Daily history

Good morning,


Quote of the day:

“We loved a love that was more than love in our Kingdom by the Sea.”

                                Edgar Allen Poe

The great state of Texas held their gubernatorial primaries on Tuesday. I was very interested to see which way the wind was blowing down there. The hard-core Republican conservative incumbent Rick Perry was running against a well known Texas US Representative Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Perry ran on the platform that there is no place for Washington politics in Texas and Hutchinson had voted for the bail-out of Wall Street anyway. Hutchinson said that Perry (Governor for 10 years) had been too well entrenched in Texas politics. Perry won by a wide margin indicating that Texas and I suspect many others are disenchanted with the entire Washington cadre and are going to do a lot of sweeping in November. I certainly hope so. Perry announced his victory while attending the annual “Salt Lick Barbecue” in Driftwood, Texas. I would have like to have been there just for the barbecue. Texas uses a lot of beef brisket and chili at their cookouts. Down in my area it is pork and baked beans. I have not had barbecued beef in a long time but I can do without the Texas chili, that stuff will scald your mouth and continue scalding as it works its way down to be expelled. I am no masochist.

Two men were hauling dope in a car driving down Cain Hoy road north of Charleston, SC. The Charleston and Berkeley County police were hot on their trail in a high speed pursuit when the bad guys wrecked. One of them opened fire on the cops but one of the cops reached the shooter and a hand to hand struggle ensued over possession of the gun. The gun fired striking the bad buy in the leg and the struggle was over. The bad guy is lucky he was not capped with the blast of a Winchester model 12 shotgun. The second bad guy ran into the woods to escape. It was then that the cops turned loose the dogs and an arrest was soon made. Speaking of Cain Hoy, it was the name a very large plantation that flourished in the 17th, 18th and 19th century. More recently it was owned by the Guggenheim family as a hunting preserve. If I am not mistaken it was in the vicinity of 20,000 acres and somewhere on the property is a slave cemetery. The property was bought by the State of South Carolina and used for the construction of I-526 and associated exits and entrance ramps along with commercial development. The days of pretty girls in big hats and hooped skirts standing under trees draped with Spanish moss are gone forever.

Again in Texas, George W. and his wife Laura were recently inducted into the Texas Museum in Austin as “Historical Texans”. Included in that bunch were Walter Cronkite, George H. Bush, Lady Bird Johnson and Darrell Royal. Darrell was a football coach for several colleges but spent the majority of his career at the University of Texas and coached them to several national championships. He is in the United States College Hall of Fame. The funny part is that he was born in Oklahoma, but who cares.

A few days ago I was trying to get a little class and was reading up on different wines. I decided that I would like a red, dry wine at room temperature for the bite, body and taste. I saw one wine that was recommended for breakfast. It seems to me that if someone had to have wine for breakfast they are not interested in the body and taste, just the bite.

In several colleges and universities in California there have been displays of racial intolerance like carving swastikas on the doors of Jewish students, making KKK like hoods out of pillow cases, etc. Like I said, prejudice is alive and well. But it is impossible for it to exist anywhere but south of the 37th parallel and east of New Mexico, isn’t it? That propaganda has been hammered into us for years. By the way, the national headquarters for the KKK is Skokie, Illinois.

My brother sent me an e-mail showing the latest fashion in sunglasses. They were modeled by young ladies in mini-bikinis. The bikinis were three pieces of triangular material about 3” a side held together with strings about the size of 50 pound test DuPont Stren. The lower triangle had a string that went back and soon disappeared only to reappear as it approached the horizontal string. I sent my brother an e-mail saying “I wonder if they were polarized?” He said “Were they wearing sunglasses?” I said “I wasn’t talking about the sunglasses.”

Recently up in Swannanoa, North Carolina a long time mail carrier in that area, Patricia Summey, went up to the front door of 86 year old Geraldine Severson house to deliver her mail. Normally Geraldine met Patricia at the door like she had been doing for several years. But this she didn’t. Geraldine was considered a “hardship case” and her mail was delivered to her front door rather to the mailbox on the street. Anyway, Patricia was uneasy without Geraldine greeting her and looked through a window and saw a figure on the floor. She called out and Geraldine answered and told Patricia not to call 911 but she had fallen, broken her hip and could not stand. She did not want anyone coming over and kicking in her front door. Patricia went down the street a few doors to Geraldine’s son-in-law and told him the story. He and Patricia returned to Geraldine’s house and opened the door with a screwdriver and rescued Geraldine. She had a hip joint replaced the next day. This is not the first time that Patricia has done favors or ran errands for the Grey Panthers on her route. I’ll bet she sleeps well at night.

