Wednesday

Oct. 7, 1998

Soaking Up the Sun

by Tom Hennen

WEDNESDAY 10/7

Today's Reading: "Soaking Up Sun" by Tom Hennen from CRAWLING OUT THE WINDOW, published by Black Hat Press, Goodhue, Minnesota, 1997.

It's the birthday of Australian novelist THOMAS KENEALLY, author of "Schindler's Ark," which was made into the film SCHINDLER'S LIST. The book won Britain's Booker Prize in 1982.

It's the birthday of writer LEROI JONES, now known as IMAMU AMIRI BARAKA, born in Newark, New Jersey, 1934, one of the leaders of the 1960's African American arts movement.

It's the birthday of the mystery writer HELEN MACINNES, born in Scotland, 1907. She wrote "Above Suspicion," "Decision at Delphi," and many others. In "The Venetian Affair" she wrote, "How meager one's life becomes when it is reduced to its basic facts. And the last, most complete reduction is on one's tombstone: a name, and two dates."

It's the birthday of Danish physicist NILS BOHR, born in Copenhagen in 1885, who won the 1922 Nobel Prize for leading research into the new science of atomic physics. Late one night in 1943, the Danish resistance whisked him and his family out of the country in a fishing boat to Sweden, where he was then flown to England to help work on the nuclear bomb.

It's the birthday in 1879 of JOE HILL, the labor organizer and songwriter, who got caught up in a Salt Lake City murder-robbery trial and was convicted of the crime, though thousands of demonstrators, and even President Woodrow Wilson, thought Hill was innocent and that he'd been accused because of his radical labor organizing.

JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY, "The Hoosier Poet," was born on this day in 1849 in Greenfield, Indiana. He wrote "Little Orphan Annie," "The Raggedy Man," and "When the Frost Is on the Punkin'."

It's the anniversary of ZELDA FITZGERALD's 1932 novel, SAVE ME THE WALTZ.

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

 

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