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Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 350 Centennial Dinner 10-13-2006
Complete info on Centennial Commemorative Book
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Yesterday, today and tomorrow
NEWS BULLETIN ARCHIVES
Also see NevadaLabor.com's Statewide U-News Roundup[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac. Items highlighted in blue are of particular interest to labor. Copyright © 2006 Dennis Myers.]]
Update: Friday, Sept 22, 2006, 4:15 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in rebel states should be free as of Jan. 1, 1863. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Reno NAACP leader and educator Ben Newsome dies
Memorial service set Saturday, Sept. 23, for longtime union memberOn Sept. 22, 1892, the Nevada State Journal reported "There are three parties in Nevada to-day contending for supremacy. Two of them, the Republican and Democratic, represent Wall street ideas, which, as is too well known, bode no good to the State."; in 1892, in Portland, Oregon, a grand jury indicted Billy Hennessey, Gus Herget and Jack Dempsey for participating in a prize fight at the Pastime Athletic Club, with Billy Maber and Billy Smith the fighters, Herget and Hennessey the seconds, Dempsey the referee; in 1919, defying a year of corporate terrorism designed to discourage a strike, 365,000 steel workers led by communist William Z. Foster went on strike in fifty cities; in 1927, Jack Dempsey lost to defending champion Gene Tunney as a result of the famous "long count"; in 1937, the U.S. government condemned bombing of civilians by Japan in Nanking; in 1939, Hollywood director Hal Roach announced that he had selected Logandale, Nevada, as the site for filming of a dinosaur/caveman movie that did not yet have a title (it would become One Million B.C., starring Carole Landis, Lon Chaney Jr. and Victor Mature and its dinosaur footage would be recycled for use in many later films); in 1944, fierce fighting by German units drove allied forces entirely out of Germany, while Soviet forces captured their fourth eastern European capital by taking Tallinn, Estonia; in 1944, Maurice Chevalier's secretary received a post card from him in hiding, where he went to escape "cleansing" committees that sprang up in France after D-Day, the post card dispelling rumors that he had been shot as an alleged collaborator: "Telling the truth about me, you will silence the backbiters. I eagerly wish to return to Paris as soon as I can get transportation and to contact again my beloved public. I hope they will be glad to hear the new songs I learned during my temporary seclusion."; in 1944, U.S. War Food Administration supervisor for Nevada Dan Ronnow said $21,150 was available to have the national school lunch program in the state again and he was waiting for applications from local school districts to determine how far the money would go; in 1949, the Las Vegas city commission voted to recommend that Governor Vail Pittman end rent control; in 1954, using an old red-baiting technique on behalf of Republican U.S. House candidate Cliff Young, GOP leader Les Gray said that Democratic candidate Walter Baring's voting record on labor issues was similar to that of leftist New York congressmember Vito Marcantonio; in 1955, water from Lake Mead reached Las Vegas for the first time; in 1955, it was announced that a U.S. Navy oil tanker would be named the U.S.S. Truckee; in 1955, the Nevada board of regents expressed their unhappiness with a $25,000 Nevada Legislature investigation of the autocratic administration of University of Nevada President Minard Stout and especially with the rumored appointment of UCLA political scientist Dean McHenry to head the probe; in 1956, attorney George Franklin was awarded $190,000 in his libel suit against Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun; in 1961, a memorial service was held at the University of Nevada in Reno for Dag Hammarskjold, U.N. secretary general killed in a plane crash; in 1965, a dedication ceremony for the first Port Arthur, Texas, traffic light that used traffic flow patterns to operate, designed to make an intersection safe, was delayed for thirty minutes when a car and an ambulance collided in the intersection; in 1965, the U.S. Post Office objected to plans to name a town in California's El Dorado County "Tahoe" because "traditionally the name 'Lake Tahoe' has encompassed the entire geographic area surrounding the lake"; in 1971, Don Schellback, designer of the state flag of Nevada, died in Tucson; in 2004, a London to Washington flight was diverted when it was learned that Yusuf Islam, AKA Cat Stevens, was on board and Bush administration officials later said he was barred from flying into the U.S. because they claimed he had an association with terrorists — even though he had met in Washington the previous May with White House officials seeking his help with "faith based" efforts (in 1989 Islam/Stevens had endorsed Iran's death sentence against author Salman Rushdie and supported Saddam during the first Gulf War).
Update: Thursday, Sept 21, 2006, 7:19 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1883, the Nevada Board of Equalization called officials of the Central Pacific and Virginia and Truckee railroads to appear before it and show cause why their tax assessments should not be increased; in 1894, the Washoe County convention of the People's Party began in Reno, reportedly the largest assemblage in county history (the party was affiliated with Nevada's Silver Party, and People's Party presidential nominee James Weaver carried Nevada in 1892); in 1897, the Marysville Appeal reported that two conductors in charge of trains that collided in August near Marysville, California, had been blacklisted from railroad employment throughout the nation; in 1897, there was a Ferris Wheel at S. J. Hodgkinson's drug store in Reno; in 1911, responding to rumors that the old high school in Reno was torn down when it was in excellent condition, school district trustees released a contractor's report listing numerous deficiencies in the structure; in 1916, Republican presidential nominee Charles Evans Hughes attacked President Wilson for trying to overthrow the Mexican government; in 1937, The Hobbit was published; in 1939, Nevada FHA administrator H.H. Scheeline told the Las Vegas Rotary that more than 100 homes had been constructed in the city; in 1939, Governor Edward Carville declared Nevada's diamond jubilee on October 31 a state holiday, closing all state and local government offices, and asked private employers to do the same; in 1949, Whittlesea Radio Taxi owner Victor Whittlesea called his cabs off the roads after a Reno strike produced picketing in Las Vegas; in 1953, two gambling licenses were approved for new resorts on the Las Vegas strip — the Casa Blanca and the Sunrise; in 1961, President Kennedy nominated Eva Adams of Nevada to be director of the U.S. Mint; in 1961, Nevada District Judge Richard Waters removed Carson City Assessor Jack Schumacher from office for neglect of duty; in 1965, Lightnin' Hopkins performed at the Matrix on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, with Jefferson Airplane as the opening act; in 1972, commenting on Oregon's efforts to keep people from moving to that state, Nevada Governor Mike O'Callaghan said Nevada might have to do the same; in 1974, Walter Brennan, the only three-time Academy Award winning male actor, died in Oxnard, California.; in 2004, Arthur Miller's last play Finishing the Picture, debuted at Chicago's Goodman Theatre with Heather Prete, Matthew Modine, Harris Yulin, Linda Lavin and Stacy Keach in the cast (the play dealt with Miller's experience with Marilyn Monroe during the filming in Nevada of The Misfits, with Prete playing Monroe and Modine playing Miller).
Update: Friday, Sept 22, 2006, 4:58 a.m. PDT — Union folksingers appear at Reno peace rally
UPDATE FROM THE RALLY, Reno Gazette-Journal 9-22-2006
Update: Thursday, Sept 21, 2006, 2:43 a.m. PDT — TRAVELING THE HAUNTS OF AMERICA
For more information contact George Mann (646) 283-7688
Julius Margolin, who just turned 90, and fellow singer and film producer George Mann, who is somewhat younger, will perform as part of the Declaration of Peace event in downtown Reno on Thursday, Sept. 21. For time and location, see below.
Do not underestimate the portent which Julius Margolin represents.
This nonagenarian is a reminder of both Christmas past and Christmas yet to come. He was born in 1916, the year Woodrow Wilson won re-election by promising to keep the country out of the European war. We entered WWI shortly after the election. Julius grew up during the Roaring Twenties, which presaged a nation now crucified on the thorns of the Reagan Bush.
Julius was a young man when Woody Guthrie and Ernest Hemingway rode the rails of a starving, devolving America as she fell victim of the last glut of greed which ended in 1929.
Julius was there when labor was finally honored with respect in this country under the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
And now, this tireless artist travels the byways of this land — your land — echoing the alarm of those who have gone before, warning that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.There is no time like the present to visit this ghost of Christmas past and harbinger of Christmas yet to come.
Step forward and hear George and Julius in Reno today, then let the word go forth from this time and place that the cycle is coming full circle once again.
Make dust ahead of it or become dust beneath it. The choice is yours.
Be well. Raise hell.
Andrew Barbano9-22-2006 UPDATE — IRONY OF IRONY
From: Arthur Shostak
Subject: On Missing Joe Glazer, Labor's Troubador
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 21:02:06 -0400
Brothers and Sisters - Let's bow our heads for a moment of silence - a really fine and true friend of Labor has passed.
From: catherwoodWIT@cornell.edu
Date: September 21, 2006 4:42:34 PM EDT
Subject: Workplace Issues Today
WORKPLACE ISSUES TODAY
M.P. Catherwood Library
School of Industrial & Labor Relations
Cornell University
Thursday, September 21, 2006
"LABOR'S TROUBADOR" DIES AT 88. Joe Glazer, the singer-songwriter known as Labor's Troubador, who played cowboy tunes on a $5.95 mail-order guitar as a boy in the Bronx, then sang songs of solidarity on picket lines and union halls and once on the White House lawn, died on Tuesday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 88. First an employee of the textile workers union, then the rubber workers union, Mr. Glazer, a burly, affable man, marshaled his booming baritone and thumping guitar to rally union loyalists and sympathizers in almost every state and 60 countries. See "Joe Glazer, 88, a Singer and Songwriter for Labor, Dies" by Douglas Martin, The New York Times, Sep 21, 2006. (Free registration may be required.)
Media Advisory — Declaration of Peace September 21
September 19, 2006
Contact: Lisa Stiller (775) 232-2823
What: The Declaration of Peace is a nationwide campaign to establish by September 21, 2006 a concrete and rapid plan for peace in Iraq, including:
- a prompt timetable for withdrawal of troops and closure of bases
- a peace process for security, reconstruction and reconciliation
- a shift of funding from war to meeting human needs.If this plan for peace is not created and activated by Congress by September 21, the International Day of Peace, Declaration signers across the U.S. will engage in nonviolent action in Washington, D.C. and in communities throughout the nation.
When: Thursday, September 21, from 4-7 p.m.
Where: Bruce R. Thompson Federal Building, southeast corner of Liberty and S. Virginia in downtown Reno
Who: The Reno Anti-War Coalition and Sierra Interfaith Action for Peace.
For national information, see: http://declarationofpeace.org/
==
At 9:29 PM +0000 9/18/06, georgemann@att.net wrote:
Julius and I are on our way to Salt Lake City from San Francisco.We're driving by Reno and wanted to stop in to the labor council to drop info about the new "Hail to the Thieves" CS, which features Billy Bragg, U. Utah Phillips, Anne Feeney, The DC Labor Chorus and many other singers singing against the Bush regime.
From: georgeandjulius@att.net
To: barbano@frontpage.reno.nv.us,
Subject: "a Union Man" Film/Concert in Reno, 9/21?
Date: Tue, 08 Aug 2006 15:55:31
Hello Andrew, Chris, Barbara and Rich:
You will recall I was in touch with you last fall about this film... Julius is turning 90 and we are going to be on the road in late September. Hoping you can work together to host this event. We do a two-hour presentation —1 hour film, then a Q & A with Julius and ending with a concert set of folk/labor songs.
Website: http://www.georgeandjulius.com/
Here's a description of the film:
Julius Margolin, at 90, is a living legend in the New York City labor movement. He's been active since the 1930s in the CIO, National Maritime Union and Local 52 of the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees, which he has represented in the Central Labor Council for 32 years. A tireless fighter for justice, equality, and against war, Julius embarked on a new career in 1999, making music and CDs with George Mann while still hitting picket lines and organizing workers in New York City and around the United States.A Union Man: The Life and Work of Julius Margolin is the story of his life through his eyes as well as those he's met along the way. Featuring guest appearances by Utah Phillips, Faith Petric and former NMU Vice President Joe Stack, as well as concert performances, it's an affectionate portrait of a rank-and-file activist still fighting for justice as he approaches 90.
This will be an event full of labor and social history as well as songs from the last 100 years.
George Mann and Julius Margolin
Pro-Labor, Anti-Bush folk music
November 22d 1916/Reno Evening Gazette
FEDERATION DOESN'T FAVOR DRILL IN SCHOOLS
Andrew Furuseth Opposes Idea Of Resolution but It Is Passed, Anyway
BALTIMORE, Md., Nov. 22. — Delegates to the convention of the American Federation of Labor this morning engaged in a warm debate over a resolution which protested against the teaching of militarism in the public schools.
The preamble set forth that "the secretary of war has communicated with public school authorities in various parts of this country in inquiring if they are willing to introduce military training of the boys in the schools and stating that the war department would provide instructors and rifles and ammunition."
The committee to which the resolution was referred recommended nonconcurrence on the ground that the resolution was "non-contentional" and deemed it of no importance.
Andre Furuseth, chairman of the committee, declared that while he was opposed to any increase in the standing army, it was his belief that "men who will not fight and women who won't be mothers are an abomination in the world."
The convention adopted the resolution and authorized the appointment of a committee to draw up another resolution touching on phases of militarism not brought out in the first one.[Courtesy of journalist-historian Dennis Myers]
Update: Wednesday, Sept 20, 2006, 2:02 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 20, 1855, Judge Orson Hyde organized Carson County, Utah, in what is today Genoa, Douglas County, Nevada. [Nevada Magazine calendar]
On this date in 1793, Dr. John Mason gave a sermon complaining about the secular nature of the United States Constitution and its failure to endorse or even mention God — "that very Constitution which the singular goodness of God enabled us to establish does not so much as recognize His being! Yes, my brethren, it is a lamentable truth; a truth at the mention of which, shame should crimson our faces."; in 1873, Nevada was represented at the California state fair in Sacramento by 20 Native Americans — men, women, and children; in 1873, six workers were killed when a fire broke out in the Belcher Mine in Virginia City, spread to the Yellow Jacket and Crown Point, and was followed by an explosion; in 1873, Reno Congregational minister F.R. Girard was directed by the American Home Missionary Society to go to San Bernardino and Rev. W.J. Clark of Iowa City, Iowa, was named pastor of Reno's Congregational Church to replace Girard; in 1876, on page three, the Nevada State Journal reported that E.A. Brown had been named agent in Idaho, Nevada and Utah for the Leininger shackle, "the most secure shackle ever invented. Prisoners are absolutely safe when this shackle is placed on them."; in 1977, hunters were using boats on Washoe Lake because they were experiencing too much difficulty in killing ducks from the shore; in 1879, Storey County, normally known for mining and the Comstock Lode, was experiencing a farming boom — four acres of onions and six of wheat and "a whole raft of small patches devoted to other kinds of products"; in 1907, in San Francisco, U.S. Senator George Nixon of Nevada and his business partner George Wingfield announced that Goldfield Con, the huge mining corporation, would pay a ten cent per share dividend; in 1932, ghost dance prophet Wovoka died on the Walker Lake Reservation; in 1938, the National Automobile Club announced that work would soon begin on a portion of the Tahoe/Ukiah highway, 2.1 miles running between LeTrianon and the Scotts Valley Road; in 1949, superintendent of schools Walter Johnson said Las Vegas schools were facing double sessions — and the baby boom had not even hit the schools yet; in 1958, at Blumstein's Department Store in New York City, Martin Luther King, Jr., was stabbed in the chest by an unstable African-American woman while he signed copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom (rushed into surgery at Harlem Hospital, surgeon Aubre Maynard made the incision over King's heart in the shape of a cross: "Since the scar will be there permanently...it seemed somehow appropriate."); in 1964, the Beatles played the last concert of their Canadian/U.S. tour, a charity event at New York's Paramount theatre (and that night Ed Sullivan reran their third appearance on his show); in 1965, on his way down the mountain from chopping down 4,862-year-old Prometheus, one of the trees in the bristlecone pine grove above the 10,000-foot level on Wheeler Peak (bristlecone pines are the second oldest living things known, after an 11,700 year old creosote bush in southern California), U.S. Forest Service employee Fred Solace had a heart attack and died (the press was told, and gullibly reported, that he was gathering bristlecone pine cones); in 1972, at the AFL/CIO convention in Las Vegas, George Meany and Steelworkers president I.W. Abel quashed a movement to endorse George McGovern's presidential candidacy by throwing their personal prestige into the fight with slashing attacks on McGovern; in 1973, Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs in three straight sets and, on the same day, Jim Croce died in a Louisiana plane crash; in 1971, the Nevada Gaming Policy Committee held a hearing on a proposal allowing bookmakers to accept telephone wagers after Governor Mike O'Callaghan received a federal warning against the idea; in 1978, the television series Vegas debuted, lasting three years.
Nevada State Journal/September 20, 1890: Nevada's decline is now a thing of the past and our sister States have commenced to observe the power of a new life. Sweep the croakers into the mire and let the live rustlers push us to the front where we are able to blow our own horn with a true American blast.Update: Tuesday, Sept 19, 2006, 2:57 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 19, 1874, Nevada superintendent of schools Orvis Ring was recovering in Lodi from surgery performed in San Francisco; in 1877, the day after its performance in Reno's opera house, the Tom Thumb troupe left Reno for Virginia City; in 1881, President James A. Garfield died eleven weeks after being shot, the longest period of presidential disability until Woodrow Wilson and Vice-President Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as president; 1911, the Nevada State Journal urged businesspeople to support a locally published city directory in preference to another published by a national firm because the national one was "published outside the state and every cent contributed to it is taken outside the state" [EDITOR'S NOTE: All money taken in by the current version of that paper is wired to the Gannett chain in Rochester, NY, at the close of every business day. MORE...]; in 1927, Charles Lindbergh visited Reno for three and a half hours on a flying national tour sponsored by millionaire Harry Guggenheim; in 1938, in Carson City, John Vallarde was sentenced to 18 months in McNeil's Island federal prison and fined $500 for violating the Mann act by transporting a woman from Utah to Nevada "for immoral purposes"; in 1943, Cass Elliott was born in Baltimore; in 1945, President Truman appointed Harold Burton as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court and the Senate confirmed Burton the same day without any scrutiny; in 1957, the Eisenhower administration detonated an underground atomic bomb at Area 12 in Nevada, then lied about the worldwide detectability of the test in order to avoid a nuclear test ban treaty, a lie later exposed by journalist I.F. Stone in his legendary I.F. Stone's Weekly; in 1958, an atomic bomb code named Eddy was exploded in Nevada, the last such test before a one-year U.S./Soviet testing moratorium took effect; in 1969, the California Board of Regents adopted a resolution ordering the president of the University of California at Los Angeles to fire instructor Angela Davis for being a communist; in 1992, Adrian Cronauer, the disk jockey who was the model for the movie Good Morning, Vietnam, taped a campaign spot for the Bush campaign, attacking Bill Clinton as a liar; in 2000, the 1914 Fernley/Lassen Railroad Depot on Fernley's Main Street was placed on the Nevada Register of Historic Places.
