Broadcast date: MONDAY, 18 December 2000

Poem: Lines from “The Everlasting Gospel,” by William Blake.

From "The Everlasting Gospel"

The Vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my Visions Greatest Enemy
Thine has a great hook nose like thine
Mine has a snub nose like to mine
Thine is the Friend of All Mankind
Mine speaks in parables to the Blind
Thine loves the same world that mine hates
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates
Socrates taught that Melitus
Loathd as a Nations bitterest Curse
And Caiphus was in his own Mind
A benefactor of Mankind
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read white

It was on this day in 1972 that a string of American B-52 bombers, 70 miles long, flew into the North Vietnam capital of Hanoi and dropped their payloads on the city. The 11-day campaign, called "Operation Linebacker Two," was the biggest aerial blitz of the Vietnam War.

It's the birthday of Harold Varmus, born in Oceanside, New York (1939). Varmus and J. Michael Bishop shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1989 for their discovery of cancer-causing genes called oncogenes.

On this day in 1917, the United States Congress approved the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, the first official step toward a nationwide Prohibition of the sale of “intoxicating liquors.”

It's the birthday of jazz musician Fletcher Henderson, born in Cuthbert, Georgia (1897). He attended Atlanta University, majoring in chemistry and mathematics, then moved to New York City to find work as a chemist. Instead, he was hired to play piano on a Hudson River boat, and several years later (1924) he formed The Fletcher Henderson Orchestra. His innovative arrangements, which emphasized the horns and left room for improvised solos between arranged passages, shaped a new sound for big band jazz.

It's the birthday of baseball legend Ty Cobb, born Tyrus Raymond Cobb, in Narrows, Georgia (1886). Cobb was a 175-pounder who stood 6-foot-1, batted left-handed, and threw right-handed. He played most of his career for the Detroit Tigers, and by the time he retired from baseball in 1928, he had set more than 90 records, including highest lifetime batting average (.367), most batting titles (12), and most runs scored (2,245).

It's the birthday today of painter Paul Klee, born on this day near Bern, Switzerland (1879). He went to Munich and became part of group of Expressionist artists known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group. He made drawings that he described as "taking a line for a walk,” and he often featured blocks of color behind characteristically spare figures, spidery lines, and whimsical squiggles. He painted, etched, and drew on a wide range of materials—glass, plywood, cotton, silk, newspaper, celluloid, pieces of tablecloth, fraying burlap, and lined notebook paper.

On this day in 1860, John Crittenden, a U.S. Senator from Kentucky—a slave state—proposed a measure that he hoped would forestall the Civil War. The Crittenden Compromise proposed that slavery should be protected south of the line established in the Missouri Compromise, that the U.S. Congress could not abolish slavery in a slave state, and that the federal government should compensate the owners of fugitive slaves. In March of 1861, the Crittenden Compromise was narrowly defeated in the Senate. Crittenden died during the war; his sons were major generals on opposing sides, one for the Union, the other for the Confederacy.

Broadcast date: TUESDAY, 19 December 2000

Poem: “Housewarming,” by Thomas R. Smith, from The Dark Indigo Current (Holy Cow Press)

Housewarming
In my dream I was the first to arrive
at the old home from the church. Wind
and night had forced through the cracks.
I pushed inside, turned on the lamps,
lit a fire in the stove. Frozen oak
logs stung my fingers; it was good
pain, my hands reddening on the icy
broom-handle as I swept away snow.
On Christmas Eve, I prepared a warm
place for my mother and father, sister
and brothers, grandparents, all my relatives,
none dead, none missing, none angry
with one another, all coming through the woods.

On this day in 1957, The Music Man by Meredith Wilson opened in New York at the Majestic Theater in Manhattan. It’s the story of a small-town librarian named Marian Paroo and a traveling con man, Harold Hill, who sells band instruments to the boys of the town, and plans to skip town before the instruments arrive. It ran for 1,375 performances.

It's the birthday of playwright Howard Sackler, born in Brooklyn (1929). He wrote many plays, including The Great White Hope, about a boxer named Jack Jefferson, based loosely on Jack Johnson, America's first black heavyweight boxing champion. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1969.

It's the birthday of singer Edith Piaf, born Edith Giovanna Gassion, in Paris (1915). When she became a cabaret singer she changed her name to Piaf, which is street slang for sparrow.

It's the birthday of Constance Garnett, born in Brighton, East Sussex, England (1862). She went to Cambridge, where she began studying the Russian language. In 1893, she visited St. Petersburg to check out current writers and books. She met the Tolstoy family, and had dinner with them. She returned to England and began translating Turgenev's complete works, which took her seven years; then she translated Tolstoy's Anna Karenina —which took her just half a year—and then his War and Peace. She moved on to be the first to translate the works of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, not stopping until she was 85 and nearly blind. In all she translated over more than 70 volumes into English.

