Thursday

Good morning,

Quote of the day:

“Professionals built the Titanic, amateurs built the Ark.”

                                               Anon

This is a horror story…beware.

A while back two year old Rodricus Williams was reported to have fallen over the railing at the “Battery” in Charleston, SC and disappeared into Charleston harbor. A lot of people went searching for him. No corpse was found. The State Law Enforcement Department (SLED) received a tip about the location of little Rodricus and began a search in Bowman, South Carolina. A block of concrete with a human body encased was found in a trash bin. There is little doubt that is little Rodricus but the block was sent to the Medical University of South Carolina for confirmation. Rodricus’ father Roger was arrested. This monster had four outstanding warrants for his arrest but he had custody of Rodricus for the last two months of his life during a bitter custody battle By the way, SLED is the law enforcement arm of the South Carolina attorney general.

This Date in History July 9

1877 On this date the first tennis tournament was held in Wimbledon, England which was then a small suburb of London. The tournament was sponsored by the All-England Lawn Tennis Club. The game was played indoors earlier and it wasn’t played on the lawn very long before the first tournament. This first one had a purse of 20 guineas and there were only 21 men participating in the “Gentlemen’s event” which was the only event. Tennis began as a French game in the 13^th century and was played without a racquet. They knocked the ball back and forth across the net with the palms of their hands. Over the years the game, athletes and equipment improved to what it is today.

1850 On this date the President of the United States Zachary Taylor died from cholera and is succeeded by Millard Fillmore. Taylor had the nickname of “Old Rough and Ready” because of his dress and demeanor. Taylor was born in the backwoods of Kentucky and had no, and I mean no, experience in politics, he was a pure warrior. From the time he was thirteen, he fought against the Indians and many other enemies of his country. It was from his military notoriety that got him nominated and elected president. After becoming president he fell under the influence of the powerful Whig senator William Seward. It was Seward that influenced Congress into buying Alaska from the Russians. It was also Seward that pushed through Congress the infamous Wilmot Proviso what stated that any lands gained in the war with Mexico would be slave free. The slave holding states, of which there were plenty including Missouri, Delaware and Maryland, raised hell but it didn’t help, the bill became law. But this bill just increased tensions that erupted into Civil War in 1861.

1993 On this date British scientists positively identified with mitochondrial DNA tests that the bones found in 1991 in a mass grave in Yekaterinburg, Russia was indeed the bones of Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra and three of their daughters which represented the last of the Romanov dynasty and indeed the last of any Czarist dynasty in Russia. They had been killed by the Russian army in the revolution of 1917 led by Lenin and others eliminated a Royalist type government forever and installed a Communist regime that exist to this day although the overall tenor of the government has softened and shaped itself differently over the years. There was a legend that one of Czar Nicholas’ daughters had escaped the massacre by the Russian army and made her way to America. Her name was suppose to be Anastasia and one woman claimed to be that woman. There was much ado about this story but the woman claiming to be Anastasia but was known here in the US as Anna Anderson eventually died and a tissue sample was taken and her DNA was compared with what was known to be that of the Romanovs. She was not one of the Romanovs, it was an attempted scam. Every body in the mass grave was identified, including that of Anastasia. But there was one body missing, it was that of the daughter Maria. What became of her has never been determined.

1918 On this date future author William Faulkner joined the Royal Air Force. It seems that the love of his life, a woman named Estelle, had married another man. Upon receiving this news, Faulkner left his home town of Oxford, Mississippi and went to Canada and signed up. He never saw combat because a truce was reached and the war was over before he reached Europe. He eventually returned to Oxford and began to write poetry. His first book of poetry was financed by one of his neighbors. One good thing happened for him, he found Estelle had divorced her husband with her having custody of the two children. William and Estelle married and began restoring a ruined ante-bellum mansion. He published four superb books in a very short period of time in The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom. The reading public was slow to understand the depth of Faulkner’s books but once they caught on his star rose like a meteor. In the meantime he was a screenwriter to earn money to feed his family. He screen wrote the blockbuster films To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep both from books written by Raymond Chandler and both starring Humphrey Bogart. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949 for a book of short stories he titled Collected Stories which included the famous Bear. He died of a heart attack at the age of 55. As the saying goes, the good die young and leave beautiful memories. Indeed.

Born today:

1866 French religious leader Earnest Dimnet. He said “Every now and then in this seething mass of humanity we find someone that seems to not need anyone. The contrast with us is stinging,”

               Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow