahara in negotiating with the Las Vegas chapter of the NAACP on integration and jobs to avert a threatened civil rights march against the casinos; in 1968, Light My Fire by The Doors hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1970, U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy told other Democrats that they would not allow their alliance with antiwar students to break up the party's traditional alliance with labor; in 1968, Pope Paul VI condemned birth control in his encyclical Humanae Vitae; in 1975, President Ford visited Auschwitz; in 2004, Arlo Gurthrie appeared in concert at the Bartley Ranch in Reno.
UPDATE: July 28, 2007, 6:52 a.m. PDT, 13.42 GMT/CUT/SUT — On July 28, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. World War I began as declarations of war by other European nations quickly followed. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Alfred Thayer Mahan / July 28, 1958: Force is never more operative than when it is known to exist but is not brandished.
George Bush / July 28, 2003: And the other lesson is that there are people who can't stand what America stands for, and desire to conflict great harm on the American people.
On July 28, 1868, with ratification of the fourteenth amendment, African-Americans became full citizens of the United States, voiding original constitutional language making them three-fifths citizens; in 1875, U.S. Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee was stricken with paralysis; in 1878, there was a Canary Bird Concert at Reno's Methodist Church — humans singing in a hall filled with cages of birds hung all around the church (Nevada State Journal: "Though the birds did not sing as much as desired the human warblers did great credit to themselves."); in 1883, the Nevada Board of Regents, meeting in Elko, decided to set the salary of the instructor in assaying and mining engineering at $250 a month and, on the second ballot, elected E. W. Farrington as principal of the University of Nevada; in 1896, the Dime novel Deadwood Dick, Jr., at Gold Dust; or, Sport Harry's Blind. A Story of the Hungary Gulch Ghost. by Edward L. Wheeler, a story of a Keeley cure clinic in the Nevada mining camp of Gold Gulch (and number 93 in the Deadwood Dick series) was published by Beadle's Half Dime Library (the Keeley cure was a bogus cure for drug addiction); in 1901, labor leader Harry Bridges, whose December 11, 1958, Reno marriage to Norika Sawada succeeded in overturning Nevada's anti-mixed marriages law, was born in Melbourne, Australia; in 1903, an Elko constable notified law officers in Madera, California, that he had located Madera fugitive Jack Barnes working on a local ranch and could apprehend him if the Californians wished (Barnes was arrested and returned to California after Madera County promised to pay the expenses); in 1914, the world war began when the Ottoman Empire declared war on Bosnia; in 1915, ten thousand African-Americans marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in silence, a protest against lynching and discrimination; in 1930, Walter "Death Valley Scotty" Scott claimed in Las Vegas that he had turned down a $750,000 movie deal; in 1932, in the District of Columbia, four troops of cavalry, six tanks, infantrymen with machine guns, and miscellaneous other forces all led by Douglas MacArthur (who said the fate of the republic was at stake) attacked the Bonus Army, unemployed veterans of World War One who had marched across the nation to seek early payment of a promised bonus; in 1934, first daughter Anna Roosevelt Dall, in Reno for a divorce (believed to be the first divorce in a first family), was reported planning to marry again as soon as her divorce was granted; in 1935, Joseph Neal, Jr., who has served as Nevada Senate majority floor leader, president pro tempore, acting governor, and at his retirement was tied for longevity of service as a Nevada state senator, was born in Mounds, Louisiana; in 1939, former Indiana governor and Philippines high commissioner Paul McNutt quashed efforts by his supporters to promote him for the Democratic presidential nomination, removing the principal competitor to Franklin Roosevelt and clearing the way for a third term for FDR; in 1945, in heavy fog, a U.S. Army B-25 bomber was piloted by an experienced flier down Manhattan's 42d Street, banked onto Fifth Avenue, dodged several skyscrapers, and plowed at an estimated 200 miles an hour into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, exploding inside the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference and killing 14 people (two women whose elevator dropped more than 70 floors survived; one of the plane's engines came out the other side of the building and landed on a 12 story building); in 1952, former U.S. representative and U.S. senator Berkeley Bunker was elected president of the Southern Nevada Knife and Fork Club; in 1956, Elvis' I Want You, I Need You, I Love You hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1996, Kennewick Man was discovered in Washington and went on to provoke a long dispute over whether the remains could be examined by scientists over the objections of Native American tribes; in 2002, on a trip to Toronto for a youth conference, John Paul II failed to apologize for the clergy sex abuse scandal, saying only "The harm done by some priests to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame, but think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests whose only wish is to serve and do good."UPDATE: July 27, 2007, 1:58 a.m. PDT, 08:58 GMT/SUT/CUT — On July 27. 