Quote of the day:
“A psychiatrist is someone that goes to a strip joint and watches the audience.”
Mervyn Stockwood
Trivia question of the day:
Who played Steve McQueen's girlfriend in the movie “Bullitt”? Answer at the end of the blog.
A while back over a three month period, Federal Drug agencies arrested 678 gang members of which 449 are illegal aliens. Every one of them had an attachment to Central American drug cartels. They arrested 67 in the Charlotte, NC area.
That reminds me of a couple of friends of mine that met me in downtown Charlotte to partake of a few frosty adult beverages. After a fairly long evening my friends headed for the Corvette they came in. It was parked on Tryon Street which is the main drag in Charlotte. After making it to their car by taking two steps forward and one step back they finally got seated in the car. Suddenly there was a tap on the driver’s side window. It was a Charlotte city cop tapping the window with a night stick. My friend lowered his window and the cop said “If you start this car you are going to jail.” My friends wisely decided against starting the car and got back out. They produced a cell phone and began trying to find a hotel. The cop came around and pointed to a doorway about 10 feet away and told them that was a hotel. They made their way into the hotel and got a room. The cop could have waited until the car was started and arrested them both. I guess he was feeling magnanimous.
A while back I went to one of my favorite watering holes. The bartender is of the alternative life style. My group was discussing another watering hole that is open 23 hours a day here in Greenville which is pretty damned redneck. The bartender came over and told us that he and his social group meet at this establishment almost every Sunday morning at the crack of dawn for their “gathering”. It was difficult for us to grasp this concept because this place is pretty rough. He said that the majority of his social group was either bartenders or servers making Sunday morning the optimum time for a gathering because most of them were not working. He said that on one occasion the bartender came over to him and said that he could not be in there with flip-flops. He reassured the bartender that he and his group would be drinking high dollar shots and expensive drinks. The bartender did not back down and told him that he had to change shoes or leave. About that time an elderly man got up from the bar and headed to the men’s room leaving a trail of pee along the entire route. My friend asked if it was OK if he left a trail of urine on the way to the men’s room and kept his flip-flops on. The bartender was adamant, the flip-flops had to go. Apparently a trail of urine was not as offensive as flip-flops.
This Date in History March 4
1861 Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President. Immediately after he was elected in November seven southern states seceded from the Union. A few years before the Republican Party was formed for the expressed purpose of freeing the slaves. Old Abe knew that he was stepping into a quagmire of Civil War but he thought he was ready for the job but after his United States Army received two or three ass-kickings from the outset and he could not find a field commander worth a damn. But as I said in a past lesson, Abe finally found Ulysses S. Grant who knew had more replacements than the Confederates and was not bashful about sending in his troops against an almost impregnable Confederate position just so he could kill just a few of them because they had no replacements and he did. Four years later Lincoln was inaugurated again after being re-elected for a second term. Shortly thereafter he and his wife Mary decided to see the play “My American Cousin” at the Ford Theater in Washington. A Confederate sympathizer, an actor named John Wilkes Booth, was waiting near the box seat where President and Mrs. Lincoln would be seated. We all know what happened next.
1944 Previously the British Bomber Command had been making night bombing raids on Berlin along with other major German cities that manufactured the tools of war. The United States Army Air Corps, the 8th Air Force in particular, flying out of various bases in England had been making daylight on cities other than Berlin. On this date the 8th Air Force made its first night raid on Berlin giving the exhausted British a breather. The 8th Air Force had a variety of commanders such as General “Hap” Arnold, General Carl Spaatz and Medal of Honor winner General Jimmy Doolittle who had led the raid on Tokyo early in the war. The defenses around Berlin had stiffened since other military targets had been destroyed and the Air Force was looking for other targets of opportunity and Berlin was prime. The bombing of Berlin was effective but did not do anything to disrupt the morale of the German people. What happened later was this:
Later on in the spring of 1945, the allies sealed off the western side of Berlin and Germany as a whole and waited not accepting any surrenders. They were giving the Russians coming in from the east and southeast a chance at their “pound of flesh”. The Russians had lost about 26 million of their countrymen to the Germans during Operation Barbarossa. Hundreds of Russian towns and villages were razed and the citizenry were unceremoniously murdered in the German onslaught. Not only that, when the Russians finally began to gain ground back toward Germany, it was the Russians that liberated the hell on earth places like Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. One can imagine the frame of mind those Russians were in after seeing all of this horror along with the death of so many of their own. The Russians struck Berlin from the east and southeast with unparalleled ferocity that will probably never be repeated in history. They killed and literally ground into the soil anything they confronted including men, women, children, dogs, cats and any thing else that was in their path. There was one story of a German anti-tank gun in Berlin being manned by German boys about 13 or 14 years old. They took a shot at an oncoming Russian tank and missed, the Russian tank commander sent a round their way killing all of them then rolled over the gun and the boys repeatedly until there was nothing left that could be identified as human. War is hell y'all, especially if one side has nothing on its mind except revenge.
1944 As a child Lepke Burkhalter would run up and down the streets of his neighborhood in New York and rob the poor guys selling fruit and produce off of their pushcarts. A little later he met up with a hoodlum name Jacob Shapiro and they formed a relationship and began to expand their business into extortion, prostitution and bootlegging. His organization became so large that it attracted the attention of the likes of Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and “Dutch” Schultz. This group formed a loose business partnership. That is until Dutch decided he was going to cap the District Attorney of New York, Thomas Dewey. The group knew that this was a bad idea so they sent Burkhalter to take care of the problem. So he shot and killed Dutch, end of problem. It was after this that Burkhalter organized his own individual service known as “Murder Incorporated”. It is estimated that Burkhalter had over 250 men and women working for his at one time or another. All it was that if you wanted someone capped, you just contacted Lepke or one of his associates and after they investigated to see if the hit was legit and enough money changed hands, your problem was over. Anyway, Lepke was arrested and convicted of murder and on this date he went to meet his maker extra crispy courtesy of “Old Sparky” in Sing Sing.
Answer to the trivia question:
Steve McQueen's girlfriend in the movie “Bullitt” was played by Jacqueline Bissett.
Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow
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