Friday

Mar. 10, 2000

At Dusk

by Jim Clark

Broadcast Date: FRIDAY: March 10, 2000

Poem: "At Dusk" by Jim Clark from Dancing on Canaan's Ruins (Eternal Delight Pub).

Today is the birthday of the British writer JAMES HERRIOT, born James Alfred Wright in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1916. He was a veterinarian in a little town in Yorkshire, and at the age of 50 started writing down the stories about his life as a country vet amongst the Yorkshire farmers. His book All Creatures Great and Small, came out in 1972 and was a huge best seller.

It's the birthday in 1903 of the "young man with a horn" the Jazz trumpeter and composer BIX BEIDERBECKE, born Leon Bix Beiderbecke in Davenport, Iowa. He played with all the greats of the day such as Jimmy Dorsey, Paul Mertz, and Hoagie Carmichael, but died at the age of 28 and most people know his music through recordings, tunes such as "Jazz Me Blues," "Davenport Blues," and the piano solo "In a Mist."

It was on this day in 1880 that the SALVATION ARMY started its work in the United States when a group of eight women and their leader George Railton landed in New York on a ship from England. The Salvation Army had started as a Christian missionary society in London's East End Slums in 1865.

Today was the day in 1876 when ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL wrote in his laboratory notebook: "My Assistant Mr. Watson was stationed in one room with the receiving instrument. He pressed one ear closely against the receiver and closed his other ear with his hand. The transmitting instrument was placed in another room and the doors of both rooms were closed. I then shouted into the microphone the following sentence, 'Mr. Watson come here I want to see you.;" To my delight he came and declared that he had heard and understood what I said."

It's the birthday of opera librettist LORENZO DA PONTE, born 1749, near Teviso, Italy, the man who penned the text to three of Mozart's famous operas The Marriage of Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787), and Cosi Fan Tutte (1790). After Mozart's death he left for London and then New York, where he taught Italian language and literature at Columbia College in the early 1880s.

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

 

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