Update: Monday, Sept 18, 2006, 12:39 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 18, 1874, articles of incorporation were filed in Oregon for a railroad to run from Winnemucca in Nevada to the Columbia River country "via Goose Lake valley, and Sprague river valley to the middle fork of the Willamette; down north of the river to Springville, Lane county; thence on the west side of the river to Portland; thence to the Columbia river."; in 1907, a Reno real estate man threatened to bring to the attention of the county grand jury the conditions in a basement being used as a classroom for the overflow of South Side School students, but school board member M.R. Walker defended its use, saying it was not unhealthy or unsanitary; in 1908, three days after a coroner's jury found the Giroux mine in Ely had been negligent in protecting the health and safety of its miners, another miner died in the Giroux mine, bring the total fatalities to six in three different incidents; in 1911, the Reno Evening Gazette reported "Numerous complaints have come to the Gazette that women in this city are being insulted on Reno's streets and that in some instances the men who insult them have been bold enough to grasp the women and walk with them, notwithstanding their protests, and their attempts to get away."; in 1924, actress Edna Purviance, the Lovelock, Nevada, woman who was Charlie Chaplin's leading lady in all his early films, testified at the arraignment of Horace Greer, accused of shooting Denver oil man Courtland Dines at a late night Hollywood party attended by Purviance and actress Mabel Normand, a crime that plagued Purviance's public image and damaged her career; in 1939, plans were being made for a $1,260,000 expansion of the Hawthorne naval ammunition depot; in 1940, Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again was published; in 1948, there was a milk shortage in Reno, leading to rumors that dairy cattle were being butchered because of skyrocketing beef prices; in 1957, the California Labor Federation raised the spectre of pushing for impeachment of President Eisenhower if he failed to resolve the Little Rock integration crisis quickly; in 1957, U.S. District Judge Oliver Carter denied San Jose physicist Wallace Hendricks' petition to stop an atomic test in Nevada on grounds that it would poison the air; in 1970, Jimi Hendrix died; in 1978, WKRP in Cincinnati premiered on CBS; in 1986, Crime Story, a television series set in Las Vegas, debuted on NBC, lasting 43 episodes until May 10, 1988 (the last episode ended in a season-ending cliffhanger that was never resolved because the series was cancelled before the next season started).
Update: Sunday, Sept 17, 2006, 2:24 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 17, 1862, Union forces hurled back a Confederate invasion of Maryland in the Civil War battle of Antietam. With 23,100 killed, wounded or captured, it remains the bloodiest day in U.S. military history. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1787, the drafting of the United States Constitution was completed; in 1908, a letter arrived in Reno from Catholic Bishop O.W. Whitaker, who previously operated the girls school in Reno (on the site of today's Whitaker Park), saying that he was going blind; in 1900, the Virginia and Truckee Railroad ran a special train to Reno to take people from the Comstock, Empire, Carson City and Franktown to the state fair; in 1911, Reno's new amusement park on Belle Isle ended its first season; in 1923, Hank Williams was born; in 1948, as the postwar red baiting period warmed up, a group called the Committee on Zeal for American Democracy was formed at Reno's State Building, part of an effort promoted across the nation by the National Security Agency; in 1956 in Clay, Kentucky, where the National Guard was on hand to protect four African-American children trying to enroll in school, the parents of the children gave up and said they would send the children to a blacks-only school in Providence, several miles south; in 1956, Nevada Labor Federation President Harry De Paoli of Reno faced a reelection challenge from James "Sailor" Ryan of Las Vegas at the state convention in the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas; in 1967, after being instructed by Ed Sullivan not to include the word "higher" when singing Light My Fire on the Ed Sullivan Show (the band agreed), the Doors sang it anyway — with emphasis — and were told by a show producer that they would never do the Sullivan show again ("Hey, man, we just did the Sullivan show," Jim Morrison replied); in 1972, M*A*S*H debuted on CBS; in 1985, at a news conference five years into his presidency, President Reagan finally spoke the acronym AIDS in public: "[I]ncluding what we have in the budget for '86, it will amount to over a half a billion dollars that we have provided for research on AIDS in addition to what I'm sure other medical groups are doing. And we have $100 million in the budget this year; it'll be 126 million next year. So, this is a top priority with us. Yes, there's no question about the seriousness of this and the need to find an answer."; in 1990, the Los Angeles Times reported, falsely, that Iraqi soldiers had removed Kuwaiti babies from incubators and left them on the floor to die, a tale repeated by the Washington Post, President Bush the Elder (at least ten times), USA Today, the Associated Press and a member of the Kuwait royal family posing as a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl at a congressional hearing [MORE on the key lie which launched the Gulf War @ BARBWIRE 11-11-2001]; in 1993, Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa released an analysis of the Nevada Plan For Public Land (an argument that Nevada owned all federally managed land in the state) that concluded the federal government had "firm control on the management of public lands"; in 2001, explosions at a Minden aerosol recycling plant left one person dead and four hospitalized [MORE @ U-News Archives].
Update: Saturday, Sept 16, 2006, 12:39 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 16, 1974, President Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam War deserters and draft evaders. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1871, the Nevada State Journal claimed that the Washo, Bannock, Pit River and Paiute tribes were stockpiling ammunition and arms: "We believe that it means murder and plunder — war upon the isolated settlers of our valleys before next Spring." [EDITOR'S NOTE: Manufacturing a WMD scare is apparently nothing new.]; in 1874, Myron Lake was reported to be running for "county dad" (Washoe County commissioner); in 1874, the Carson Index asked why the Nevada congressional delegation had not been able to obtain money for Nevadans who "furnished money, rations, animals and arms" for the 1860 war by whites against the Pyramid Lake tribe; in 1908, Reno businesspeople met with members of the Nevada Railroad Commission to plan strategy for opposing the Southern Pacific Railroad over freight rates before the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission; in 1911, a legal notice was published inviting bids on a new Truckee River bridge; in 1914, U.S. House candidate Thomas Andrew of Massachusetts said he would campaign around his district by aeroplane; in 1914, Margaret Foley of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association spoke at a street meeting at Second and Virginia Streets in Reno, after which she would campaign in Gardnerville, Virginia City, Dayton, Silver City, Mason, Yerington and Carson City, then return to Reno to speak every night during the fair, all as part of the campaign to amend the Nevada Constitution in the November election to allow women to exercise their right to vote; in 1925, B.B King (Riley B. King) was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi; in 1949, Las Vegas Little Theatre and Bird Cage performer Barbara Knudson was signed to a seven year contract with Paramount Pictures, with her first role in The Great American Tragedy with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (probably A Place In The Sun, based on Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy); in 1956, Klaus Landsberg, who produced the first telecast of an atomic test in Nevada, died of cancer in Los Angeles; in 1964, Shindig debuted on ABC with Sam Cooke hosting and the Wellingtons, the Everly Brothers, the Righteous Brothers and unknown Bobby Sherman performing alongside the famed go-go dancers; in 1972, Earl Robinson and David Arkin's Black and White by Three Dog Night, written by Robinson and Arkin in 1955 to celebrate Brown vs. Board of Education, hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1977, Procter Hug, Jr., of Reno was sworn in by Vice-President Mondale as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; in 1977, after Reno municipal court sent a letter to Lloyd Compton of Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia, telling him his fine for running a red light in Reno was $25, he sent a money order for $10 and $15 in Saudi riyals.
Update: Friday, Sept 15, 2006, 12:15 a.m. PDT — Union construction flagger seriously injured. Laborers' Union Local 169 flagger Tina Smith, a resident of Fernley, is in Washoe Medical Center with broken ribs, a punctured lung and other injuries suffered in a Monday, Sept. 11, accident on Interstate 80 near the California state line (eastbound near mile marker 6, according to the Nevada Highway Patrol). No information has been issued as to whether or not a citation has been issued. According to NHP and other reports, a DHL driver trying to avoid rear-ending a vehicle in front of him slammed on his brakes and swerved into Ms. Smith in the construction zone. She may be released from Washoe Med as soon as today. (FYI: Penalties for construction zone traffic violations increased.)
UPDATE 9-21-2006: Three citations were issued in this incident. More soon. Stay tuned.
On Sept. 15, 1963, four black girls were killed when a bomb went off during Sunday services at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, in the deadliest act of the civil rights era.
[New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Addie Mae Collins
Denise McNair
Carol Robertson
Cynthia WesleyOn this date in 1906, Father Thomas Tubman returned to Reno from a conference with the Sacramento Catholic bishop in Grass Valley with approval for a new cathederal in Reno, with construction slated to start by September 22d; in 1906, Reno schools were taxed "to the uttermost" with nearly 1,500 students, 139 more than in 1905; in 1911, Harry Goodwin, a baseball player with the Reno Overland team, was adjudged insane by a Sacramento court and committed to a Napa asylum; in 1911, a coroner's jury empaneled in White Pine County to look into the August 23d deaths of three miners in the Giroux mine found the three had died of smoke and gas inhalation and found that Giroux Consolidated Mines had been extremely negligent in caring for the health and safety of its workers; in 1921, Portland, Oregonians were debating where to put their upcoming world's fair, with a dozen sites in and around the city being considered for the Atlantic-Pacific Highways and Electrical Exposition; in 1921, George Ramsey rode the legendary Indian motorcycle from San Francisco to Reno in seven hours, 45 minutes, beating by an hour the previous record set on a Harley Davidson (Ramsey made it from Verdi to Reno in 18 minutes); in 1934, U.S. Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota, a Republican chairing the senate investigation of arms trafficking, said that U.S. arms manufacturers were "calloused to rottenness", used U.S. warships as "sample cases" in marketing their arms in other nations, were "instrumental in provoking war scares, arousing suspicion between friendly nations and blocking disarmament efforts", used bribery freely, ignored U.S. treaty commitments, and benefited from collusion with the U.S. war and navy departments in obtaining release of patent rights and secret designs; in 1934, a survey by State Government, the magazine of the American Legislators' Association, said that half the states had turned to sterilization to control "defectives" and criminals and that more than 16,000 people had been sterilized since Indiana passed the first law in 1907; in 1934, the New Deal and Democratic leaders were at war with labor, with National Recovery Administration director Hugh Johnson denouncing a national textile strike that was in its second week with 14 dead and troops mobilized in six states and Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge preparing to use national guardsmen as strikebreakers; in 1934, the U.S. Public Works Administration announced an acceleration of plans to construct or improve tribal hospitals around the nation, including at the Western Shoshone agency in Nevada; in 1934, after T.O. McKinnon of Mina, Nevada, offered a $25 reward to the person who found the house that was stolen from him, W.G. Emminger claimed part of the reward for finding the roof; in 1949, President Truman disassociated the U.S. government from Nevada U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran's visit to fascist dictator Francisco Franco of Spain, saying the senator was not speaking for anyone but himself; in 1949, a news report said Las Vegas city commissioners were preparing to end rent control; in 1963, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was bombed by Ku Klux Klan members, killing four girls attending a Sunday service at which the sermon was titled "The love that forgives"; in 1966, construction on the proposed new Reno television station KTVN was halted because KOLO went to court to appeal the license award to KTVN by the Federal Communications Commission; in 1972, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas ordered bail for the "Fort Worth Five," who had been jailed by a Texas judge for three months on contempt for refusing to testify about gun running to Ireland.; in 1972, University of Nevada, Las Vegas enrollment went over the 6,000 mark, to 6,005, six percent over the previous year's 5,657; in 1977, Nevada supreme court justices hearing a case challenging the Nevada open meeting law's requirements that judicial administrative meetings (but not other court proceedings) be open were caustic toward the legislators‚ exempting themselves from the law.
Update: Thursday, Sept 14, 2006, 12:35 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1959, the Soviet space probe Luna 2 became the first man-made object to reach the moon as it crashed onto the lunar surface. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On Sept. 14, 1904 , a Washoe County coroner's jury accused train engineer L. Isoard of causing a train wreck near Laughton's hot springs on September 12 in which two people were killed and 28 (including Isoard himself) were injured; in 1906, the City of Reno was developing a plan for signal lights to be flashed from the top of the new city hall to summon police or other uses; in 1913, a day after a cloudburst caused a flood that swept away homes in Goldfield (killing five people and damaging the power station), lights were restored while dinner was being served by candlelight and orchestras played; in 1932, in Gardnerville, alcohol prohibition agents arrested Jose "Tony" Dettling, owner of Dettling's pool hall, after they found a false wall behind which were barrels of whisky; in 1932, the Reno Central Trades and Labor Council met to plan how to lure the American Federation of Labor national convention to Reno; in 1949, members of the Las Vegas city commission said wartime rent control in the city should end within a month; in 1959, the first human made object on the moon was the Soviet rocket Luna 2, which was crashed into Palus Putredinis; in 2003, Emily Rose Christian was born, the first child born on Pitcairn Island in 17 years.
Update: Wednesday, Sept 13, 2006, 8:23 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1847, the U.S. executed thirty prisoners of war, members of the St. Patrick's Battalion, a body of Irish, German, and Scottish soldiers — many of them deserters from the U.S. — who fought against the U.S. aggression against Mexico, bringing to 48 the number of the battalion so treated (of 5,000 U.S. deserters in the disreputable war against Mexico, only the San Patricios were executed; ceremonies honoring them are held each year in Mexico and County Galway); in 1862, Private Barton Mitchell of the 27th Indiana found three cigars wrapped in Robert E. Lee's special orders 191, which provided Union General George McClellan with information on Lee's plans (the CIA web site calls it "one of the most important pieces of intelligence ever presented to a general in battle") that conceivably made it possible for McClellan to win the war in a single day (he was quoted saying "If I can't whip Bobby Lee with this, I shall gladly go home"), but he dithered indecisively for 18 hours and lost the benefit of the fantastic find, instead ending up in the bloody battle of Antietam (where 23,000 men were killed in a single day) and eventually — on November 7 — prompting President Lincoln to finally cashier McClellan; in 1900, University of Nevada Professor N.E. Wilson addressed the California Dairymen's convention in Sacramento on "The Alkali Test for Lactic Acid in Cream"; in 1907, the divorce case of the president of the Mine Owners Association and his wife in Goldfield was generating talk with her saying "Major Stanton has beaten me time and again. I have suffered intolerably since I have been with him. My statement that he threw a lamp at me is absolutely true. I have been told that Major Stanton has been married five times before and I believe it." and him saying "The girl is not 16, but nearer 20. I never had an idea that she was so spiteful — She acted coolly and threw money away. My housekeeper warned me against her."; in 1907, federal officials moved into San Francisco to deal with an outbreak of plague, and the death from the disease of the Chinese Six Companies corporation president spread panic; in 1911, in Denver, a man was granted a divorce from his wife after he testified she was "politics crazy" (the Reno Evening Gazette later suggested that Nevada divorce lawyers add the grounds to their repertoire); in 1921, in New York, Beatrice Andina asked for a legal separation from her husband of 41 years, Peter Andina, because after he started going to motion picture shows, he became too cross to live with; in 1921, movie comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, one of the screen's most popular performers, was indicted for rape and causing the death of actress Virginia Rappe during a wild party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco (Arbuckle was found not guilty but his career was destroyed); in 1939, a man from Westwood, California, married his Santa Cruz girlfriend from his bed in Washoe General Hospital after he arrived in Reno and was hit by a hit and run driver; in 1944, a photograph was taken from a U.S. bomber at Oswiecim, Poland, showing bombs falling from the plane's bomb bay directly over the crematoria at Auschwitz Birkenau (although they were physically over Auschwitz at the time the photo was snapped, the forward momentum of the bombs actually carried them to a nearby I.G. Farben industrial complex), demonstrating that the U.S. had the ability to shut down Auschwitz by bombing if it chose; in 1965, Yesterday b/w Act Naturally by the Beatles was released in the U.S. (Capitol 5498, not released as a single in England); in 1967, after a judge approved topless waitresses in New York City, Mayor John Lindsay's administration scrambled to find a way to cover them up again; in 1967, the Del Webb Corporation sold the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas and announced plans to use the money on three other Webb properties — the Sahara and the Mint in Las Vegas and the Sahara Tahoe; in 1972, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that the next Oscar ceremonies would be a tribute to Charlie Chaplin, including a special Oscar and the return of Chaplin to the United States to accept it (Chaplin had traveled abroad in 1952 and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover arranged to have his reentry permit revoked after he left; Chaplin's first leading lady, from 1918 to 1923, was Edna Purviance of Lovelock, Nevada); in 1972, the Nevada Supreme Court postponed oral arguments in a court case to determine the ownership of the polluted riverbed of the Carson River; in 2000, after pleading guilty to a technical violation, former U.S. nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee was set free by federal Judge James Parker with an apology for his persecution by federal investigators.
Update: Tuesday, Sept 12, 2006, 12:54 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1885, the cornerstone of Morrill Hall, the first building on the new state university campus in Reno, was dedicated {Nevada Magazine calendar}; in 1896, news reports said that Robert Fitzsimmons and James Corbett had agreed for fight for the heavyweight championship (after being rejected by other states, the fight was held in Nevada on March 17, 1897); in 1900, the Virginia Evening Chronicle in Virginia City called for efforts to kill the "unholy scheme" — a state constitutional amendment to make lotteries legal that had already been approved by the 1899 Nevada Legislature and needed to be approved by the 1901 legislative session; in 1908, an Ely mining engineer who was an addicted gambler killed himself by taking potassium of cyanide; in 1939, the Public Works Administration, a Depression era agency that constructed public works around the nation, declined two proposed Las Vegas projects — a $30,500 sidewalk project and a $126,680 street project; in 1949, U.S. Representatives Norris Poulson of California, Fred Marshall of Minnesota, and Wayne Aspinall of Colorado, speaking in Boulder City, called for three more dams on the Colorado River (the Bridge Canyon project, Kanab Creek project and Marble Canyon project); in 1949, a labor meeting was held on plans to acquire the troubled Biltmore Hotel for a Clark County labor temple; in 1956, Nevada organized crime figure Joseph "Doc" Stacher was stripped of his U.S. citizenship by a federal court judge in Los Angeles on grounds he had concealed his criminal record when he applied for citizenship in 1930; in 1956, in the first day of testimony of a $1,200,000 libel suit by attorney George Franklin against Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun, reporter Ed Reid refused to identify the people he interviewed in writing a story that accused Franklin of blackmail and operating a "baby adoption racket"; in 1959, in an effort to popularize color television, NBC put a new one-hour western called Bonanza on the air, using outdoor Nevada locations to show colorful settings, bringing new tourism life to Virginia City; in 1977, black South Africans were stunned and infuriated by news that their young leader, Steven Biko, had died in police custody; in 2002, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a discussion of commercial architecture on York and Street roads brought the worst comparison: "We look like Las Vegas on Street Road."
Update: Monday, Sept 11, 2006, 12:44 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1846, the Donner Party entered Nevada near Pilot Peak. [Nevada Magazine calendar]
Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again (1940): I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me —and I think for all of us — not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream. I think the life which we have fashioned in America, and which has fashioned us — the forms we made, the cells that grew, the honeycomb that was created — was self-destructive in its nature, and must be destroyed. I think these forms are dying, and must die, just as I know that America and the people in it are deathless, undiscovered, and immortal, and must live.
