Daily history

Good morning,


Quote of the day:

“We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.”

                                        Shirley Abbott

Here is an item that will wake you up this morning. Out in Bell, California, a small town southeast of Los Angeles, there are just short of 40,000 residents. The majority is Latinos and 17% live below the poverty level spending a lot of time getting food stamps and standing in line at the Food Bank. The Los Angeles Times published the salaries of the city governing body and here is what the residents discovered. The city manager’s salary was $789,000/year with a 12% raise per year guaranteed. That, my friends, is double what the President of the United States salary is. The fire chief had a salary of $458,000 which is half again what the fire chief of Los Angeles gets in a city of 3.8 million. Needless to say, the residents showed up at city hall in force demanding the ouster of the Mayor, the City Manager and the Fire Chief. After a while those three did resign in the knowledge that they would receive 2/3 of their salary as a retirement pension. More hell was raised and finally the District Attorney of Los Angeles County stepped in and began an investigation as to whether obviously corrupt city officials were indeed eligible for a pension. We shall see. By the way, the District Attorney of Los Angeles County is named Jerry Brown. I wonder if he is related to the Jerry Brown that was the Governor of California many years ago and had Linda Ronstadt as his girlfriend.

Over in Cowpens, South Carolina a few days ago an undercover cop working in the vice squad paid a visit to “Mr. Waffle” near I-85 (been there) seeking prostitutes. He saw a woman loitering out front and struck up a conversation. The woman asked him to buy her a soft drink which he did. The woman offered him “any kind companionship he liked.” She introduced herself as Angela Loudermilk which surprisingly was her real name. They got into the deputy’s truck and she demanded to see the man’s penis and he complied and Angels chose to grab him by his penis and said “Ok, I guess you are not a cop.” The man suggested a form of sex and Angela “repositioned” herself and it was at this time that the deputy identified himself as being under cover and arrested poor Angela. The question I have is how did Angela expect to identify the man as a cop or not by feeling of his penis? Do cops have a tacitly identifiable peculiarity down there? We learn things every day. By the way, they had a photo of Angela in the item and she had a strangely familiar looking face…she looked a lot like Jeremy Shockey, the tight end for the new Orleans Saints.

A few years ago a group of men got together and decided to open a bar/restaurant on the east side of Austin, Texas. The discussed a name and a logo and decided on The Longbranch Inn as the name and a caricature of a beaver as their logo. The beaver ended up with just the smiling head and buck teeth with LBI on the brim of a sailor’s hat. This last week they got a cease and desist order from an organization saying that the Longbranch was infringing on the copyrights of the University of Oregon State Beavers logo. The owners thought it was a joke but it proved not to be. A comparison photo of each logo was shown and sure enough they were identical except for the “LBI” on one of the sailor’s caps and “OSU” on the other. The Longbranch agreed to change their logo and initiated a contest. The Longbranch has a stuffed Beaver above their bar. So far the leading entry is the same beaver logo except this one has black Groucho Marx glasses on. I don’t know if that will be enough, however. It is pretty damned bad when there is an organization that makes a living making comparisons on college logos against those in free enterprise.

This date in history July 26

1775    Earlier in October of 1774 a Patriot printer from Philadelphia named William Goddard, after years of being frustrated because the Royal Mail Service was not unable to deliver his newspaper to his readers nor to bring important information to Goddard, petitioned the Continental Congress to form a Continental Post Office. The Congress delayed its decision until after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. On this date Congress authorized the formation of a Continental Post with Ben Franklin as this nations very first Postmaster General. Ben held this post until the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776 and then he was sent to France as the American Emissary. Ben’s son-in-law Richard Bache was named to replace Ben. This was the very first act, and would not be the last, of nepotism in the United States government arena.