This date in history March 4

1861 Abraham Lincoln is inaugurated as President on this date. Immediately after he was elected in November seven southern states seceded from the Union in protest. A few years before the Republican Party was formed for the expressed purpose of freeing the slaves. Old Abe knew that he was stepping into a quagmire of Civil War but he thought he was ready for the job but after his United States Army received two or three ass-kickings from the outset and he could not find a field commander worth a damn. But as I said in a past lesson, Abe finally found Ulysses S. Grant who knew had more replacements than the Confederates and was not bashful about sending in his troops against an almost impregnable Confederate position just so he could kill just a few of them because they had no replacements and he did. Four years later Lincoln was inaugurated again after being re-elected for a second term. Shortly thereafter he and his wife Mary decided to see the play “My American Cousin” at the Ford Theatre in Washington. A Confederate sympathizer, an actor named John Wilkes Booth, was waiting near the box seat where President and Mrs. Lincoln would be seated. We all know what happened next.

1944    Previously the British Bomber Command had been making night bombing raids on Berlin along with other major German cities that manufactured the tools of war. The United States Army Air Corps, the 8th Air Force in particular, flying out of various bases in England had been making daylight on cities other than Berlin. On this date the 8th Air Force made its first night raid on Berlin giving the exhausted British a breather. The 8th Air Force had a variety of commanders such as General “Hap” Arnold, General Carl Spaatz and Medal of Honor winner General Jimmy Doolittle who had led the raid on Tokyo early in the war. The defenses around Berlin had stiffened since other military targets had been destroyed and the Air Force was looking for other targets of opportunity and Berlin was a prime target. The bombing of Berlin was effective but did not do anything to disrupt the morale of the German people. What happened was this. Later on in the spring of 1945, the allies sealed off the western side of Berlin and Germany as a whole and waited not accepting any surrenders. They were giving the Russians coming in from the east and southeast a chance at their “pound of flesh”. The Russians had lost about 26 million of their countrymen to the Germans during Operation Barbarossa. Hundreds of Russian towns and villages were razed and the citizenry were unceremoniously murdered in the German onslaught. Not only that, when the Russians finally began to gain ground back toward Germany, it was the Russians that liberated the hell on earth places like Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps set up by the Germans. One can imagine the frame of mind those Russians were in after seeing all of this horror along with the death of so many of their own. The Russians struck Berlin from the east and southeast with unparalleled ferocity that will probably never be repeated in history. They killed and literally ground into the soil anything they confronted including men, women, children, dogs, cats and any thing else that was in their path. There was one story of a German anti-tank gun in Berlin being manned by German boys about 11 or 12. They took a shot at an oncoming Russian tank and missed, the Russian tank commander rolled over the gun and the boys repeatedly until there was nothing left that could be identified as human. War is hell ya’ll, especially if one side has nothing on its mind except revenge.

1944    As a child Lepke Burkhalter would run up and down the streets of his neighborhood in New York and rob the poor guys selling fruit and produce off of their pushcarts. A little later he met up with a hoodlum name Jacob Shapiro and they formed a relationship and began to expand their business into extortion, prostitution and bootlegging. His organization became so large that it attracted the attention of the likes of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and “Dutch” Schultz. This group formed a loose business partnership. That is until Dutch decided he was going to cap the District Attorney of New York, Thomas Dewey. The group knew that this was a bad idea so they sent Burkhalter to take care of the problem. So he shot and killed Dutch, end of problem. It was after this that Burkhalter organized his own individual service known as “Murder Incorporated”. It is estimated that Burkhalter had over 250 men and women working for his at one time or another. All it was that if you wanted someone capped, you just contacted Lepke or one of his associates and after they investigated to see if the hit was legit, and enough money changed hands, your problem was over. Anyway, Lepke was arrested and convicted of murder and on this date he went to meet his maker extra crispy courtesy of “Old Sparky” in the prison at Sing Sing.

1941    On this date a British commando team launches a raid on an armed German freighter named the Krebs. The Krebs was at anchor in a fiord in Norway. The British started by blowing up different stuff like oil and gasoline tanks, communication towers and even captured a few German soldiers as a diversion. But what they were really after was the Enigma code machine inside the Krebs. Before they could get to the machine the captain of the ship threw it over the side. The water was far too deep to go after it. But they gather up enough written materiel whereby the British intelligence was able to decipher German code for four or five weeks. They did eventually capture an Enigma machine off of a disabled German U-boat and then after much study with some of the greatest code breaking minds in the free world, they broke the German code. Speaking of that, the code breakers discovered that the German Air Force was going to attack Coventry, England on one particular night and warned British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Churchill could not warn the people of Coventry about the raid because if he did the Germans would have known that their code had been compromised and would have made drastic changes which would have been disastrous for the Allies. Again, war is hell.

Born today:

1745    Charles Dibdin, English writer. He wrote “Then trust me, there is nothing like drinking so pleasant on this side of the grave, it keeps the unhappy from thinking, and even makes the valiant more brave”. I know what you mean Chuck, and I have had black eyes to prove it.

Quotable quotes:

“Canada is a country with no cuisine. When was the last time you went out for a Canadian dinner?Mike Myers

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow