Friday

                        Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“There is no doubt that it is around family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominate virtues in human society, are created, strengthened and maintained.”

                                         Winston Churchill

Here is more good news. A while back down in Mobile, Alabama 29 year old Michael Woolf and his wife got into an argument in their double wide. Michael testified that his wife produced a pistol and aimed it at him. He said that he was able to disarm his wife and during the struggle the gun fired accidentally and their two year old son was killed. Woolf said that he finally gained control of the weapon and shot and killed his wife. He went on trial and the jury did not buy his story and convicted him of first degree murder and recommended the death penalty. The final determination was made at the sentencing hearing...it was death. It is unfortunate that two people were killed but the recommendation of the death penalty is appropriate.

           This Date in History  November 4

1801 US Patriot William Shippen died in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He was a member of the powerful Shippen family of Philadelphia that could trace their ancestry back to the earliest settlements in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. William went to medical school at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. William and his brother Edward were successful physicians in Philadelphia and were instrumental in the upbringing of their community. William was present at the founding of the Benjamin Franklin Public Academy that eventually became the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and served as a trustee for 24 years. He also was part and parcel of the founding of the College of New Jersey that became Princeton and served as a trustee there also. Now here is where the fun starts. Edward’s daughter Margaret (Peggy) Shippen flirted heavily with one John Andre and his close friend Benedict Arnold. But Peggy chose Benedict Arnold for a husband. Soon thereafter, Andre was captured at a road block and in his boot was a document detailing the surrender of West Point, New York to the British by US General Benedict Arnold for 20,000 pounds Sterling. When Arnold found out the Andre had been captured he and Peggy hightailed it to the British warship HMS Vulture for refuge. Arnold was made a commander of a British combat unit and fought against his countrymen for the remainder of the war. Andre was hanged as a spy, as well he should have been. After the surrender of British General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Arnold and Peggy fled to London where he died in 1801 in relative obscurity and poverty with Peggy at his side. There are those that believe that Arnold betrayed his country because he got his feeling hurt when a junior officer was promoted ahead of him, but in retrospect I think he needed the money to keep up the “high maintenance” Peggy in the lifestyle that she was accustomed. I have a niece that is “high maintenance” so I know what it means. I believe the small town in Pennsylvania named Shippensburg was named after William Shippen.

1928 The notorious gambler Arnold Rothstein is shot and killed at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. Arnold was found at a service entrance of the first floor bleeding heavily. He had been upstairs playing poker with his friends when the shooting occurred. One of the players was “Hump” McManus. A few weeks before, Arnold and Hump had been playing in a poker game and Arnold lost a cool $306,000 to Hump but refused to pay saying the game was rigged. It was Hump that invited Arnold to come and play in this game although the actual murderer was never determined. After Arnold was found bleeding, the police tracked the blood trail back upstairs to a room where four men were sitting around a table playing pinochle like nothing had happened. The cops went back down to Arnold and asked him who had done the shooting. Arnold just held a finger up to his lips and shook his head no and he was gone. Arnold was most famous for the “Black Sox Scandal” whereby Arnold financed the rigging of the 1919 World Series. There is no question that Arnold was involved, the actual players that took money and played badly will always be in question. One of those was a man from Greenville, SC named Joseph “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. He was banned from baseball for life by baseball commissioner Judge Kennesaw Landis. Joe played around in amateur leagues for a while but he eventually became too old and bought a liquor store.

On one occasion Ty Cobb was traveling from Detroit to his home near Royston, Georgia stopped by Joe’s liquor store to say hello. After Ty walked in Joe acted like he did not know him and Ty said “Joe, don’t you know who I am?” And Joe said “I know who you are Ty, but I didn’t think you would want to know me.” What a sad tale.

1995 Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated. Two years before Rabin and his lifelong foe, Yasser Arafat, had signed the so-called Camp David Accord under the tutelage of US President Jimmy Carter. The accord stipulated that both sides would seek peace and the PLO would recognize Israel’s right to exist. In 1994, Rabin, Arafat and Israeli under Secretary Shimon Peres were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The murderer of Rabin was a 25 year old Jew that shot Rabin while he was walking to his car after a meeting discussing peace in the Middle East. He shot Rabin in the leg and then in the chest. He was arrested on the spot and said that he was glad he did it because Rabin was giving away Israel to the Arabs. Under Secretary Shimon Peres assumed the office of prime minister. I remember seeing Rabin speak several times and he seemed sincere in his search for peace and was a man of great dignity. His loss was hurtful to us all.

1948 T.S. Eliot was born to a privileged family in Saint Louis, Missouri on September 8, 1888. His family wanted him to become a lawyer or a doctor and sent him to the finest schools in the world including Harvard, Sorbonne and Oxford. He returned to Harvard to study the Indo-European language of Sanskrit. After all of this schooling he secured a job with Lloyds of London and moved there permanently. While there he met the American poet Ezra Pound. Eliot had begun writing essays and poetry and assembled them in treatise named “Criterion”. He and Ezra Pound fed off each other for ideas. He was soon recognized as the author of a new type of poetry that changed the way poetry was written thereafter and every renowned poet since then has been influenced by him. His first work was The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock. His masterpiece was The Waste Land published in 1922. He was recognized as the genius that he was when he received the Nobel Prize for literature on this date. Eliot died in 1965 but not before becoming one of the most influential poets in history.

Births and deaths:

1898 US writer Eugene Field died. When critiquing a poem titled “Why do I live?” he wrote back to the author saying “Because you sent this poem by mail and are not here in person.”

1918 English soldier/writer Wilfred Owen died. He said “No lips are so red…as those stones kissed by the English dead.” Owen was killed in combat during WWI just a few days before the Armistice.

                Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow