Thursday

May 6, 1999

Warning

by Jenny Joseph

Broadcast Date: THURSDAY: May 6, 1999

Poem: "Warning," by Jenny Joseph, from Rose in the Afternoon (Dent, 1974).

It was on this day in 1954 that the British runner ROGER BANNISTER broke what was considered an impossible human barrier: the four-minute mile. He was a 25-year old medical student at the University of Oxford, and at a meet there that day he ran a mile in three minutes, 59 and four- tenths seconds.

The German dirigible, HINDENBURG, exploded on this day in 1937 while docking at Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. No one is entirely sure why it exploded, but seven million cubic feet of hydrogen blew up, killing 36 of the 97 passengers and putting an end to the era of dirigible travel.

It's poet RANDALL JARRELL's birthday today, born in Nashville, 1914. He taught college for a few years, then joined the Army Air Corps during the war and worked as a control tower operator. Afterward he came out with a collection about soldiers called Little Friend, Little Friend that started his writing career.

CHIEF CRAZY HORSE surrendered to the U.S. Army on this day in 1877, not quite a year after wiping out Custer's troops at the Battle of Little Bighorn. Crazy Horse had been on the run from the army for about two years, after attacking gold prospectors who swarmed onto Black Hills Sioux Indian Reservation land. After the battle of Little Big Horn, on June 25, 1876, the army stepped up its attempts to grab him, and finally, at the Red Cloud Agency in Nebraska, he and his tribe surrendered.

It's the birthday of SIGMUND FREUD, born in 1856 in Freiberg, Moravia, the founder of psychoanalysis.

It was on this day in 1682 that King Louis XIV moved the French court out of Paris southwest about 15 miles to the brand new palace of VERSAILLES.

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

 

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