It's the birthday of Henry Clay Frick, born in West Overton, Pennsylvania (1849). He became a partner of Andrew Carnegie, and, after they feuded and parted ways, Frick made it one of his missions in life to one-up his former colleague. When Carnegie built a mansion in Manhattan, Frick spent five times as much on his own home. When Frick died, he left his home —and his extensive personal art collection—to the city of New York; the museum is now called the Frick Collection.

On this day in 1776, Thomas Paine published the first of 16 "American Crisis" papers to spur on the Revolutionary Army and his fellow colonists. The first paper opened with the words "These are the times that try men's souls." George Washington ordered that the paper be read to all the men getting settled at Valley Forge.

Broadcast date: WEDNESDAY, 20 December 2000

Poem: “Ave Maria Gratia Plena,” by Oscar Wilde.

Ave Maria Gratia Plena
Was this His coming! I had hoped to see
A scene of wondrous glory, as was told
Of some great God who in a rain of gold
Broke open bars and fell on Danae:
Or a dread Vision as when Semele
Sickening for love and unappeased desire
prayed to see God's clear body, and the fire
Caught her brown limbs and slew her utterly:
With such glad dreams I sought this holy place,
And now with wondering eyes and heart I stand
Before this supreme mystery of Love:
Some kneeling girl with passionless pale face,
An angel with a lily in his hand,
And over both the white wings of a Dove.

On this day in 1985, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill establishing a Poet Laureate for the United States. The first laureate, named in 1986, was Robert Penn Warren. The current Poet Laureate is Stanley Kunitz.

In 1957 on this day, 23-year-old Elvis Presley got his induction papers to become a private in the U.S. army.

It’s the birthday of fiction writer Hortense Calisher, born in New York City (1911)—who wrote almost exclusively about New York, where she grew up and lived her entire life. She wrote novels, but is most highly regarded for her short stories, which began appearing in The New Yorker in the 1940s. She once said that the action of a short story is “an apocalypse served in a very small cup.” Her stories tend to inject shocks into a deceptively cool narrative: in one, at a posh dinner table the women all suddenly remove their blouses; in another, a bald woman discards her wig while embracing her lover—then is shunned for her honesty. Some of Calisher’s many novels are False Entry (1961), Queenie (1971), and Age (1987); her story collections include In the Absence of Angels (1951) and The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (1975).

It's the birthday of Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, born near Aldershot, England (1865) and brought to Ireland at a young age by her father, a British colonel. She was glamorous, upper-class, and legendarily beautiful—six feet tall, with cascading red hair. Poet William Butler Yeats met Gonne, by then an actress, in 1891, through the Young Irish Theatre movement he had started. Falling in love, he described her "With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind / That is not natural in an age like this." Yeats stayed a virgin until he was 31 in the hope that she would marry him. She refused his many proposals, preferring to focus all her passion on the cause of Irish independence. She campaigned for land reform, helped tenants fight eviction, advocated for political prisoners, began a program that fed lunch to Dublin school kids, and founded the Daughters of Erin. Yeats wrote a play for her, Cathleen ni Houlihan, in which Gonne played the title role.

On this day in 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. South Carolina suffered badly during the War: 65 percent of the state's men were killed or wounded and much of its land was burned to the ground during General Sherman's march.

On this day in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was completed. A ceremony in New Orleans took down the flag of France and raised the flag of the United States to symbolize the official transfer, which included most of the land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. The purchase doubled the size of America.

Broadcast date: THURSDAY, 21 December 2000

Poem: “When My Dead Father Called,” by Robert Bly, from Eating the Honey of Words: New and Selected Poems (Harper Collins).

When My Dead Father Called

Last night I dreamt my father called to us.
He was stuck somewhere. It took us
A long time to dress, I don't know why.
The night was snowy; there were long black roads.

Finally we reached the little town, Bellingham.
There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,
Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed
The uneven sort of shoes that men wore

In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.
Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps
He left us somewhere once, or did I simply \
Forget he was alone in winter in some town?

It's the winter solstice today, at 1:37 Greenwich Mean Time, the time when the sun is in its southernmost position in the heavens. That means that, in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the shortest day of the year.

At sunset tonight, Hanukkah begins, the first night of the eight-day holiday that celebrates Judas Maccabeus' victory, in 167 BC, over the Syrian-Greek King who had an altar to Zeus built in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. Such desecration of the temple sparked a rebellion by Jewish nationalists. After their victory, the temple was cleansed and rededicated.

On this day in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack in Los Angeles, the day after writing the first episode of Chapter 6 in The Last Tycoon, his unfinished novel about the movie business. He was 44 years old, and had been writing film scripts in Hollywood the previous 3 years. His plan had been for The Last Tycoon to be 60,000 words long—roughly as long as The Great Gatsby—but by the time of his death, he’d already written 70,000 words, and, judging by his outline, was only halfway through the story.

“The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Heinrich Böll, born in Cologne, Germany (1917). He was drafted into the German army when he was 22, and suffered "the frightful fate of being a soldier and having to wish that the war might be lost." His most popular book was The Clown (1963). In 1971, he won the Nobel Prize for what the Nobel committee called "his most grandly conceived work," Group Portrait With Lady, a survey of German life over five decades.

On this day in 1913, Arthur Wynne published a tee-shaped word puzzle or 'word-cross' in the newspaper The New York World; twenty years later, crossword puzzles were in nearly every newspaper in the country.

It's the birthday of Anthony Powell, in Westminster, London (1905), sometimes called "the English Proust" because of his enormous 12 volume novel, A Dance To The Music of Time, a million words long. The series was published in two-year intervals from 1951 to 1975. Powell also wrote four volumes of memoirs and The Fisher King.

It's the birthday of novelist and journalist Dame Rebecca West, born Cecily Fairfield in County Kerry, Ireland (1892).

On this day in 1879, Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen with a different ending than Ibsen had intended. In Ibsen's original version, Nora leaves her husband and children at the end, but in this production, the leading lady wanted Nora to stay. She got her way.

Broadcast date: FRIDAY, 22 December 2000

Poem: “I'll tell you how the Sun rose,” by Emily Dickinson.

I'll tell you how the Sun rose
I'll tell you how the Sun rose —
A Ribbon at a time —
The Steeples swam in Amethyst —
The news, like Squirrels, ran —
The Hills untied their Bonnets —
The Bobolinks — begun —
Then I said softly to myself —
"That must have been the Sun"!
But how he set — I know not —
There seemed a purple stile
That little Yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while —
Till when they reached the other side,
A Dominie in Gray —
Put gently up the evening Bars —
And led the flock away —

It’s the birthday of poet and translator Kenneth Rexroth, born in South Bend, Indiana (1905). When he was 10, his mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis and given just 2 months to live; he went along with her to buy her coffin, and was with her when she died. Three years later, his father died. The boy grew up in a tough part of Chicago, but got to meet Clarence Darrow, Sherwood Anderson, Countee Cullen, Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes. There was a tea room where they used to read and talk about poetry and where jazz was played. While still in his teens, he fell in love with a woman who was 10 years his senior, and followed her East to Greenwich Village. He taught himself Greek, read Plato and other classics, began translating Sappho—and then, with a Japanese primer, translated Oriental poetry. Then he traveled West, out to San Francisco. An early backer of the Beat movement, he wrote poems that at first were heavily influenced by Surrealism but later grew shorter and tighter in form. He translated from Japanese, Chinese, Greek, Latin, and Spanish; his own collections include Bird in the Bush (1959), Assays (1962), and With Eye and Ear (1970).

It’s the birthday of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edward Arlington Robinson, born in Head Tide, Maine (1869), who wrote short dramatic poems describing the people in a small New England village, ‘Tilbury Town,’ very like the place where he grew up.

It’s the birthday of composer Giacomo Puccini, born in Lucca, Tuscany (1858). He wrote La Boheme (1896), Tosca (1900), Madame Butterfly (1904), and Turandot (1924).

It's the birthday today of Thomas Higginson, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1823). He was an abolitionist and social reformer who had written several pieces for The Atlantic Monthly. But the reason we know him today is that, in the spring of 1862, he received a letter and four poems from Emily Dickinson. The letter read: "MR. HIGGINSON—Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive? The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask. Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude. If I make the mistake, that you dared to tell me would give me sincerer honor toward you. I enclose my name, asking you, if you please, sir, to tell me what is true? That you will not betray me it is needless to ask, since honor is its own pawn." He read the poems, but didn’t know what to make of them. He met Emily Dickinson only twice, but after her death, he helped to edit and publish her poems; that is, he re-wrote them to make them acceptable to the readers of his day. It took years to undo his changes.

Broadcast date: SATURDAY, 23 December 2000

Poem: “The Gift,” by William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams Volume II 1939-1962 (New Directions).

The Gift

As the wise men of old brought gifts
   guided by a star
      to the humble birthplace

of the god of love,
   the devils
      as an old print shows
retreated in confusion.

   What could a baby know
      of gold ornaments
or frankincense and myrrh,
   of priestly robes
      and devout genuflections?

But the imagination
   knows all stories
      before they are told
and knows the truth of this one
   past all defection

The rich gifts
   so unsuitable for a child
      though devoutly proffered,
stood for all that love can bring.

   The men were old
      how could they know
of a mother's needs
   or a child's
      appetite?

But as they kneeled
   the child was fed.

      They saw it
and
   gave praise!

      A miracle
had taken place,
   hard gold to love,
a mother's milk!
   before
      their wondering eyes.

The ass brayed
   the cattle lowed.
      It was their nature.

All men by their nature give praise.
   It is all
      they can do.

The very devils
   by their flight give praise.
      What is death,
beside this?

   Nothing. The wise men
      came with gifts
and bowed down
   to worship
      this perfection.

On this day in 1947, three physicists—John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley—demonstrated a transistor to executives at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. That first transistor was crudely constructed from a razor blade, gold foil, an uncoiled paper clip, a piece of plastic, and a sliver of germanium crystal. Nine years later they received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention.

It's the birthday of poet and translator Robert Bly, born in Madison, Minnesota (1926). He was editor of the long running literary magazine The 50s (which later became The 60s). His books of poetry include The Light Around the Body (1967—National Book Award), and Eating the Honey of Words (1999). He’s also the author of the prose books Iron John: A Book about Men (1990) and The Sibling Society (1996).

It's the birthday of Harriet Monroe, born in Chicago (1880). She was 32 years old when she decided to establish a magazine devoted entirely to poetry—and intended to pay poets for their work. In September, 1912, she came out with the first issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. For the next twenty-four years Monroe raised money, awarded prizes, and published Poetry. In 1914 she published Carl Sandburg's controversial "Chicago Poems" and in 1915 printed "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot.

It's the birthday of the man who deciphered the Rosetta Stone, Jean François Champollion, in 1790 in a small town in southwest France. The Rosetta Stone was a black stone covered with inscriptions found by a French officer near the Egyptian town of Rosetta in 1799. There were three bands of text: hieroglyphics on top, Arabic-looking characters in the middle, and Greek on the bottom. It became very famous all across Europe, and Jean François Champollion decided that he wanted to be the first to decipher the its hieroglyphics. He determined which hieroglyphs corresponded to which names of famous people: Alexander, Cleopatra, Augustus, and Nero. Finally, in 1822, he had learned enough characters to understand the structure of the Egyptian language, and had broken the code.

Broadcast date: SUNDAY, 24 December 2000

Poem: “The Oxen,” by Thomas Hardy.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
   'Now they are all on their knees,'
An elder said as we sat in a flock
   By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
   They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
   To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
   In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
   'Come; see the oxen kneel

In lonely barton by yonder coomb
   Our childhood used to know,'
I should go with him in the gloom,
   Hoping it might be so.

Today is Christmas Eve—in Christian homes, the night before the infant Jesus, son of God, was born in Bethlehem. In Mexico, Christmas Eve is the last of nine nights of processions called Las Posadas, which reenact the journey to Bethlehem by Mary and Joseph. In other parts of America, it's traditional to light fires or candles to light the way for Mary and Joseph and their visitors. Cajuns in Louisiana still build large wooden structures all along the Mississippi River levee and light them on Christmas Eve, creating enormous bonfires that can be seen for miles.

On this day in 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was named the Allied Supreme Commander of British and American forces. The appointment was announced during President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chat for Christmas Eve. In that same broadcast, FDR expressed confidence that the Allies would be victorious: "Last year I could not do more than express a hope. Today I express a certainty, though the cost may be high and the time may be long."

It's the birthday of journalist and author I.F. Stone, born Isidor Feinstein, in Philadelphia (1907). He was best known for The I.F. Stone Weekly, a four-page paper that he wrote and published, with his wife Esther, for nearly two decades. During his career, Stone decried the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two and the treatment of migrant farm workers; he pled the cause of Palestinians as well as Israelis; and he exposed lies by big business. He was also an early critic of McCarthyism and of the Vietnam War.

On this day in 1906, a U.S. Weather Service scientist named Reginald Fessenden made the world's first wireless radio broadcast. Fessenden—broadcasting over the Atlantic Ocean from a 400-foot tower at Brant Rock, Massachusetts—sent out a holiday message that reached ships within a radius of 5 miles. At precisely 9 o'clock that evening, Fessenden sent out, using Morse code, a call to all stations within range. He then got on the air, gave a short speech, sang "O Holy Night," accompanying himself on the violin, then passed the microphone to his wife, who read part of the Christmas story from the Bible.

It's the birthday of artist Joseph Cornell, born in Nyack, New York (1903) who made sculpture using found objects. His signature was the Cornell box—small, wood-framed rectangles holding a wide range of objects, such as Hollywood publicity photos, lunar maps, pressed butterflies, small glass bottles, children's jacks, tiny plastic lobsters, pocket-watch faces, postage stamps, stuffed birds, and magazine pictures. His material came from all over—beaches, junk shops, Asian markets, and dime stores: "Everything can be used," he wrote, "but of course one doesn't know it at the time.”

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