Category: Uncategorized

Time Flies September 27

Arrivals:

1722 – Samuel Adams, yet another one of the Adams boys, who spent most of his adult life fomenting revolution against George III and the British Empire.  He is one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and one of the organizers of the Boston Tea Party, from which a modern right wing political group takes its name.  He is currently spinning in his grave.

1840 – Thomas Nast, the 19th century cartoonist who invented Santa Claus in 1863.  Santa was later refined by Coca Cola.  Nast also invented the Democrat Party’s donkey symbol (1870) and the Republican elephant (1874).  He is sometimes credited with inventing Uncle Sam, but that’s not true.

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1998 – Google first appeared on the Internet.  Contrary to public belief, Google does NOT make you stoopid .

1964 – The Warren Commission finally finished their investigation into the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  Their conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.  That was the first and last time anybody believed it.

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Departures:

1965 – Clara Bow, silent film actress and the “It” girl.  If even half the stories about her are true, she makes antics of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and that whole crowd look tame.  This is especially true since she was performing in the days when celebrities still had some pride.

1967 – Prince Felix Yussupov, who, with a couple of other guys, murdered Rasputin.   According to Yussupov’s own account, on the night of December 16th, 1916, the conspirators poisoned Rasputin with cyanide, shot him at least 3 times, beat him with an iron bar, bound him hand and found, tied him in a carpet, and threw him into the half-frozen Neva River.  When Rasputin’s body was found 3 days later, it was discovered that he had drowned after fighting his way out of the ropes and the carpet.  Obviously, all this greatly contributed to the legend of the Mad Monk.

Time Flies September 26

Arrivals:

1774 – Johnny Appleseed.  This was a real guy!  His name was John Chapman and he did wander around the country, planting apple trees.  As a kid, I loved this story, but as an adult, I wondered where the hell he got the money from.  The fact is he was subsidized by the cider industry – very interesting. 

1933 – Donna Douglas, Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies.  She also played Frankie to Elvis Presley’s Johnny in the movie Frankie and Johnny.  And that’s about it.

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1957 – The first performance of West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s total rip of Romeo and Juliet.  It was a massive success on Broadway and in London.  It was made into a movie in 1961 and won 10 Academy Awards.  Elvis Presley was originally asked to play Tony, but he declined and the role was given to Richard Beymer who disappeared right after the movie and didn’t reappear again until 1990, on Twin Peaks.

1962 – The Beverly Hillbillies, the much laughed at television show, that laughed all the way to the bank, premiered on CBS.  Although these days nobody admits ever having watched the show, it consistently had a huge audience throughout its entire 9 year run on CBS.  It was the first of the “fish out of water” situation comedies that get resurrected every generation and have been successful ever since.

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Departures:

1820 – Daniel Boone, the first in a line of real American heroes.  He was followed by Davy Crockett (1786 – 1836), Kit Carson (1809-1868) and Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917).  After that, the frontier was closed and people settled down and started going to the movies.  Through the rest of the 20th century American heroes were made of fiction and celluloid finally culminating in Indiana Jones.  And in the 21st Century they have died out altogether.

2003 – Robert Palmer, a singer whose limited range and abilities came together, at exactly the right time, with the emerging giant MTV and the stylish art of Patrick Nagel to produce the hit “Addicted to Love” (1985).  Palmer and his managers knew a good thing when they saw it and repeated the combination with “Simply Irresistible” in 1988.

Time Flies September 25

Arrivals:

1764 – Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny on the Bounty.  On April 28th 1789, Christian took over HMS Bounty and set Captain (he was really a lieutenant) Bligh and a few loyal crewmen adrift.  Christian sailed off into the Pacific and into history.  Over the years, popular culture has treated Fletcher Christian very well.  He has always been portrayed in the movies by the leading hunk of that particular generation.  In 1935, Clark Gable was Fletcher Christian; in 1962, it was Marlon Brando; and in 1984, it was Mel Gibson.   Actually it’s about time for another Mutiny on the Bounty movie.  Any suggestions?

– Michael Douglas was born on this day in 1944, and his wife Catherine Zeta-Jones, was born exactly 25 years later, in 1969.  Douglas, the son of old-time Hollywood actor Kirk Douglas, has won 3 Golden Globe Awards and 2 Oscars, one for Best Actor in Wall Street.  Zeta-Jones was pretty good dancing with Tony Banderas in The Mask of Zorro.

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1966 – The smallest crowd in New York Yankees history watched the Chicago White Sox beat the Yankees 4-1.  Nobody seems to want to remember that only 413 people showed up at 65,000 seat Yankee Stadium that day.  There is very little speculation and even a lot of confusion as to what day it was.  So why did it happen?  The Yankees sucked.  Mantle was out, Maris was hurt and Whitey Ford couldn’t  throw a fit, plus they were a million games out ofthe pennant race.  Excellence matters even if you are the New York Yankees.

1981 – Sandra Day O’Conner was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.  She was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court and had been appointed by one of the most conservative Presidents ever – Ronald Reagan.

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Departures:

1970 – Erich Maria Remarque, author and World War I German soldier, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front.  It is one of the best anti-war novels ever written. The Nazis, for obvious reasons, hated the book, and it was banned and publicly burned.  Remarque, seeing the writing on the wall, fled Europe for the USA, but his sister, Elfriede Scholz, stayed in Germany.  She was arrested by the Nazis, convicted and guillotined, in pretty short order, in 1943. 

 1987 – Mary Astor, one of the few actresses who made the transition from silent films to “talkies.”  She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Great Lie (1941) but is best remembered as Bridget O’Shaughnessy the woman who shoots Miles Archer and hires Sam Spade to help her find “the black bird” in The Maltese Falcon.