Tuesday
Nov. 3, 1998
Thanatopsis
Today's Reading: Selected lines from "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878).
It was on this day in 1948 that the Chicago Tribune headline read "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Democrat Harry S. Truman had taken over the presidency after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, and had run against the Republican governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey. All the opinion polls showed Dewey would be an easy winner, but Truman won by a 114 electoral-vote margin.
It's the birthday of Australian writer Kath Walker in 1920 in Queensland, Australia; she later took an aboriginal name, OODGEROO NOONUCCAL. She was one of the first aboriginal writers to be published.
It's the birthday of journalist JAMES RESTON, one-time executive editor and vice president of The New York Times, born in 1909 in Clydebank, Scotland. His family emigrated to the United States when he was 10 years old, and he broke into journalism as a schoolboy hanging around the Dayton, Ohio, Daily News, answering the telephone and taking down sports scores. He started his professional life at the New York Times in 1939 as a London reporter.
It's the birthday of IGNATIUS DONNELLY'S birthday, the novelist and reformer, born in 1831 in Philadelphia. He wrote science fiction novels in the 1880s and '90s, predicting such things as radio, television, and poison gas.
It's the birthday of poet and journalist WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, born in Cummington, Massachusetts in 1794. He served for 50 years as the editor of the New York Evening Post.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®