1953, the Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom, ending three years of fighting. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On July 27, 1875, the Nevada State Journal said the practice of firing guns in Reno after dark was out of hand: "Quiet, peaceable citizens should not be put in fear and danger of their lives at the pleasure of every hoodlum who happens to own a pistol."; in 1877, at an Oglala Lakota council at Camp Robinson, Nebraska, U.S. Army Lieutenant William Clark read a message from General George Crook proposing that Crazy Horse and 17 other tribal members travel to D.C. to meet with President Hayes; in 1916, German officials in Belgium executed Captain Charles Fryatt of Britain after a strange court martial in which Fryatt was prosecuted and convicted of using his ship to defend against the German u-boat that was attacking him; in 1931, Six Companies, the conglomerate building Boulder Dam, announced it would open a recreation/sports clubhouse for dam workers, to be managed by actor (he debuted in Mae West's She Done Him Wrong) and former heavyweight contender Frank Moran; in 1933, the World Economic Conference in London (the U.S. had several delegates, including U.S. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada) collapsed after the new U.S. president, Franklin Roosevelt, issued an intemperate message on the conference; in 1939, fifty people saw Reno mobsters William Graham and James McKay off at the airport on their departure for New York to surrender to federal officials and begin serving prison sentences for fraud; in 1939, United Mine Workers chief John L. Lewis fired a blistering attack at Vice President John Nance Garner over Garner's lobbying on amendments to a wage/hour law, calling him "that labor baiting, poker playing, whisky drinking, evil old man...He will never achieve the presidency in this great republic by baiting labor and seeking to debase America"; in 1940, with its release of A Wild Hare, Warner Brothers introduced the character of Bugs Bunny; in 1950, Crescent township near Searchlight in Clark County, which almost no one knew existed, was eliminated so that three people living at the Rex Bell ranch could legally vote without the necessity of forming an entire precinct and polling place for them; in 1952, Las Vegas businessperson Ralph Thomas withdrew from the race for the Republican nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives to become campaign manager for one of his opponents, Samuel Arentz of Pioche; in 1954, the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, elected with a 1951 landslide of 65 percent of the vote, was overthrown by CIA-paid and -trained mercenaries, turning the nation into a horror over four decades of vicious military juntas that waged a genocidal war against the indigenous Mayan Indians and against political opponents; in 1959, the Reno City Council put off a decision on what to do with the old aquarium/fish hatchery building adjoining the municipal pool in Idlewild Park; in 1959, the county supervisors in California's El Dorado County approved an ordinance banning nudist colonies over the objections of Supervisor Jack Wallace, who said "This is the only industry operating in my district."; in 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon was nominated for president by the Republican National Convention in Chicago; in 1967, African-American leader Rap Brown told a Maryland rally "Black folks built America, and if America don't come around, we're going to burn America down" (two days later, Governor Spiro Agnew ordered his arrest: "It shall now be the policy of this state to immediately arrest any person inciting to riot, and to not allow that person to finish his vicious speech"); in 1974, Lynyrd Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama was released; in 1976, after a long court battle with U.S. immigration officials, John Lennon won permanent residency in the United States; in 1985, a day after The New York Times crossword puzzle clue for 42 down was "Vegas term", the key to the puzzle came out and the correct term was "odds"; in 2000, the Nevada historical records advisory board discussed a problem of improper storage of state records by state agencies, such as a prison storage building where records were "covered with pigeon droppings, dead pigeons and dead rodents" so severe that an archivist suggested keeping everyone out of the building and calling a hazardous materials team.
