Daily history

Good morning,




Quote of the day:

“So long as there is breath in me, that long I will persist. For now I know one of the greatest principles of success; if I persist long enough I will win.”

Ho Chi Minh



Until my attitude improves, in addition to the history lesson I will be sending out some of my biographies instead of remarks about present day. This bio is about Hunter S. Thompson (nicknamed Gonzo), who is one of my favorites. Gonzo is no longer with us.



A biography of Gonzo





On July 28, 1937, just two weeks before me, Hunter S. Thompson is born in the Cherokee Triangle area of Louisville, Kentucky. He was the eldest of three sons born to Jack and Virginia Thompson. His father was an insurance adjuster and a veteran of WWI whilst his mother was a reference librarian and secretary. When Hunter was 14 his father died of Myasthenia Gravis leaving the three boys for his mother to raise alone. It was reported but never confirmed that his mother got heavy into the sauce because of the stress. Hunter was a good athlete, especially in baseball but he never played organized ball. He went to high school at the Louisville Male High School which was normally for the upper crust in Louisville society. While there he joined a Literary Group and wrote pieces for the high school newspaper and helped edit the school album. He was kicked off the Literary Group because of his legal problems. He was almost continuously in trouble in school and on one occasion he was caught in a car with others that had performed an armed robbery and he served 60 days in the local jail. It was never proven that Hunter was a participant in the robbery. After being released, he joined the US Air Force and went to Lackland Air Force Base for basic training. (Me too). After basic training he went to school in Illinois to study aircraft electronics but eventually ended up at Eglin Air Force Base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The base commander there discovered Hunter’s writing skills and made him a major contributor to the base newspaper, especially sports. The base had a football team that fielded some pretty good players like Max McGee and Zeke Bratkowski. Hunter would travel with the team and send back essays of the games they played on the road along with the home games. Hunter’s enlistment ended with him being the rank of Airman 1st class (three stripes) and was discharged with an Honorable Discharge but was not offered a chance for reenlistment. His commanding officer stated that Hunter was good at what he did but he resented authority and would pass that attitude to others in contact with him. (Me too). While at Eglin he would also write anonymous articles for the local newspaper in Fort Walton. After the Air Force he became the sports editor of a newspaper in Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania before moving to New York and attending Columbia University and took a course on short-story writing under the G.I. Bill. During this time he was working for Time magazine as a copy boy for $51 a week. He used a typewriter in the office to copy Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in order to get a grasp on different writing styles. He was fired from Time for insubordination. Later that year he went to work as a reporter for a newspaper in Middletown, New York. He was soon fired from that job because he destroyed a candy machine in the office that took his money and did not give up any candy. (Been there, as most of us have) and then went down the street and got into a cuss fight with the owner of a restaurant who was an advertiser in the paper. After a series of jobs including one or two in Puerto Rico, he ended up as a caretaker in a resort in Big Sur, California that eventually became a virtual commune of artists and Bohemians. Hunter chose to write an uncomplimentary article about the artists and Bohemians in Big Sur for Rogue magazine that was distributed nationwide. Needles to say, he was fired as caretaker. He then went to Brazil and became an editor for the only English speaking newspaper, National Review, which was owned by Dow-Jones. While there he was joined by his longtime girlfriend Sandra Conklin and upon returning to the United States they were married. They had issue of five pregnancies which resulted in only one survivor. She had three miscarriages and one child died soon after birth. The survivor they named Juan Fitzgerald. He continued to write for the National Review about a variety of subjects including an essay on his visit to Ketchum, Idaho to determine the reason for the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. While there he stole a rack of elk antlers that were hanging over the doorway to the Hemingway cabin. He had a falling out with National Review when they refused to publish his critique of Tom Wolfe’s new book The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Body and he moved to San Francisco and dived head-first into the drug-hippie culture that was just beginning. Hunter got an opportunity to live with Sonny Barger and the San Bernardino branch of the Hell’s Angels. Sonny is the acknowledge founder of the Hell’s Angel’s phenomenon. After a while the Sonny figured out that Hunter was doing research for a book and demanded that the Hell’s Angels get a piece of the action and when Hunter hesitated, he received a “stomping” as the Angels called it, but it really was a severe beating. In spite of the beating, Hunter wrote of his experiences and a book titled Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Story of Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs. The book was a runaway best seller and Hunter got a lot of money and many offers to write books. He chose to write about his past experiences with the hippies in San Francisco and what is up with them later. He gave the Hippies hell because he felt they had sold out their political agenda and was just interested in the drugs. In 1972 he delivered what is considered his masterpiece titled Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It proved to be crisp and to the point yet it treaded lightly on the factual side over to the imagined and back again to the factual. This writing style was confusing to those that were not familiar with Hunter. Not only that, Hunter himself was a central character but using a pseudonym. This style of writing was named “Gonzo style” by another writer and the name stuck. The Thompson family moved to an Aspen, Colorado suburb called Woody Creek after receiving $15,000 for “Hell’s” plus 2/3 of the price of his house in Woody Creek. Thompson named his house “The Owl Farm”. Hunter ran for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado under the “Freak Power” banner. He came in a very close second to the winner. Hunter had always been talking about “The American Dream” and in “Fear and Loathing” he finally told us how to find it. He said the American Dream is found in “Two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, a quart of Tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen ampoules of amyl nitrate.” Hunter enjoyed much success throughout the remainder of his life. He had many friends in the movie industry including Johnny Depp, Bill Murray and Sean Penn among many others. Several of his books were made into movies.



On February 20, 2005 Hunter Thompson, aged 67, blew his brains out while sitting at his typewriter talking to his wife who was at a gym in Aspen. He had delivered what ended up being a suicide note to his wife four days before. It read:



“No More Games, No More bombs. No More Walking, No More Fun, No More Swimming, 67, That is 17 years past fifty, 17 years more than I wanted or needed, boring, I am always bitchy, No Fun-For Anybody, 67, You are getting greedy, Act your old age—Relax—This won’t hurt.”



Gonzo’s funeral was a spectacular one financed by his close friend Johnny Depp. Gonzo had designed a tower with a cannon on top and in August of 2005 about 250 people saw Hunter’s ashes loaded into the cannon and blasted into the breeze. When asked why, Johnny Depp said “I was just trying to grant the last wish of an old friend.”



This date in history September 13



1899 The first fatality in an automobile accident occurs in New York on this day a stock broker was stepping off a southbound trolley at Central Park West and 74th Street when he was run over by an automobile traveling north. The stock broker was sent to the hospital where he died two days later. The automobile driver was arrested and fined $1,000 dollars. The upside of this unfortunate event was that it opened up a new and thriving business in the legal profession known at the “accidental death or injury lawyer”. It is a little known fact that these beasts and vampire bats are related.



1977 General Motors introduced a diesel engine powered automobile for the first time in their Oldsmobile 88 and 98. The diesel is reputed to be more fuel efficient and more durable. The down side is that the engine is noisy, not as quick as a gasoline burning engine, and puts out way more pollutants into the atmosphere. For these reasons the diesel in a car didn’t work out like GM had wanted. I believe diesels are available only in imported cars. They are still an option in American made trucks but they are noisy and stink like sh-t.



1965 Louis Armstrong wins a Grammy for his rendition of “Hello Dolly”. What can one say about Satchmo? He was one of the most internationally beloved members of the musical community in history. Born in poverty in 1901 in New Orleans, Louis went to a reform school at the age of 10 where he learned to play the cornet as was soon recognized for the talent he possessed. At the age of 15 he was playing locally for the King Oliver band on a regular basis. Oliver took his band to Chicago and when Louis was 17 Oliver asked him to come join the band. Louis did so and thus began the meteoric rise of this amazing talent. I miss him.



1862 While resting in a field that the CSA army had used two days before, two soldiers of the Union army found a document wrapped around 3 cigars lying on the ground. Upon examination the document was recognized to be Special Order 191 which was CSA Gen. R. E. Lee’s plans for what turned out to be the Antietam campaign. The document was sent up the chain of command toward that bastion of ineptitude US Gen.George B. McClellan. On its way to George, the document was examined by one of his staff and the signature on the bottom of the document was recognized as being that of Robert Chilton who R.E. Lee’s adjutant was making the document genuine. The Order described how Lee wanted to deploy his troops for the upcoming battle. George had Lee by the short hairs now and he knew it. But George in his typical inept way did nothing for 18 hours and finally formed up the army and sent them toward where he knew was the weakest point. Lee had his army spread out in 5 sections over a 40 mile area but smelled out that something wasn’t right and collected his army into one unit just in time for the Battle of Antietam and this turned out to be the bloodiest single day battle in American history.



1916 Roald Dahl is born in Wales. Roald had a very unhappy youth, his father mother and sister had died and he was abused in a foster home. As soon as he could Roald left on a life of adventure that many of us would have loved to experience. He went on exploratory trips to Newfoundland and Tanzania. At the outbreak of WWII he joined the Royal Air Force and became a fighter pilot and was a participant in several major engagements and was in fact shot down over Libya and was seriously injured. He used a piece of his femur that had to be removed as a paperweight in his office. I am telling you, this guy was something else. After he recovered he was sent to Washington as an attaché where he met the famous author C. S. Forester who told Dahl that he should write about his war experiences. This he did and was soon published in the Saturday Evening Post, a weekly magazine. Dahl had found his calling. In 1943 he wrote a book for Disney named The Gremlins among others. His most famous book was Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. He wrote several screen plays among them was Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory based on his book, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Bond movie You Only Live Twice. He was a true talent.



1990 Russian Andre Chikalko is arrested and taken to Leningrad and charged with the killing and mutilation of at least 53 people making him one of the worst serial killers in history. The Russians denied this for a long time because they did not want the world to know that a monster such as Andre could exist in a communistic society. But history has proven that serial killers have existed in nearly every nook and cranny of the planet. They ain’t discretionary.



Born today:



1916 Welch writer Roald Dahl. He said “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole around you because the greatest secrets are hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who do not believe in magic will never find it.” Roald, that kind of thinking would be well accepted by a person I know in Black Mountain, North Carolina.



1876 US writer Sherwood Anderson. He said “I go about looking at horses and cattle. They spend their days grazing, having sex, working when they have to and raise their children for less that a year. I am sick with envy of them.” Me too.



1938 US advice columnist Judith (Miss Manners) Martin. She received this request for advice “Please list some tactful ways of removing a man’s saliva from your face.” Miss Manners responded with “Please list some decent ways of acquiring a man’s saliva on your face.” I would have liked to heard the answer to that one.



1939 US press secretary Larry Speakes. He said “Those that don’t know what is going on are doing the talking and those that know what is going on are not talking.” Confusion reigns in politics, ya’ll.



Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow