Archives at Zinester: History at a Glance - Dean Perchik Column. Storytime

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O.K. campers, what is 38 inches long and has 47 holes? Obviously, the answer is Irishman Bobby Sands’ belt. On the 1^st in 1981, Robert Gerard Sands, while imprisoned in The Maze prison in Northern Ireland, began a hunger strike to protest the English treatment of the Irish nation. The following March 9 was his 27^th birthday and I imagine he took a pass on the birthday cake. At the beginning of the strike, he was elected to Parliament[ii]. Sands had been imprisoned in 1972 for his somewhat militant approach[iii] to the issue of Irish independence. The hunger strike ended only with Sands’ death on May 5, while still in custody.

On the 2^nd in 1807, the United States Congress[iv] passed an act "prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States... from any foreign kingdom, place, or country." They could have saved the country a whole lot of grief and saved hundreds of thousands of lives in the middle of the nineteenth century if they had taken the simple step of also prohibiting slavery but apparently, they did not seriously consider that option.

Aside from being the last American member of the Whig party to serve in public office and the first Vice-President to rise to the Presidency upon the death of the incumbent[v], John Tyler[vi] was also the first president to have his veto overridden by both houses of Congress. On the 20^th of February in 1845, Tyler vetoed a bill relating to revenue cutters and steamers. The Senate and the House, in a surprising and uncharacteristic burst of energy, wasted no time in voting to override this veto on the 3^rd of March.

On the 4^th in 1917, Jeannette Rankin of Montana assumed her seat in the United States House of Representatives. She was the first woman elected to that body. It should be noted that at the time of her election the 19^th amendment to our Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, had yet to be ratified. Most politicians are notable for their tendency to be wishy-washy. Remarkably, Rankin was wonderfully consistent over the course of her very long career. She voted one of the fifty members of Congress to vote against the nation entering World War I. She was the only member of Congress to vote against entering World War II. After her Congressional career was over, did she go on the lecture circuit? Not a chance. She still manned the barricades and was a leader in the opposition to the Vietnam War. It is not terribly surprising to learn that she was a founding member of both the American Civil Liberties Union[vii] and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom[viii].

Alferd Packer[ix] died on April 23, 1907 after having served roughly 40 years[x] as punishment for cannibalism. His death however, in no way posed an obstacle to the esteemed Mr. Packer being pardoned on the 5^th in 1981 in spite of his death 74 years before that date. It is unfortunately only an urban legend that the Department of Agriculture’s cafeteria in Washington, D.C, was for a time named the Alferd Packer Cafeteria. However, for a short period in 1968, students at the University of Colorado successfully renamed their cafeteria the ‘Alferd G. Packer Memorial Cafeteria’ whose slogan was ‘Have a friend for lunch’. I have been unable to discover any evidence, either in school or court records, or for that matter any newspapers, that would indicate that controlled substances were involved in the naming of University of Colorado’s cafeteria; though considering the year I think you would be on safe ground to assume that such was the case.

John II, King of Castile, was born on the 6^th in 1405. He assumed the throne of Castile upon the death of his father, Henry III of Castile. John was a very precocious lad. Poor little thing, his dad died when the future king was only one year and ten months old.

Don’t you just hate it, I know that I do, when someone keeps saying to you “What’s the rush? You New Yorkers are all alike – always in a hurry. We’ll get to it, we’ll get to it.” On the 7^th in 1992, the good people of the state of Michigan finally got around to ratifying the 203-year-old 27^th amendment[xi] to the United States Constitution.

On the 8^th in 1618 legendary big shot thinker Johannes Kepler[xii] published his third law of planetary motion: "The squares of the orbital periods of planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axis of the orbits". I have absolutely no idea what that means nor do I have a clue about the meaning of his other two laws on the subject. I think Kepler was very lucky to have had his elves to fall back on, because at least their cookies are very good. Oh heck, those are the Keebler elves, not the Kepler elves. I guess Kepler was just another hack that I don’t understand, and now without the cookies I have absolutely no reason to even try to understand him.

Sondre Norheim was born in ?verb?, Norway[xiii] on June 10, 1825. He took to skiing as a duck does to water (or, for that matter, to orange sauce). He is generally credited with popularizing the sport of downhill skiing. He is also responsible for introducing the Norwegian words ski and slalom to the world at large. At some point, he immigrated to the United States and settled in North Dakota. While he always thereafter kept a pair of skis near his front door, he was somewhat disappointed by the scanty opportunities that the prairie offered for downhill skiing. He died slope-less on the 9^th in 1897 and was buried in Denbigh, North Dakota.

