1. Harry Houdini and the American Dream, early 1900’s.
And the show begins: hands and feet in shackles; nailed into a weighted wooden crate; lowered into murky water as hundreds watch, holding their breath along with the man trapped inside. IT IS A DEATH TRAP! But minutes later, Harry Houdini, the legendary escape artist -- the “Handcuff King” -- emerges yards away on the shore, alive and out of breath, and the crowd roars with relief and approval. How did Houdini do it? With a combination of technical skills, great physical strength, and masterful showmanship. Houdini had made a study of locking devices and could break free of most simple locks unaided. As for the others, he always carried a hidden key. And the wooden crates which entrapped him were always constructed with a sliding panel. Houdini’s escape tricks -- from water-filled milk cans, buried coffins, and straightjackets while suspended in mid-air -- were simple, yet they mystified his audiences. Houdini's greatest skill was his ability to convince people, through masterful showmanship, that what they were seeing was real. People want to believe in magic, and Harry Houdini let them. This Jewish boy from Budapest who grew up in Wisconsin, moved to New York as a teenager, got rich in the theater, toured the world, entertained presidents, starred in films, flew his own airplane, and left his large library to the Library of Congress, lived the American Dream.
2. Segregationist Gov George Wallace at the schoolhouse door, 1963.
Although the desegregation of schools had become federal law in 1954 under the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the University of Alabama, with Gov. Wallace's support, had continued to deny admission to Black students. In 1963, three Black students with sterling credentials applied for admission to the University in an action organized by the NAACP; and an Alabama federal district court ordered the University to admit them, forbidding Wallace from interfering. Days later, two students, accompanied by US Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and a three-car motorcade of federal marshals, arrived at the University's Tuscaloosa campus, where Wallace stood in the doorway of Foster Auditorium to block their entrance into the building. While the students waited in the car, Katzenbach confronted Wallace, demanding that he step aside and comply with the terms of the federal court order. When Wallace refused, Katzenbach called President Kennedy, who issued an executive order placing the Alabama National Guard under federal control and ordered a guard division to proceed to Tuscaloosa. When the guard contingent arrived, Wallace relented and the students entered Foster Auditorium, where they completed their student registration. That night, in a nationally televised address, President Kennedy called for the enactment of a comprehensive civil rights bill. The bill, largely written by Katzenbach, became law in 1964.
3. Life in a Nebraska “soddie,” 1880’s.
In the Great Plains, where neither lumber nor stone construction materials were readily available, homesteaders turned to prairie grass, with its dense, deep roots, which they cut into rectangular building blocks called “Nebraska Bricks.” To build a house, they’d lay these Bricks root side up, so the roots of one layer could grow into the layer above and, in time, develop into a solid wall. The walls would be formed with a slight slope, with the top of the house a bit smaller than the bottom, to allow for safe settling. Wooden door frames would be set in place early in the construction process, and window frames would be locked into place with little dowels when the walls reached chest height. But people had to come to terms with dirt floors. Some put rugs over them and those with money installed wooden planks above the packed dirt as flooring material. Nice sod houses had roofs made from wood planks or shingles; but you could get a roof for free by laying cedar poles crosswise to make a ceiling and piling bundles of brush, mud and sod on top. But heavy rains were a threat to even the nicest soddie; and insects, snakes and vermin always found a way inside. But look at the bright side: a soddie gave people a free or cheap house whose thick earthen walls kept them comfortable in the worst winter blasts and summer scorchers for as long as six or seven years.
4. The Battle of the Somme begins, July 1, 1916.
While the First World War would eventually involve thirty nations, with military operations across Europe, in Africa and in the Middle East, the crisis point in 1916 lay in France, a nation in grave peril. The French army had suffered 650,000 casualties — dead and wounded — after seventeen months of fighting and its morale was then nearing collapse. Germany’s forward troops were within a five-day march to Paris and the very survival of the French nation was at stake. If France fell, Germany’s expansionist capabilities would rise dramatically, jeopardizing Britain’s status as a global power. A major assault against entrenched German positions in France was needed and France pressed Britain to commit to a joint offensive; and Britain’s War Office agreed, committing its troops to battle along a 25-mile front on the River Somme in northern France. This battle commenced on the morning of July 1, 1916, with the British firing of a huge mine beneath the Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, a German field fortification near the village of Beaumont Hamel, ten minutes before zero hour. The British army suffered 57,420 casualties on that first day while gaining only three square miles of French soil. Of these, 19,249 were fatalities, making the day the most costly in British military history. The British army would continue its fight along the Somme for nearly five months and suffer a total of 420,000 casualties; and towns and villages across the British Empire would lose an entire generation of young men. For this sacrifice, Britain gained in total a strip of land six miles deep and twenty miles wide. The war would go on for two more years.
5. Born in 1874.
1. Carl Bosch, German chemist, engineer, Noble laureate. 2. Gertrude Stein, writer. 3. Guglielmo Marconi, inventor. 4. Herbert Hoover, US President. 5. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. 6. Robert Frost, American poet. 7. Honus Wagner, baseball player. 8. Ernest Shackleton, polar explorer. 9. Harry Houdini, escape artist.
6. This week’s odd lot.
1. USS Bunker Hill, an aircraft carrier, after being hit by two Japanese kamikaze fighter planes on May 11, 1945, in the Battle of Okinawa, resulting in 389 personnel dead or missing and 264 wounded. 2. George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, demonstrating a B-52 flying low enough to fry chickens in a barnyard -- a still from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 classic film, "Dr. Strangelove."
Thanks for taking a look. We’ll be back on Wednesday with more.