UPDATE: July 26, 2007, 12:17 a.m. PDT, 07:17 GMT/SUT/CUT — On July 26, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On July 26, 1603, James VI became king of England (he would switch the nation from the Celtic to the Julian calendar and commission the magnificent King James edition of the Bible, but also prosecuted witches and wrote a book on the subject, Daemonology); in 1847, the nation of Liberia was declared a republic as a home for freed African-Americans and slaves released from the West Indies and from slave ships; in 1906, a cloudburst in Goldfield washed tents away and collapsed buildings; in 1921, defense attorneys announced that at least four and possibly more of the players accused in the black sox scandal would testify in their own defense; in 1921, Secretary of War John Weeks said that at the rate of applications for discharge by soldiers, the size of the army could probably be reduced to the 150,000 level ordered by Congress by July 31, and he also announced the abandonment of Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, Arkansas and the Carolinas posts (this was in the days when it was a matter of pride that the U.S. always had a small standing army unless there was a war); in 1925, former U.S. representative, U.S. secretary of state and three- time Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan died, five days after the end of the Scopes evolution trial in Tennessee in which he served as prosecutor; in 1935, at a New York demonstration, protesters tore a swastika flag off the German ship Bremen, an incident that reportedly inspired Hitler to come up with a law forbidding Jews in Germany to display the flag; in 1939, voters in Boulder City recalled one member of the school board but retained a second target of the recall election, failing to resolve the question of a fired school principal whose fate was one of the issues in the recall; in 1939, it was reported that Las Vegas got its first dude ranch, the Bolderado Ranch; in 1942, William Faulkner began work as a Warner Brothers scriptwriter; in 1945, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was turned out of office when his Conservative Party was overwhelmingly defeated; in 1948, President Truman desegregated the U.S. military; in 1951, the FBI staged a coast to coast roundup of U.S. communists, including William Schneiderman (who had been arrested in the 1940s and, defended by lawyer Wendell Willkie, took his case to the U.S. Supreme Court which ruled that a citizen can be a communist and still be attached "to principles of the United States Constitution"); in 1952, the Howard Hughes organization announced its continuing interest in building a plant in the Red Rock canyon area west of Las Vegas as soon as a land transfer could be arranged; in 1955, Britain, France and the United States called on Saigon dictator Ngo Dinh Diem to respect the Geneva agreements on Indochina (which the U.S. actually opposed) and begin discussions with Hanoi on plans for an election on reunification (which the U.S. actually opposed); in 1956, Egyptian President Nasser reclaimed the Suez Canal from British management, causing Israel, France and Britain to launch a war against Egypt, but the British public revolted against their government's action, forcing British Prime Minister Anthony Eden to call off the military adventure and later resign; in 1959, the first U.S. nuclear reactor meltdown took place at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory, a Boeing facility 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles., when a reactor underwent a power "excusion" or "criticality accident", was first shut down, then was restarted without a determination of what caused the problem, and was permitted to operate for several weeks, was shut down again, and collected radioactive material was slowly released into the atmosphere (from 260 to 459 times the amount released at Three Mile Island) without danger levels being monitored, possibly exposing nearly two thousand people to radiation; in 1968, Truong Dinh Dzu, presidential peace candidate, was sentenced to five years at hard labor by the Saigon regime for urging a coalition government (the prosecution was little reported in the U.S.); in 1969, a two-day strike and lockout at 12 Las Vegas casinos ended with an agreement between the casinos and the Operating Engineers and Teamsters; in 1996, President Clinton announced a $93 million contract award to IBM to develop a superfast computer to simulate nuclear tests; in 2005, Margaret Goodman of Las Vegas resigned as chief ringside physician for Nevada state boxing regulators in protest against the state's failure to adopt stringent safety procedures for the ring; in 2001, the 29 World War Two Navajo code talkers were honored with congressional gold medals at a ceremony in the rotunda of the U.S. capitol.
UPDATE: July 25, 2007, 12:04 a.m. PDT, 07:04 GMT/SUT/CUT — On July 25, 1956, the Italian liner Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish ship Stockholm off the New England coast, claiming the lives of 51 people. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George W. Bush / July 25, 2003: Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace.
The Dean of Reno Bloggers could very well be Andrew Barbano, self-described "fighter of public demons," who started putting his "Barbwire" columns online in 1996 and now runs 10 sites.