On Sept. 11, 1609, Henry Hudson's ship, the Half Moon, entered a bay on the east coast that is now New York harbor; in 1857, a party made up of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and some of their allies attacked a Methodist wagon train at Mountain Meadows and murdered every man, woman, and child; in 1893, at an interfaith gathering in Chicago, Swami Vivekananda of India was a sensation among Protestants for his address declaring that his Hindu faith regards all religions as representing universal truths, a message that made him an acclaimed religious figure in the United States (he lectured thereafter at churches throughout the U.S. and his vision of tolerance was so influential that in 1998 a statue of him was erected in Chicago); in 1900, France began withdrawing its forces from Beijing in an effort to spur negotiations between China and the allies (allied military forces — including France, the United States, and Britain — were occupying China to enforce commercial privileges for Western corporations); in 1919, the U.S. again invaded Honduras to protect U.S. corporate banana interests; in 1922, the League of Nations formally proclaimed Britain's imperial mandate over Palestine, leading to the British destruction of more than a thousand communities and murder of thousands, creating victims and mourning throughout the Middle East and creating festering wounds that still influence the region (historian Howard Zinn: "At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homes like a school bully distributes marbles."); in 1941, in Des Moines, Charles Lindbergh carried his opposition to war across a line that offended many ("I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war."); in 1942. an internment camp for Japanese Americans began operation in Topaz, Utah; in 1950, President Truman approved National Security Council memorandum 81/1 to create the legal pretext for an invasion of North Korea; in 1950, the U.S. State Department serviced the needs of oil companies by calling a Washington meeting of all the major companies to plan strategy for paying minimal royalty payments to Arab governments for oil concessions while using "allied oil interests [to] help protect and preserve overall U.S. interests in the area..." (which turned out to include, in 1953, U.S. overthrow of the civilian reform government of Iran and reinstallation of the deposed Reza Pahlavi as dictator); in 1953, a report prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency providing a plan for overthrowing the elected civilian government of Guatemala was completed; in 1964, the U.S. ambassadors to Laos, Saigon and Thailand met in Saigon and agreed to use U.S. and Saigon regime troops to invade Laos on missions that would go on sorties up to 20 kilometres inside the border — without informing the Laotian government; in 1973, a U.S.-engineered coup in Chile overthrew democratically elected President Salvador Allende (who was "suicided") and installed a vicious military dictatorship (the junta admitted to a death toll during the coup of only 3,197); in 1980, a U.S. District Court dismissed a lawsuit that sought to return the Black Hills to tribal hands; in 1990, George Bush the Elder announced his intention to go to war against Iraq; in 2001, 2,749 citizens of the United States died, believed to be the worst one-day U.S. death toll since the 1864 battle of Cold Harbor; in 2004, doves representing peace were released in a ceremony in downtown Reno.Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again (1940): I think the true discovery of America is before us. I think the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come. I think the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us. And I think that all these things are certain as the morning, as inevitable as noon. I think I speak for most men living when I say that our America is Here, is Now, and beckons on before us, and that this glorious assurance is not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished. I think the enemy is here before us, too. But I think we know the forms and faces of the enemy, and in the knowledge that we know him, and shall meet him, and eventually must conquer him is also our living hope. I think the enemy is here before us with a thousand faces, but I think we know that all his faces wear one mask. I think the enemy is single selfishness and compulsive greed.
Update: Sunday, Sept 10, 2006, 2:28 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1874, the Nevada State Agricultural, Mining, and Mechanical Society decided to hold a state fair; in 1908, U.S. Senator George Nixon donated 221 feet of land on Virginia Street to the City of Reno to permit widening of the street at its intersection with Center Street; in 1917, the Wilson administration shut down the Philadelphia Tageblatt, a newspaper that criticized his decision to go to war, and charged the editors with violation of the Espionage Act; in 1917, Otto Schoffan, who was being shipped by rail to one of the Wilson administration's internment camps in Utah, escaped by leaping from the train near Las Vegas, Nevada; in 1917, Dallas, Texas, voted for alcohol prohibition; in 1938, a man without a country, John Dolanchuk, left New York on the President Roosevelt, his fourth trip to Europe in hope of finding a nation willing to accept him (with Roumania saying he was a German and Germany saying he was a Roumanian, he had been refused residency by the U.S., England, and France); in 1948, the White House announced that President Truman would visit Reno on September 22d; in 1949, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge, Franklin Roosevelt's last appointment to the court and a champion of free expression, died in York, Maine; in 1953, Willie Martello, owner of Searchlight's El Ray Club casino, was stripped of his license for a year by the Nevada Tax Commission for operating a rigged slot machine; in 1955, Carson City trustees were trying to figure out what to do about the Hotel Van Cliff, which had been granted a license for its bar by a previous board of trustees, with City Attorney Cameron Batjer arguing that the license should be revoked until (and if) the hotel was ever actually constructed; in 1974, former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark won the Democratic U.S. senate nomination and U.S. Representative Hugh Carey won the Democratic nomination for governor (both opposed by party leaders) in New York; George McGovern presidential campaign manager Gary Hart won the Democratic U.S. senate nomination in Colorado and Michael Dukakis won the Democratic nomination for governor in Massachusetts; in 1974, in the Nevada Assembly district 17 race, a recount confirmed that Democrats Ruby Duncan and Bob Price would appear on the November election as a result of the following tally: Bob Price 194, Ruby Duncan 174, Curly Price 170; in 1976, Columbia Pictures president David Begelman forged actor Cliff Robertson's name on a ten thousand dollar check, which when detected five months later set off a major corporate scandal and the discovery of several other Begelman embezzlements, all of which a majority of the Columbia board of directors tried to cover up; in 2000, The West Wing won a record nine Emmy awards; in 2001, the motion picture remake of The Quiet American starring Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine, based on Graham Greene's legendary 1955 novel about a U.S. agent in Vietnam (reportedly based on Colonel Edward Lansdale), was released into theatres — and pulled from circulation the next day by studio executives who feared it would cause offense in the wake of the September 11 tragedies.
Update: Saturday, Sept 9, 2006, 3:07 p.m. PDT — On this date in 1553, Pope Julius III chose Rosh Hashanah to order the confiscation and burning of the Talmud in Rome; in 1776, the Second Continental Congress changed the nation's name from the United Colonies to the United States; in 1879, the Bodie News, in a commentary reprinted in Reno's Journal, criticized Nevada's later governor Lewis Bradley for supporting having the state university in Elko and expressed the hope that Governor John Kinkead would take a different position; in 1913, U.S. Interior Secretary Franklin Lane announced a new plan for Lake Tahoe and the Truckee River under which the federal government would refrain from timber cutting along the river for five years to help restore the watershed, dredge the upper section of the river to provide better flow and would not take any more water from the lake than it receives from natural sources (Lane also collapsed the same day and was under the care of his physician brother); in 1913, former deputy Reno city clerk A.E. Cunningham, convicted of embezzlement in 1911, won parole from his nine year sentence; in 1949, the U.S. Lime Corporation purchased the first parcel of real property from the Basic Magnesium plant built in Henderson by the federal government and acquired after the war by the Colorado River Commission for economic development purposes; in 1954, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy complained that the senate subcommittee investigating charges against him was invading his privacy in its investigation; in 1955, it was reported that half of the African- Americans in Georgia who signed a petition calling for school integration had been fired from their jobs and their names circulated through white citizens councils to prevent their being hired elsewhere; in 1956, Elvis appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time; in 1957, engineers from the lower Colorado basin (Arizona, Nevada, and California) announced they would meet on September 14 to discuss the proposed Glen Canyon Dam that was being planned for the "benefit" of the upper Colorado basin states; in 1971, the John Lennon album Imagine was released in the United States (on October 8 in England); in 2002, the Las Vegas Sun reported on the emergence of the abandoned and submerged community of St. Thomas from Lake Mead as the level of the lake dropped during a drought.
Update: Friday, Sept. 8, 2006, 12:37 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 7, 1880, President Rutherford Hayes (he lost both the popular and electoral vote and was appointed by Congress) visited Reno; in 1880, the Nevada State Journal, reporting that the steamer Nevada had picked up 347 Mormons in Liverpool presumably for shipment to the U.S., asked "How about that letter written by Secretary Evarts [U.S. Secretary of State William Evarts] demanding that this thing be stopped?"; in 1896, the Silver Party, which ruled Nevada in the 1890's and into the 20th Century, began its state convention in Elko and nominated Francis Newlands for the U.S. House of Representatives; in 1905, members of the United Typothetae of America unanimously adopted a resolution pledging themselves to resist an eight-hour day for members of the International Typographical Union and counseling against use of the union label (paradoxically, the Typothetae began as a printer's union); in 1913, Nevada State University agriculture chair C.S. Knight reported signs that Nevada's troubled sugar beet industry was recovering and was headed toward "future growth and permanency" (the industry soon died out); in 1934, United Press reported that local police and federal agents were close to cracking the kidnappings of William Hamm (Hamm's Beer) and banker Edward Bremer and linked those crimes to the March 6, 1934, bank robbery in Sioux Falls committed by the Dillinger gang (the kidnappings were actually the work of the Karpis/Barker gang); in 1932, Patsy Cline was born in Winchester in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia; in 1953, KZTV (now KOLO TV-8 ) in Reno, which would become Nevada's second television station, put a test pattern on the air so residents could start tuning their television sets for the start of operations at the end of the month; in 1974, President Ford granted an unconditional pardon to former President Nixon [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 2000, the Bureau of Indian Affairs issued an apology to Native Americans: "Tell your children that the time of shame and fear is over. Tell your young men and women to replace their anger with hope and love for their people. Together, we must wipe the tears of seven generations."
Update: Thursday, Sept. 7, 2006, 12:53 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 7, 1940, the German air force began its blitz on London during World War II. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
George Bush the Elder/American Legion Convention/September 7, 1988: "This is Pearl Harbor day. Forty seven years ago to this very day, we were hit and hit hard at Pearl Harbor."
On this date in 1872, the Nevada State Journal reported "The new Ormsby house is up to the third story, and when finished will be the finest wooden hotel in Carson, or the State."; in 1910, the day after Nevada's first full-fledged primary election, the outcome in the Republican governor and attorney general races was still in doubt, with William Massey leading Tasker Oddie in the governor's race and George Springmeyer and Hugh Brown in an even closer race for attorney general; in 1926, Ray Baker defeated Patrick McCarran for the Democratic U.S. senate nomination, Tasker Oddie defeated Edwin Roberts for the Republican U.S. senate nomination and Morley Griswold beat H.C. Heidtman for lieutenant governor (which eventually resulted in his becoming acting governor); in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth succeeded in sending an image through the air by electronic means — the start of television; in 1936, Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holley was born in Lubbock, Texas; in 1941, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told his private secretary "If we must have preferences let me whisper in your ear that I prefer Arabs to Jews."; in 1949, Las Vegas' second polio case of September was reported; in 1949, Clark County Engineer M.E. Tyson, who took over management of McCarran Field when airport manager John Barrett was fired, said the field would probably become financially self supporting by October 1; in 1950, the Nevada Appeal ran an editorial on the capabilities of Korean troops: "THE GOOKS‚ ARE DOING WELL"; in 1954, shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, schools in Baltimore and the District of Columbia were desegregated, demonstrating that it could be done promptly; in 1954, six years after his shocking loss of the U.S. presidency and four years after his election to a third term as governor of New York, Thomas Dewey announced he would leave public life; in 1954, the French flag was brought down in Saigon for the last time; in 1954, Harry Conway, who under the name Bud Fisher created the comic strip Mutt and Jeff, died in New York's Roosevelt Hospital; in 1954, Nevada Governor Charles Russell asked President Eisenhower to authorize federal drought aid to the state; in 1972, U.S. Representative Frank Thompson of New Jersey, head of the national Democratic voter registration drive, bailed out in a dispute with aides to presidential nominee George McGovern; in 1972, after U.S. District Judge Bruce Thompson upheld Nevada District Court Judge Grant Bowen's order banning the publication of jurors' names in the Tom Bean penalty rehearing (Bean was convicted of murdering Olympic skier Sonya McCaskie), the Reno Gazette-Journal appealed the issue to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; in 1972, on the first day of school, Clark County superintendent of schools Kenny Guinn was forced to cancel elementary school "until further notice" after a group of parents won a court order halting implementation of an integration plan. Nevada Attorney General Robert List and school district lawyer Robert Petroni flew to Washington to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the integration plan, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund entered the case against List and Petroni, and protest marches were held on the Las Vegas strip, at the county courthouse, and in the downtown casino district; in 1975, after a woman in Reno repainted the faded fire hydrant on her property as Raggedy Ann, the fire department repainted it plain red; in 1998, Roger Maris' home run record fell to Mark McGwire after Maris held it longer than Babe Ruth.Update: Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2006, 4:29 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 6, 1901, President William B. McKinley was shot and mortally wounded by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Update: Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2006, 8:09 a.m. PDT — As of this morning, Google has recorded 3,455 news stories about "crocodile hunter" Steve Irwin's death and 318 about George Bush's new anti-terrorism strategy.
On Sept. 6, 1882, a Mrs. Holland of the Bullion Ravine area of the Comstock pleaded guilty in Nevada District Court to being a "common scold", which the prosecutor said made her a nuisance in the neighborhood, and was sentenced to a $60 fine or thirty days in jail; in 1887, a New York Morning Journal reporter named Ertel was in Reno and the Nevada State Journal expressed the hope that the would get a better portrayal than in other newspapers: "Nevada has been unjustly represented by several leading papers in the Far East, so much so that the opinion is general that our State is a barren sagebrush waste, and totally unfit for habitation."; in 1906, at a Native American settlement a mile and a half east of Sparks, a store owned by George Moffit was blown up, killing him and injuring his wife and child; in 1939, U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada said "There is a group in the senate of which I am one, that is resolved [this] country will not go into this war. In the last 150 years since this country became a constitutional democracy, if we had engaged in every war in which central Europe is involved, we would have been forced to have our armed forces everlastingly at points of embarkation and our natural resources would have been spent or largely exhausted. The American republic must not be regarded as an instrumentality for the furtherance of Europe's quarrels. Those quarrels have been going on for ten centuries."; in 1949, Las Vegas Review-Journal printers failed to appear for work after talks broke down over the use of new typesetting equipment; in 1953, with ships over the site of the sinking, the British Admiralty was reported to be trying to salvage the Titanic; in 1956, National guardsmen used drawn bayonets to clear a path for 11 African-American children trying to attend school in Sturgis, Kentucky; in 1958, the Nevada Board of Regents fired food and drug laboratory director E.L. Randall; in 1960, in a stunning olympics performance, Rafer Johnson set a record of 8,392 points in the decathlon and won a gold medal; in 1972, Saigon regime dictator Nguyen Van Thieu abolished local elections in the territory under his control; in 1972, John and Yoko appeared on the Labor Day muscular dystrophy telethon; in 1975, U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada said in Washington that he was convinced Ronald Reagan would challenge President Ford for the Republican presidential nomination; in 2002, the United States Congress traveled to New York on two Amtrak trains for ceremonies honoring the victims of September 11 ( it was only the second session of Congress held outside Washington since 1800).Update: Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2006, 12:41 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 5, 1972, Palestinian terrorists attacked the Israeli Olympic team at the summer games in Munich; 11 Israeli athletes and coaches, five terrorists and a police officer were killed. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1651, while on a visit to Massachusetts to comfort a fellow Baptist who was ill (a blind man named William Witter), Obadiah Holmes was whipped 30 times with a three cord whip held in both hands for preaching Baptist doctrine; in 1873, the Humboldt Register reported that after the Humboldt County, Nevada, county seat was moved from Unionville to Winnemucca, the former county court house was auctioned off for $125, the Recorder/Sheriff's office/jail building for $52; in 1896, the Nevada Populist Party Convention in Reno voted against fusion with the Democrats; in 1933, a state convention in Nevada ratified the federal constitutional amendment repealing alcohol prohibition, the only amendment ratified by the convention process; in 1939, the local chapter of Daughters of the Utah Pioneers began work on a marker on North Fifth Street in Las Vegas to the old Mormon fort, the marker constructed from stones from around the nation to be ten feet tall with a six foot base; in 1949, a Labor Day parade in Las Vegas included 200 carpenters union members marching in white overalls and bartenders and culinary union members working at a moving bar and lounge; in 1953, Gardnerville Air Force pilot Capt. Hamilton Shawe, Jr., was released by North Korea after three years as a prisoner of war; in 1953, drivers in Reno struck the Yellow Cab Company during the Labor Day weekend; in 1960, the third congress of the Vietnamese Lao Dong Party, despairing of ever seeing the large powers support the agreement they wrote at Geneva (providing for restoration of Vietnam as one nation, free elections, and no outside intrusion) formally decided to liberate the south, ending President Ho Chi Minh's policies of discouraging armed insurrection in the south and trust in the large powers; in 1964, The House of the Rising Sun by the Animals reached number one on the record charts; in 1972, longtime U.S. Representative Walter Baring of Nevada was defeated for renomination in the Democratic primary election by University Regent James Bilbray; in 1975, President Ford was the target of an attempted assassination by Manson family member Lynette Fromme while walking across the capitol grounds in Sacramento; in 1989, a special two day hearing held on the conduct of University of Nevada Reno professor Thomas Harrington on his conduct with a female student began, ultimately resulting in his being discharged; in 1994, at a U.N. family planning conference in Cairo, Norway Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland was harshly critical of a Vatican/Islam alliance that prevented any discussion of birth control: "States that do not have any population problem — in one particular case, even no births at all — are doing their best, their utmost, to prevent the world from making sensible decisions regarding family planning."
Update: Monday, Sept. 4, 2006, 5:16 a.m. PDT — Labor leaders: Wild West mentality lingers in Nevada
LABOR DAY 2006 Guest Editorial, Reno Gazette-Journal.Virginia City Labor Day Parade shows off another era by Ray Hagar, Reno Gazette-Journal, 9-5-2006
Update: Monday, Sept. 4, 2006, 1:41 a.m. PDT — LABOR DAY, 2006: On Sept. 4, 1781, El Pueblo Nuestra Senora Reina del los Angeles was founded in California by Spanish settlers; in 1882, Charles D. Gibbs read a paper at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco on the Carson City prehistoric footprints; in 1896, a Storey County jury ruled against the Virginia and Truckee Railroad in its effort to avoid paying its taxes, ordering the railroad to pay nearly $13,000 in back taxes plus penalties plus legal fees; in 1908, author Richard Wright (Native Son, Black Boy) was born near Natchez; in 1908, the boom camp of Rawhide in Mineral County was destroyed by fire; in 1913, Anaho Island National Wildlife Refuge in Pyramid Lake was established; in 1921, Vice-President Calvin Coolidge was standing on a speaking platform in Williamburg in his home state of Massachusetts when the platform collapsed under him; in 1921, a meeting was held at Donner Lake to discuss changing the route of the Reno/Truckee road from Dog Valley pass to along the Truckee River; in 1927, children from the Nevada orphan's home were taken by train to a Labor Day picnic/celebration at Laughton's hot springs west of Reno, courtesy of the Western Federation of Labor; in 1946, U.S. Senator Edward Carville of Nevada, who as governor appointed Berkeley Bunker to the U.S. senate (Bunker was later defeated) to fill a vacancy and then later appointed himself to a different vacancy, was defeated by Bunker in the Democratic primary; in 1946, the national Veterans of Foreign Wars commander said that "rowdyism" had made the national convention in Boston "the worst convention in VFW history"; in 1949, Vice-President Alben Barkley spent the day in St. Louis courting the widow Jane Hadley; in 1949, the national convention of the American Legion endorsed the McCarran/Walters Immigration Act sponsored by Nevada's U.S. Senator that made entry into the U.S. relatively easy for white western Europeans and progressively more difficult for eastern Europeans, Asians, and Africans; in 1949, University of Nevada student and former 4-H livestock award winner Carol Lampe, Nevada's first entry in the Miss America contest, left Reno for Atlantic City where her talent was to be a three-minute talk on how to raise a prize steer; in 1951, in the first coast to coast television broadcast, President Truman spoke before a conference in San Francisco carried by 97 stations in 47 cities; in 1953, General William Dean, the highest ranking prisoner of war in Korea, was released after 38 months of captivity; in 1957, the Edsel, which would pioneer new marketing theories but itself fail, went on sale; in 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to surround Little Rock's Central High School to protect it from nine African-American students who were expected to begin attending; in 1962, the Beatles recorded Why Do You Do It and Love Me Do while photographer Dezo Hoffman shot carefully framed photographs of them, shooting George Harrison mostly from the right because he had received a black eye in the Pete Best riots (drummer Best's fans were angered when he was ejected from the Beatles and replaced by Ringo Starr); in 1967, Republican presidential candidate George Romney told Detroit television interviewer Lou Gordon that on a trip to Vietnam in 1965 "...I had just the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam, not only by the generals, but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job," a comment that journalists used to crucify Romney, forcing him to withdraw from the GOP race in which he was the principal obstacle to Richard Nixon, leaving Republican voters with no dove candidate (an account of the campaign by British journalists noted that Romney was not the only one brainwashed on Vietnam by U.S. officials — "most Americans had been"); in 1969, a no-fault divorce law was signed into law by California Governor Ronald Reagan.
