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art, books, fiction, History, literature, mental-health, one-hundred-years-ago, poetry, reading, Writing
One Hundred Years Ago (with additional commentary from me)
February 6
The skull of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa is stolen from his grave in Chihuahua. Its whereabouts are unknown to this day. (His widow, Luz, keeps the touring car in which Villa was shot, in 1923, in the front yard of their hacienda. It becomes a planter.)
March 4
A writer in in Budapest commits suicide and leaves behind a note containing a crossword puzzle. The puzzle is yet to be solved.
May 9: Explorer Richard E. Byrd and his Navy Chief Aviation pilot Floyd Bennett claim to be the first people to fly over the North Pole, in their plane named “Josephine Ford,” which, if you ask me, looks far to small to make such a demanding trip.
May 12: Norwegian Roald Amundsen and his fifteen-strong crew fly over the North Pole in their “Norge” airship, becoming the first verified explorers to accomplish the feat. Seventy years later, it’s revealed that “Josephine Ford” had sprung an oil leak and the Americans had to turn back before they reached the Pole.
Damn.
June 23
The first Scholastic Aptitude Test (now commonly referred to as SAT) is administered to 8,000 high school students. The test, based on a World War I aptitude test administered to immigrants, is aimed at keeping Jewish students, disturbingly bright and hard-working, out of Ivy League colleges. I am not making this up.
Read more: 1926: Oh, What a Year!August 23
“The Latin Lover” Rudolph Valentino, Hollywood silent movie star, dies suddenly of perforated ulcers, aged 31. His condition is named after him as “Valentino’s syndrome”. The following day, 60,000 mourners cause a riot in New York trying to reach Valentino’s body. (Part of Valentino’s 1921 film The Sheik was filmed in the Guadalupe Dunes.)
September 20
The North Side Gang attempts to assassinate powerful mob boss and rival Al Capone at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois. Despite over a thousand rounds of submachine gun ammunition being fired, Capone escapes unharmed. (Capone favored the Central Coast as prime territory for bootlegging. By tradition, the photo below shows Capone shooting pool at what is today the Cool Cat Cafe in Pismo Beach. Those windows remain.)
October
6. Against the St. Louis Cardinals, The Yankees’ Babe Ruth hits three home runs in a World Series game, the first player ever to do so.
14. A.A. Milne’s children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh published by Methuen & Co. in London. (Eeyore fan here.)
22. Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel The Sun Also Rises is published. (About bulls but not balls.)
31. On Hallowe’en, escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini dies from sepsis after suffering a ruptured appendix during a dangerous escape attempt from a water tank.
November
3. Sharpshooter Annie Oakley, star of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and later the subject of the musical Annie Get Your Gun, dies in Greenville, Ohio aged 66. (Sitting Bull, who befriended her, called her “Little Miss Sure Shot; the Wild West Show visited San Luis Obispo twice in the early 1900s.)
13. P. L. Travers’ short story “Mary Poppins and the Match Man” appears in The Christchurch Sun in New Zealand, marking the first published appearance of the eponymous character. (Mary’s a Kiwi!)
December
3. Mystery and thriller writer Agatha Christie disappears from her home in Surrey, England. She would be found 11 days later at a spa in Harrogate, purportedly suffering from amnesia.
5. Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin is released in America, being shown in New York. (The stairway shootout in Kevin Costner’s The Untouchables is an homage to a similar scene in Potemkin.)
5. French Impressionist painter Claude Monet dies in Giverny, aged 86. The only time I have ever time-traveled was thanks to Monet.
https://jimgregory52.com/2023/04/09/time-traveling-with-monet/
11. Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, publishes Volume 2 of his manifesto Mein Kampf. (It is the safest place for Germans to hide their money, in that no one has ever read Volume 2.)
31. Buster Keaton’s brilliant film The General–his unlikely hero, a Southerner, steals a locomotive during the Civil War—debuts in Tokyo.
Thank you to historic newspapers.com
A Work in Progress 