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

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Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation[i].

Robert Ernest Cowan (1862 – 1942)

Gustav III was the king of Sweden in the latter part of the eighteenth century. On the 16^th in 1792, being prone to any number of excesses Gustav hosted an extravagant Masked Ball. Apparently, not all was particularly well in paradise and a number of assassins used the occasion to enter into the king’s presence and attempt to kill him. While Gustav was gravely wounded, the injury was not immediately fatal. He would remain in power, albeit suffering from the infection of his wound. He would linger until March 29 on which day he said to those caring for him Jag k?nner mig s?mning, n?gra ?gonblicks vila skulle g?ra mig gott. Which translates to "I feel sleepy; a few moments rest will do me good". Having said this, Gustav quietly died.

Lawrence Edward Grace Oates, who went by the nickname Titus Oates[ii], was born on the 17^th in 1880. He was an English member of one of Robert Falcon Scott’s expeditions taking a shot at reaching the South Pole in 1912. The expedition ran into a heck of a lot of problems, Oates more so then the other members of the team due to an old injury. Oates, hoping to make a sacrifice for the others in his party so that they might not be slowed down by him, stepped out of their tent during a raging storm, saying to his compatriots as he opened the tent door to leave “I am just going outside and may be some time.” It was, I suppose, a noble gesture. A gesture ultimately proved useless, as everyone else would also die, shortly after Oates left, on the ice.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a very wealthy woman who was born on April 14, 1840. Time and her husband were both very kind to her, affording her the opportunity to amass an extraordinary collection of art. When she died in 1924, she left instructions for her vast collection to be housed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, a museum that she designed and built to house her collection. I cannot state emphatically enough how very precise her instructions were. She gave strict directions as to how the paintings and other various art objects were to be displayed in the museum. On the 18^th in 1990, thieves broke into the museum and made off with paintings conservatively valued in excess of $300 million. The paintings have not been recovered, nor has the identity of the thieves been conclusively determined. As a result of the terms of Ms. Gardner’s will, the empty frames of all the paintings stolen are still on display, exactly where they were when the theft occurred. The museum has taken the extraordinary step of constructing an additional building to exhibit more of its collection without disturbing the layout mandated by Ms. Gardner for the main exhibition space.

David Livingstone was born on the 19^th in 1813 in Scotland. As an adult, he would become a doctor and a missionary who spent the bulk of his life in central Africa. Everyone must be familiar with his famous encounter with Sir Henry Morton Stanley[iii], who was Welsh and who had been sent to Africa by the New York Herald to find Livingstone, which he did in 1871. When Livingstone finally got around to dying on the 1^st of May in 1871, two of his friends, Chuma and Susi, would carry his body for over 1000 miles to a port so that Livingstone’s body could be returned to England for proper burial in Westminster Abbey. One question that immediately occurred to be when I learned of this was “What condition was the body in after being carried for that distance across Africa in May?” The weather had to have been really hot.

Giuseppe Zangara died on the 20^th in 1933. Zangara was an unremarkable person. Except, that is, for one little thing, a minor detail really: He attempted to assassinate both President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Chicago mayor Anton Cermak on the preceding February 15. FDR, of course, survived the attempt. Cermak did not. Zangara pled guilty and was sentenced to death in Old Sparky, Florida’s electric chair. The sentence was carried out only 10 days after Cermak’s confession. Zangara was an ardent anti-capitalist who stated to police "I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists." It is more than likely that the reason for Zangara failing to hit both of his targets is that he was only 5 feet tall and had to stand on a folding chair to see over the hat that spectator Lilian Cross was wearing while standing in front of him. I imagine that having to do that threw his aim off just a little bit.

