Wednesday
Nov. 3, 1999
Poem: "Ooly Pop a Cow" by David Huddle from Summer Lake published by Louisiana State University Press.
It's the birthday of the poet and journalist WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, born in Cummington, Massachusetts, in 1794. For 50 years BRYANT was the editor of the New York Evening Post, a paper that championed free trade, worker's rights, free speech and abolition. Bryant came to the job as a famous poet, after publishing his long poem "Thanatopsis" which had been inspired by the Berkshire hills and streams where he grew up. He'd written it when he was 17 years old, and it praised nature and rejected the faith of his Puritan forefathers. A few lines of advice from "Thanatopsis:" So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one that wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.
It's the anniversary in 1900 of the FIRST AUTOMOBILE SHOW IN THE U.S., held at Madison Square Garden in New York. Back then there were hundreds of car manufacturers, many of whom made their cars by hand and brought them to show at the Garden. Steam was the big thing at the show, with the introduction of a piece of equipment called the Flash Boiler, which quickly produced steam and got you on the road in a hurry. Trouble was, it was heavy, expensive, and hard to operate, and it quickly fell out of favor. Electric cars were also on display, and for a while they were the most popular car because they were quiet and easy to run, but they failed because their batteries died too soon. By 1910, nearly all the manufacturers switched to internal combustion engines.
It was on this day in 1916 that the experimental PLAYWRIGHT'S THEATER opened its first New York season at 139 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, with a little one-act play, Bound East for Cardiff, by the then-unknown writer Eugene O'Neill. The theater had staged its first plays that summer at the seaside resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts, using a building on a wharf as a stage. The Provincetown players wrote and performed their own plays, designed and constructed all the sets and costumes themselves, then felt ready for the move to the big city by fall. O'Neill was 28 years old and Bound East for Cardiff was his first play, written after 10 years of hard living as a sailor in Liverpool, Buenos Aires, and New York. Over the next two decades, he followed that up with more than 20 full-length plays, won four Pulitzer Prizes, and remains the only American playwright to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
It's the birthday of the Australian aboriginal writer OODGEROO NOONUCCAL, born Kath Walker in 1920, Queensland, Australia. She was one of the first aboriginal writers to be published, and her 1964 book of poems, We Are Going, sold out in three days, and over the next 25 years she followed that with other books like The Dawn Is At Hand, Father Sky and Mother Earth, and The Rainbow Serpent. She changed her name in the 1980s from Walker to Noonuccal, and as an act of protest against the treatment of aboriginals gave up her membership in the Order of the British Empire.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.®