Wednesday

Sep. 16, 1998

Aunt Celia

by Carl Dennis

WEDNESDAY 9/16

Today's Reading: "Aunt Celia, 1961" by Carl Dennis from RANKING THE WISHES, published by Penguin Books (1997).

It's the birthday of literary critic, professor and editor HENRY LOUIS GATES JR., in Keyser, West Virginia, in 1950, an expert on black literature whose critical works include Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self and The Signifying Monkey: Towards A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (1987).

Writer JOHN KNOWLES, born in Fairmont, West Virginia, on this day in 1926, is best known as the author of the novel A Separate Peace (1960), about high school boys whose youth is drawing to a premature end during the war summer of 1942. His other novels include Morning in Antibes (1962), The Paragon (1971) and A Stolen Past (1983).

Blues guitarist B.B. KING, who shortened his on-air name from Beale Street Blues Boy, to B.B., was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, in 1925.

J. C. PENNEY, the founder of Penney's department stores, was born in Hamilton, Missouri, in 1875.

Railroad builder JAMES J. HILL was born in Wellington, Ontario, in 1838, later settling in Saint Paul where he took over the St. Paul and Pacific Railroads which became the Great Northern Railway.

THE PILGRIMS set sail from Plymouth, England, on this day in 1620 in the MAYFLOWER, which carried about 100 passengers across the Atlantic and arrived off the tip of Cape Cod on November 21. The Pilgrims were Puritans who had separated from the Church of England and had first gone to Holland to escape Charles I's efforts to suppress their religious beliefs.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®

 

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