BACK to Blog Posts

April 14, 2018
April 14th, 2018

Quiz: What do these people have in common? Issac Stern, Pincas Zukerman, Midori, Ytshak Perelman, Yehudi Mehunin.

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What was Bedlam?
History for 4/14/2018
Birthdays: King Phillip III of Spain, Christian Huygens, Arnold Toynbee, Sir John Gielgud, Menachem Schneerson- the Grand Rabbi of Chabad, Papa Doc Duvalier- Haitian dictator 1907, Robert Doisneau, Rod Steiger, Loretta Lynn, Morton Sobotnick, Frank Serpico, Pete Rose, Julie Christie, Kenneth Mars, Anthony Michael Hall, Steve Martin is 67, Sarah Michelle Geller is 40, Adrien Brody is 44. Katsuhiro Otomo

69AD- Battle of Bedriacum- After the death of Nero, several Roman generals turned their legions around and marched to Rome. In this battle General Otho was killed by the Gaulic Legions of Aulus Vitellius. He would soon be killed by Vespasian and his son Titus.

73A.D. MASADA- After the great Jewish revolt against Rome was crushed by Titus and Jerusalem destroyed, two legions remained behind to do mopping up of guerrillas. A group of zealots, Essene rabbis and their families held out in a mountaintop stronghold for two years in an epic siege.
The night before the Zealots realized the Roman siege engines were about to breach the walls. They resolved to not be taken alive. This day soldiers of the Tenth Legion Felix broke into the quiet works. They found 960 corpses. The zealots had preferred mass suicide to slavery. They killed their families, and then themselves.
Contrary to modern sensibilities, the Romans were not horrified by the ghastly scene. Greco-Roman ethics considered suicide a rational way out of a bad situation. They expressed grudging admiration of their Jewish foes. The reason we even know about this incident was because a Jewish turncoat named Flavius Josephus wrote its history. The Masada fortress was rediscovered in 1947.

1471- Battle of Barnet- battle in the English War of the Roses in which power player Warwick the Kingmaker was killed by King Edward IV.

1543- Explorer Bartolomeo Ferrelo returned to Spain with news of a big new harbor he discovered on the Pacific coast of California that he named for his patron Saint Francis- San Francisco Bay.

1777- During the American Revolution, British loyalist counterfeiters with a printing press on board the HMS Phoenix stationed in New York Harbor, began to make phony Continental money to undermine the Yankee economy. The Continental dollar became so worthless that “Not worth a Continental” was a favorite phrase.

1828- The first edition of Noah Webster’s Dictionary published. In the 70.000 entries Webster made it a political point to separate American English from the King’s English, and substituted Spanish roots for words in the place of Norman French roots. This is when “Colour” became “Color”, Theatre became Theater, and Checque became Check.

1865- ABRAHAM LINCOLN ASSASSINATED- Well known actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot the President in the back of the head as he watched the play "Our American Cousin". Lincoln had seen the play several times and knew most of the lines by heart. Booth leapt onto the stage and shouting something. It may have been” Sic Semper Tyrannus-And thus with Tyrants” the motto of the State of Virginia, or “The South is Avenged”. No one is completely sure.
That same night Booths accomplice Lewis Paine, stabbed Secretary of State William Seward in his bed. When Seward’s son tried to stop him Paine broke his skull and ran out into the street shouting "I am Mad!" Another man named George Atzenrodt was supposed to kill the Vice President but he lost his nerve and did nothing.

In the box with the Lincolns were a Major Henry Rathbone and his fiance' Miss Clara Harris. Lincoln had asked General & Mrs. Grant to join them at first but the Grant's declined. Nellie Grant didn’t like Mary Lincoln. Anyhow, to Clara Harris this was a pretty lousy first date, watching the president get a bullet in the brain, her dress splattered with Major Rathbone's blood from being slashed with a knife and seeing Mrs. Lincoln go insane, but she married Rathbone anyway. Rathbone was never the same man. Ten years later while living as ambassador to the German city of Hanover, Rathbone murdered Clara, and was confined in an asylum for the criminally insane.

1871- Canada set it’s currency in dollars, cents and mills.

1883- Leopold Delibes’ opera Lakme premiered in Paris.

1906- The Azusa Street Church opened. Rev William Seymour began the first Pentecostal-Charismatic Church, a movement that spread around the world.

1910-At a baseball game in Washington, William Howard Taft becomes the first President to throw out the season's first ball.

1912- RMS TITANIC SINKS- At 11:40PM The unsinkable luxury liner going too fast and 14 miles off course strikes an iceberg and goes down, taking millionaires and immigrants alike. As the stricken liner sank, the cruiser SS Californian watched a short distance away. They could have saved more people but their radioman had gone to bed, and they thought the emergency flares lighting up the night sky were party skyrockets. No one was saved until the SS Carpathia arrived on the scene at dawn.

A strange fact is in 1898 a writer named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called Futility, in which an 880 ft luxury liner sank on her maiden voyage in the month of April. The fictitious ship was named the Titan.

1925- WGN broadcasts its first regular season baseball game. Quinn Ryan behind the mike as Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Cubs defeated the Pirates on Opening Day, 8-2.

1927- The first Volvo automobile rolled off the assembly line in Goteborg Sweden.

1930- Russian poet Vladimir Mayakowsky shot himself. This was convenient for Stalin because Mayakowsky had grown disillusioned with the Soviet regime. Stalin made a great public spectacle of his funeral.

1931- In Spain Socialists and Anarchists united to drive out the King Alphonso XIII and proclaim the Second Spanish Republic. Salud Republica!

1935- THE DUST BOWL - The drought conditions and over farming in the plains states had been building for years but this storm climaxed the decade long event. On this day a big dust storm struck Cimarron County Oklahoma. It blacked out the sun over five states. Cattle choked, calves and children disappeared in the drifts. Not even weeds would grow in it. The dust got through cracks in houses and when you awoke in the morning the only clean spot on your pillow was where your head lay.
After this storm the migration of farmers rose until the estimate was 40% of the populations of the drought stricken areas. People from Oklahoma, Nebraska, Iowa, Texas and Missouri piled their worldly goods onto their jalopies and got on Route 66 West to California. They were nicknamed 'the Oakies, and their plight was dramatized in the songs of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath.

1956- In Redwood City, Cal. Charles Ginsburg, Ray Dolby and Charles Anderson demonstrated the first videotape recording machine. They were going then for a mere $75,000 each.

1960- The musical Bye Bye Birdie opened on Broadway.

1962- Bob Dylan recorded “Blowing in the Wind”.


1969- The first regular season baseball game played outside the United States. The Montreal Expos play their first home game, treating 29,184 fans at Jarry Park to an 8-7 win over the St Louis Cardinals. Speaking about Expo fans, Cub announcer Harry Carrey noted: "They discovered 'boo' is pronounced the same in French as it is English.”

1986- President Reagan ordered U.S. military places bomb Libya in retaliation for a terrorist bombing in a nightclub in West Germany. 15 civilians were killed including a son of Libyan President Mohamar Kaddafi. .

2005- Baseball returned to Washington D.C., 34 years after the Washington Senators left to Texas, the Washington Nationals played their first game.

2008- Ollie Johnston, the last animator of Walt Disney’s original Nine Old Men, passed away at age 96.

Yesterday’s Question: What was Bedlam?

Answer: Bedlam was the original mental asylum in London, a corruption of St Mary of Bethlehem. Inmates were held in brutal conditions. In 1930 the hospital reformed and moved to a different site. The name Bedlam later came to mean insane or chaotic conditions.