Friday
May 21, 1999
Song of the Master and the Boatswain
The Sea and the Mirror (selected lines)
Poem: "Song of the Master and the Boatswain," selected lines from "The Sea and the Mirror," by W. H. Auden, from The Collected Longer Poems of W.H. Auden (Random House).
CHARLES LINDBERGH, "the Lone Eagle," landed his plane, the "Spirit of St. Louis" in Paris on this day in 1927, the first solo flight across the Atlantic. Nearly 100,000 Parisians stormed the plane as soon as the propeller stopped. They put him on their shoulders, and Lindbergh later said, "For nearly half an hour I was unable to touch the ground." He was 25 years old.
It's poet ROBERT CREELEY's birthday, Arlington, Massachusetts, 1926, author of more than 60 poetry collections, and editor of the Black Mountain Review, which published the work of the young Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others.
It's the birthday in Moscow, 1921, of physicist ANDREI SAKHAROV, known in his country as the "Father of the Soviet bomb" but also for his dissident activities, for which he was put in a Soviet gulag. He won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.
It's the birthday of the designer and architect, MARCEL BREUER, in Pecs, Hungary, 1902. He got his start at the Bauhaus in Germany producing chairs, and moved on to design enormous concrete buildings. Some of his best-known buildings are the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York.
THE AMERICAN RED CROSS was founded on this day in 1881 by Clara Barton. She was 59 years old and during the Civil War had gotten the nickname the "Angel of the Battlefield" for treating the wounded and helping gather identification records of the dead.
It's the birthday in Red Wing, Minnesota, 1867, of FRANCES DENSMORE, for years the nation's expert on American Indians, particularly their songs and music.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®