On July 25, 1791, the Free African Society, a group formed to assist blacks freed from slavery, developed a plan for an African Church of Philadelphia, which became the African Methodist Episcopal Church, usually called the AME Church, though there was some resistance to a separate church for blacks instead of including them in white congregations; in 1861, the Crittenden Resolution, defining the purpose of the Civil War as preservation of the union rather than the abolition of slavery, was passed by Congress; in 1866, an expedition was formed at Fort Churchill, Nevada, under the command of Major R.S. Williamson to explore little-known areas of Nevada, Idaho, southern Oregon and northern California; in 1868, Henry Worthington of Nevada was appointed U.S. minister (ambassador) to Uruguay; in 1898, the U.S. invaded and occupied Porto Rico; in 1938, on his hugely popular radio program, Catholic priest Charles Coughlin called for the formation of a joint Protestant/Catholic group, which was subsequently formed as the American Christian Front and held anti-Semitic street meetings and launched boycotts against Jewish businesses to make the United States into a Christian nation; in 1941, Benjamin From, a Jewish physician in Luck or Lutsk in the Ukraine, was told to end his surgery on a Christian woman and when he continued the operation German soldiers dragged him out of the hospital and murdered him and his family; in 1943, amid widespread military defeats two weeks after the Allies landed in Italy, members of the Fascist Grand Council met and dissociated themselves from Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel dismissed him as head of government; in 1945, Henry Kaiser and Joseph Frazer announced they would form a car company to compete with the big three and with the assistance of labor unions they succeeded, for a time; in 1946, at Moore's Ford on the Apalachee River in Georgia, four young African-Americans — Roger Malcom, George Dorsey, Dorothy Dorsey Malcom and Mae Murray Dorsey — were pulled from a car driven by a white farmer and lynched in a canebrake by beating and shooting, the last known mass lynching in U.S. history and one that enraged the nation and prompted President Truman to order an FBI investigation that at one point looked into possible complicity of racist Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge (no one was ever charged); in 1949, Civil Aeronautics Authority official William Howard met with Yerington officials about plans to improve the airfield so it could handle Bonanza Airlines and other carriers' planes; in 1952, President Truman commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence of Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Collazo, who killed White House guard Leslie Coffelt in a botched 1950 attempt to assassinate Truman at Blair House; in 1952, in Henderson a schedule was announced of dates on which employees of Basic Management Inc. could purchase their homes from the company; in 1956, on a vote of 373 to 9 after little debate, the U.S. House of Representatives cited playwright Arthur Miller for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names in an appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities; in 1963, a Sacramento firm purchased Sundown Town, an amusement park in the hills between the Mount Rose highway and Washoe City that was built by Buster Keaton, Jr., and later burned down; in 1963, a Murray Hertz column in the Las Vegas Review-Journal was headed Streisand Kookie, But Headed For Top; in 1965, at the Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan, Al Kooper and Paul Butterfield's Blues Band thrilled the audience — but appalled folk purists as word spread — by performing loud electric rock; in 1970, Burt Bacharach and Hal David's (They Long To Be) Close To You by The Carpenters hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1972, Jean Heller of The Associated Press broke the story of U.S. Public Health Service experiments on 399 African-American men from 1932 to 1972 at the Tuskegee Institute, in which health workers deliberately failed to treat low income blacks who came to the service for help with syphilis, in some cases allowing them to die or transmit the disease to wives; in 2001, Celine Dion said in Montreal that her three-year sabbatical from performing would end in 2003 when she would appear in a Las Vegas musical.
[[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: July 24, 2007, 12:54 a.m. PDT, 07:54 GMT/SUT/CUT — On July 24, 1802, Alexandre Dumas was born in Villiers-Cotterets, later becoming the world's most famous black author with classic novels like The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Man in the Iron Mask and The Corsican Brothers; in 1847, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints fleeing religious persecution in the United States arrived in the Salt Lake Valley after a thousand mile journey, intent on forming a new nation of Deseret (the U.S. proved unwilling to allow the theft of the land it stole from Mexico); in 1899, Mormon pioneer day, marking the fifty-second anniversary of the arrival of the Latter Day Saints in the Salt Lake Valley, was celebrated by 250 people from Lund and Preston in White Pine County; in 1915, a driver traveling around the west arrived in Reno and reported that on a trip to Emerald Bay he discovered a bridge out (officials said the repairs could not be made for several days); in 1939, Las Vegas police blamed a supply of something called "prank whisky" for a weekend during which (1) a man climbed into the top of the Episcopal Church and kicked out the windows, then curled up and rested, then went to a grocery store to break their windows, (2) a man punched his own car in the headlight, (3) a man kicked a tray out of a waiter's arms, and (4) a man wandered around block 16 — the prostitution district — brandishing a shotgun; in 1952, as Democratic Party bosses gained ground in their effort to stop the presidential candidacy of Estes Kefauver by promoting Adlai Stevenson, U.S. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada said that "when you check into the Stevenson reports you find they don't have any basis in fact" and argued that the Stevenson movement was losing momentum; in 1959, in a debate in the kitchen of a model U.S. tract home on display at an exhibition in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon was verbally slapped around by Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, with Nixon at one point telling Khrushchev that the USSR might be ahead of the US in rocket development, but the US was ahead of the USSR in color television; in 1959, two thousand Little League players, parents and fans gathered for a breakfast in the parking lot of Washoe Market at the corner of Vine and Fifth Streets in Reno; in 1959, the name of Minard Stout, forced out as president of the University of Nevada in Reno in 1958, resurfaced in a trade publication in which he was promoting the Curtiss-Wright "air car" which would be tested near Reno; in 1963, a $106.4 million master plan for Las Vegas streets and highways was shown and included completion of Interstate 15, 25 additional miles of freeway, upgrading of 335 miles of streets to expressways or major arteries, construction of 65 miles of ring roads, designation of 2d, 3d, 12th and 13th streets as one way; in 1967, Surrealistic Pillow by Jefferson Airplane went gold; in 1974, President Nixon, who had said he would only obey a "definitive" ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court on whether he had to surrender incriminating tape recordings of his conversations, was hit with a unanimous Court order that he produce the tapes written by his own appointee Warren Burger (though unknown to the outside world, most of the opinion's language had been forced on Burger by the rest of the court).