Update: Sunday, Sept. 3, 2006, 2:20 a.m. PDT — On Sept. 3, 1886, Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles after Miles promised him that, following a stay in Florida, he would be permitted to return to Arizona, a promise that was never kept; in 1906, four years before the "great white hope" fight in Reno, African-American Joe Gans triumphed over Oscar "Battling" Nelson in a brutally hot fight (Gans entered the ring carrying an umbrella) in Goldfield [John L. Smith: Goldfield deserves a statue to commemorate the fight the changed the game]; in 1912, most of the remaining Mormon colonists in Sonora, Mexico, fled back to the U.S. when forces led by rebel General José Inés Salazar marched into the area; in 1939, when the Athenia was attacked and sunk by a German submarine (the U-boat commander, Fritz-Julius Lemp, mistook the passenger ship for an armored cruiser) eight hours after Britain declared war on Germany, Las Vegas figure Harry Trehearne was on board (he survived); in 1946, more than a thousand Jewish illegal immigrants trying to sneak into Palestine were taken off a blockade running ship and sent to detention camps on Cyprus; in 1946, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., author of the novel Reno which did much to spread the myth that divorcees throw their wedding rings into the Truckee River, was married to Maria Feliza Pablos at the home of Samuel Platt in Reno; in 1949, tribal leaders from four states ended a meeting in Elko at which they decided to not yet participate in a federal program that removed reservations from federal control; in 1953, bandleader Ted Lewis, often credited with being the first big name entertainer to perform at a Nevada casino (the Commercial Hotel in Elko in 1941) began a run at the Riverside Hotel in Reno (Lewis was also the first entertainer to perform in the Riverside theatre); in 1956, the Las Vegas YMCA announced that it was seeking 640 acres of federally managed land south of the city for expanded recreation programs; in 1964, assistant secretary of defense John McNaughton drafted a memo listing ways the U.S. could provoke Vietnam into attacking to make the U.S. look less like an aggressor; in 1964, the U.S. Wilderness Act was signed into law; in 1967, U.S.-backed General Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president of the Saigon government with 35 percent of the vote, but the big news was the 17 percent of the vote collected by peace candidate Truong Dinh Dzu, a little known attorney who was then arrested and thrown into prison by Thieu; in 1971, Nixon aides Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, with other characters they hired, burglarized the office of psychiatrist Lewis Fielding to obtain the patient file on antiwar activist Daniel Ellsberg; in 1991, movie director Frank Capra (It Happened One Night, Lost Horizon, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington) died.
United Mine Workers President John L. Lewisresponding to President Roosevelt's "a plague on both your houses" denunciation of labor and management during steel industry wage negotiations
September 3 (Labor Day) 1937: "Those who chant their praises of democracy but who lose no chance to drive their knives into labor's defenseless back must feel the weight of labor's woe even as its open adversaries must ever feel the thrust of labor's power. Labor, like Israel, has many sorrows. Its women weep for their fallen and they lament for the future of the children of the race. It ill behooves one who has supped at labor's table and who has been sheltered in labor's house to curse with equal fervor and fine impartially both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace. I repeat that labor seeks peace and guarantees its own loyalty, but the voice of labor, insistent upon its rights, should not be annoying to the ears of justice or offensive to the conscience of the American people."
Update: Saturday, Sept. 2, 2006, 9:15 p.m. PDT — On Sept. 2, 1871, an "old, well known snow bank" on Thomas Canyon Peak (described as west of Washoe City) that had never been known to disappear even in the hottest summers, was gone under the onslaught of this summer's heat; in 1908, the Nevada Democratic Convention, which featured credentials battles and at least two fist fights, nominated Francis Newlands for reappointment to a new term as U.S. Senator, George Bartlett for the U.S. House, three party regulars as candidates for the electoral college, and Judge Peter Somers was elected as Democratic state chair; in 1910, the Sparks Labor Day committee and former Democratic U.S. senate candidate Charles McIntosh were quarreling over which of them was responsible for the removal from the Labor Day celebration program book of a page headlined "Kick The Southern Pacific Company Out Of Politics," and whether it was done at the demand of the railroad; in 1910, the earth opened and swallowed the Virginia City post office (EDITOR'S NOTE: Perhaps Southern Pacific thought that someone had mailed the offending page there.]; in 1939, shares on the New York Stock Exchange soared after Hitler invaded Poland, beginning World War Two, but then declined after news reports that French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier was talking about peace negotiations; in 1939, at the start of the school year, Clark County superintendent of schools Maude Frazier warned parents and students that hazing of first year students at Las Vegas High School would not be tolerated; in 1942, amid heightened anti-British and anti-U.S. sentiment following the hanging of Irish Republican Army soldier Thomas Williams for killing a British constabulary officer named Murphy, Ulster women saluted British occupiers and U.S. tourists with Nazi salutes; in 1942, U.S. Senator Berkeley Bunker of Nevada, appointed to the senate by Governor Edward Carville after Senator Key Pittman's death, was easily defeated in the Democratic primary by former governor James Scrugham; in 1945, Japan formally surrendered in ceremonies aboard the USS Missouri, ending World War II [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 1953, thirty-seven days after the armistice in Korea was signed, the American Legion called for all-out war against Korea using "the full military strength and might of our government with every usable weapon at its disposal" if further armistice negotiations failed; in 1953, Desert Inn co-owner Wilbur Clark was indicted on four federal counts of tax evasion; in 1972, during a nonviolent protest against living conditions in the Nevada State Prison, three firebombs were tossed into the dining hall; in 1974, the CBS Evening News carried a report by reporter David Dow on the Nevada Democratic primary election race between U.S. senate candidates Maya Miller and Harry Reid; in 1995, Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opened; in 2004, after Vestin Mortgage of Las Vegas — the largest creditor of bankrupt Mid-State Raceway — called for appointment of an independent trustee, Mid-State said it would make the company's problems worse and a federal bankruptcy judge in Reno said the case should be heard in New York instead of Nevada because that's where the company's operations were.
Update: Friday, Sept. 1, 2006, 1:14 p.m. PDT — On Sept. 1, 1939, World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On Sept. 1, 1874, two missing Nevada state prison inmates were found between the ceiling and the roof over the warden's quarters; in 1907, United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther was born in West Virginia; in 1909, British antiques dealer Betsy Hill, who was sent to Ellis Island on grounds of insanity because she smoked, was released with comments about her brilliance and lack of mental defect; in 1909, while the sheriff of Pulaski County, Arkansas, headed to Reno to take custody of suspected embezzler Ralph Swartout from Reno police, attorney Patrick McCarran won Swartout's release on a writ of habeus corpus only to see him immediately arrested again, whereupon he petitioned for another such writ; in 1936, Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas announced that he had sold arms to Spain for its battle against fascist rebels; in 1937, Chiang Kai-Shek apologized for the bombing by Chinese planes of the commercial ocean liner President Hoover; in 1937, George Wingfield, George Wingfield, Jr., and Jean McKeever repurchased the Golden and Riverside hotels, which the elder Wingfield previously owned but lost when they were seized by Crocker First National Bank; in 1958, student government contracts that paid Richard Bryan $80 a month to serve as president of the Associated Students of the University of Nevada (the legal name of the student government) and paid Carol Gardenswartz $60 a month to serve as Associated Women Students (president) took effect; in 1965, U.S. Senators Howard Cannon, D-Nev., and Alan Bible, D-Nev., met with U.S. Representative Walter Baring, D-Nev., and offered to cut 19,500 acres off their proposal for a 123,380-acre Great Basin National Park, but Baring insisted on his own proposed 53,000 acre park; in 1975, the cover of Time magazine carried a photograph of Air Force Sergeant Leonard Matlovich behind the headline "I Am a Homosexual", a major benchmark in the young gay rights movement (Matlovich, a career soldier and war hero who earned the bronze star, purple heart and air force commendation medal, was discharged, ordered reinstated by the courts, reached an out of court settlement with the Pentagon, ran for supervisor in San Francisco, died in 1988, and rests in Arlington National Cemetery under a marker reading "When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men, and a discharge for loving one"); in 1975, Reno newspaperman Ty Cobb retired; in 2003, Cameron B. Sarno of Waihupa, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, was killed in Kuwait City.
Update: Thursday, August 31, 2006, 1:14 a.m. PDT — On this date 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 1878, the Storey County Republican Central Committee voted to require that Republican voters would be permitted to vote in the party primary election only after averring "that he voted for...[Republican presidential nominee Rutherford] Hayes...in 1876, or would have done so had he been a qualified elector."; in 1885,DuBose Hayward, poet and author of the book and play Porgy and collaborator on Porgy and Bess, was born in Charleston, South Carolina (in 2002 he was named one of "Fifty Americans Who Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books"; in 1916, the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce chaired by U.S. Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada began a series of hearings on the prospect of a nationwide strike in support of an eight hour work day; in 1920, Loyd Alvia "Dutch" Myers was born in Cozad, Nebraska; in 1921, housing could not be found in Reno for the world war veterans attending the University of Nevada under a federal vocational education program; in 1936, in Washington, the U.S. Indian Bureau announced it was acquiring 2,100 acres of land on the south fork of the Humboldt River in Nevada for fifty Native Americans family homesites; in 1939, after a CIO picket line was withdrawn, work was resumed on installation of an electrical system at Boca Dam, with water releases not possible until the three-week job work was completed (the reservoir created by the dam is used to regulate water flowing to Reno); in 1939, Jerry Allison, the member of the Crickets who gave the group its name and boyfriend and husband of Peggy Sue Gerron, was born in Hillsboro, Texas; in 1954, on the first day of senate committee hearings on the censure of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, committee chair Arthur Watkins of Utah gaveled McCarthy and his lawyer Edward Bennett Williams to silence when they kept trying to raise irrelevant issues; in 1964, the U.S. Food Stamp Act was signed into law; in 1975, United Press International carried a story about how the U.S. would soon go metric so everyone should learn it; in 1975, Elko officials said they were close to beginning land acquisition for the city's railroad track relocation project; in 1976, George Harrison lost a plagiarism lawsuit over , which bears aMy Sweet Lord striking resemblence to He's So Fine, but the judge in the case (himself a songwriter) said it was apparent that the plagiarism was inadvertant; in 2002, Lionel Hampton, who played vibes in the Benny Goodman Quartet and later led the Lionel Hampton Orchestra, died in New York; in 2005, U.S. Representative James Gibbons, R-Nev., announced his candidacy for the governorship.
If you're going to New York, don't get off in Chicago —Philosopher Dutch Myers
Update: Wednesday, August 30, 2006, 12:45 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1963, the hot-line communications link between Washington, D.C., and Moscow went into operation. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On Aug. 30, 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 1878, the Gold Hill school trustees cleared teacher James Bray of charges of ungentlemanly conduct toward young women on an outing to Emerald Bay but also said school superintendent E.J Pasmore was justified in bringing the charges; in 1886, the Nevada State Journal reported "Mr. Lee's celebrated race horse, William Crabb, who had his leg badly fractured several weeks ago, and who could not be cured, was given an easy death by means of chloroform..."; in 1902, Patrick McCarran announced his candidacy for the Nevada Assembly; in 1939, Indianapolis attorney Frank McHale and Indiana chief justice Michael Fansler, advance men for former Indiana governor Paul McNutt (the frontrunning Democrat against Franklin Roosevelt's third term bid) were in Reno seeking support; in 1956, in Knoxville, Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson said President Eisenhower and the Republican Party were not accomplishing "peaceful uses" of atomic energy quickly enough; in 1965, Bob Dylan's album Highway 61 Revisited was released by Columbia; in 1975, the Reno Silver Sox won the California League championship with a 6 to 2 victory over the Modesto A's; in 1989, Ringo Starr appeared at the Aladdin in Las Vegas; in 1991, Alex Haley spoke at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Update: Tuesday, August 29, 2006, 3:39 a.m. PDT — On this date in 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]
On Aug. 29, 1878, in the yellow fever epidemic, 140 new cases and 49 deaths were reported in New Orleans, 99 new cases and 70 deaths in Memphis; in 1878, Storey County superintendent of schools E.J. Pasmore and Virginia City Grammar School No. 2 principal James Bray (later state school superintendent) had a fist fight in front of the International Hotel over Bray's alleged conduct with several young women during an outing at Emerald Bay; in 1896, the Nevada Democratic State Central Committee appointed a panel to investigate whether Democratic candidates for the state's members of the electoral college had been legally selected; in 1910, the Student Record, student newspaper at the University of Nevada in Reno, changed its name to the U. of N. Sagebrush; in 1918, in Chicago, (future major league baseball commissioner) Judge Kenesaw "Mountain" Landis denied a new trial to 100 members of the Industrial Workers of the World (aka "The Wobblies") convicted of antiwar activities (labor leader William "Big Bill" Haywood told Landis "No member of the I.W.W. is guilty of any act against the United States. If released there is nothing I could do but to continue to uphold the I.W.W. constitution as I have done in the past" and J.H. Byers of Portland said "The charge is absurd. My parents are good Americans and I have held public office."); in 1919, Sparks trainmen and yardmen joined a wildcat railroad strike that was spreading through the west in support of California streetcar workers, while in Las Vegas union leaders warned their members against going out; in 1936, Seattle Mayor John Dore demanded that Post Intelligencer owner William Randolph Hearst either reach a settlement with the newspaper's striking workers or "get out of Seattle"; in 1936, a summit meeting of Washo, Paiutes and Shoshone at Stewart, Nevada ended with an endorsement of the U.S. Indian Reorganization Act; in 1939, the Southern Pacific Company was advertising a $5,000 reward for information leading to the person or persons responsible for the disastrous train derailment in Nevada's Palisade Canyon that killed 24 of the 165 passengers on August 12; in 1941, the NBC Radio program Death Valley Days #563 was a radio play titled The Homeliest Man In Nevada; in 1950, Reno physician Kennth Elges and Jules Golding of Redwood City, California, charged with providing abortions in Reno, were taken into custody by the Washoe County sheriff after the Nevada Supreme Court denied habeas corpus (a Stanford University student, Clara Messerve, had earlier testified that she did not receive an abortion from Dr. Elges, but the case was pursued on the basis of testimony by District Attorney Harold Taber that Messerve told him Elges have provided her with an abortion); in 1956, Squaw Valley Lodge, scheduled to be the headquarters of the 1960 winter Olympics, was destroyed by fire; in 1960, Jordanian Prime Minister Hazza Majali, described by Time as "one of the west's best friends in the Arab world" was murdered by a bomb in his office (his obit appeared in an issue of Time that had on the cover another of the west's "best friends" — Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran); in 1965, Mal Goode joined ABC News, becoming the first African-American network correspondent; in 1966, Students for a Democratic Society held its national convention in Clear Lake, Iowa, where Buddy Holly had played his last concert seven years earlier; in 1966, the Beatles performed in public for the last time (not counting the January 30, 1969, rooftop concert) at Candlestick Park south of San Francisco — John Lennon took photographs of the group and himself; in 1996, Isaac Hayes demanded that presidential candidate Robert Dole stop using his Soul Man composition as a campaign theme — "I'm A Dole Man."
Update: Monday, August 28, 2006, 4:03 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1955, Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was abducted from his uncle's home in Money, Miss., by two white men after he had supposedly whistled at a white woman. He was found brutally murdered three days later [AP]; in 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 Aug. 28, 1879, U.S. Representative Rollin Daggett of Nevada was at Steamboat Springs south of Reno writing a book; in 1908, Acting Governor Denver Dickerson said he would not allow his name to go before the Democratic state convention for nomination to the U.S. senate seat held by Francis Newlands, and would in fact aid Newlands in winning reelection; 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 as he prepared an invasion; in 1913, two and a half years after he was suspended from the practice of law because of improper conduct with his divorce client Corrine Bell, attorney William Schnitzer was readmitted to practice by the Nevada Supreme Court; in 1934, a political earthquake hit California: Muckraking novelist Upton Sinclair, with the support of the Townsendites and their "End Poverty in California" economic populism movement, won the Democratic nomination for governor (leaders of both parties united to defeat Sinclair by pioneering public relations techniques of demonizing a public figure); in 1934, the Truckee Carson Irrigation District agreed to release project manager Dean Stuver at the request of U.S. Bureau of Reclamation director Elwood Mead, who wanted Stuver's services in Washington; in 1936, six years after he vanished in Manhattan, New York detectives were looking for Judge Joseph Crater in southern California's Cuyamaca Mountains; in 1951, A Place in the Sun, starring Shelley Winters and Elizabeth Taylor and filmed at Lake Tahoe, was released; in 1953, California Attorney General Edmund (Pat) Brown announced that the fight against marijuana was "showing marked results"; in 1961, Please Mr. Postman by the Marvelettes was released by Tamla Records; in 1969, Nevada Attorney General Harvey Dickerson, a nominal Democrat who did not ordinarily get involved in party affairs, sent a letter to Democratic state chair Robert Rose that seemed to say that Rose wasn't doing his job and offering suggestions for how to make the case against Governor Paul Laxalt and other Republicans; in 1975, Ethiopean emperor Haile Selassie was reported by the military junta to have died as a result of complications in surgery, a claim his surgeon denied; in 1976, Republican U.S. Senate candidate David Towell accused U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada of opposing open meetings in the senate; in 2002, the Washoe County School District settled for $451,000 the lawsuit of teenager Derek Henkle who accused school administrators of failing to protect him from years of physical abuse for being gay.
Update: Sunday, August 27, 2006, 12:54 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1962, the United States launched the Mariner 2 space probe, which flew past Venus the following December. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On Aug. 27, 1874, a day after six Tennessee African-Americans were removed from the Trenton jail and lynched, the Nevada State Journal carried a dispatch on the atrocity and observed "It is noticeable that all the talk in the South about 'a war of races' comes from one side. It is the side that is particularly bent on waging just such a war. There has been no outrage upon the Government since 1860, no Leaguers, no Ku-Klux, no outrage upon the colored people in the form of plunder, rapine, or attempted disenfranchisement, but what has come directly or indirectly from the Democratic party."; in 1883, a volcano on Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait erupted in one of the most violent explosions ever recorded (heard 2,891 miles away and over one-thirteenth of the globe), destroying most of the island, leaving nearby islands barren, dropping debris on Madagascar, causing a tidal wave that killed nearly 40,000 people in Sumatra and Java, and changing the earth's climate — for years, winters came sooner and stayed later, temperatures were lower (the eruption became the subject of the 1969 film Krakatoa East of Java; after the movie was released someone noticed that Krakatoa is west of Java); in 1899, an extension of the Nevada California Oregon Railroad reached the head of Snowstorm Canyon, about nine miles past Carlo, and trains were expected to be on Madeline plains in a week; in 1914, English Prime Minister Herbert Asquith said he recognized "the strain which is placed on the public" by censorship of war news, but did not say there would be any change; in 1915, General John Pershing, who would become U.S. commander in the world war, lost his wife and three daughters when their home in San Francisco's Presidio burned (a five year old son was rescued); in 1921, Frederick Nixon's wife arrived in Reno to stand by him during his bigamy trial (he also married a Reno woman) but arrived after he had already been sentenced, and a news report said the first Mrs. Nixon and her husband "were apparently reconciled, and both wept on parting" as he was taken to the Nevada State Prison; in 1936, President Roosevelt attended the funeral in Salt Lake City of U.S. War Secretary George Dern, the first New Deal cabinet member to die in office and a former Utah governor; in 1952, Robert Dwyer was installed as Catholic bishop of Nevada; in 1953, U.S. Attorney James Johnson said in Reno that under a ne w federal law Nevada Native-Americans were no longer prohibited from purchasing alcoholic beverages; 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, Washoe County Democratic Party chair Tom Cooke, commenting on the party's treasury of $1,140 compared to the county Republican treasury of $18,000, said "Our work will have to surpass Republican dollars" and Nevada Democratic chair Keith Lee announced that U.S. representatives Hale Boggs and Sam Rayburn would campaign in the state for the Democrats during the '54 campaign; in 1954, the Nevada State Federation of Labor's president, James "Sailor" Ryan, presided over an annual convention in which the federation was expected to endorse his candidacy for Nevada lieutenant governor; in 1967, Beatles manager Brian Epstein died; in 1971, World War Two photographer Margaret Bourke White died in Stamford, Connecticut; in 1971, a taxpayers lawsuit was filed to overturn the new Nevada legislative reapportionment plan on the grounds that it failed to provide one-person, one-vote; it created multi-member senate districts to protect incumbents and it created districts for African-American voters; in 1971, Pyramid Lake tribal chair Charles Renda informed the Pyramid Lake Task Force that the tribe was considering rejoining the task force; in 2001, Israeli agents murdered Palestinian leader Mustafa Zibri; in 2003, a religious monument was removed from the Supreme Court of Alabama building.
Update: Saturday, August 26, 2006, 7:17 a.m. PDT — On this date in 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 1839, La Amistad, a schooner filled with Africans and two Spaniards, was taken into custody by the U.S. Coast Guard near Long Island and it was turned over to officials in New London, Connecticut; in 1869, Francis Cardiff, a Hale and Norcross miner in Virginia City, died after taking "black drops" he purchased at a local pharmacy; in 1871, with Brigham Young present, ground was broken at Three Mile Creek (now Perry) for the Utah Northern Railway; in 1875, there was a run on the Bank of California in San Francisco, whose economic power had allowed it to rule Nevada's Comstock Lode, and it closed its doors without being able to meet depositor demands; in 1908, G.M. Reading of Wellington arrived in Carson City with news of a discovery of "surface gas" (natural gas) in the Wellington oil fields and said he was on his way to Reno with samples to test before a group of oil executives; in 1921, a two day meeting to organize a Nevada farm cooperative began at the Reno chamber of commerce; in 1932, contempt of court charges against two Culinary Union officials over picketing at Reno's Monarch Café in spite of a restraining order obtained by the owners were dismissed (but an injunction against picketing was granted on August 27); in 1935, Geraldine Ferraro was born in Newburgh, New York; in 1936, an American Bar Association committee criticized the conduct of the judge, jurors and defense attorneys in the trial of Bruno Hauptmann (EDITOR'S NOTE: Hauptmann was convicted and later executed for the kidnaping and murder of the infant child of Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh); in 1939, a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers (at home) and the Cincinnati Reds was televised from Ebbets Field, the first major league telecast; in 1941, the Army announced plans to air condition with swamp coolers Camp Sibert in Nevada; EDITOR'S NOTE: Déjà vu all over again: in 1953, two weeks after the 882,000-member national carpenters union left the AFL, Reno's Central Trades Council removed the local carpenters union from its rolls; in 1953, the Reno Evening Gazette ran an editorial entitled The Wetback Problem; in 1963, the New York Herald Tribune began publication of a series of articles designed to counter unfavorable news coverage by U.S. journalists on the scene in Vietnam, written by Marguerite Higgins, a war correspondent in World War Two and Korea who became a red baiting propagandist (virtually every point made by the Higgins series was discredited, most of them within months, leading to Higgins' eclipse on the newspaper and in journalism); in 1970, in the English Channel, the Isle of Wight Festival was underway with Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, the Who (the release of their legendary performance was delayed by Columbia for years), the last performance of Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Free, Ten Years After and the Moody Blues; in 1978, Albino Luciani of Venice was elected pope, taking the name John Paul I; in 1980, a bomb planted at Harvey's casino at Stateline, Nev., exploded during an attempt to defuse it; in 1998, former Nevada assemblymember (1972-76) and senator (1978-82) Jean Ford died.
Update: Friday, August 25, 2006, 4:57 p.m. PDT — TRUE CABLE TV COMPETITION COMING TO NEVADA FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER? The City of Reno has reached tentative agreement with AT&T (union-signatory with CWA Local 9413) to provide cable/video service in competition with Charter Communications. Unlike the Charter franchise, no public input was received. However, Reno city staff has certainly been sensitized to the ratepayer positions, although the council, city manager and community relations department chose to ignore them. Sparks' citizens advisory committee was likewise presented with the research developed in three years of work by the City of Reno's Citizens Cable Compliance Committee. The AT&T franchise will be heard at the Aug. 30, 2006, council meeting. MUCH MORE: Scoops, dupes, shucks and jukes. Don't assume that cable competition is coming soon. [8-31-2006 update: BARBWIRE PREDICTIONS COME TRUE.] — AB
On August 25, 1875, on the recommendation of several men, including explorer John Wesley Powell, the commissioner of Indian affairs was seeking appointment of a man named Stephen Powers to go to Nevada and California to collect "specimens" for display during the U.S. centennial; in 1887, the Nevada State Journal wrote this on the start of the school year: "There are many unfavorable criticisms that might be made upon the school management in the State, but nearly all the ills of our school system lie in stupid legislation."; in 1910, a labor union ball was held at the Coney Island amusement park in Sparks to raise money for the Sparks Labor Day celebration; in 1923, after six years in a mental hospital following his conviction for attempting to assassinate U.S. Senator Charles Henderson of Nevada, former Nevada rancher Charles Grock was seeking release, which would mean he would go to prison for the crime; in 1932, United Press reported that Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was working on a ten-reel film "his first chance to come back as a comedian since he was indicted in September 1931 [actually 1921] charged with the murder of Virginia Rappe" (though UP neglected to include it, Arbuckle was found not guilty) [EDITOR'S NOTE: Nothing's changed. The media continue to commit hurtful sins of omission. Click here for more.]; in 1935, Mayor C.W. Bangs of Huntington, Indiana, was out of jail after serving 100 days for trying to substitute power provided by a municipal plant for that supplied by a commercial company and swore he was planning to go ahead with efforts to give consumers municipal power even if it meant going back to jail; in 1936, newspapers were reporting another "cure" for drug addiction, this one in China; in 1936, members of the Reno city council, Mayor Cooper, City Attorney Doug Busey and other officials were photographed by a motion picture camera during a staged meeting following the regular meeting; in 1943, Mrs. Walter Zione was sentenced to three months in the Washoe County jail for wearing the uniform of an Australian air force captain (the charge was "wearing the uniform of a nation not at war with the United States"); in 1944, Paris was liberated from years of Nazi occupation; in 1950, President Truman torpedoed labor unions planning a strike by ordering the U.S. army to seize U.S. railroads and operate them; in 1954, Reno consulting engineer David Baker accepted a postion with the Atomic Energy Commission; in 1961, a group of 200 people meeting in the Mapes Hotel Skyroom sent a wire to U.S. Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges asking that the ban on construction of an east/west freeway through Reno be lifted and meeting chair Tom Cooke called on Renoites to "flood" Hodges with messages; in 1962, The Loco-motion by Little Eva hit number one and Sherry by the Four Seasons appeared on the charts, starting at number 91 (it eventually hit number one); in 1975, Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run album was released; in 2003, Topazia Bridget Jones, a probationary Southern Nevada Community College employee, was fired and then reinstated two hours later by chancellor Jane Nichols, circumstances which set off a long running drama in which the Nevada Board of Regents was shown at its bungling worst. Nichols and Assemblymember Wendell Williams, D-Las Vegas, departed their jobs in the campus system, and CCSN President Ron Remington and his consultant John Cummings were fired (though remaining as teachers), with Remington eventually winning a $400,000 settlement.
Update: Thursday, August 24, 2006, 2:20 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1862, Alexi Von Schmidt and his crew were in Verdi working on the survey that produced the Nevada/California border that became known as the Von Schmidt line; in 1879, a fire swept Loyalton, north and west of Reno on the California side of the border, destroying the hotel, Levi & Bros. clothing store, blacksmith shop, saloon, homes, and barns; in 1899, the Reno trial of a man named Arthur Hennesey for vagrancy was not the routine matter it usually was, as other vagrants appeared to testify: "The trial was replete with dramatic statements, as several denizens of the tenderloin district were summond [sic] to give testimony from the witness box" (Hennesey was convicted anyway); in 1910, the Nevada State Journal reported that Peavine Mountain northwest of Reno was a volcano that was erupting with lava pouring from the crater (they couldn't print it if it wasn't true); in 1918, the Wilson administration asked Nevada to supply 1,580 more men for civilian war work, most of them to be sent out of state; in 1919, ninety year-old Mary Swartz of Akron, Ohio, went for her first automobile ride in a car driven by her daughter and they got into an accident in Bedford, Pennsylvania, prompting Mrs. Swartz to swear off autos (she took the train back to Akron); in 1932, citing fights started by the practice, Reno police started cracking down on women who boosted drinks ("Buy me a drink?") from customers in speakeasies to help the house; in 1932, saying he would not inquire into the motives of legislators, New York Governor and Democratic presidential nominee Franklin Roosevelt ruled that he would not take testimony in an ouster hearing on New York City Mayor James Walker's claim that removal proceedings against him were part of a Republican cabal; in 1932, U.S. Representative Samuel Arentz condemned Hoover Dam contractor Six Companies Inc. for issuing scrip instead of money in paying its workers, saying that it could only be sold at a large discount or used at a Six Companies store in Boulder City; and the Nevada State Journal editorialized that Six Companies was "dodging taxes, ducking state laws [designed] to protect the workers, paying in scrip instead of cash, crushing the life out of independent merchants and generally acting as czar in the Boulder City neighborhood" and said the Hoover administration "has accomplished the following to clean up the mess: " (followed by several inches of blank space; in 1933, in a New York Times article, reporter Walter Duranty denounced as propaganda reports of Soviet government-engineered famine in the Ukraine, one of several reports for which he won the Pulitzer Prize that were entirely inaccurate (a British diplomat said Duranty told him he knew the famine reports were probably correct); in 1935, Congress approved a $250 million soak-the-rich measure, including estate taxes, a graduated corporation income tax, an excess profits tax, and others; in 1935, leaving a Baltimore poor ward for the District of Columbia, John MacDonald, who perjured himself to help the government send labor leaders Tom Mooney and Warren Billings to prison for a parade bombing during the world war that they did not commit, petitioned Congress to help him free the pair; in 1952, the Nevada State Journal endorsed Alan Bible over Thomas Mechling for the U.S. senate; in 1952, Tonopah Episcopal minister William Wolfe donated a collection of artifacts from his ten years as a missionary among Philippine Igorots to the Nevada Historical Society; in 1954, U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey's Communist Control Act of 1954, effectively outlawing the communist party, took effect; in 1954, six weeks after a serious earthquake, and after repairs to the distribution system of the Truckee Carson Irrigation District had been made, another earthquake hit so violently that the University of Nevada seismology lab's equipment was disabled, the quake rolling over five western states (ten hours later another one hit, the second and third of a series of four major earthquakes that hit Nevada in 1954), and Governor Charles Russell said he was considering seeking federal aid to deal with the damage from the earthquakes; in 1966, Clark County District Attorney Edward Marshall said he was prepared to prosecute federal officials for violating state wiretap laws in their investigation of skimming in casinos; in 1967, among a small audience that listened to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at London's Park Lane Hilton were the Beatles, brought there by Patti Harrison, a member of the Spiritual Regeneration movement; in 1976, delegates to an American Legion national convention booed Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter for saying he would pardon Vietnam war resisters; in 1976, the Nevada Denturists Association filed suit to overturn a law that said only dentists could work with patients on false teeth; in 1990, Nevada district judge Jerry Whitehead, who had previously ruled that the first amendment does not protect subliminal messages, now ruled in favor of Judas Priest, a band which was sued over supposed subliminal messages in their music (which were never shown to exist) that allegedly caused suicide attempts: "The scientific research presented does not establish that subliminal stimuli, even if perceived, may precipitate conduct of this magnitude...The strongest evidence presented at the trial showed no behavioral effects other than anxiety, distress or tension." (Vance v. Judas Priest).
Update: Wednesday, August 23, 2006, 2:34 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1873, the Central Pacific Railroad was having its wooden pipes that ran from above the Masonic cemetery to the Depot Hotel in downtown Reno replaced with iron pipes; in 1887, Stanislaus County (California) District Attorney John Kittrell, a former attorney general of Nevada, was bedridden with eczema and "doubts are entertained of his recovery"; in 1910, a thousand people gathered in Ely for the last Democratic rally of the campaign before the primary, with U.S. senate candidate Key Pittman and Acting Governor Denver Dickerson as principal speakers (state treasurer candidate Jack O'Sullivan sang The Wearing of the Green); in 1914, a chapter of Sigma Nu fraternity was chartered at the University of Nevada in Reno; in 1924, a day after Democratic presidential nominee John Davis denounced the Ku Klux Klan, Republican vice presidential nominee Charles Dawes did the same, and in Texas anti-Klan candidate Miriam Ferguson won the Democratic nomination for governor, which was tantamount to election; in 1952, Sydney's Sunday Sun reported that Britain would detonate an atomic bomb in Australia's Montebello Islands within six weeks, but neither any Australian scientists nor Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies were invited; in 1963, Vu Van Mau, foreign minister of the Saigon regime, resigned in protest against the southern dictatorship's treatment of Buddhists; in 1969, the legendary album Blind Faith entered the record charts; in 1972, the Republican National Convention in Miami chose Spiro Agnew as its candidate for vice-president over George Romney, whose name was placed in nomination by Nevada GOP state chair George Abbott; in 1983, Chicago Mayor Harold Washington appointed Fred Rice as the city's first African-American police superintendent.
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, The New York Times:
Your e-mail headline service today perpetuates an ancient injustice.
You write that "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."
Dr. Samuel Mudd was sent to prison for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Fearing nuclear attack, the United States invaded Iraq. Standing alone, both narrow truths perpetuate big lies. Reality requires a few more words.
Sacco and Vanzetti were executed notwithstanding evidence of their innocence. Like Dr. Mudd, their exoneration was proclaimed long after their deaths.
Almost eight decades later, Sacco and Vanzetti still get dissed.
The Times' short attention span approach reminds me of a 1970s-vintage Tumbleweeds cartoon.
"Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Tumbleweeds to marry Hildegarde Hamhocker," shouts a newsboy.
The spinster-stalked cowboy hurries to confront the editor of the Grimy Gulch Desert Denouncer.
"Why did you print that I'm marrying Hildegarde?"
"Because it's news, son, big news."
"But it's a lie!"
"That ain't news."
What's changed?
Andrew Barbano
Reno, NevadaIn defense of the Associated Press: The AP Sacco-Vanzetti item which ran on this date in the Reno Gazette-Journal noted that the pair were vindicated in 1977 by Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. (I have no way of knowing if that was AP's text or the work of an alert local editor.) The men were posthumously pardoned on Aug. 23, 1977, the 50th anniversary of the state-sanctioned murders. Massachusetts did somewhat the same thing, with a lot longer time lag, for the Salem witches.
A confession to the crime by a gangster in 1925 did not force the government to investigate injustice while the men were still alive. They were prosecuted as much for their political beliefs and their Italian heritage as for evidence of robbery and murder. English-only nutsos will appreciate that their limited facility in the language of the prosecution caused them to not fully understand questions during their show trial. For more, go to http://www.torremaggiore.com/saccoevanzetti/english.html
Tumbleweeds text used with apologies to and copyright © T.K. Ryan.
Update: Tuesday, August 22, 2006, 12:01 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1851, the schooner America defeated the Aurora, winning the British cup that U.S. officials then decided to call the America's Cup; in 1878, the Silver Party of Nevada held a primary election to elect delegates to the party's nominating convention; in 1909, the Southern Pacific Railroad began running gasoline motor car service between Reno and Truckee; in 1911, the Nevada State Journal carried a front page article bylined "by Convict No. 1368" that described the emotional reaction inside prison walls in Carson City, including tears, to the death of a horse that had served inmates for twenty years; in 1954, for the thirtieth year, a picnic was held in Oakland's Mosswood Park for hundreds of Nevadans living in the bay area; in 1956, the Nevada delegation's votes put both Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon over the top in the votes on their nominations for president and vice president, with delegation chair Kenneth Dillon announcing both votes: "Nevada is proud to cast the twelve votes which give the nomination to President Eisenhower" and "Nevada, the birthplace of Mrs. Pat Nixon, proudly casts the twelve votes which assure the nomination of Richard Nixon"; in 1956, Elvis began working on his first movie, The Reno Brothers, soon to be renamed Love Me Tender to exploit one of the songs he sang in the film; in 2003, Alabama's chief justice Roy Moore was suspended from office for breaking the law by not obeying a court order to remove a religious marker from the rotunda of the public's court house.
