Broadcast date: MONDAY, 20 November 2000
Poem: “Forty-Five,” by Hayden Carruth, from Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (Copper Canyon Press).
When I was forty-five I lay for hours
beside a pool, the green hazy
springtime water, and watched
the salamanders coupling, how they drifted lazily,
their little hands floating before them,
aimlessly in and out of the shadows, fifteen
or twenty of them, and suddenly two
would dart together and clasp
one another belly to belly
the way we do, tender and vigorous, and then
would let go and drift away
at peace, lazily,
in the green pool that was their world
and for a while was mine.
It’s the birthday of writer Deborah Eisenberg, born in Chicago (1945), best known for her short story collections: Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986) and Under the 82nd Airborne (1992).
"I wish I were faster, and more fluent, but it just takes many months of scrabbling around in swampy territory to figure out what it is that I want. There's always a point at which I think I have a final draft, then I read it and ask myself, 'Why have I written this?' Then I go back and write it again and that's the final draft."
It’s the birthday of South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, born in Springs, an East Rand mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa (1923). Her father was a Jewish jeweler originally from Latvia, and her mother was British. She went to a convent school where she started writing at the age of nine. Her first short story, Come Again Tomorrow (1938), appeared in a Johannesburg magazine when she was 15. By her 20's she had her first piece accepted by the New Yorker, which has been publishing her ever since. Her sixteen collections of short stories and thirteen novels often explore the issue of race in South Africa, and deal with relationships among white radicals, liberals, and blacks. Her best known novel is probably The Conservationist (1974), which won the Booker Prize in Great Britain.
It’s the birthday of journalist and commentator (Alfred) Alistair Cooke, born in Manchester, England (1908). He first came to the United States in 1932, on a scholarship to study theater at Yale University. He came back as a commentator on American culture and society with a weekly, 15-minute radio program, Letter from America, which began in 1946. It was broadcast to fifty-two countries on the BBC World Service, and was the longest running radio program in history.
It’s the birthday of cartoonist Chester Gould, born in Pawnee, Oklahoma (1900), creator of Dick Tracy, who first appeared in the Detroit Daily Mirror in 1931. Originally called Plainclothes Tracy, Dick was a clean-cut, square-jawed, plainclothes detective who faced an ugly assortment of villains with names like Mole and Pruneface. The comic strip also featured a “Crimestopper Notebook,” which offered tips on crime prevention.
It’s the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, born in Marshfield, Missouri (1889), for whom the Hubble Telescope is named. He went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received a law degree. He passed the Kentucky bar exam in 1913, but gave up practicing law after one year to return to Chicago for a doctorate in astronomy. “I chucked the law for astronomy,” he said, “and I knew that even if I were second or third-rate, it was astronomy that mattered.” Hubble went to work at Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, where he discovered that there are other galaxies outside the Milky Way, opening up a whole new field of astronomy. He later discovered that these distant galaxies were moving away from the Milky Way; in other words, the concept of the expanding universe, which has been called “the most spectacular astronomical discovery of the twentieth century."
Broadcast date: TUESDAY, 21 November 2000
Poem: “Pre-Holiday PMS,” by Ginger Andrews, from An Honest Answer (Story Line Press).
I don't want to be thankful this year.
I don't want to eat turkey and I could care
if I never again tasted
your mother's cornbread stuffing.
I hate sweet potato pie. I hate mini marshmallows.
I hate doing dishes while you watch football.I hate Christmas. I hate name-drawing.
I hate tree-trimming, gift-wrapping,
and Rudolph the zipper-necked red-nosed reindeer.
I just want to skip the whole merry mess—
unless, of course, you'd like to try
to change my mind. You could start
by telling me I'm pretty and leaving me
your charge cards
and all your cash.
It’s the birthday of English novelist Beryl Bainbridge, born in Liverpool, England (1933). Her books include The Birthday Boys (1993), which was fashioned around Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole; and The Dressmaker (1973), about a young woman who lives with her two unmarried aunts in Liverpool during World War Two.
It’s the birthday of novelist Marilyn French, born in New York City (1929). She wrote her thesis on James Joyce (1976), and a year later came out with her novel The Women’s Room (1977), which became a huge success and enabled French to write and publish without doubt and anxiety about money. Her other titles include Her Mother's Daughter (1987), Our Father (1993), and Women's History of the World (2000).
It’s the birthday of children’s novelist Elizabeth George Speare, born in Melrose, Massachusetts (1908). She’s best known for her book The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958), about a sixteen-year old girl who becomes caught up in a witch hunt in colonial New England.
It’s the birthday of tenor sax player Coleman Hawkins, born in St. Joseph, Missouri (1901). He picked up the tenor saxophone--which, up to that time, was considered a kind of vaudeville novelty instrument--when he was nine; it was Coleman Hawkins, more than anyone else, who developed the tenor saxophone into one of the most popular jazz instruments. It was during his decade with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra (1923-1934) that Hawkins developed as a soloist. In 1934, Hawkins traveled to Europe, where he stayed for five years, playing with most of the great European jazzmen, like Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. When war broke out in Europe, Hawkins returned to the United States (1939), where he laid down his most celebrated recording, “Body and Soul.”
It’s the birthday of French philosopher and writer Voltaire, born François Marie Arouet, in Paris (1694). He studied law, but dropped it to become a writer. He produced a series of satirical poems which landed him in the Bastille for a year. Twice in his life, he had leave France because of what he’d written on political subjects. The publication of his anti-establishment Philosophical Letters forced him to flee to the country in 1734, and he didn’t return for 28 years. His best known work is the philosophical tale Candide (1766), in which the optimistic Dr. Pangloss declares, “All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”
On this day in 1620, 41 men aboard the Mayflower, at anchor off Cape Cod, signed what was called the “Mayflower Compact,” a document which created a body politic and bound the signers to its laws. The Mayflower Compact became the foundation of the government established by the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
Broadcast date: WEDNESDAY, 22 November 2000
Poem: “Ever,” by Richard Tillinghast, from Six Mile Mountain (Story Line Press).
And when she was gone
the silver lost its frail brilliance,
the cut glass cobwebbed,
the clocks ran down.The two brothers
in the story she would read us on Christmas Eve
never made their way in from the blizzard,
never rescued the beggar-woman from the snowdrift
or laid their pennies on the alter,
or found out why the chimes rang.
Today is St. Cecilia’s Day, dedicated to the patron saint of music.
On this day in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullet while riding in a motorcade in downtown Dallas. Millions of Americans learned the news as Walter Cronkite read the wire copy: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States is dead.” Three rifle shots had apparently been fired from the sixth floor of a building along the motorcade route. Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the shooting, and two days later he was shot and killed in the Dallas police station by a local nightclub owner, Jack Ruby. President Kennedy’s body was flown back to Washington, where his casket lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda, on the same black-draped platform which nearly a century earlier had borne the casket of Abraham Lincoln.
It’s the birthday of English composer Benjamin Britten, born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England (1913). His works include the operas Peter Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951), the Ceremony of Carols (1942), and his War Requiem, written for the re-consecration of Coventry Cathedral (1962).
On this day in 1906, delegates to the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin chose the letters S.O.S. as the new international distress signal. S.O.S., represented in Morse code by three dots, three dashes, and three dots, stands for “Save Our Souls.”
It’s the birthday of American pianist, singer and songwriter Hoagland Howard (“Hoagy”) Carmichael, born in Bloomington, Indiana (1899). Largely self-taught, he went on to compose such hits as “Two Sleepy People” (1939), “In the Cool Cool Cool of the Evening” (1951), and “Stardust” (1927).
It’s the birthday of French leader Charles de Gaulle, born in Lille, France (1890). He served as a lieutenant in World War One, and when the Germans invaded France in 1940, de Gaulle led one of the few successful tank operations against the enemy. After the Nazi-backed Vichy government came to power in France, de Gaulle fled to London, where he organized a Free French resistance movement and a provisional French government. After the Normandy invasion and the liberation of Paris, de Gaulle’s provisional government became the government of France. De Gaulle resigned the presidency in 1946, and stayed in retirement until he was asked to form a new government in 1958, in response to the crisis precipitated by the Algerian War. When asked about the difficulties he faced as president of France, de Gaulle once quipped, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”
It’s the birthday of English Victorian novelist Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pseudonym, George Eliot, born in Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, England (1819). Her novels include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), and her masterpiece, Middlemarch (1872).
Broadcast date: THURSDAY, 23 November 2000
Poem: “The Wild Swans at Coole,” by William Butler Yeats.
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
Today is Thanksgiving Day, first celebrated by the Pilgrims and ninety Wampanoag Indians at Plymouth, Massachusetts in early December 1621, after the Pilgrims’ first year in the colony. Thanksgiving was proclaimed a national holiday more than 200 years later, in October of 1863. The proclamation, made by President Abraham Lincoln, was the result of a long and untiring campaign by Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set the third Thursday in November as Thanksgiving. This was changed to the fourth Thursday in November by a joint proclamation of Congress in 1941.
Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade takes place today along Broadway in New York City. The parade began in the 1920s when employees of the department store marched down Broadway from 145th Street to 34th Street to celebrate the American holiday. Giant helium-filled balloons depicting cartoon characters became a parade tradition in 1927
Another Thanksgiving tradition is football. When the Intercollegiate Football Association was formed in 1876, it set its championship game for Thanksgiving Day. By 1893, football was so firmly a part of Thanksgiving Day holiday, that the New York Herald could complain on its editorial page: “Thanksgiving Day is no longer a solemn festival to God for mercies given.… It is a holiday granted by the State and the Nation to see a game of football.”
On this day in 1903, the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso made his debut in the United States, singing the role of the Duke in Verdi’s Rigoletto at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
It’s the birthday of the silent Marx Brother, Adolph Arthur “Harpo” Marx, born in New York City (1888).
On this day in 1874, Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd was first published, by Smith, Elder, and Company in London. The novel, which had earlier been serialized in Cornhill Magazine, was Hardy’s first great success as a novelist.
Broadcast date: FRIDAY, 24 November 2000
Poem: “Winter Winds Cold and Blea,” by John Clare.
Winter winds cold and blea
Chilly blows o'er the lea:
Wander not out to me,
Jenny so fair,
Wait in thy cottage free.
I will be there.Wait in thy cushioned chair
Wi' thy white bosom bare.
Kisses are sweetest there:
Leave it for me.
Free from the chilly air
I will meet thee.How sweet can courting prove,
How can I kiss my love
Muffled in hat and glove
From the chill air?
Quaking beneath the grove,
What love is there!Lay by thy woollen vest,
Drape no cloak o'er thy breast:
Where my hand oft hath pressed,
Pin nothing there:
Where my head droops to rest,
Leave its bed bare.
It’s the birthday of editor and commentator William F. (Frank) Buckley, Jr., born in New York City (1925), the grandson of an immigrant who amassed a huge fortune in the oil industry. In 1955, Buckley founded the conservative journal National Review.
It’s the birthday of journalist Eric Severeid, born in Velva, North Dakota (1912). For thirty-eight years he was a correspondent and commentator for CBS, first on radio and then on the CBS Evening News. He came out with a memoir, Not So Wild a Dream, in 1976.
It’s the birthday of American composer and pianist Scott Joplin, “the King of Ragtime,” born in Bowie county, Texas (1868). He came to fame with The Maple Leaf Rag (1899).
It’s the birthday of American architect Cass Gilbert, born in Zanesville, Ohio (1859). He joined the New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White which sent him to oversee some work in St. Paul, Minnesota. He got his first big break in 1896, when he was commissioned to design the new Minnesota State Capitol. Gilbert then moved to New York, where he received the commission for the U.S. Custom House (1899-1905), and the 60-story Woolworth Building. He also designed the monumental Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., and the campuses of the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis), the University of Texas (Austin), and Oberlin College, in Ohio.
On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was first published, selling out its first printing of 1,250 copies on the first day. The full title of Darwin’s book is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Species in the Struggle for Life. Darwin presented the evidence for the process of evolution, and sought to explain it by means of the theory of “natural selection,” often referred to as “the survival of the fittest.”
It’s the birthday of French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, born in Albi, France (1864). In the 1880’s he settled in Montmartre, and became known for his paintings of prostitutes, barmaids and cabaret stars, as in “At the Moulin Rouge” (1892).
It’s the birthday of Italian author Carlo Lorenzini, who wrote under the name Carlo Collodi, in Florence, Tuscany (1826). As a young man, Collodi was an ardent supporter of the Risorgimento--the movement for Italian independence from Austria. He worked as a journalist to support the cause, and in 1848, when independence was achieved with the founding of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, Collodi began to write books for children. His most famous book was Pinocchio (1880), about a wooden puppet who wants to become a real boy.
Broadcast date: SATURDAY, 25 November 2000
Poem: “Patience,” by Kay Ryan, from Say Uncle (Grove Press).
Patience is
wider than one
once envisioned,
with ribbons
of rivers
and distant
ranges and
tasks undertaken
and finished
with modest
relish by
natives in their
native dress.
Who would
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with
its own harvests.
Or that in
time's fullness
the diamonds
of patience
couldn't be
distinguished
from the genuine
in brilliance
or hardness.
It’s the birthday of poet, novelist and critic Robert Welch, born in Cork, Ireland (1947). Welch is the author of Secret Societies (1997), a book of poems; Groundwork (1997), a novel; The Abbey Theatre, 1899-1999 (2000), a history of Dublin’s great national theater; and is the editor of The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature (1996).
It’s the birthday of English playwright and short story writer Shelagh Delaney, born in Salford, Lancashire (1939). She wrote her first play, A Taste of Honey (1958), at the age of nineteen.
It’s the birthday of American composer Virgil Thomson, born in Kansas City, Missouri (1896). He studied music at Harvard, and then went to Paris to study with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger. It was there that he met Gertrude Stein, who wrote the librettos for two of Thomson’s most famous works: the operas Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), and The Mother of Us All (1947), based on the life of Susan B. Anthony.
It’s the birthday of novelist Helen Hooven Santmyer, born in Cincinnati, Ohio (1895). At the age of 87 she came out with her best selling novel ...And Ladies of the Club.
It’s the birthday of American naturalist and writer Joseph Wood Krutch, born in Knoxville, Tennessee (1893). While working on a biography of Henry David Thoreau (published in 1948), he became interested in natural history and he turned to nature writing. After moving to Arizona in 1950, he wrote The Desert Year, The Voice of the Desert, The Grand Canyon, and The Forgotten Peninsula (about Baja California).
It’s the birthday of temperance reformer Carry Nation, born in Garrard County, Kentucky (1846). She became known across the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s for her personal war against liquor traffic. In 1892, she founded a chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. Several years later, when it became clear that more radical methods were needed, she stormed into a local saloon singing temperance hymns and calling down the wrath of God. Soon she was traveling throughout Kansas, smashing up bars with her trademark hatchet. After the turn of the century, she turned to the Eastern lecture circuit to spread her temperance message, and made money on the side by selling miniature souvenir hatchets.
It’s the birthday of Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, born in Fife, Scotland (1835). Carnegie immigrated to western Pennsylvania with his family when he was twelve years old, and quickly found his first job as a bobbin boy in a local cotton factory. He rose quickly in the business world: before he was 40, he had founded what would become the Carnegie Steel Company, which, through shrewd management and technological innovation, came to dominate the steel industry in the late 19th century. In 1900, Carnegie sold his company to J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel Corporation for 250 million dollars. He spent the rest of his life giving away his vast wealth, and by the time he died, he had given away about 350 million dollars. Among other things, he endowed the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Carnegie Hall, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and 2,509 public libraries.
Broadcast date: SUNDAY, 26 November 2000
Poem: “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.Then up and spake an old Sailòr,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane."Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast,
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.Down came the storm and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frightened steed,
then leaped her cable's length."Come hither! come hither! my little daughtèr,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."He wrapped her arm in his seamen's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast."O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
Oh say, what may it be?"
"'T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!"
And he steered for the open sea!""O father! I hear the sound of guns,
Oh say, what may it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!""O father! I see a gleaming light,
Oh say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.Then the maiden clasped her hand and prayed
That savèd she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown seaweed,
On the billows fall and rise.Such was the wreck of the Hesperus
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!
On this day in 1942, the movie Casablanca had its premiere at the Hollywood Theater in New York City. The release of the film had been scheduled for June 1943, but was moved up because of the Allied landing in North Africa on November 8, 1942. On the same day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered mandatory gasoline rationing in the United States.
It’s the birthday of Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, born in St. Paul, Minnesota (1922). He studied cartooning in a correspondence school, and started his strip, “Li’l Folks,” for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, in 1947. When he was 28 years old, Schulz took a train to New York City, where his comic strip was picked up by the United Feature Syndicate and renamed Peanuts. It debuted in seven newspapers, but over the years, Peanuts came to appear in more than 2,600 papers in 75 countries, making Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus and Lucy household names for millions of readers.
On this day in 1832, the first streetcar began operation in New York City.