It is a long-settled fact that the Anglican Church is really nothing more than Catholic Lite. In the England of the sixteenth century however, it is more like Catholic Light. In 1556, Thomas Cranmer was the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was a rather committed member of the Anglican Church. You would not be incorrect if you were to label him one of the cornerstones of Anglican theology. He’s the guy who gave Henry VIII a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, which led to the dominoes falling for the Roman Catholic Church in England. Cranmer was also on the wrong side of the street in all that nastiness that surrounded Lady Jane Grey and her attempt to usurp the throne. With Mary, Queen of Scots on the throne, she being a Catholic definitely out of the closet, Cranmer tried to do a bit of back-pedaling to distance himself from his rabidly anti-Catholic views. He was not terribly successful at this however and Mary directed that he either recant or be burned at the stake. He gave recanting a shot, though he didn’t really have his heart in it. Mary then directed that he declare his position in public. He was led into a square on the 21^st in 1556 and placed on top of a big pile of sticks. This should have given him a clue that he should probably have paid a bit closer attention to what was going on. He was called upon to make public his belief that the pope was an o.k. kind of guy he said, instead, "And as for the Pope, I refuse him, as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.” A match was then put to the woodpile and all his hopes for having a good day went up in smoke.

Always the bride’s maid, never the bride. William Woods Holden was the governor of North Carolina in 1871. On the 22^nd in 1871, he became the first governor of a state in the United States to be removed from office as the result of an impeachment proceeding. He does not have the prestige associated with being the first governor to be impeached however. That honor goes to Charles Lawrence Robinson, governor of Kansas in 1862, who was the first governor to be impeached, though he was acquitted and was not removed from office.

Some rather annoying people are born with silver spoons in their mouths. Horatio William Bottomley was not one of those however. He was born on the 23^rd in 1860 in London, England. He spent the first 14 years of his life in an orphanage. Nevertheless, the experiences of his youth had imbued him with a strong desire to improve his situation in life and he pursued it with an unyielding sense of purpose. He founded a journal, John Bull, which became a platform for his rather self-serving patriotism. In the course of time, he ended up as a Member of Parliament, an Independent representing Hachney South. He succumbed however, as many politicians do, to the many temptations for unjust enrichment that he encountered. In 1921, he was convicted of fraud, perjury and false accounting, sentenced to seven years in jail and expelled from Parliament. One of the nicer comments made about his character was one made by Matthew Engel, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, who pointed out that Bottomley was “irredeemably, utterly, psychotically corrupt. He built a string of other businesses on nothing more than fresh air: but there were always useful and distinguished idiots on the board, so he could tell the shareholders' meeting: "I would love to pay you a dividend, but my directors won't let me."

George Francis Train was born on the 24^th in 1824 in Boston, Massachusetts. When he was four years old, both his mother and his father died from yellow fever and his rather strict Methodist grandparents raised George thereafter. I am undecided if this personal tragedy had a ruling impact on George’s life. While it must have had a great affect on him, I can only wonder if it was the reason that he became both a successful businessman and a certifiable crackpot. While not the inspiration for Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, he did travel around the World three times, on one of them convincing the Queen of Spain to build a railroad through the backwoods of Pennsylvania. For the first trip, he left Tacoma, Washington and completed the journey in 67 days. Because of his interest in public affairs, he conducted a national campaign for his election to the position of Dictator. At his campaign rallies, he would charge a fee for admission and made a great deal more money doing so. He financed Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s newspaper The Revolution. He ended his days sitting on a park bench in New York’s Central Park, handing out dimes, feeding the pigeons and speaking to no one other than children and animals. He died on January 5, 1904 and was buried in Brooklyn, New York’s beautiful Green-Wood Cemetery.

On the 25^th in 1655, Christian Huygens, a Dutch part-time astronomer, discovered Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. I really don’t see what the big deal is. Titan is huge; it has a diameter of over 5000 kilometers. It would be really impressive if he had found the moon Mimas, which has a diameter of about 400 kilometers.

On the 26^th in 1484, William Caxton published his translation of Aesop’s Fables, in London, England. Aside from this date, little else is known with any certainty about Caxton. What is known is that he was the first English person to become a printer in England; his contemporaries in London were Dutch, French or German. Caxton was exposed to the printer’s trade during a tour of the continent. While in Germany, Caxton was bitten by the publishing bug and when he returned home, he immediately set about establishing himself as a printer and bookseller. Not surprisingly, he met with a great deal of resistance and outright hostility from the Merchant class in England, who felt that “if the printed page were to become widely available to the population, then it might filter through to the poor. The poor might then become aware and enlightened of their circumstances and, ultimately become dissatisfied and aggrieved.” You have to admit that his critics had made a damn good point.

