The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

It's the birthday of Pre-Raphaelite poet Christina Rossetti (books by this author), born in London in 1830. She grew up in a large, boisterous household. She had two brothers and one sister, and her parents were Italian, so all the children grew up speaking Italian and English. Her father was a political refugee and a Dante scholar and poet.

Rossetti was a successful and much-admired poet in her own right. She published her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), when she was 31 years old. And most people today would probably recognize one of her poems as a well-known Christmas carol.

It begins:
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.

It's the birthday of Calvin Trillin (books by this author), born in Kansas City, Missouri (1935), who started out working for the religion section of Time magazine, which he did not like. He said: "I finally got out of that by prefixing everything with 'alleged.' I'd write about 'the alleged parting of the Red Sea,' even 'the alleged Crucifixion,' and eventually they let me go."

In 1967, Trillin began writing a regular column for The New Yorker magazine called "U.S. Journal," which he saw as a chance to write about ordinary people who didn't usually get covered in the national press. As a result of traveling so much, Trillin began eating in a variety of local restaurants, and at a time when most food writers focused on gourmet food from France, Trillin wrote about barbecue ribs in the Midwest. His first collection of food writing was American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater (1974), in which he declared that the top four or five restaurants in the world are in Kansas City.

His recent books include Tepper Isn't Going Out (2001), Feeding a Yen (2003), About Alice (2006), and Dogfight: The 2012 Presidential Campaign in Verse (2012).

It's the birthday of travel writer Kate Simon (books by this author), born Kaila Grobsmith in Warsaw in 1912. Her father moved to America, and a few years later, she and her brother and her mother met him at Ellis Island. She said: "I must have started being a travel writer when we first came to America. The places I had to get to know very quickly, the languages I couldn't understand. And all that peeping in places and climbing up on the roof is part of the very primitive beginnings of that kind of curiosity. It was as if, 'How can anything happen without my being there to witness and report it?'"

Simon grew up in the Bronx, and she loved New York. She wanted to write a city guidebook that would be different from all the other books on the market, so she wrote New York Places and Pleasures: An Uncommon Guidebook (1959), which is still in print and has gone through four revisions since then. It was so successful that she started getting commissions to write travel books, and wrote about cities and countries all around the world.

And she also wrote memoirs: Bronx Primitive: Portraits of a Childhood (1982), A Wider World: Portraits of an Adolescence (1986), and Etchings in an Hourglass (1990), which she completed just before she died of cancer in 1990.

It's the anniversary of The Great Smog, a London air pollution event that was responsible for the deaths of about 12,000 British subjects on this date in 1952.

London has been notable for its fog since Roman times; it is one of the city's defining characteristics. Fog forms when moist air makes contact with cooler ground; the moisture condenses and forms a low-lying cloud. Natural conditions made the Thames estuary fertile ground for fog. But the air quality became much worse in the late 1700s with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Factories were built all over Britain; the factories burned coal and spewed gases and particulates into the air. The particles joined with droplets of moisture and formed especially thick, oppressive, and toxic fogs. People burned coal in their homes too, and this changed the nature of London's fogs. They were sometimes known as "pea-soup" fogs, because of their yellowish color, which was caused by the mingling of fog with coal smoke from the city's fires. Some people remembered those fogs with nostalgia. In his novel Put Out More Flags (1942), Evelyn Waugh wrote: "The decline of England ... dates from the day we abandoned coal fuel. We used to live in a fog, the splendid, luminous, tawny fogs of our early childhood ... We designed a city which was meant to be seen in a fog."

But the splendid fogs of Waugh's youth turned deadly a decade after he published his novel. The weather had been especially cold that early December in 1952, and Londoners responded as they always had: by burning more coal to keep their houses warm. But late on December 5, one of the city's trademark fogs rolled in, blanketing the capital. The fog mingled with soot, tar particles, and sulfur dioxide, and the foul mixture was trapped over London by a weather pattern known as a thermal inversion. A cold, still air mass hovered over the city, and the winter sun was too low in the sky to warm and disperse the air mass and break through the clouds of smog. So the cold, dense, yellow-black air lingered, forming a layer almost 200 meters thick.

For five days, visibility was so poor that the city was virtually shut down. At some points, people couldn't even see their own hands and feet, and were getting lost in their own neighborhoods. But poor visibility was not the worst of Londoners' problems: as the moisture in the fog reacted to the chemicals in the pollution, droplets of sulfuric acid, or "acid rain," were formed. The BBC reported: "The air was not only dark, tinged with yellow, but stank of rotten eggs. This is because the fog was laced with sulphur and other toxins in the smoke from coal fires. Those who ventured out into the soot-choked air recall returning home with their faces and clothes — even petticoats — blackened. Some were bought to their knees, coughing uncontrollably." The first known casualties were cattle at a Smithfield livestock show. Over the next few days, a hundred thousand people were made ill, and ambulances couldn't drive in the smog, so the sick received no treatment unless they could make their own way to the hospital.

At first, people didn't panic; they were used to London's thick fogs. It wasn't until the undertakers were running out of coffins, and the florists were running out of flowers for funeral wreaths, that they realized how deadly the Great Smog had been. When the smog finally lifted on December 9, it left 4,000 Londoners dead in its wake. And over the following months, a further 8,000 — mostly the elderly and those with chronic respiratory conditions — died of complications from exposure to the acid smog.

The Great Smog changed the way people looked at pollution, and, in 1956, Parliament passed the first Clean Air Act, which regulated the burning of coal in urban homes and factories. The act was rolled out gradually, so it took some time before smoky fogs became a thing of the past. In 1962, a similar event killed 750 Londoners, but eventually the reforms fulfilled their purpose, and pollution related to the burning of coal has been greatly reduced. Today, there are computerized monitoring stations all around London that check the air for carbon monoxide and other pollutants. They show that cars — not coal — are the main threat to air quality today.