Marcello Malpighi[xiv] was born on the 10^th in 1628 in Italy. He initially entered the University of Bologna at the age of 17 to study Aristotelian Philosophy. Like many entering college however he soon switched majors and decided to become a physician. My guess is that he did this to extend his time in college. Not, of course, that I even considered doing such a thing. He found his niche after making the switch however and went on to have a prosperous and happy career. He did a great deal of work with the aid of a relatively new tool – the microscope. He made quite a few discoveries in his work. You know, stuff like finding out that insects do not use lungs to breath. He also did ground breaking work in the study of development of chicken embryos in their eggs. He was the first person to discover and describe human taste buds. However, if the FBI should appear at your home to execute an arrest warrant, before you go blaming whatever rat turned you in, blame Marcello, because it was his work that led him to the discovery of human fingerprints.

Edward Mallet rented rooms over the White Hart pub, on Fleet Street in London, England. From these rooms he wrote and published a newspaper called The Daily Courant[xv]. Publication of the paper began on the 11^th in 1702. Its appearance made the paper the first regular daily newspaper in the United Kingdom. The paper had a decent run, lasting until 1735. Mallet’s offering would continue until 1735 when it merged with the Daily Gazetteer. Today, anyone with half a mind to do so can publish pretty much whatever he or she wants to. While the ‘half a mind’ part is not a requirement, a brief perusal of today’s papers will clearly show that writers with half a mind would immeasurably improve the stuff that is printed and sees the light of day.

On the 12^th in 1610, Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncios (Starry Messenger) was published. This book has the distinction of being the first scientific treatise to rely on observations obtained by using a telescope. It brought to Galileo[xvi] a great deal of acclaim and, perhaps more importantly a degree of financial security. In her book Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel on page 36, points out the rather sweet deal Galileo was able to swing. He was appointed “Chief Mathematician of the University of Pisa and Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke… He also secured a bonus in personal liberty by arranging for his university appointment in Pisa to entail no noisome teaching duties”

Charles Bonnet, the son of French expatriates, was born in Geneva, Switzerland on the 13^th in 1720. As an adult, he chose to make the practice of law his profession. He possessed a roving eye however, and dabbled in the murky worlds of philosophy and the natural sciences. His work with the law was passable but largely unremarkable. In the natural sciences however, he managed to make a bit of a splash. A portion of Bonnet’s work in that field resulted in his having a syndrome named after him. The Charles Bonnet Syndrome, is a condition in which vivid, complex visual hallucinations occur in apparently normal people. I was somewhat surprised to learn that because I had always thought that the condition described was in fact the Owsley Syndrome.

Have you noticed that some days are just a lot busier than others are? The 14^th is one such day. For instance, on the 14^th in 1489, Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, woke up one morning and sadly discovered that she had run found herself just a bit short of ready cash. To remedy this singularly unpleasant turn of events, she sold her kingdom to Venice. The reaction of her subjects has been lost to time. Also on the 14^th, in 1757, on-board the HMS Monarch, Admiral John Byng put in front of a firing squad and executed for wanton neglect of his duties as an admiral in his majesty’s navy. Who would have imagined that the British were such sticklers for details of that sort? The 14^th in 1883 saw the death of Karl Marx. Contrary to popular belief, he was not the fifth Marx Brother, but a hirsute social theorist whose work has been largely misunderstood by university undergraduates and tenured professors everywhere. This date in 1984 was not a particularly good one for Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein. He was the target of, and seriously wounded in, a rather amateurish assassination attempt in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Overall, the 14^th is more or less a wasteland brightened only in the latter part of the twentieth century by the birth of Marieke Elizabeth Perchik in 1990.

Born on the 15^th in 1791, Charles Knight entered into the field of publishing as an apprentice to his father, a publisher and bookseller in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in England. Knight achieved some success, but at the end of his apprenticeship, he chose to leave his father’s concern and venture into the strange world of journalism. His success continued. In fact, one publication he worked for, the Windsor, Slough and Eton Express remains in print to this day. One thing led to another however, and he left publishing in 1827. Not one to let sleeping dogs lie, he then became the superintendent of the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge[xvii]. The society would publish inexpensive books that primarily dealt with self-help topics. Whatever you may think of the type of things they probably covered, doesn’t the name alone make you want to rush out and join the damn thing? I know that I do.

[1] From the introduction to Cowan’s 1923 Norton I Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

[1] In October of 1972, shortly after Sands joined the Irish Republican Army, he was arrested and charged with possession of four handguns. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

[1] Among the many privileges granted to members of both houses of Congress is enjoy the privilege of being free from arrest in all cases, except for treason, felony, and breach of the peace. Since Congress is literally infested with attorney, it no surprise the rules of the House strictly guard this privilege; a member may not waive the privilege on his or her own, but must seek the permission of the whole house to do so. More or less, it is like caging a fox in the hen’s coop.

[1] The president was William Harrison. His inauguration address had 8444 words, the longest of any inaugural address, conducted in the open air on a cold and rainy day. Harrison’s address took over two hours to complete. He was soaked to the skin, caught a really nasty cold, and died.

[1] President Tyler's favorite horse was one that he named "The General". When the horse died, Tyler buried it at his estate, Sherwood Forest Plantation, complete with a headstone on which was inscribed, "Here lies the body of my good horse 'The General'. For twenty years he bore me around the circuit of my practice and in all that time he never made me blunder.