Nevada State Journal / July 25, 1896:
SILVER CONVENTION.
Senator Stewart Makes a Rousing Speech.
BRYAN AND SEWALL.
The Convention Nominates Them by Acclamation.
ST. LOUIS, July 24 — It was 10:11 o'clock when Chairman St. John called the Silver Convention to order. Rev. Dr. Court led in prayer.... By invitation Senator Stewart of Nevada addressed the convention. He said that Wall street was represented by a powerful lobby at the Chicago Convention, but could do nothing with the honest Democratic patriots. He made a plea for harmony among the silver forces and predicted victory. He said he went to Chicago with little hope that a silver platform would be adopted, but he was agreeably disappointed. There never was a more patriotic band of men on earth than the delegates who controlled the Chicago convention. The Wall street corporation money was no use there. At the mention of Bland's name, the delegations arose, cheered, shouted and flourished umbrellas and flags.
The Senator said that Bryan's convention speech was the greatest oration in history. "I know William J. Bryan," he said, "he believes what we believe. He is as true to his principles as the needle to the pole.
"...Under the resolution adopted yesterday the roll of States was called to find out how many old soldiers occupied seats as delegates. The poll showed 109 Union veterans, 18 Confederate veterans, and 4 Mexican war veterans.
"... Judge Scott of Omaha was called to the platform. He said, „Oh God send pestilence and disease and vermin and war and famine among us if you will, but in thy good providence, Oh God, deliver us from another four years of oppression under Grover Cleveland."
He called for three cheers for Bryan, which were given....The convention adjourned until 3:30 p.m. when the rules were suspended and Bryan nominated by acclamation. Sewall was also nominated by acclamation for Vice President.UPDATE: July 23, 2007, 1:15 a.m. PDT, 08:15 GMT/SUT/CUT — On Tuesday, July 24, Americans United for Change will assemble at 8:00 a.m. PDT in Las Vegas and Reno to thank Nevada's Democratic congressional delegation for increasing the minimum wage. Workers will gather in front of the Bruce Thompson federal building at 400 S. Virginia Street at Liberty Street, location of the downtown Reno offices of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. In Las Vegas, they will gather at the offices of U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkely at 2340 Paseo Del Prado.
On July 23, 1914, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serb assassin; the dispute led to World War I. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George W. Bush on Vladimir Putin / July 23, 2001: You saw the president yesterday. I thought he was very forward-leaning, as they say in diplomatic nuanced circles.