Update: Monday, August 21, 2006, 11:27 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1858, the seven Lincoln/Douglas debates in the Illinois U.S. senate race began in Ottowa, Illinois; in 1911, T.T. Lindner, who held an oil lease on land in Churchill County, arrived in Reno where he said he intended to apply to Governor Tasker Oddie and Lieutenant Governor Gilbert Ross for use of the state's drilling rig; in 1920, the Clark County Review reported that Democratic vice presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt had cancelled appearances in Cheyenne and Reno on August 24 in favor of a Los Angeles appearance; in 1920, Nevada Attorney General Leonard Fowler advised the county clerk of Nye County that voters could sign petitions to place independent candidates on the ballot without losing their own standing as registered voters of a political party; in 1927, Washoe County Surveyor Thomas King predicted that the Mount Rose Road, closed when a lake dam burst, would reopen within 30 days; in 1936, in Washington, D.C., an AFL report on housing around the nation said Reno needed 100 new houses and that 82 Reno homes were unfit for habitation; in 1936, in a battle between republican and fascist forces in the Spanish civil war, Algeciras and Gibraltar on opposite sides of the Bay of Algeciras were both bombed; in 1938, a plane flown by Ted Morrill and Mark Peters of Reno was forced by a broken propeller to land at Hubbard Field after sevent- seven hours and five minutes of sustained flight, believed to be a world record; in 1953, U.S. Representative Cliff Young of Nevada reported that the Army Corps of Engineers was reluctant to build a road from Overton through the Valley of Fire to Nellis Air Force Base because it was not a "military necessity"; in 1956, former Nevada governor's press secretary and Nevada Weekly founder Larry Henry was born; 1959, testimony ended in the first case brought before Nevada's new gambling regulatory commission, a cheating case against the shuttered Bonanza Club in North Las Vegas, whose owners also held a casino license for the Carson Nugget; in 1961, Reno casino owner Ernie Primm said he was ending construction of a multi-story complex that included a 900-seat theatre after the Reno city council denied an application for rezoning to permit gambling there, an application that was filed after construction started; in 1965, the antiwar song Eve Of Destruction by Barry McGuire was released; in 1983, Phillippine leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated on the tarmac of the Manila airport moments after returning from exile; in 1986, a cloud of toxic gas emerged from Lake Nyos (shortly to be compared to Nevada's Pyramid Lake) in Cameroon, swept through nearby valleys, and killed more than 1,700 people.
REVOLUTIONARY REMEMBRANCES: On this date in 1831, former slave Nat Turner led a violent insurrection in Virginia which killed 55 whites. He was later hanged and skinned for getting uppity, among other things. He only needed have waited another 33 years for the Emancipation Proclamation. If he could have found the patience to hang around just another 134 years, he could have enjoyed the right to vote, which has since been repealed for black people in the south and middle America. Mr. Turner was obviously not a patient person. In 1940, anti-Stalinist/Leninist and Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky died in Mexico City from wounds inflicted by an assassin sent by Mother Russia. (Facts from AP and PBS.org, flames by the BARBWIRE]
Update: Sunday, August 20, 2006, 1:31 a.m. PDT — On this date in 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]
On this date in 1873, a petition to the Elko county commissioners was being prepared demanding that something be done about the "growing power of the railroad monopolers" and the "attitude which the Central Pacific Railroad assumes toward the people of Elko county by and through their unjust discrimination in fares and freights."; in 1874, Poor's and Cossitt's Islands in the Truckee River were being developed for recreation purposes — "there are four islands formed by the branching of the Truckee, from one to five acres in extend, thickly covered with willows and cotton wood. It is proposed to connect these islands by rustic bridges, to enable the vistors to explore their hidden mysteries, [where] wild flowers, gooseberries and currants, grow abundantly."; in 1880, the Nevada State Journal reported that the Egyptian obelisk (now known as Cleopatra's needle) that was given to the U.S. by the Khedive of Egypt had arrived in New York, that it was carved "in the days of Mr. Thotmes [Thutmose], about 3,400 years since", and that when it was installed in Central Park the Masonic markings in its base would be placed in the same position as they were when it was in Egypt; in 1909, news reports said that "scientific societies all over the United States have now banded together" to stamp out the housefly; in 1909, Tex Rickard was in danger of losing one of his Nevada mining leases after failing to meet his payroll; in 1921, "Chicago, Aug 20. Wrist watches, popularized by the world war, have joined the dodo bird. In a few years they will be entirely extinct, Chicago jewelers, called before the Cook county tax board of review, predicted. Even now they have no sale."; in 1921, in Paris, theosophist, birth control advocate, and suffragist Annie Besant of England said she was rushing back to India to save "her" Indians from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: "Gandhi is getting desperate and likewise losing his head and I must get back to my people as quickly as possible. They have great confidence in me and I am sure I can, in a huge measure, lead them away from the radical, vicious teachings of Gandhi."; in 1932, the American Legion of Pennsylvania condemned President Hoover and General Douglas MacArthur for attacking and routing the Bonus Expeditionary Force of veterans that occupied a section of the District of Columbia to demand payment of the world war bonus, and the Legion's resolution also commended D.C. Police Chief Pelham Glassford for trying to keep the peace; in 1932, at a huge mass labor meeting in Las Vegas, U.S. Senator Tasker Oddie, a critic of Hoover Dam contractor Six Companies for making "exorbitant profits" while workers "are making barely enough to pay for their food and lodging," said he was finished trying to get President Hoover's interior secretary of the interior do deal with the problem and would take it to the senate committee on irrigation reclamation; in 1941, fifty-five Civilian Conservation Corps workers from the Hobart Mills camp moved to Camp Mason Valley near Yerington; in 1942, Isaac Hayes was born in Covington, Tennessee; in 1956, President Eisenhower personally denied passports to three reporters seeking to travel to report on mainland China; in 1956, delegates were arriving at the Republican National Convention, being held at San Francisco's Cow Palace, except for former Illinois state auditor Orville Hodge, who was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in prison for stealing nearly a million dollars from the state treasury; in 1964, the Beatles appeared in concert at the Las Vegas Convention Center, playing an afternoon show at 4 and an evening show at 9, with prices ranging from balcony for $2.20 to $5.50 for floor seating in front (8,408 attended — the arena held 7,500, so some fans were put backstage to get around fire laws — and the Beatles were paid a flat $25,000, no percentage of the gross); in 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to destroy Alexander Dubcek's "socialism with a human face"; in 1998, President Clinton ordered the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan under the claim that it was a chemical weapons factory — but Clinton later refused to produce the evidence when the factory's owner hauled the U.S. into court, and the U.S. released the company's impounded assets rather than defend the case.
Update: Saturday, August 19, 2006, 4:17 a.m. PDT — AIN'T DEMOCRACY GRAND? On this date in 1934, a plebiscite in Germany approved the vesting of sole executive power in Adolf Hitler as Fuhrer. (See Poor Denny's, below) [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1871, the Reese River Reveille changed hands, O.L.C. Fairchild selling out to A. Casamayou and J.H. Dennis; in 1884, without provocation, Doc Holliday shot a former adversary from Tombstone days in Hyman's Saloon in Leadville, Colorado; in 1911, fire escapes were installed at the Nevada orphans home in Carson City; in 1934, Germans voted nine to one (or so German officials claimed) in favor of a ballot measure investing Chancellor Adolf Hitler with sole power in the reich (the New York Times reported that a Christian bishop "at victory fete says Hitler's anti-Semitism is fight for Christianity"; in 1943, postwar planning was being launched. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 32 million people would be left jobless when the war ended and recommended that the problem be dealt with beforehand, and the Reno chamber of commerce was planning postwar advertising; in 1943, Nevada was allotted 313 cooking stoves during the first wartime stove ration period; 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, news reports said mummies of early inhabitants of north America had been found buried with the bones of horses and camels in Pershing County, Nevada; in 1953, Judge Frank McNamee ordered former Las Vegas city commissioner William Peccole to stand trial for attempted extortion; in 1954, a congressional report raised the possibility that a small atomic weapon could be brought into the United States past customs agents, and the U.S. House of Representatives enacted a bill providing half a million dollars for rewards to aid in detecting such schemes; in 1960, in Las Vegas, western AFL/CIO official Daniel Flanigan called on Nevada labor union members to ignore the religious issue and support Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts against Vice President Richard Nixon, who he described as "anti-labor"; in 1961, singer and movie and television star Spade Cooley was convicted of murder for killing his wife; in 1961, on Highland Way in Reno, an elaborate frontier-style fort built for the use of neighborhood kids was operating as a commercial child care facility, Fort Highland; in 1967, the Beatles' All You Need Is Love hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1971, U.S. Senator Howard Cannon of Nevada said he supported President Nixon's wage and price controls and said he thought that President Johnson should have imposed them at the start of the war; in 1971, Nevada Lieutenant Governor Harry Reid announced he would not run against U.S. Representative Walter Baring in the 1972 Democratic primary election; in 1977, Groucho Marx died; in 2003, Las Vegas was hit with a sudden rainstorm, dumping three inches that caused flooding which damaged 183 homes and 80 businesses.
Update: Friday, August 18, 2006, 3:05 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1863, General Jason Fry appointed Major George Andrews to be Provost Marshal for the Territory of Nevada; in 1876, the Carson Opera House was dedicated with celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher in attendance; in 1879, a strike by Nevada charcoal workers ended when a Eureka County sheriff's posse opened fire on a camp of about a hundred Italo-American workers at Fish Creek, killing five; in 1906, the Tonopah Bonanza ran a story, Lady Broker in Town, about Bird Wilson, Nevada's seventh female attorney; in 1916, deputy attorney general Edward Patrick advised a Lander County official that it was legal for women to sign nominating petitions for independent candidates; 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, women in the United States gained the right to vote with Tennessee's ratification of the 19th amendment to the U.S. constitution, giving the amendment the required number of states; in 1927, a car bringing Mineral County Senator John Miller, Rear Admiral Luther Gregory and naval Commander Myron Baker back to Reno from an inspection of the proposed site for a U.S. munitions depot near Hawthorne went off the road and rolled over three times, injuring both navy officers; in 1937, U.S. Attorney General Homer Cummings had the FBI checking on private Nazi training camps around the U.S.; in 1937, local Machinists Union leader Philip Drury objected to a proposed anti-picketing law in Sparks; in 1953, Reza Pahlavi fled to Rome after trying, and failing, to depose Iran's civilian government (the U.S. and Britain would do the job for him, allowing him to return to Iran to impose a quarter-century long reign of terror); in 1954, assistant secretary of labor J. Ernest Wilkins attended a cabinet meeting, the first known instance of an African American being present in an official capacity at a meeting of the cabinet; in 1954, two members of the North Las Vegas city council resigned after being acquitted of bribery charges, to be followed shortly by another councilmember and the mayor, clearing the way for remaining councilmember Dorothy Porter to become Nevada's first woman mayor; in 1955, Hilda Gadea and Ernesto "Che" Guevara were married; in 1962, Lee Hays and Pete Seeger's If I Had A Hammer by Peter Paul and Mary was released by Warner Brothers Records; in 1963, James Meredith graduated from the University of Mississippi, the first African American to do so; in 1964, the Beatles left England for their first concert tour of Canada and the United States; in 1991, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was taken prisoner in a poorly planned coup attempt that fell apart in three days but also left Gorbachev weakened, reformer Boris Yeltsin strengthened, and led to the end of the Soviet Union, exactly the opposite intent of the plotters; in 1995, sports columnist Bill Lyon called the upcoming Mike Tyson/Peter McNeeley bout in Las Vegas the Return of the Rapist, "the illusion of a fist fight" in "a city built on illusions", Don King's "most shining larcenous achievement yet", and "consumer fraud" (the fight lasted less than two minutes); in 1996, travel columnists Gene and Adele Malott reported that Branson, Mo., had surpassed Las Vegas as the "live performance capital" but did not explain how the determination was made, though they did say Branson had become the number one destination for buses, according to the American Bus Association; in 1996, the E channel carried "a close up on the women who are Vegas showgirls."
Update: Thursday, August 17, 2006, 4:42 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1969, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair concluded near Bethel, N.Y. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1872, a newspaper to support Horace Greeley's presidential candidacy was being started in Pioche, using the equipment of the defunct Elko Chronicle; in 1876, John J. Powell was in Reno to promote his book Nevada/Land of Silver; in 1909 in Goldfield, Thomas Heslip committed suicide after his wife was murdered, allegedly by Pat Casey, and the sheriff's office moved Casey to Tonopah by auto because of the danger of lynching; 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; in 1935, talks began in Reno between the Reno Employers Council and the Bartenders and Culinary Workers Union after their contract expired at midnight; in 1951, Maurice Siegel, brother of murdered mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel and executor of his estate, petitioned Nevada district court in Las Vegas to increase the college allowance of Benjamin's daughter Barbara from $100 to $200 a month (she was attending the University of Michigan); in 1954, President Eisenhower was faced with a veto decision after the U.S. Senate enacted a bill sponsored by Hubert Humphrey making unpopular opinion a crime by stripping the Communist Party of legal protections and making party membership a criminal offense publishable by prison and heavy fines (a less punitive version of the bill passed by the house was criticized by Humphrey as a "powder puff" measure); in 1954, plans were reported for the Virgin and Moapa valleys of changing the administrative division between high school and the lower grades to the sixth grade instead of the eighth grade; in 1956, Nevada lobbyist Harvey Whittemore was born in Carson City; in 1956, the Democratic National Convention nominated Estes Kefauver for vice president on the second ballot, with the Nevada delegation supporting John Kennedy (The Nevada votes: Kennedy 11, Kefauver 2, Robert Wagner 1 on the first ballot, Kennedy 13-1/2 votes to Kefauver 1/2 vote on the second ballot); in 1956, Judge Joseph Butler dismissed charges of scalping tickets to the Democratic National Convention against Ben Mitchell of St. Louis on the ground that the ticket scalping law applied to places and events of amusement and the convention was not. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Had the law read abusement, Mitchell would undoubtedly have been convicted.]; in 1960, Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis (author of the song You Are My Sunshine) seized control of the New Orleans public school system just as it was supposed to be integrated by court order; in 1960, the Beatles began a three-month gig at the Indra Club in Hamburg with their new drummer Pete Best (they had desperately coaxed him into joining them when it became clear they would lose the engagement if they could not come up with a drummer); in 1960, the list of particulars in the Soviet indictment of U.S. U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers included his three years of training at an alleged spy training center at Indian Springs, Nevada; in 1964, Teamsters President James Hoffa was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine for defrauding the union pension fund; in 1964, plans by the South Tahoe Public Utilities District to export treated effluent from the lake basin hit a snag when STPUD's counsel said transport across state lines raised legal issues that required requesting a legal opinion from the California attorney general; 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."
Update: Wednesday, August 16, 2006, 4:01 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1872, William Sharon withdrew as a candidate for appointment to the United States Senate (he would run again in 1874 and be appointed by the 1875 Nevada Legislature); in 1940, at a hearing he demanded before U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee chair Martin Dies, Humphrey Bogart denied being a contributor to the communist party, a charge made against him by a former party member testifying before a Los Angeles County grand jury; in 1940, mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, later a Las Vegas casino operator, was arrested by Los Angeles police at his Holmby Hills home for murdering a member of the Louis Lepke gang, an arrest sparked by the New York investigation of Brooklyn's Murder Incorporated; in 1940, Reno Mayor August Frohlich recommended former state district judge, Lander County district attorney, and Nevada legislative bill drafter Antonio Maestretti to the Reno city council to be a municipal court judge; in 1954, federal "trust" supervision of the Klamath tribe of Oregon ended; in 1954, over the objections of the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. House of Representatives approved its version of U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey's bill outlawing the communist party; in 1954, Ohio common pleas court judge William Thomas, saying he saw "no evidence" in the record submitted by prosecutors to prevent bail being set, released Bay Village osteopath Samuel Sheppard on $50,000 bail, provoking angry comments from prosecutor Frank Culitan and Cleveland police detective chief James McArthur, who threatened to halt investigation of the case in protest against the bail; in 1956, Adlai Stevenson was nominated for president at the Democratic National Convention, with the Nevada delegation voting for Averell Harriman over Stevenson 7 to 5; in 1962, without telling him that the group had just gotten a major recording contract, Beatles manager Brian Epstein informed Pete Best that the other members of the group had decided to drop Best as drummer (Beatles road manager Neil Aspinall, Best's friend, decided to quit in solidarity with him); in 1977, Elvis died at Graceland Mansion in Memphis, Tenn., at age 42.
Update: Tuesday, August 15, 2006, 5:53 p.m. PDT —
Washoe County voters turned away at polls
K-Mart Taxes Groceries
BARBWIRE special web edition for the Ides of August
+LINKS TO ELECTION RESULTS
8-15-2006Update: Tuesday, August 15, 2006, 12:01 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1987, Great Basin National Park (Nevada's first and only national park), was dedicated. [Nevada Magazine calendar]
On this date in 1095, in Clermont, France, the first Christian Crusade to eject Arabs and Jews from their homelands began with a message from Pope Urban II: "On this account I, or rather the Lord, beseech you as Christ's heralds to publish this everywhere and to persuade all people of whatever rank, foot-soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians and to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends."; in 1877, a mob from Galena, Kansas, attacked and tore down an eight foot tall, half mile long fence that stood between Galena and the immediately adjacent Empire City, Kansas (the two towns were angrily competing for new settlers and the fence was built by the Empire City town government); in 1895, at the Ohio Republican Convention, U.S. Senator and former secretary of the treasury John Sherman defended the Crime of 1873 (the demonetization of silver) by attacking Nevada U.S. Senators William Stewart and John Jones for consenting to abandoning bimetallism (dropping the traditional silver and gold for money to go solely to gold as a monetary standard) and then changing their minds; in 1902, by some accounts, Harry Longbaugh (aka Harry Place aka the Sundance Kid) and Ethel/Etta Place, who had returned to the United States from Argentina, departed the U.S. for Argentina again on board the S. S. Chubut; in 1904, John Kinkead, treasurer of the Territory of Nevada, governor of the State of Nevada, and governor of the Territory of Alaska, died in Carson City; in 1925, a highway between Incline Village and Glenbook was completed on the east side of Lake Tahoe, closing the last gap in a road around the lake; in 1927, jury selection began in Carson City in the trial of former Nevada state treasurer Ed Malley and former state controller George Cole who allegedly embezzled $516,322.16 of state funds and invested it in oil stocks. [EDITOR'S NOTE: This is about as good a reason as can be asserted for NOT merging the functions of the state treasurer and state controller. This theft, which still plagues Nevada education today as it wiped out a federal endowment fund, required collusion between two crooks. Better to keep the check and balance. MORE]; in 1927, the Washoe County Commission awarded the contract to build a water system for Wadsworth to Nevada Transfer and Warehouse Company; in 1939, the premiere of The Wizard of Oz was held at Grauman's Chinese Theater; in 1940, fourteen people were left homeless on Las Vegas' west side when their home burned to the ground; in 1945, Illinois Governor Dwight Green pardoned Joeseph Majczek (framed by police in 1933 of murdering a police officer) after Majczek's mother spent a decade washing floors to raise $5,000 for a reward which she offered for information proving his innocence, information which was provided by an investigation by two journalists at the Chicago Times, a case reenacted in the James Stewart film Call Northside 777 (Governor Green failed to pardon Theodore Marcinkiewicz, convicted with Majczek and also later exonerated and released); in 1947, Britain, which less than a decade earlier experienced the consequences of large power-partitioning of Czechoslovakia, "granted" India its independence, but only after carving the nation up into two countries with three components (India was flanked on east and west by Pakistan) in the belief that it would provide more of an anti-Soviet bulwark, thus pitting religious groups against each other, and violence instantly broke out in both nations with the death toll already at 153 by the time independence took effect; in 1947, University of Nevada electrical engineering professor Irving Sandorf told the Reno Kiwanis Club that half-minute thawing and heating of frozen foods was already being done by "high frequency tubes", and that television could be used for child care; in 1947, a coroner's jury reported that the death of 29-year old Canadian Melvin Roberts, who at the time of his death was sharing a Franktown trailer with Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr. (author of the 1929 novel Reno), was the result of a self administered "excessive dose of barbiturates"; in 1953, at a federal court hearing in Carson City, Harry Claiborne, attorney for crime figure Benny Binion of Las Vegas, argued against Binion being returned to prison to complete the final 58 days of a five-year prison sentence for tax evasion; 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 1965, the Beatles, flying in a helicopter toward a landing in Shea Stadium, saw the flash of innumerable flashbulbs aimed skyward and reportedly heard, over the helicopter blades, the roar from the largest concert crowd in human history — 56,000 fans who, at promoter Sid Bernstein's insistence, paid a maximum of $5.65; in 1969, the Woodstock festival began in Bethel, New York; in 2001, scientists announced the first discovery of another solar system.