Elizabeth Muriel Gregory "Elsie" MacGill was born on the 27^th in 1905 in Vancouver, British Colombia, Canada. She was the first woman elected to the Engineering Institute of Canada. She was hired as Chief Aeronautical Engineer at Canada Car & Foundry, the first woman in the world to hold that position. During World War II, she was selected to design and build the Hawker Hurricane, a plane thought by many to be responsible for England’s success in the Battle of Britain. Her work earned her the nickname Queen of the Hurricanes. She was well aware of the unique position she held in the world of engineering and remarked, “My presence in the University of Toronto's engineering classes in 1923 certainly turned a few heads. Although I never learned to fly myself, I accompanied the pilots on all test flights – even the dangerous first flight – of any aircraft I worked on.”

Henry Fabre was a French aviator from Marseilles, France. On the 28^th in 1910 at the controls of Le Canard, a plane he had designed and built, Fabre lifted off the surface the Etang de Berre, a body of water adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea and successfully completed the first flight by a seaplane.

Warner Leroy Baxter was born on the 29^th in 1889, in Columbus, Ohio. He moved with his widowed mother to San Francisco, California in 1889, allowing him plenty of time to adjust to his new surroundings before the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake would force the family to live in a tent for a couple of weeks. Once firmly and safely ensconced on the left coast, Baxter was drawn to Hollywood and managed to have some success as an actor. In 1921, he got his first starring role in the movie Sheltered Daughters. It was as the Cisco Kid in the movie In Old Arizona, the first all-talking movie, that he finally achieved true star status.

Crawford Williamson Long[iv] was born in Danielsville, Georgia in the early years of the 19^th century. He would survive infancy and go on to become a physician, surgeon, and pharmacist. One of his patients, the unfortunate James M. Venable came to him with a rather nasty tumor growing on his neck (Venable’s neck, not Long’s). On the 30^th in 1842, Dr. Long removed the tumor in the first operation using general anesthesia, a feat that was in all likelihood greatly appreciated by Mr. Venable.

On the 31^st in 1547, Francis I, King of France[v] died. His death was immediately followed by Henry II’s coronation as king. I am sure that Francis would disagree but this all worked surprisingly well because the date was also Henry’s 39^th birthday which meant that the royal bakers only had to make one cake. While Francis managed to have a long and happy reign, Henry would not share that happy feature with him. Henry was rather fond of jousting and similar recreational activities. On June 30^th 1559, Henry traveled to the Place des Vosges in Paris to participate in a joust to celebrate the signing of the Peace Treaty of Cateau-Cambr?sis, which ended the war with his enemies of long standing, the Habsburgs of Austria. Now tell me what the odds of what follows happening is, o.k.? In the joust, his opponent’s lance suddenly shattered. A small piece of it flew through the open space on his visor.. It penetrated Henry’s eye, then travelled through his brain and ultimately exited through his ear. Henry would linger until July 31, in which could only have been excruciating painful

[1] Titus Oates was a conspirator in attempts to kill King Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Titus is ranked first on the BBC’s the list of the 17^th century’s 100 worst Britons. In the list of the worst Britons in the last 1000 years, Oates is placed in third place.

[1] Stanley would enlist at first in the Confederacy’s army during the American civil war. He was taken prisoner by the Union and would then switch sides. Once in the Union army, he would desert and enlist in the Union’s navy, from which he would also desert.

[1] He’s the guy who sent Jacques Cartier to explore the St. Lawrence seaway in Canada.

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

[ii] Titus Oates was a conspirator in attempts to kill King Charles II in the late seventeenth century. Titus is ranked first on the BBC’s the list of the 17^th century’s 100 worst Britons. In the list of the worst Britons in the last 1000 years, Oates is placed in third place.

[iii] Stanley would enlist at first in the Confederacy’s army during the American civil war. He was taken prisoner by the Union and would then switch sides. Once in the Union army, he would desert and enlist in the Union’s navy, from which he would also desert.

[iv] Doc Holiday was Long’s cousin.

[v] He’s the guy who sent Jacques Cartier to explore the St. Lawrence seaway in Canada.