On July 23, 1834, Catholic Cardinal James Gibbons, champion of the labor movement, supporter of the separation of church and state and defender against Vatican condemnations of "Americanism", was born in Baltimore; in 1866, Congress enacted legislation creating the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit consisting of California, Oregon and Nevada; in 1904, the ice cream cone may have been invented by Charles Menches at the St. Louis World's Fair, who put two scoops in a rolled waffle cone (the "cornucopia"), though there are other claimants to the honor among Fair confectionary vendors: David Avayou, Abe Doumar, Arnold Fornachou, Ernest Hamwi and Albert and Nick Kabbaz — or an anonymous fair customer who curled up a waffle to use as a cone; in 1915, Reno's evening hours downtown became quieter when saloons complied with the city council's new prohibition on music in barrooms; in 1930, Union Pacific and government officials met about the route of a railroad spur from Black Canyon to Las Vegas for the Boulder Dam project; in 1934, a Colored Democratic Club was formed in Clark County; in 1952, amid a nationwide heat wave, Las Vegas had the highest recorded temperature in the nation at 110 degrees, and a major water shortage, with angry residents protesting Desert Inn Golf Course watering, the Las Vegas Land and Water Company predicting ten remaining days of water supply, and state water engineer Hugh Shamberger considering mingling sewer water with domestic supply; in 1957, after questioning convict Donald Wedler about his knowledge of the (Dr. Sam) Sheppard murder case for three hours, Cleveland law enforcement officials denounced his confession to Marilyn Sheppard's murder only to have a merchant seaman then identify Wedler as a man who gave him a ride near Sam Sheppard's home on the night of the murder; in 1957, the Nevada Supreme Court removed four regents (Cyril Bastian of Caliente, Grant Sawyer of Elko, N.E. Broadbent of Ely and William Elwell of Las Vegas) from office because they were appointed by legislators in violation of the separation of powers, but did not overturn the law expanding the board of regents from five to nine members and said the governor could fill the vacancies, and Governor Charles Russell was expected to reappoint the four; in 1959, after Fidel Castro's resignation as prime minister in a dispute with President Manuel Urrutia, millions of Cubans demanding his return to office staged a one-hour strike that paralyzed the nation; in 1959, a Reno plumbers strike entered its fourth week; in 1967, during a Tigers/Yankees doubleheader in Detroit, smoke appeared over the stadium wall and after the games, players were told to go straight home to avoid the race riot in the city that would leave 43 people dead (outfielder Willie Horton, who grew up in the city's projects, ignored the advice and drove straight into the middle of the riots to try to help calm things down); in 1969, The Beatles recorded the aptly named The End, the last song recorded for the last Beatles album, Abbey Road; in 1989, after overnight news reports declared Laurent Fignon the winner of the Tour de France on the assumption that no human could close the 50-second gap between Fignon and second-placer (and ex-Renoite) Greg LeMond in the 15.5 miles still to run from Versailles to Paris, LeMond astonished television viewers around the world by finishing eight seconds ahead, his second Tour win (LeMond made the race with 37 shotgun pellets in his body, the aftermath of a hunting accident in which he was shot in the chest, putting him out of action for two years) [EDITOR'S NOTE: Was Dick Cheney part of that hunting party?]; in 2003, Josh Byers of Norwalk, California, former student body president at Reed High School in Sparks, died east of Baghdad in Iraq.UPDATE: July 17, 2007, 4:15 p.m. PDT, 23:15 SUT/CUT/GMT —Barbano on Nevada Newsmakers: NevadaLabor.com editor Andrew Barbano joins host Sam Shad, GOP stalwart Bill Brainard and Retail Assn. of Nevada lobbyist Liz McMenamin on statewide TV. Principle guest on the show is Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (aka TRIC) developer and brothelord Lance Gilman. The entrepreneurial whoremaster announced on the show that his idol, Joe Conforte, will do a satellite hookup (pardon the expression) as part of the grand re-opening of Mustang Ranch, the world's most famous house of ill repute. Click here for statewide broadcast schedule. Hey — whad'ya expect on a show committed to all aspects of follytix?
UPDATE: July 3, 2007, 12:11 a.m. PDT, 19:11 SUT/CUT/GMT — On July 3, 1863, the Civil War Battle of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania ended after three days in a major victory for the North as Confederate troops retreated. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On July 3, 1848, following a slave revolt, Generalguvernør Peter Von Scholten declared the abolition of slavery in the Danish West Indies (now the U.S. Virgin Islands); in 1916, the Journal of Negro History (since 2001 the Journal of African American History) began publication; in 1926, the Nevada Labor Federation convention renewed its support of an amendment to the U.S. constitution outlawing child labor; in 1933, an archeological expedition reported finding a well-preserved three-story cliff dwelling containing hundreds of rooms near the Arizona border south of Bluff, Utah, "stored away in a canyon where the sun's rays never penetrate"; in 1933, in a competition with rival cowboy actor Ken Maynard at the National Air Races in Los Angeles, Hoot Gibson's plane crashed but he survived; in 1937, under a new schedule approved by the Roosevelt administration, Boulder Dam workers started getting Saturday off for the first time; in 1941, German forces crossed the Dvina River from Lithuania into Latvia as they swept through the Baltics; in 1946, White Pine County Senator Charles Russell announced he would run for the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1953, Harry Belafonte, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis appeared on the cover of Ebony magazine, believed to be the first time an African-American appeared together with whites on the cover of a U.S. magazine; in 1956, Las Vegas leaders expressed hope that at least one and possibly two large conventions could be lured to the city by 1960; in 1962, following an eight-year