1908    On this date Attorney General Charles Bonaparte orders a group of newly hired investigators to report to Chief Examiner Stanley Finch of the Department of Justice. This event was the first baby step in the formation of the FBI. One year later the Office of Chief Examiner was renamed the Bureau of Investigation. When America entered WWI, the Bureau of Investigation was tasked with investigating draft dodgers, violators of the Espionage Act and immigrants suspected of radicalism. The last one bothers me. Radicalism could be interpreted as an every day attitude to some people but very dangerous to others. Anyway, lawyer and librarian J. Edgar Hoover joined the bureau in 1917 and quickly worked his way to be an assistant to the Attorney General. Hoover and his anti-radical philosophy made him popular during the time period known as the “Red scare era” in 1920-1921. Hoover established a card file on anyone he felt was a “radical” numbering over 450,000. He also had over 10,000 “suspected” communists arrested. The great majority of these people were questioned briefly and released. Hoover was just flexing his muscles. This was a very dangerous ideology and gave Hoover enormous power. Congress eventually became very afraid of this man but his powers of investigation insured his longevity at his position. The upside of the formation of the FBI was they could pursue criminals across state lies since they were a federal agency. Hoover became the acting director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. With Congressional approval, Hoover greatly expanded and improved the Bureau with a centralized fingerprint file, an agent training school for agents and he whipped the Bureau into a very efficient crime fighting entity. They were going to need it in the 1930’s during prohibition because powerful criminals like the head of Murder, Incorporated Lepke Burkhalter, “Machine Gun” Kelly who specialized in the kidnapping of people of rich families and demanding enormous ransoms, not to mention Al “Scarface” Capone, “Dutch” Schultz among many others would present a great challenge. The bureau was titled the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. Hoover established an arm of the bureau called COINPRO which was an acronym for counter-intelligence program. This unit was used to counter the supposed infiltration of communists into the US. But it was also used to keep tabs on organizations like the KKK and was used unashamedly to harass and track the movements of Martin Luther King, Jr. simply because Hoover did not agree with his goals of equality for all. When the Watergate scandal broke much pressure and criticism was brought on the Bureau in general and Hoover in particular for the first time Hoover’s tenure. It was during this time frame that Hoover died of heart failure at the age of 77. Evidence proved that the FBI had suppressed evidence that would have proven the culpability of President Richard Nixon in the knowledge of the wrong doing and the attempt to cover it up. Since this time the Congress has established a process of selection of the FBI director that included Congressional approval and limited the tenure to 10 years. The FBI has proven to be a great asset to Americans, but at times have severely over stepped its boundaries.

1984    A real life monster named Edward Gein dies in a mental facility. It was his enjoyment to kill women, skin them and make suits of clothes out of the skins. He died of complications from the ravages of cancer. He was born in LaCrosse, Wisconsin to an alcoholic father and a domineering mother who taught him that women and sex was evil (this reminds me of my 3rd ex-wife). He and a younger brother were raised on a farm near Plainfield, Wisconsin. His mother and father died and his brother was killed in a mysterious fire leaving Edward alone on the farm. On an investigation of a missing person, the police found a beheaded and disemboweled woman’s corpse on the farm. The police also found furniture and suits of clothes made of human body parts and skins. Gein said that he would dig up freshly buried female corpses because they reminded him of his mother. The investigators found the skulls and body parts of 10 different women on the farm. Originally Gein was deemed unfit for prosecution because he was crazy as hell. Later on he was deemed fit for trial and the judge found him crazy as hell and sentenced him to a mental facility for the rest of his days. I do not understand reason for the trial except guarantee that he would never be free again. The movies Psycho, Silence of the Lambs and the Texas Chainsaw Massacres were loosely based on the life of Ed Gein.



1942 On this date author William Faulkner began work as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers. Faulkner had written three novels that were not immediately successful and they were The Sound and the Fury, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom. Faulkner was a very good screenwriter and delivered two blockbuster movies with To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep which were novels by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Chandler respectively. Faulkner was not the only author that did some screenwriting to put food on the table. Some of them were Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman and Raymond Chandler among others.



Born today:

1907    English movie director Alfred Hitchcock. The following exchange took place between the reed thin English author and full time smart ass George Bernard Shaw and the rotund Hitchcock.



Hitchcock: “One look at you and one realizes that there is a famine in the land”

Shaw: “One look at you and one realizes who caused it”.



1902    US comedienne and wife to George Burns, Gracie Allen. She said “When I was born I was so surprised that I did not talk for a year and a half.” Gracie and George was a memorably funny couple.

Died today:

1863    One of the greatest Americans ever, Sam Houston. Sam said of one of his political opponents “He has all the characteristics of a dog, except the loyalty.” Sam was pretty salty and had engaged in several duels in his 70 years on the planet.

1925    US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. He said “Nobody can make a million dollars honestly.” Hey William, I wish you would have lived long enough to have known of Bill Gates or Rupert Murdock.

1952    Argentine Royalty Eva Peron. The movie Evita was about her life. She said “Without fanaticism nothing gets accomplished.” Think on that, ya’ll.

1995    Governor of Michigan and father of Mitt Romney, George Romney. He said “The magnitude of our social problems will require that all citizen and institutions make a commitment to volunteering, as a way of life, and as a primary opportunity for needed change.” George uttered this statement after Detroit suffered the worst race riot in 100 years and he as Governor had to ask the Federal government for help suppressing it and soon a regiment of the 82nd Airborne showed up. Life can be a bitch sometimes.

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow