Tuesday

                      Musings and History

Quote of the day:

“Bitterness will shorten your life. It will inhibit your ability to love and be loved. It will be the casket in which you are buried.”

                                     Reverend T. D. Jakes

Here is an example of a good leader:

While an air traffic controller I was working in Pensacola, Florida. At that time the Vietnam War was underway and US Navy training was going full bore including carrier based training involving the aircraft carriers Lexington and Kitty Hawk. The sky was full of airplanes, we had the same traffic count as Miami.

The assistant chief was the person we controllers went to when we had a problem that required a change in procedures. He had a standing order...”Do not come to me with a problem without three possible solutions then I will select one of the three, after all you controller are the experts.” This man understood his limitations. The end result was that we solved our own problems and if it did not work, it wasn't his fault. He loved to go downtown to the strip joints where he was known to the dancers as “Radar”. He has since gone to that great control tower in the sky.

             This Date in History  April 18

1775 On this date one of the most important events in world history occurred. During the occupation of the American colonies the English parliament handed down more and more oppressive laws and taxes upon the colonists. The colonists formed a shadow government and genuine rebellious groups to prepare to combat the English army and kick them out of the Colonies. This was not easy trick, because the British army was one of the most formidable on the planet. Earlier the Patriots had intercepted information that a regiment of British soldiers were going to Concord, Massachusetts to capture a cache of arms that the Patriots had hidden there and to capture the Patriot leaders John Hancock and John Adams thought to be in Lexington. The Patriots would need to know from which direction the British would be coming meaning were they going to cross over to Charlestown and the head toward Concord or were they going to take the more circuitous route by the Boston peninsula. The Patriots assigned that task to Paul Revere and Richard Dawes. An observer in the Old North Church steeple, the tallest structure in the town, and would signal with one lantern if he observed the British troops were going by the Boston peninsula and two lantern if they were going to cross over. Revere would go by the peninsula and Dawes would cross over and both would ride to Lexington and alert the “Minutemen” and John Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming. The “Minutemen” were essentially National Guard for the colonies. It was two lanterns and Revere and Dawes began riding toward Lexington and Concord yelling their warning. There were about 700 British troops and the Minutemen gathered 77 men. Eventually the Patriots and the British confronted each other near Lexington. The British commander ordered the Patriots to disperse and the Minutemen hesitated slightly and then somehow a shot was fired and then everyone open fire. After the smoke had cleared there were 8 dead Patriots and 30 wounded. This was the shot heard around the world. There was only one British soldier wounded but the struggle for independence for the colonies began in earnest, the Revolutionary War had begun. By the way, the British never captured Adams and Hancock.

1942 Earlier after the Japanese had raided Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt told the American military to plan some kind of strike against Japan for no other reason than to restore American morale and confidence. The military decided that bombing Tokyo would get the job done. The tricky part was how. The nearest friendly airport was in 400 miles west in China and if the bombers departed from those bases and made their bomb run they could not get back. So the answer was to have the bombers depart from an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, make their bomb run and land in China. The only bomber had that could even come close to taking off from an aircraft carrier was the Mitchell B-25 medium bomber. So the United States Army Air Force tasked Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle get make this happen. Doolittle picked 16 of the best B-25 crews and sent them to Eglin AFB, Florida for training. Doolittle marked off the length of an aircraft carrier deck onto a runway and then trained the crews to get off the ground before the end. He never told them the purpose of the training until all of the crews were fully trained. The bombers were flown to the west coast and ferried to the docked aircraft carrier USS Hornet and hoisted aboard. It was determined early on that the bomber could not get off the carrier deck with a full bomb load so the were loaded with a half load. It was determined that the aircraft had to get within 500 miles of Tokyo to have a chance of making it to China. The Hornet left the west coast headed west toward Japan. On this date the Hornet spotted a Japanese vessel when they were 630 miles from Japan. The Japanese vessel was destroyed but the Commander of the Hornet ordered Doolittle and company to depart right away in case the spotted vessel got a message off. All the bombers got off the carrier and made it to Japan although not all made it to Tokyo. Tokyo was bombed and a few of the bombers made it to China, some crashed into the Yellow Sea and some crashed in Japan. But they got the job done. Only four months after the raid on Pearl Harbor the capitol of Japan was bombed by American aircraft. America was jubilant.

1521 The Catholic monk Martin Luther is on trial in Worms, Germany. He was accused of defying the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V with his writings and was threatened with torture if he did not recant. Luther asked for a day to consider. On this date Luther returned to the representative of Charles V and refused to recant stating that he would continue to preach and write what he read in the bible and not what he was told to preach and write. Needless to say, Charles V representatives were stunned knowing that if they forced Luther to preach and write what they wanted, they would be denying the bible. Luther was released. His friends knew there would be a price on Luther’s head and hustled him off to a secret castle where he interpreted the bible written in Latin into common German so the average man could read it. This was the first act of Protestantism and went a long way toward allowing the common man to think for himself about what was written in the bible, not what was interpreted for them by the church.

Born today:

1947 US actor James Wood. He said “I would not walk across the street and pull one of those movie executive out of the snow if they were bleeding to death. Not unless I was paid for it. None of them ever did me any favors.” Damn James, bitterness kills.

1963 US comic Conan O’Brien. He said “I read where archaeologists uncovered the graves of fifty of Ramesses II children...fifty children, y'all! I want to know who decided to name a condom after this guy.” It was the same guy that named a condom after a group of people that took in a wooden horse and were destroyed because of it.

Died today:

1955 German physicist Albert Einstein. He said “The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them.” 

           Thanks for listening   I can hardly wait until tomorrow