nationalist revolt, Algeria regained its independence after 132 years of French rule; in 1965, Trigger died; in 1970, at the behest of the Downtown Casino Association, the American Independent Party of Nevada and local law enforcement agencies, the Las Vegas city commission rushed through an "emergency" ordinance in an effort to stop a five-hour rock festival at Cashman Field featuring Janis Joplin, B.B. King, Country Joe and the Fish, the Youngbloods and the Illinois Transit (on July 5 Georgia Governor Lester Maddox requested a law outlawing rock festivals in his state); in 1971, Jim Morrison died in Paris; in 1973, the church on the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux Reservation that in 1972 became a symbol of the Wounded Knee occupation burned down and arson was suspected; in 1973, former Nevada political boss Norman Biltz died in Reno; in 1981, the surviving Doors attended a ceremony at Jim Morrison's grave in Paris; in 1988, a civilian Iranian airliner carrying 66 Iranian children and their family members from a summer at Bandar Abbas to Dubai was brought down by antiaircraft fire from the U.S.S. Vincennes, killing all 290 passengers, which may have played a role in provoking the December 1988 Pam Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland (the Vincennes was decommissioned last Wednesday in San Diego); in 1996, the movie Independence Day, set in part at Nevada's Area 51 base, debuted (the film's marketer and some of its stars appeared on March 22d at the dedication of Nevada's "Extraterrestrial Highway"); in 2002, the only trauma facility in southern Nevada, University Medical Center Trauma Center in Las Vegas, shut down after dozens of physicians went on strike over the price of their malpractice insurance and state laws on malpractice.
UPDATE: July 2, 2007, 12:52 a.m. PDT, 07:52 CUT/SMT/SUT — On July 2, 1937, aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first round-the-world flight at the equator. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
American Independence Day
Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams: Philadelphia, 3 July...But the Day is past. The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.
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.
[When this letter was revealed years later by Abigail's nephew William Shaw, the nation had already begun celebrating the wrong date, so Shaw altered the text before releasing it, re-dating it July 5 and changing the first line to read "The Fourth Day of July".]
Resolution declaring independence / adopted by Congress July 2d, 1776: Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.On July 2, 1752, the first English Bible published in the colonies was printed in Boston; in 1776, the Continental Congress declared independence from England; in 1776, all New Jersey residents, women and African-Americans included, obtained the right to vote, a state of affairs that continued until 1807; in 1881, President Garfield was shot in a railroad station (he lingered on for eleven weeks before dying, the longest period of executive disability until Woodrow Wilson); in 1917, encouraged by the Wilson administration's raids against political radicals as well as Woodrow Wilson's own racism, vigilantism exploded in East St. Louis as white rioting targeted African-Americans (the official count of the dead was 39, but newspaper reports at the time said 200); in 1921, after Woodrow Wilson repeatedly opposed efforts to formally end the world war, Congress finally was able to accomplish it after Warren Harding took office; in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for president by the Democratic Party; in 1937, in Alturas, California, Harry French of a local newspaper family was convicted of murdering competing newspaper publisher Claude McCracken; in 1946, an investigating commission reported that King Ananda Mahidol of Siam [Thailand], found shot dead on June 9, had probably been assassinated); in 1946, postwar shortages caused the Las Vegas Review-Journal to announce that it would fail to publish on the 4th, 5th and 6th of July because of a lack of newsprint paper; in 1946, as senators in Washington fought over whether to renew the lapsed Office of Price Administration, merchants and landlords took advantage of the lapse in price controls to push prices up, and in Las Vegas OPA rent director Harry Claiborne said he had been flooded with complaints about rent hikes that he no longer had authority to curb: "The landlords have failed to show any discretion. Their money-grabbing tactics today are almost certain to bring adverse legislation against them...The national picture on rents is almost certain to bring some regulation."; in 1947, something crashed near Roswell, New Mexico; in 1956, backed for the first time by The Jordanaires, Elvis recorded Don't Be Cruel, Anyway You Want Me, and Hound Dog; in 1958, the Las Vegas strip had become the city's most traveled section of road, according to a months-long traffic study; in 1958, the Stardust Hotel Casino opened in Las Vegas; in 1970, Larry Ray Brenner, son of Virginia Brenner of Las Vegas, died in Phuoc Long province, Vietnam (Panel 09W Line 109); in 1970, three years before Roe vs. Wade, the national convention of the Lutheran Church in America endorsed abortion; in 1970, theatre chain owner William Phares, who purchased the (Reno) Riverside Hotel but was not yet through escrow, and who had been approved by state regulators for a gambling license but had not yet picked it up, was killed in a car wreck on a Texas bayou near Port Arthur; in 1977, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that the law creating the Clark County Commission was unconstitutional and ordered that the seven incumbent commissioners be removed from office and that the governor appoint replacements (Governor Mike O'Callaghan said he would reappoint the same people who were being removed); in 1999, worker protests were being held at Jensen Precast plants in Sacramento and Fontana in California and Sparks in Nevada during a strike at Jensen's Las Vegas facility (police were called to the Sparks plant but went away after finding nothing illegal about the protest); in 2003, George Bush invited attacks on the U.S. forces he sent to Iraq: "There are some who feel like — that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is, bring them on."
UPDATE: July 1, 2007, 1:25 a.m. PDT, 08:25 CUT/SMT/SUT — On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule after 156 years as a British colony. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On July 1, 1880, "When the news reached Carson that [accused presidential assassin Charles] Guiteau had been hung the fire bells were rung and there was a general jollification among the people."; in 1880, the Steamboat ditch outside Reno was completed; in 1914, James Scrugham began serving as dean of the University of Nevada School of Engineering at a salary of $3000 (he would later become publisher of the Nevada State Journal, governor, U.S. representative and U.S. senator); in 1937, two labor union picketers were arrested and charged by city attorney Douglas Busey under Reno's anti-picketing law; in 1940, California changed from "good until revoked" driver licenses to licenses that expired after four years; in 1941, the March on Washington was originally scheduled for this date by A. Philip Randolph, who wanted a massive march of 100,000 people to draw national and international attention to the plight of African-Americans and refused repeated pleas from President Franklin Roosevelt to cancel it (finally in desperation Roosevelt signed an executive order throwing thousands of defense jobs open to previously barred blacks and creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it; Randolph then cancelled the march, but he finally saw it happen in 1963); in 1942 in Reno, movie star cowboy Buck Jones appeared at a "Victory Day" observance and the city completed its quota of $50,000 in defense stamp and bond sales; in 1943, a Paris radio broadcast said the Vichy governor of Martinique had asked the U.S. to intervene to aid a transition of the island from collaborationist control to free French control; in 1943, U.S. Senator Pat McCarran got a bill providing more aid for western desert reclamation (irrigation) projects through the senate by calling it a wartime measure; in 1946, San Francisco exotic dancer Sally Rand, arrested twice in one week, convinced Judge Daniel Shoemaker to view her act — which he did in company with prosecutor Frank Brown and defense attorney Jake Ehrlich, then ruled that it was those offended by the dance who were the perverts; in 1951, the Las Vegas Review-Journal published on its front page a photograph released by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission of the second, third or fourth atomic test in Nevada, detonated in February 1951 (the AEC did not identify which of the three February tests the barely visible photograph depicted); in 1954, meeting in the Las Vegas city commission hall, 200 citizens asked for a bond issue to build a municipal airport and for the city to apply for federal funds under the Federal Airport Act of 1946 (sponsored in the senate by U.S. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada and in the house by U.S. Representative Clarence Lea of California); in 1954, the Las Vegas Valley Water District began operating as a publicly owned entity after the Union Pacific Railroad sold the Las Vegas Land and Water Company to the public; in 1956, on his Sunday night variety show, Steve Allen put Elvis in a tuxedo and had him sing Hound Dog to a basset hound in a top hat, swamping the competing Ed Sullivan in the ratings (a 20.2 Trendex compared to Sullivan's 14.3) but also angering Elvis fans who picketed Allen carrying signs reading "We want the real Elvis"; in 1956, the Boulder Highway Association met and decided to go to the Clark county commissioners to seek help in stopping the Nevada Highway Department's version of a freeway along the Boulder Highway; in 1958, a couple of contracts were let for development of Squaw Valley in preparation for the 1960 winter olympics, including one to build lifts on Squaw Peak and KT 22; in 1970, Groucho Marx, Lana Turner, Buddy Hackett, Barbara Streisand, Bob Hope and Chuck Connors appeared at the opening of Kings Castle hotel casino in Incline Village, Lake Tahoe; in 1996, in Superior Court of San Bernardino County, California, Pacific Gas and Electric was ordered to pay six hundred residents of Hinkley $333 million for contaminating the groundwater from 1951 to 1966, a case dramatized in the film Erin Brockovich; in 2003, Las Vegas columnist Vin Suprynowicz claimed that on this date he had lunch with a retired judge who told him a Nevada Supreme Court decision on Governor Guinn's tax program had been fixed in advance, a claim Suprynowicz published without any substantiation then or since.
[[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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