Thursday

Nov. 4, 1999

Broadcast Date: THURSDAY: November 4, 1999

Poem: "The Ugly Child" by Elizabeth Jennings from The Secret Brothers published by MacMillan Press.

It was on this day in 1995 that Israeli Prime Minister YITZHAK RABIN was assassinated. He'd been in office three years, and during that time put a freeze on new Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and held secret negotiations with the Palestinians that led to the Israel-PLO accords in September, 1993—a move that angered many Israelis. A few minutes after speaking at a Tel Aviv peace rally Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist.

It's the anniversary in 1922 of the discovery of KING TUTANKHAMEN'S tomb in Egypt. British archeologist Howard Carter had been looking for the tomb for six years, and just as he and his men were removing some worker's huts to leave the area they stumbled on the tomb. They dug for three days to reach the tomb's sealed entrance, and Carter went inside holding a candle. The candle flickered constantly and it took him a minute to realize what he was seeing; at first he thought it was just paintings, then he realized they were statues and enormous gold bars stacked against the wall opposite the entrance. He was heard to mutter: "wonderful, marvelous, my God, wonderful!"

It was on this day in 1918 that the young British poet, WILFRED OWEN, commanding a company of WWI soldiers, stood up from a canal in Belgium to launch an attack against the Germans and was killed. It was the exact day that Austria signed a truce ending its hostilities with the Allies, and one week before the general cease-fire. Owen was 25 years old, and his parents in London were informed of his death as victory bells tolled. Owen had only seen a handful of his poems published in his lifetime, but he'd kept writing, mostly about the horrors of trench warfare. After the war his poems were collected and published, and in 1961 composer Benjamin Britten paired them with the ancient Latin funeral text to create his War Requiem.

It's the birthday of WILL ROGERS, 1879 born near the town of Claremore, in what is now northeastern Oklahoma, but back then was known officially as Indian Territory. Rogers grew up on a ranch roping steers and riding, then made his way to New York in 1905, doing rope tricks in vaudeville shows; within 10 years he was a star on Broadway, famous for his onstage one-liners like, "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock." By the 1920s he was America's most popular comedian.

It's the wedding anniversary of ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND MARY TODD, in 1842, Springfield, Illinois. They'd met three years earlier at a dance when Lincoln was a 30-year-old lawyer serving eastern and central Illinois, and Todd, 21, was newly arrived in Springfield and living with her sister. Lincoln had been unlucky in love several times before: his first love, 22-year-old Ann Rutledge, had died from fever in 1835. The following year he'd met and courted a woman named Mary Owens, but when he proposed to her she turned him down. And things didn't look so good with Miss Todd either; the first letter that we have in her own hand, written to her cousin a few months after she met Lincoln, describes him as "an agreeable lawyer. I wish you could see him, the most perfect original I had ever met, yet Mercy, I love him not, & my hand will never be given, where my heart is not."

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

 

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