Tuesday
Sep. 28, 1999
Friendship After Love
Poem: "Friendship After Love" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox from Poems of Passion, 1883.
It's the birthday in 1950, Schenectady, New York, of JOHN SAYLES, best known now as an independent filmmaker, but who started off as a writer. He was just 27 when his second novel came out, a story about political turmoil in late-1960s Boston called Union Dues. After that, Sayles went to work for Hollywood, turning out scripts for low-budget action pictures like Piranha, and Battle Beyond the Stars to bankroll his own films: Eight Men Out and The Return of the Secaucus Seven. Eight Men Out was about the 1919 World Series in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox, agreed to throw the Series. Sayles says he tried to portray the eight men sympathetically, because: "It was a labor situation. If you got hurt, there was no pension, no nothing. There was no Social Security. You were just gone. You were in Pawtucket playing minor league ball the next week. So everybody else was just trying to make what they could when they could."
It was on this day in 1920 that the BLACK SOX SCANDAL broke. Eight members of the Chicago White Sox were indicted for throwing the 1919 World Series to Cincinnati. They admitted getting somewhere between $70,000 and $100,000, but when brought to trial they were acquitted, largely because a key piece of evidence, their original confession, was missing. Most people believe the confession was stolen. Though they didn't serve jail time, the eight players were suspended from the game for life.
It was on this day in 1912, that W.C. Handy published the first blues song in America, "MEMPHIS BLUES."
Cartoonist AL CAPP was born on this day in 1909, New Haven, Connecticut, creator in 1934 of the comic strip, Li'l Abner.
Playwright ELMER RICE was born on this day in 1892, in New York City. His best-known play was Street Scene, set outside a New York tenement building.
It's the birthday in 1856 of the writer and the pioneer early-childhood educator KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN, born in Philadelphia, and best known for her 1903 story Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
It was on this day in 1066 that the NORMANS LANDED IN ENGLAND to begin their conquest of the island. Two weeks later, they surprised the King's army at Hastings, then swept into London and on Christmas Day, 1066, William of Normandy was declared the new king. All of England's literature, legal, and government documents for the next few centuries were either in French or Latin.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®