[1] Rankin was in good company at the ACLU. Her fellow founding members were Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman and Albert DeSilver, all of them having illustrious careers outside of their activist careers.

[1] This group was an outgrowth of the Women’s Peace Party, which had been formed in 1915 at a meeting in Washington, D.C. that had been called for by Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt. Addams was the first woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize and, more importantly, was a cousin of cartoonist Charles Addams. Catt was a close associate of suffragist Susan B. Anthony.

[1] It has long been bandied about that at his sentencing, the judge screamed out "Damn you, Alferd Packer! There were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!" While it would be nice if that was what he said, sadly, the transcripts are not so theatrical. What the judge actually said was "Close your ears to the blandishments of hope. Listen not to the flattering promises of life, but prepare for the dread certainty of death”

[1] At the time of his sentencing, the forty years that Packer got was the longest sentence in history. He was paroled on February 8, 1901 and went to work as a guard at the Denver Post.

[1] Actually, Alabama did not get around to ratifying it until May 5, 1992, thereby putting the amendment over the top. Michigan’s ratification was unnecessary but it does make for an interesting story. I tend to view Alabama’s less than timely ratification as just the sort of thing that those kind of people tend to do.

[1] Kepler began his career as an assistant to famed astronomer Tycho Brahe, who also dabbed in astrology and alchemy.

[1] The Olympic Flames for the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley and the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer were all lit at Norheim’s birthplace.

[1] Malpighi was Pope Innocent XII’s physician and he also taught medicine at the Papal Medical School

[1] On October 31, 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled, and officially conceded that the Earth was not stationary, as the result of a study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture.

[1] In 1828 and 1829 Knight would publishThe Library of Entertaining Knowledge. At least he hoped that it was entertaining.

[i] From the introduction to Cowan’s 1923 Norton I Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

[ii] He was elected on April 9, 1981.

[iii] In October of 1972, shortly after Sands joined the Irish Republican Army, he was arrested and charged with possession of four handguns. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

[iv] Among the many privileges granted to members of both houses of Congress is enjoy the privilege of being free from arrest in all cases, except for treason, felony, and breach of the peace. Since Congress is literally infested with attorney, it no surprise the rules of the House strictly guard this privilege; a member may not waive the privilege on his or her own, but must seek the permission of the whole house to do so. More or less, it is like caging a fox in the hen’s coop.

[v] The president was William Harrison. His inauguration address had 8444 words, the longest of any inaugural address, conducted in the open air on a cold and rainy day. Harrison’s address took over two hours to complete. He was soaked to the skin, caught a really nasty cold, and died.

[vi] President Tyler's favorite horse was one that he named "The General". When the horse died, Tyler buried it at his estate, Sherwood Forest Plantation, complete with a headstone on which was inscribed, "Here lies the body of my good horse 'The General'. For twenty years he bore me around the circuit of my practice and in all that time he never made me blunder.

[vii] Rankin was in good company at the ACLU. Her fellow founding members were Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman and Albert DeSilver, all of them having illustrious careers outside of their activist careers.

[viii] This group was an outgrowth of the Women’s Peace Party, which had been formed in 1915 at a meeting in Washington, D.C. that had been called for by Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt. Addams was the first woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize and, more importantly, was a cousin of cartoonist Charles Addams. Catt was a close associate of suffragist Susan B. Anthony.

[ix] It has long been bandied about that at his sentencing, the judge screamed out "Damn you, Alferd Packer! There were seven Democrats in Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!" While it would be nice if that was what he said, sadly, the transcripts are not so theatrical. What the judge actually said was "Close your ears to the blandishments of hope. Listen not to the flattering promises of life, but prepare for the dread certainty of death”

[x] At the time of his sentencing, the forty years that Packer got was the longest sentence in history. He was paroled on February 8, 1901 and went to work as a guard at the Denver Post.

[xi] Actually, Alabama did not get around to ratifying it until May 5, 1992, thereby putting the amendment over the top. Michigan’s ratification was unnecessary but it does make for an interesting story. I tend to view Alabama’s less than timely ratification as just the sort of thing that those kind of people tend to do.

[xii] Kepler began his career as an assistant to famed astronomer Tycho Brahe, who also dabbed in astrology and alchemy.

[xiii] The Olympic Flames for the 1952 Winter Olympics in Oslo, the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley and the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer were all lit at Norheim’s birthplace.

[xiv] Malpighi was Pope Innocent XII’s physician and he also taught medicine at the Papal Medical School

[xv] The paper was a single page with two columns.

[xvi] On October 31, 1992, Pope John Paul II expressed regret for how the Galileo affair was handled, and officially conceded that the Earth was not stationary, as the result of a study conducted by the Pontifical Council for Culture.

[xvii] In 1828 and 1829 Knight would publishThe Library of Entertaining Knowledge. At least he hoped that it was entertaining.