Update: Monday, August 14, 2006, 3:05 a.m. PDT — Orville Belding, former Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 350 apprenticeship coordinator, dies. Funeral service set for August 16, 2006. Reno Gazette-Journal family-paid obituary.
Update: Monday, August 14, 2006, 1:36 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1861, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) arrived in Carson City [Nevada Magazine calendar]; in 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law [AP]; in 1945, President Truman announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]; in 1980, workers jumped the fence and stopped work at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. The strike, led by future President Lech Walesa, sparked the formation of the Solidarity Trade Union. [BARBWIRE]
On this date in 1900, the United States invaded China to intervene in the Boxer Rebellion; in 1918, twelve soldiers, the latest group drafted to meet Clark County's draft quota, were sent to Reno for training; in 1920, the Clark County Review reported U.S. Census Bureau figures showing that Esmeralda County (Goldfield) lost 74.3 percent of its population from 1910 (6,959) to 1920 (2,410); in 1935, an application for $1,250,000 for construction of the Pioche/Boulder Dam power line was received at the Public Works Administration in D.C.; in 1935, the Dionne quintuplets were signed to appear in Harold Lloyd's film The Milky Way (in fact, they ended up not appearing in the movie, but did make several other films — The Country Doctor, Reunion, Quintupland and Five of a Kind, a 1938 film that contained a television broadcast); 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 1941, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Atlantic charter foreswearing the use of aggression, territorial aggrandisement, territorial sovereignty and other principles that their two countries would freely violate in the post-war years; in 1945, World War Two ended; in 1947, United Nations Secretary General Trygve Lie said the greatest problem facing the world organization was the veto given to the five permanent members of the Security Council; in 1947, U.S. Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, who was battling President Truman's conservative policies, nevertheless endorsed Truman for the Democratic presidential nomination instead of his friend Henry Wallace; in 1950, an Edward R. Murrow broadcast 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 censored by CBS management and never aired; in 1954, the Nevada Board of Regents issued a statement announcing it would hold a meeting in southern Nevada soon, in response to requests from that area, but also denying that it had purchased a site for a "Nevada Southern" campus; 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: Sunday, August 13, 2006, 2:33 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1591, Hernando Cortez brought European civilization to the Aztecs by destroying Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), including the magnificent aqueduct and canal system; in 1881, two months before O.K. Corral, Newman Clanton, head of the Cowboys faction in Tombstone, Arizona, was killed in an ambush in Guadalupe Canyon, New Mexico; in 1890, Nevada State Treasurer George Tufly resigned; in 1896, the Hole in the Wall Gang reputedly robbed a bank in Montpelier, Idaho; in 1926, Fidel Casto was born in Mayari, Cuba; in 1935, Anna Boettinger, daughter of President Roosevelt, said in Las Vegas that she expected that her father "probably will visit Boulder dam on his vacation trip to the west coast"; in 1935, a survey team was set up at Midway to begin work on the Hoover Dam "rim of the lake" road; in 1942, the motion picture Bambi premiered at Radio City; in 1947, vandals cut down or damaged some of the Japanese cherry trees that lined the Truckee River along Riverside Drive in Reno; in 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]; in 1967, the Daughters of the American Revolution, offended by the antiwar views of Joan Baez, denied the use of Washington's Constitution Hall for a Baez concert; in 1973, Republican national chair George Bush said he had discovered that the Nixon/Agnew campaign had $2.5 million salted away after the 1968 election when it was hitting up GOP contributors for more money to pay off a" deficit" from the campaign, and that it still had a million dollars when it obtained seed money for the 1972 campaign from the Republican National Committee; in 1998, in Las Vegas, Garth Brooks began four concerts over four days, each sold out and with a cumulative audience of 72,076; in 1999, new development or demolition proposals for the Mapes Hotel were due by today, the deadline set by the Reno city council.
Update: Saturday, August 12, 2006, 4:42 a.m. PDT — He was only 18, dammit...[BARBWIRE: Roll over and play dead]
The only really important political or workplace news of the day
Sun Valley Marine dies in Iraq
An 18-year-old Marine from Sun Valley died Thursday while engaged in combat operations in Iraq,
the Department of Defense said Friday.
Reno Gazette-Journal 8-12-2006SPEAKING OF WAR, on this date in 1898, the peace protocol ending the Spanish-American War was signed. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1939, the City of San Francisco train mysteriously derailed west of Elko, killing 24. [Nevada Magazine calendar]
On this date in 1874, the Nevada State Journal recommended an article from the Sacramento Union that said the people of Nevada should stop tying their fortunes to the mining industry — "of all aristocracies the most hoggish, heartless and insolent"; in 1881, a party that included John Muir became the first known white men to set foot on Wrangell Land, an island north of Siberia; in 1935, from Aklavik, North West Territory, Will Rogers wrote in his newspaper column: "Get your map out and look this up. The mouth of the McKenzie river, right on the Arctic ocean. Eskimo are thicker than rich men at a save the constitution convention. This is sent from one of the most northerly posts of the northwest mounted police. We are headed for famous Herschel island in the Arctic. Old Wiley [famed pilot Wiley Post] had to duck his head to keep from bumping it as we flew under the Arctic circle."; in 1935, Minnesota Governor Floyd Olsen, elected on the Farmer Labor ticket, said he was ending his alliance with the New Deal, which he considered too conservative, to join the growing national movement for a liberal third party to change the "damnable" capitalist system; in 1940, independent U.S. Senator George Norris of Nebraska led a floor fight to stop enactment of a peacetime military draft; in 1942, Wycliffe Bible Translators was incorporated in Glendale, California; in 1947, the south shore of Lake Tahoe pulled tourists from the more popular north end of the lake when 5,000 people attended a festival at Bijou that included boat races, acquatic exhibitions, a bathing beauty contest, dancing and entertainment; in 1950, Pope Pius XII released an encyclical on "false opinions" entitled Humani Generis (On Human Origin), which called evolution "not...fully proved even in the domain of natural sciences" and said that "communists gladly subscribed to this opinion" — and then approved of teaching evolution and additional research "in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology"; in 1951, former Las Vegas hotelier Billy Wilkerson's magazine Hollywood Life was put under the control of a court receiver while the outcome of a damage suit was determined; in 1953, in a mutual accounting of prisoners of war by the U.S. and Korea, the Nevada families of Sgt. Robert Rounds (Las Vegas) and PFC Chester Roper (Reno) were informed that the men had died in prison camps; in 1954, a bill sponsored by Republican U.S. Senator Irving Ives of New York and supported by President Eisenhower, guaranteeing a presumption of innocence in unions accused of communist influence, was successfully amended by Democrats led by U.S. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota to outlaw the communist party (Nevada's Pat McCarran voted against the change); 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 1960, the Nevada Gaming Control Board met with New Frontier Casino executives and members of the public were barred from the meeting; in 1960, Clark County casino licensing board chair Butch Leypoldt (who was also county sheriff) said the board at its next meeing would discuss how to have casinos create payroll trust funds to protect workers when casinos shut down without notice; in 1961, the traditional exemption of young men in St. Pierre and Miquelon from the French military draft was revoked (St. Pierre and Miquelon is a tiny island colony of France northeast of Maine); in 1961, a full page ad was run in the Reno Evening Gazette by the Reno Tourist Growth and Development Committee: "A MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE OF RENO — RENO NEEDS NEW TOURIST ATTRACTIONS TO KEEP PACE WITH HER COMPETITIVE SISTER CITIES" (the ad seemed mainly concerned with Las Vegas and it called for removing the red line that kept all gambling in downtown Reno); in 1964, a 42-day strike of Nevada and New Mexico facilities of Kennecott Mining was settled on issues of wages, job security, vacations, sick leave, and health benefits; in 1997, as part of its ongoing effort to draw away from its southwestern roots, NASCAR added Las Vegas to the Winston Cup circuit.
Update: Friday, August 11, 2006, 3:54 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1965, deadly rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles. (See Poor Denny's Almanac for this date, below.) [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1875 , construction began in Truckee on a jail (now the home of the Truckee-Donner Historical Society); in 1879, hundreds of Nevada carbonari (charcoal workers who burned hard wood until it was ready for use in mining smelters), mostly Italian immigrants, marched in Eureka in protest against a cut in price paid by mill owners; in 1879, the U.S. marshal arrested Elias Jackson "Lucky" Baldwin at his Santa Anita ranch near Los Angeles and seized his distillery, warehouses, and wine vaults on a charge of defrauding the revenue tax by refilling stamped brandy bottles; in 1908, a post office was opened at Al Tahoe; in 1934, the first prisoners arrived at a new federal penitentiary on Isla de los Alcatraces in San Francisco Bay; in 1939, a Filipino infant named Maria Corazone Rafael, born with her heart outside her body, was kept strapped down to keep her from thrashing and damaging the heart while physicians tried to figure out what to do (the child died six days later); in 1943, in Sicily, General George Patton cursed as a "yellow bastard" and physically attacked hospitalized field artillary Private Paul Bennet, who — wishing to return to his unit — had earlier begged doctors not to evacuate him; in 1940, an army airplane — a Vultee BT13 — crashed into Boulder Lake, killing pilot Laurence Wernberg; in 1947, President Truman vetoed a measure sponsored by U.S. Rep. Charles Russell of Nevada that would have provided price supports for strategic minerals; in 1947, Carson City attorney Elvera Wollitz was assisting the National Association of Women Lawyers in a study of recently enacted congressional legislation; 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 a.m. cessation of hostilities between the Vietnamese and the defeated French (the entry of the U.S. quickly brought war back); in 1956, Don't Be Cruel by Elvis was released; in 1956, after Egyptian President Nasser reclaimed the Suez Canal from British management, causing Israel, France, and Britain to launch a war against Egypt, Reno's Nevada State Journal ran an editorial saying that "Unless Cairo backs down in the present excitement over the Suez Canal, somebody is going to get hurt" (under pressure from the British public, it was British Prime Minister Anthony Eden who backed down, calling off the military adventure and later resigning); in 1960, Las Vegas Culinary Union leader Al Bramlet accused Governor Grant Sawyer, state gambling regulators and local Clark County officials of being so anxious to approve new casino licenses that they had reneged on a promise to force casinos to create "go-broke" funds to aid workers left in the lurch when casinos closed; in 1960, Henderson Mayor William Byrne publicly accused City Councilmember Jack Stevens of malfeasance for purchasing property adjacent to land targeted by the city for acquisition; in 1960, members of the Washoe County "intelligence squad" arrested physician Thomas Wyatt, owner of Carson Hot Springs, at his home in Crystal Bay on a charge of attempted abortion; in 1962, Green Onions by Booker T and the MGs was released; in 1962, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do by Neil Sedaka hit number one on the Billboard chart (it's the only song to break into the top ten twice by the same artist at two different tempos); in 1965, a traffic stop of two African American boys by white police officers sparked the beginning of five days of riots in the Watts section of south central Los Angeles that left 34 people dead; in 1968, the first Beatles single on their own Apple label was released: Hey Jude b/w Revolution (the latter prompted considerable discussion, particularly since it was released in the aftermath of the police riot in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention).
Update: Thursday, August 10, 2006, 2:45 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1993, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as the second female Supreme Court justice. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
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 1872, wheat being grown on the Pyramid Lake tribal reservation had heads that were seven inches long and there were plans to display them at the California State Fair; in 1879, the Nevada State Journal commented on the abysmal record of U.S. Senator William Sharon (in his six-year term he showed up for work so rarely that the comptroller of the currency investigated not issuing him a paycheck, but he refused to resign so a working senator could be appointed) and the prospect of the Nevada Legislature electing him to another term: "If among the whole number of prominent men in the State — or out of it, for that matter — there is one less entitled to political preferment at the hands of the people of this State, than Mr. Sharon, the reason is unknown, and if the declared sentiment throughout the State, touching this question of the Senatorship can exert to which in simple justice it is entitled; at the expiration of his term of office Mr. Sharon will be quietly relegated to private life where no more mention may be heard of him."; in 1899, a brick and stone building was being constructed for the electric light and power company on the south side of the river opposite the western limit of Powning's addition in Reno; in 1914, a new monument was in place over the Susanville grave of Issac Roop, governor of the Provisional Territory of Nevada, and a formal dedication was being planned for September 9; in 1920, Mamie Smith recorded Perry Bradford's Crazy Blues for the legendary Okeh Records, which released it with It's Right Here For You, considered the first blues record; in 1939, a Reno bartender's union picket line was thrown up at Tommy's Victory Club in Carson City; in 1956, Douglas County marked a melancholy anniversary — the 50th year since the Virginia and Truckee Railroad ("now almost forgotten") arrived in the Carson Valley; in 1966, Sparks city councilmembers William Galt, Albert Demers and Henry Swart and Sparks Mayor Chet Christiansen testified before a county grand jury investigation of reported threats against lieutenant governor candidate Galt; in 1968, in an effort to hold together the supporters of Robert Kennedy after the assassination, U.S. Senator George McGovern announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination; in 1988, President Reagan signed legislation for $20,000 payments to some U.S. citizens interned by the U.S. government during World War II (this was for the benefit of citizens of Japanese descent; German Americans, Italo-Americans, and other groups interned have never been compensated).
Update: Wednesday, August 9, 2006, 3:13 a.m. PDT — On this date in 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]
HOW MANY WERE KILLED AT NAGASAKI? As with the Times/AP number for Hiroshima, the BBC disagrees. Once again, perhaps the difference lies in the word "instantly." [MORE FROM THE BBC]
On this date in 1854, Walden, or Life In The Woods by Henry David Thoreau was published, creating a wholly false impression of solitude and isolation on Walden Pond — in fact, according to researcher Walter Harding, Thoreau went into Concord or was visited by someone from town every day of his two years there, and the pond was on a railroad line; in 1861, General Nathaniel Lyon was killed in the Battle of Wilson's Creek, aka the Battle of Oak Hills, known as the "Bull Run of the west" (Lyon County, Nevada, is named for him; in 1899, a boxcar load of 750,000 silver dollars was shipped by Wells Fargo through Reno from the Carson City branch U.S. mint to San Francisco and such shipments were planned until the mint's vaults were emptied; in 1919, eight Goldfield men were arrested and five charged under the state's new "criminal syndicalism" statute enacted at the behest of Nevada businesses to crack down on labor unions, particularly mining unions (that statute is still on the books, in chapter 203 of Nevada Revised Statutes); 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, the Salvadoran Congress rejected the Monroe "doctrine" and voted to join in a South American arbitration panel that excluded the United States and supplanted panels formed by the U.S.; in 1920, in a message to a Massachusetts Democratic Party official, Herbert Hoover said he would not accept the Democratic presidential nomination; in 1920, Nevada Attorney General Leonard Fowler announced that he would go to court to overturn the divorce of actress Mary Pickford on grounds of fraud; in 1920, articles of incorporation were filed for a Reno Athletic Club; in 1940, crowds were gathering in Kingston, Arizona, for the trial of two communists accused of disturbing the peace by being attacked for circulating a petition seeking ballot status; in 1951, the Washo tribe filed a claim of $43,811,985.84 before the U.S. Indian Claims Commission (a body formed by Congress in 1946 to retroactively purchase appropriated Native American lands after embarrassing postwar comparisons were made between the U.S. treatment of the tribes and Nazi treatment of the Jews and others), based on the 1862 value of Washoe land, mineral, timber, fish and game rights, plus interest as a result of findings by professional assessors (21 years later, the U.S. settled the case by paying $5,000,000 to the Washo); in 1968, Democratic Party officials denied rumors that the 1968 national convention would be moved out of Chicago; 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; in 1968 as part of its ongoing harassment campaign to drive the underground newspaper Love out of existence, the Reno police department arrested and jailed three of the paper's street vendors; in 1974, President Nixon's resignation took effect and Vice-President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in [AP]; in 1995, Grateful Dead lead singer and blues guitarist Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack in San Francisco at 53.
Resolution of the Virginia City Miners Union/August 9 1902:
WHEREAS, the members of Virginia City Miners Union have seen with increasing satisfaction the efforts of the Nevada State University to establish in this City a System of University Extension which affords the miners the opportunity of becoming more useful and intelligent in their vocations; and,
WHEREAS, the object of this Union is to promote and hasten the same; and,
THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that Virginia City Miners Union extend its thanks to the Board of University Regents and to the President and members of the faculty who have given their time and attention to the Extension class; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that this Union hopes that the idea of University Extension will be fostered and encouraged so that it may become a permanent part of our State Educational System and to aid in promoting this end to which we pledge our best efforts./s/ J. W. Kinniken
Secretary
Update: Tuesday, August 8, 2006, 3:10 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1974, President Richard Nixon announced he would resign following damaging revelations in the Watergate scandal. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Update: Monday, August 7, 2006, 12:40 a.m. PDT — On August 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] [EDITOR'S NOTE: The "attacks" on the American destroyers Maddox and Turner Joy have since been attributed to either a passing school of dolphins or a CIA-staged event to widen support for the Vietnam War. President Johnson took the "attacks" as an affront to his Texas manhood and reacted just as the CIA hoped he would. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was often quoted as a precedent to the congressional resolution supported by both Democrats and Republicans giving President Bush the Lesser permission to go to war whenever his little heart desires more brown people dead. Like the Korean "police action," Vietnam was not an officially declared war. The U.S. has not declared war on another country since World War II. Asking for war powers for what truly should have been a police action has led us to the latter day crusades of today. — BARBWIRE.]
HOW MANY WERE KILLED AT HIROSHIMA? From the BBC: Official Japanese figures at the time put the death toll at 118,661 civilians. But later estimates suggest the final toll was about 140,000, of Hiroshima's 350,000 population, including military personnel and those who died later from radiation. Many have also suffered long-term sickness and disability. [MORE FROM THE BBC]
On August 7, 1409, the Council of Pisa, called to mend the "great schism" in the Catholic Church which left the church with two popes, solved it 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 1855, a treaty was signed with the western Shoshone (the Senate failed to ratify it); in 1902, two time president of the League of Women Voters of Nevada, Esther Nicholson, was born in Allegan County. Michigan; 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 1919, Leslie King, father of President Gerald Ford, married Margaret Atwood at Reno after being divorced from Dorothy Gardner (Ford's birth name was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.); in 1931, a strike at Boulder Dam, led by the Industrial Workers of the World, began. 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, there were published reports about rumors that Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were meeting somewhere at sea between the U.S. and England (it was off the coast of Newfoundland, starting on August 9, and resulted in the Atlantic Charter, an agreement that their two nations would not seek separate peace agreements and outlining conduct of their nations during war and a postwar period); 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 1961, Cuban Minister of Industries Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his delegation left the room during remarks at a Uruguay economics conference by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon and then returned for the Mexican finance minister's remarks; in 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy gave birth to Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, who weighed 4 pounds 10 ounces, at Otis Air Force Base hospital and when a respiratory problem was detected, the child was rushed 65 miles in an ambulance to Boston's Children's Hospital; in 1963, union plumbers threw a picket line up at the Nevada atomic testing site against Reynolds Electrical Engineering, the last holdout against a new industry contract; 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.
Update: Sunday, August 6, 2006, 1:43 a.m. PDT — On August 6, 1945, the United States, 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] [EDITOR'S NOTE: Compare the disparity between the latter number and that quoted by Dennis Myers, below. Perhaps the difference lies in the word "instantly." UPDATE: MYERS HAS PROVEN CORRECT, THE NEW YORK TIMES/AP ARE AT BEST UNCLEAR. Here's the answer.]
On this date in 1863, a Storey County Miner's Union was organized; in 1874, the Territorial Enterprise reported of the visit of U.S. Representative John Shanks of Indiana, chair of the House Indian Affairs Committee, "The General [Shanks was a Union army officer in the civil war] expresses astonishment at the honesty, sobriety and industry of the Indians in this State, and seems to think their domestication should not be a difficult matter. He is especially surprised to find that the Indians are increasing in numbers through natural and healthful growth, even when brought in close contact with civilization. This is a marked exception to the rule — so marked as to be entitled to especial attention — yet the exception finds ready explanation in the extreme tardiness with which the Indians of Western Nevada, particularly, adopt the destructive vices of the whites. The women are noted for their chastity and industry, while the men are generally temperate and peaceful in disposition. Their children are robust and healthy, and sickness is rare among them."; in 1887, Carson City was reportedly going wild for baseball — "Men who cannot pick up a dead ball on the ground without letting it drop are going into the business. Others who could not hit a ball in a week, or if they did they couldn't make first base in an hour, are buying ball bats and practicing in the diamond field."; in 1907, Fallon skating rink owner W.D. Clark provided his facility for church services after the Churchill County Commission revoked permission from Father Thomas Horgan for Catholics to use the school house; in 1912, in an endless speech (16,000 words), Progressive Party presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt's messianism, nearly equal to that of his opponent Woodrow Wilson, was on full display in Chicago: "Now to you men who, in your turn, have come together to spend and be spent in the endless crusade against wrong, to you who face the future resolute and confident, to you who strive in a spirit of brotherhood for the betterment of our Nation, to you who gird yourselves for this great new fight in the never-ending warfare for the good of humankind, I say in closing, we stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord."; in 1940, U.S. Senator Harry Truman, dogged by his association with the now disgraced Pendergast machine that elected him in 1934, nevertheless defeated bossbusting Governor Lloyd Stark to win renomination in the Missouri Democratic primary election; in 1940, Native American boxer Buddy Davis of Schurz arrived in Las Vegas for a Golden Gloves tourney; in 1941, Lloyds of London was effectively offering 100 to one odds that no bombs would fall on the United States by offering insurance policies for $1 on every $1,000 of damage resulting from aerial attacks; in 1941, the spillways of Boulder Dam were tested as a first stop in emptying Lake Mead to get it ready for the "re-filling floods" expected when spring came; in 1945, 140,000 people died in the atom bombing of Hiroshima [EDITOR'S NOTE: Compare the disparity between the latter number and that quoted by the New York Times, above. UPDATE: MYERS HAS PROVEN CORRECT, THE NEW YORK TIMES/AP ARE AT BEST UNCLEAR. Here's the answer.]; in 1965, the soundtrack album Help! by the Beatles was released; in 1970, the Summer Festival for Peace, produced by Sid Bernstein in Shea Stadium on the 25th anniversary of Hiroshima, featured performances by Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Paul Simon, Johnny Winter and Steppenwolf; 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.
Update: Saturday, August 5, 2006, 4:51 a.m. PDT — On August 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]
On this date in 1883, the Nevada State Journal wrote "Within a very few years Lake Tahoe will be one of the most popular resorts on the American Continent. All the most desirable places along the lake shore are being picked up by wealthy men with an eye to future use. Quite recently a number of lots, 60x160 feet, at Tallac, were purchased by parties residing in San Francisco and Virginia City — and one Sacramentan has also secured one — and the owners intend erecting cottage houses upon them, in which their families will pass the summer months. The site is a beautiful one, facing the lake, and surrounded by a grove of fine trees, a sandy beach leading from the lawn to the water."; in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed that both Congress and the state legislatures enact subversive activities and seditious acts laws; in 1940, Clark County state senate candidates Frank McNamee, a Republican and A.C. Grant, a Democrat, joined forces and went to court together, asking that the court place both their names on the ballot for an unexpired term instead of letting the county commission appoint a replacement; 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 1954, a Speotyto cunicularia (burrowing owl) was sighted on the Manse Ranch in the Pahrump Valley; in 1958, University of Nevada regents accepted a $40,000 grant from the Atomic Energy Commission and a $632.25 donation of used TV studio equipment from KOLO Television in Reno; in 1963, photographer Marilyn Newton joined the Reno Gazette-Journal; in 1966, Revolver by the Beatles was released in England (on August 9 in the U.S.); in 1978, at the end of a summer of rampant uncontrolled growth when six casinos opened in Reno, drawing people seeking work from around the nation, exhausting the local sewer capacity and creating a housing shortage, the Los Angeles Times ran a story headlined Biggest Little City‚ Bursting at the Seams; in 1981, the FAA began firing striking air traffic controllers (BARBWIRE); in 1994, a three-judge panel, after meeting with North Carolina Senators Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, removed special prosecutor Robert Fiske and replaced him with Kenneth Starr, a consultant to the Paula Jones legal team — an arrangement that offended the assistant prosecutors, who resigned rather than work for Starr; in 2000, Alec Guinness (Obiwan Kenobi, Yevgraf Zhivago, and many other roles) died at age 86 at King Edward VII Hospital in Midhurst, West Sussex; in 2002, someone returned Miss Abby Fitch-Martin by Kataryn Gerin-La Joie Loughlin to the Lincoln, Nebraska, library 37 years after it was checked out.
Update: Friday, August 4, 2006, 9:15 a.m. PDT — On Aug. 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany while the United States proclaimed its neutrality. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
Andrew Hamilton: But to conclude: The question before the Court and you, Gentlemen of the jury, is not of small or private concern. It is not the cause of one poor printer, nor of New York alone, which you are now trying. No! It may in its consequence affect every free man that lives under a British government on the main of America. It is the best cause. It is the cause of liberty.
On this date in 1735, after defense attorney Andrew Hamilton admitted the guilt of his client, New York Weekly Journal owner John Peter Zenger (that is, Zenger did print the statements he was accused of printing in violation of the sedition libel law), but argued that their truth was a defense. Hamilton asked the jury for jury nullification with the judge objecting to his line of argument. The jurors found Zenger not guilty; in 1869, Emperor Norton I (Joshua A. Norton of San Francisco, who in 1859 declared himself emperor of the United States and after whom the character of the King in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was supposedly patterned) took pity on his people and outlawed the Democratic and Republican parties; 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 1883, the Nevada Appeal proposed that King Kalakaua of Hawaii, who was visiting San Francisco, be invited to Carson City to see the prehistoric cave footprints on the grounds of the state prison; in 1898, the Indian Congress of the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition and Indian Congress opened in Omaha; in 1916, the United States purchased the Danish Virgin Islands for $25 million, with title transferring on January 25 1917; in 1926, the last of the location filming on Nevada's Black Rock desert for the silent film The Winning of Barbara Worth was completed (except for a wedding scene at St. Paul's Church in Winnemucca on August 6); in 1934, Indiana Attorney General Philip Lutz said the famous wooden gun used by John Dillinger to escape from the Crown Point jail had been located in the possession of Dillinger's brothe- in-law Emmett Hancock; in 1934, workers at a federal transient relief work camp at Lehman Creek were building campgrounds around Baker and Lehman creeks; in 1947, San Francisco Library Commission President Steve Coulter, a former four-term member of the Nevada Assembly, was born in Los Angeles; in 1951, at the Nevada Federation of Labor convention at Reno's Riverside Hotel, union leader Ralph Alsup — on bail while appealing a conviction of shooting a fellow union member — initiated a convention discussion of his status (reporters were excluded from the hall during the discussion); in 1956, Hound Dog by Elvis was released; 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 1973, Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn's The Morning After by Maureen McGovern, also known as Song from the Poseidon Adventure (sung in the film by Carol Lynley), went to number one on the Billboard chart; in 1980, John and Yoko began working on Double Fantasy; in 1987, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the "fairness" doctrine which prevents broadcasting from enjoying First Amendment rights (President Reagan later vetoed an effort to reimpose the doctrine); in 1989, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service put the Desert Tortoise, now Nevada's official state reptile, on the endangered species list, provoking legal action by Nevada real estate developers and brokers (killing a Desert Tortoise has been illegal in Nevada under state law since 1950).Update: Thursday, August 3, 2006, 9:01 a.m. PDT — ON THIS DATE IN 1981, members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), a union which had endorsed the election of Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter, went on strike and were eventually fired by the Reagan administration. [BARBWIRE]
Labor’s losses were major and lasting. For one, the PATCO strike exposed bitter inter-union rivalries, as between the Pilots Union and PATCO. This weakened a valued perception of Labor solidarity. (Little media notice was taken of $750,000 in aid raised by Labor for the strikers, or the AFL-CIO’s relentless effort to get Reagan to soften his blow). For another, the strike revealed the willingness of many to cross a picket line and take the jobs of strikers, this a blow to any notion entertained of working-class solidarity. And the strike led the media to mercilessly trash the PATCO’s bargaining demands, and by inference, denigrate those of all unions. The greatest loss concerned the ability of unionists to withdraw their labor power. Employers threatened after PATCO’s debacle to hire permanent replacements for all economic strikers, much as the FAA had done with Reagan’s blessings. No single development before ’81 or since has hurt Labor as severely as this one. Strikes of 1000 workers or more declined from 424 in 1974 (high water mark) to 17 in 2004. (Excerpted from an op-ed submission by Prof. Arthur Shostak)
ON THIS DATE IN 1892, Dr. Mary Hill Fulstone, who earned a medical degree from Berkeley in 1918, who served her residency in San Francisco during the worldwide flu pandemic, who ministered to Native Americans in Nevada and California, who campaigned successfully for a new hospital in Yerington, who was elected to the Nevada board of education, who was named Nevada mother of the year in 1950, who was named Nevada doctor of the year in 1961, and who was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Nevada in 1964, was born in Eureka, Nevada; in 1908, electric arc street lights and gas lines were being installed in Sparks; in 1909, author Walter Van Tilburg Clark, whose novels (The Ox Bow Incident, The Track of the Cat, The City of Trembling Leaves) are set in Nevada where he grew up, was born in East Orland, Maine; in 1911, a group of 60 tourists trying to get from Atlantic City to Los Angeles in a caravan of cars made it from coast to coast by arriving in San Francisco where they planned to stay for three days and then depart for Los Angeles (and from there ship their cars back east); in 1911, Walter Fulmer, who joined Wells Fargo as a boy in Reno and rose through the ranks (including a time as messenger between Austin and Battle Mountain), was appointed purchasing agent for western operations from Mexico to the Yukon; in 1943, in Sicily, General George Patton cursed as a coward and physically attacked Private Charles Kuhl, a hospitalized soldier with a fever of 102 degrees who was suffering from dysentery, diarrhea, and malaria; in 1958, the Northwest Passage was finally located when the submarine Nautilus became the first vessel to cross the north pole underwater with a Reno sailor, Clarence Price, on board (another submarine also named Nautilus had tried and failed to do the same thing in 1931); in 1963, the Beatles appeared for the last time at Liverpool's Cavern Club; in 1963, Surfer Girl by the Beach Boys was released; in 1968, Governor Ronald Reagan signed a measure passed by the California Legislature creating a California/Nevada regional Lake Tahoe agency (state approvals were needed, followed by congressional approval); in 1968, the Nevada Committee for the Rights of Women called for repeal of state abortion laws; in 1968, Hello, I Love You by the Doors hit number one on the Billboard chart; in 1971, Ringo's It Don't Come Easy went gold; in 2003, Washington Post columnist George Will published a column critical of Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn, comparing him to F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tom and Daisy in The Great Gatsby.
Update: Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 4:19 a.m. PDT — ANOTHER VACANT HOLE IN THE WALL: 2000 citizen predictions finally verified. After six years of lies and denials, Wal-Mart finally admits to the imminent closure of its Reno Northtowne location. (Office Max has already vacated the location next door.)
Update: Wednesday, August 2, 2006, 12:02 a.m. PDT — On this date in 1923, the 29th president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, died in San Francisco. Calvin Coolidge took the oath of office as President of the United States. [New York Times/AP e-headlines]
On this date in 1776, signing of the declaration of independence of the British colonies in the Americas began; in 1876, while playing poker with his back to most of a saloon, James "Wild Bill" Hickok was shot in the back of the neck by Jack McCall (Hickok's poker hand of two black aces and two black eights —the fifth card is unknown — is now known as the dead man's hand); in 1880, Deputy Sheriff William Weaver was shot and killed while on duty in Tuscarora, Nevada, and his alleged assailant, William Hammond, was also killed; in 1919, it was reported that George Mahana filed for a divorce in Las Vegas after Mahana was sued by G.H. Green for alienation of Green's wife's affections after Mrs. Green sued Mr. Green for divorce after Mrs. Mahana sued Mr. Mahana for divorce; in 1921, a Chicago jury acquitted all those accused in the "Black Sox" scandal in which the Chicago White Sox threw the world series; in 1922, Paul Laxalt was born in Reno; in 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter representing atomic scientists to President Roosevelt, urging atomic research; in 1943, in the Solomon Islands, the Japanese destroyer Amagiri rammed and cut in two the U.S. patrol boat P.T. 109, and its skipper courageously saved members of the crew and then summoned help — but was nearly cashiered from the service for being caught unawares by the much slower moving destroyer; 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, if it happened, was provoked by secret U.S.-sponsored attacks on a radar station and a port in the north of Vietnam); in 1964, the Beatles and the Kinks appeared together at Gaumont Cinema in Bournemouth; in 1969, the International Red Cross reported that since a June 2d shootdown of a Red Cross relief plane by Nigeria, the death rate of children in Biafra had returned to thousands each day; in 1969, Miss Nevada (Mrs. Diane Boiseclair) won the Miss Nude America competition; in 1971, a U.S. government document was drafted documenting a 30,000-soldier army the CIA was secretly funding in Laos; in 1971, the U.S. Senate select committee on Indian affairs approved legislation transferring water rights and 2,640 acres of federally managed land to the Fallon Indian Reservation; in 1990, after learning of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, President George Bush said he had little interest in taking military action (the next day at Aspen, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher browbeat him into changing his mind, telling him that it was an equivalent situation to Hitler and Czechoslovakia).
Update: Tuesday, August 1, 2006, 7:02 p.m. PDT (RENO) — This evening, KRNV TV-4 reported the failure of the Progressive Leadership Alliance/Culinary Union petition, which sought to impose a surcharge on any new Reno casino located outside the downtown redevelopment district. The Washoe County Registrar of Voters has found that the petitions were deficient by 1,046 signatures. The sponsoring entities may appeal to the Reno City Council or the courts. TV-4 was unable to contact a union or alliance representative. A Station Casinos PR person expressed delight.
READ MORE ABOUT IT: Petition failure benefits casino
Reno Gazette-Journal 8-2-2006The Las Vegas Review-Journal's version of the above story
Las Vegas Review-Journal 8-2-2006Reno trade unionistas file casino corporate welfare remedy initiative
Reno Gazette-Journal 5-4-2006Update: Tuesday, August 1, 2006, 3:19 a.m. PDT — On this date in 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, 1875: The attention of the whole world is at present fixed upon the Comstock Lode, and its daily product is one of the world's wonders. It is worthy of all the admiration it is receiving, but its greatness ought not to dwarf the merits of a good many other districts of this State, which only need what the Comstock has always had — namely, capital to put them in full operation — to bring their owners marvelous returns. [EDITOR'S NOTE — READ MORE ABOUT IT: The many images of the Comstock Miners unions by Guy Louis Rocha]
On this date in 1862, John Griffin, later of Belmont, Nevada, enlisted in the Confederate Army, 1st Virginia; in 1875, the Nevada State Journal had a new press that would soon allow it to turn out a thousand copies an hour — but the editors apologized for this date's number ("We were so busy unpacking our new improved Fairhaven power press that we did not have time to pay much attention to this issue of our paper"); in 1887, someone upriver from Reno or possibly at Lake Tahoe was changing the flow of the Truckee, undercutting the generation of electric power by the Electic Power Company for Reno; in 1905, the Reno Power Light and Water Company was selling its land holdings in Prosser and Spanish Springs Valley for home sites; in 1917, Native American labor organizer Frank Little, who opposed U.S. entry into the world war and who was working with Montana copper miners to protect them against Anaconda Copper, was kidnapped from his boarding house and lynched from a railroad trestle near Butte; in 1923, President Harding, suffering from pneumonia in San Francisco after a bout of food poisoning, was believed to be doing better and doctors were preparing to announce that all danger was past; in 1923, Junior College of Kansas City sociologist William Lewis claimed "Kansas City is becoming the divorce centre of the world" and that the Missouri city was replacing Reno; in 1942, Jerry Garcia was born; in 1944, two months after D-Day, a mother and father in Tonopah were notified that their son, James D. King, was killed in the Normandy landing, reportedly the first Tonopahan to die in the Second World War; in 1952, President Truman commuted to life imprisonment the death sentence of Puerto Rican nationalist Oscar Collazo who, with Griselio Torresola, stormed the temporary presidential residence, Blair House, on November 1, 1950, in an attempt to kill Truman (Torresola and police officer Leslie Coffelt were killed; Collazo was pardoned by President Carter in 1979 and died in 1994); in 1952, Minard Stout, former education professor at the University of Minnesota, arrived in Reno where he would take over the presidency of the University of Nevada on September 1; in 1960, Hank Ballard's The Twist by Chubby Checker was released; 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, Utah scientist Robert Pendleton charged the Utah Health Department with not acting quickly to prevent distribution of milk tainted by fallout from Nevada atomic testing; in 1971, the concerts for Bangladesh organized by George Harrison were held at Madison Square Garden; in 1973, American Graffiti was released; in 1975, Meadow Gold Dairies executive Ronald Averett resigned from the Nevada Dairy Commission after the disclosure of grand jury transcripts recording his admission that he had offered kickbacks to get a merchant to carry Meadow Gold products; in 1981, MTV began broadcasting; in 1988, The Last Temptation of Christ was released; in 2002, a special session of the Nevada Legislature, called to deal with medical malpractice issues, ended at 4:27 in the morning; in 2003, fifth-year drought conservation measures ordered by the Clark County commission took effect.
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