Monday
Apr. 12, 1999
Postscript
Poem: "Postscript," by Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
It's the birthday of novelist SCOTT TUROW, in Chicago, 1949, author of the 1989 legal thriller Presumed Innocent, written in a spiral notebook while he was riding to his law office on a Chicago commuter train every day.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT died on this day in 1945 in his vacation home of Warm Springs, Georgia. He was 63 and died of a cerebral hemorrhage. In his will, FDR left nearly a half-million dollars to the Warm Springs Foundation, which was a spa for polio sufferers like himself.
Ten years later on this day, THE SALK VACCINE was announced for polio.
THE CIVIL WAR began on this day in 1861 when Confederates fired on the federal Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®