On this day,December 7, 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor Hawaii and America entered World War II. I remember the day very well. It was a Sunday and I was in grade school. It seemed like time stopped that Sunday morning because all of the adults were in shock. If you remember President Kennedy being shot in Dallas and the reaction of people, you know what the reaction was back in 1941 to the news. It came to us not…
War is a terrible thing and World War I was a disastrous war with senseless deaths and little accomplished. It began in 1914 and didn’t end until 1918. The main fighting was on the Western Front. There were about 100,000 British, French, American and German troops along the length of the Western Front in 1914. "The Western Front" described a line between land controlled by the Germans on the East and the Allies on the West. There were miles of deep trench…
Today is the anniversary of the death of one of my personal hero's, Dorothy Day, who was born in Brooklyn, NY and died November 29, 1980 at age 84 years. If ever there was the common person’s saint, Dorothy is it. Unlike plastic saints this is a woman who struggled through life trying to find her purpose and making a lot of mistakes on the way. She is someone all of us sinners can relate to. She was raised in San…
The National Geographic channel has an excellent series on the sinking of the Titanic. Seehttp://www.nationalgeographic.com/ I watched a documentary and was very impressed with it. I had always assumed the reason for the sinking was simple and obvious: she hit an iceberg, but it turns out there is a lot more to the story than that. This was the largest ship ever built at the time. She was nearly 900 feet long, twenty five stories high and weighed 46.000 tons….
The Cliveden hotel (pronounced CLIV-d’n) is unique. It is one of the world’s finest luxury hotels located in the heart of the Berkshire countryside outside of London, near Heathrow Airport, and surrounded by 376 acres of gardens and parklands. The River Thames runs through the property. The former home of Nancy Astor, guests have included every British monarch since George the I as well as Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt. This five star hotel is a Victorian three story…
While we were in Europe I read an article from London by John F. Burns about a woman who died there September 2nd. Eileen Nearne, known as Didi , had volunteered, in World War II, to join the Special Operations Executive, a wartime agency known as "Churchill’s secret army." It consisted of some 14,000 agents who were recruited to conduct espionage behind enemy lines during the war. She was born on March 15, 1921 into an Anglo-Spanish family that moved to…
A lot has been written and published about the 1945 disappearance of five aircraft in what is known as the Bermuda Triangle. Five Avengers with fourteen airman flew off on a mission and were never seen again. This flight was designated as flight nineteen. Lots of speculation has been made about the mysterious jinx of the Bermuda Triangle and the disappearance of flight nineteen, but the actual explanation is very probably pilot error. Bermuda Attractions has a well written summary…
Dennis Hevesi has written an obituary for Manfred Gans http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/world/europe/19gans.html that reads like a wonderful short story that could be made into a movie. Gans was a child, living with his parents in Borken, Germany. He had been born there April 27, 1922. His father was a well to do merchant in town and the first Jew to serve on the city council. As life for Jews became more and more difficult under Hitler his parents sent him to England when he…
I was listening to a National Public Radio’s broadcast about President Obama’s new oval office rug http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129609461and was interested to learn about Theodore Parker who was a minister of the Unitarian church (1810-1860). It turns out that Martin Luther King frequently used things Parker had said or written and that one of the quotes in the rug was attributed to King, but had originally been said by Parker. Jamie Stehm wrote an article in the Washington Post Oval Office rug gets…
The Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, also known as the "Wobblies" were a militant labor organization during a time when industry used goons, a willing police force or private guards to violently stop labor organizations. Beatings, shootings and arrests of union workers was common place. The IWW had some 100,000 members at its peak in 1923. They advocated a socialistic or communist ideology and had a reputation for sabotage and violence against industry to achieve labor demands. In Washington State the…
