Saturday
Nov. 6, 1999
Poem: "Swimming" by Ellie Schoenfeld from Screaming Red Gladiolus! published by Poetry Harbor Press.
It's the birthday of playwright THOMAS KYD, London, 1558 , best known as the author of The Spanish Tragedie, written in 1592. It was the most popular play in England at the time and started a whole genre called "revenge tragedies," plays that center on the main character's desire for revengeand which usually end up at the final curtain with a stage full of bodies. Shakespeare's Hamlet, written eight years later, is a revenge tragedy. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedie, a Spanish nobleman seeks revenge against his son's murderers. He stages a play in which he invites the murderers to be actors. While playing his role he actually kills them, then himself. The year after The Spanish Tragedie premiered Kyd was arrested and charged with atheism, then tortured, and he died at the age of 36.
It's the birthday in Washington, D.C., 1854 of the March King, JOHN PHILIP SOUSA. His father was a U.S. Marine Band trombonist, and he signed John up as an apprentice to the band after the boy tried to run away from home to join a circus band. By the time he was 13 years old Sousa could play violin, piano, flute, cornet, baritone, trombone, and was a pretty good singer, too. At 26 he was leading the Marine band and writing the first of his 136 marches for them, including "Semper Fidelis," "The Washington Post," and "The Stars and Stripes Forever" (1897). In addition to all those marches, he wrote nearly a dozen light operas, as many waltzes, and three novels.
It's the birthday in Aspen, Colorado, 1892 of HAROLD ROSS, who founded the New Yorker in 1925 and ran it for over 25 years. Ross quit high school to become a reporter and during the First World War served in France editing the military paper, Stars and Stripes. He and the banker Raoul Fleischmann started the New Yorker on $25,000, and he was at the helm until just before he died in 1951. His motto as an editor: "Editing is the same thing as quarreling with writers. Same thing exactly."
It's novelist JAMES JONES' birthday, born in 1921, in Robinson, an Illinois town on the Indiana state line. Jones wrote several books but is best known for his WWII novel From Here to Eternity (1951), which won the National Book Award and was part of a trilogy that he completed several years later with The Thin Red Line and Whistle. He served in the Army from 1939 to 1944, and won the Purple Heart for being wounded in action.
Several notable PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS were decided on November 6: The results of the 1928 race were flashed for the first time ON AN ELECTRIC SIGN outside the New York Times building: "Hoover beats Smith". (Herbert Hoover vs. the four-time Democratic governor of New York, Alfred E. Smith) BENJAMIN HARRISON won the 1888 election, beating incumbent Grover Cleveland 233-to-168 electoral votes, even though Cleveland got 90,000 more popular votes than Harrison. In 1861 JEFFERSON DAVIS, running unopposed, was elected president of the Confederacy. When the Civil War ended he was indicted for treason, but he was never brought to trial, and, instead, was included in the general amnesty of 1868. ABRAHAM LINCOLN was elected the nation's 16th president in 1860, winning 180 electoral votes to 12 over his rival, Democrat Stephen Douglas. Lincoln took a strong anti-slavery position in the campaign and won despite not getting a single vote in 10 southern states.
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