From now until February 1, Cambridge University Press is offering free access to the top ten articles that have appeared in the History of Education Quarterly, following a poll of its members. These articles are drawn from sixty volumes of HEQ. Take a look. As Jack Schneider, the editor of the HEQ, and I would attest, the study of the history of education is fascinating.
Archives for category: History
Did you ever stop to think about the origins of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?
Probably not.
But it’s a true story with a happy ending.
It starts like this:
Rudolph came to life in 1939 when the Chicago-based Montgomery Ward company asked one of their copywriters, 34-year-old Robert L. May, to come up with a Christmas story they could give away in booklet form to shoppers as a promotional gimmick — the Montgomery Ward stores had been buying and distributing coloring books to customers at Christmastime every year, and May’s department head saw creating a giveaway booklet of their own as a way to save money. Robert May, who had a penchant for writing children’s stories and limericks, was tapped to create the booklet.
May, drawing in part on the tale of The Ugly Duckling and his own background (he was often taunted as a child for being shy, small, and slight), settled on the idea of an underdog ostracized by the reindeer community because of his physical abnormality: a glowing red nose. Looking for an alliterative name, May considered and rejected Rollo (too cheerful and carefree a name for the story of a misfit) and Reginald (too British) before deciding on Rudolph. He then proceeded to write Rudolph’s story in verse as a series of rhyming couplets, testing it out on his 4-year-old daughter, Barbara, as he went along. Although Barbara was thrilled with Rudolph’s story, May’s boss was worried that a story featuring a red nose — an image associated with drinking and drunkards — was unsuitable for a Christmas tale. May responded by taking Denver Gillen, a friend from Montgomery Ward’s art department, to the Lincoln Park Zoo to sketch some deer. Gillen’s illustrations of a red-nosed reindeer overcame the hesitancy of May’s superiors, and the Rudolph story was approved. Montgomery Ward distributed 2.4 million copies of the Rudolph booklet in 1939, and although wartime paper shortages curtailed printing for the next several years, a total of 6 million copies had been distributed by the end of 1946.
The post-war demand for licensing the Rudolph character was tremendous, but since May had created the story on a “work made for hire” basis as an employee of Montgomery Ward, that company held the copyright to Rudolph, and May received no royalties for his creation. Deeply in debt from the medical bills resulting from his wife’s terminal illness (she died about the time May created Rudolph), May persuaded Montgomery Ward’s corporate president, Sewell Avery, to turn the copyright over to him in January 1947, and with the rights to his creation in hand, May’s financial security was assured. (Unlike Santa Claus and other familiar Christmas figures of the time, the Rudolph character was a protected trademark that required licensing and the payment of royalties for commercial use.)
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was reprinted commercially beginning in 1947 and shown in theaters as a nine-minute cartoon the following year, but the Rudolph phenomenon really took off when May’s brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, developed the lyrics and melody for a Rudolph song. Marks’ musical version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” (turned down by many in the music industry who didn’t want to meddle with the established Santa legend) was recorded by cowboy crooner Gene Autry in 1949, sold two million copies that year, and went on to become one of the best-selling songs of all time (second only to “White Christmas”). A stop-action television special about Rudolph produced by Rankin/Bass and narrated by Burl Ives was first aired in 1964 and remains a popular perennial holiday favorite in the U.S.
May quit his copywriting job in 1951 and spent seven years managing the Rudolph franchise his creation had spawned before returning to Montgomery Ward, where he worked until his retirement in 1971. May died in 1976, comfortable in the life his reindeer creation had provided for him.
The story of Rudolph is primarily known to us through the lyrics of Johnny Marks’ song (which provides only the barest outlines of Rudolph’s story) and the 1964 television special. The story Robert May wrote is substantially different from both of them in a number of ways.
Rudolph was neither one of Santa’s reindeer nor the offspring of one of Santa’s reindeer, and he did not live at the North Pole. Rudolph dwelled in an “ordinary” reindeer village elsewhere, and although he was taunted and laughed at for having a shiny red nose, he was not regarded by his parents as a shameful embarrassment; Rudolph was brought up in a loving household and was a responsible reindeer with a good self-image and sense of worth. Moreover, Rudolph also did not rise to fame when Santa picked him out from a reindeer herd because of his shiny nose; instead, Santa discovered the red-nosed reindeer quite by accident, when he noticed the glow emanating from Rudolph’s room while he was delivering presents to Rudolph’s house. Worried that the thickening fog that night (already the cause of several accidents and delays) would keep him from completing his Christmas Eve rounds, Santa tapped Rudolph to lead his team, which the young reindeer agreed to do, after first stopping to complete one last task: leaving behind a note for his mother and father.
As Ronald Lankford noted in his cultural history of American Christmas songs, Rudolph’s story was a classic reflection of American values during the 1940s and beyond:
Much like the modern Santa Claus song, Rudolph’s story is for children; more specifically, it is a children’s story about overcoming adversity and earning, by personal effort, respect in the adult world. As a young deer (child) with a handicap that turns out to be an unrecognized asset, Rudolph comes to the rescue of an adult (Santa) at the last minute (on Christmas Eve). When Rudolph saves the day, he gains respect from both his peers (the reindeer who refused to include him in games) and the adult world. The story of Rudolph, then, is the fantasy story made to order for American children: each child has the need to express and receive approval for his or her individuality and/or special qualities. Rudolph’s story embodies the American Dream for the child, written large because of the cultural significance of Christmas.
I think you will find this book review interesting. I reviewed Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism; Steve Suitts, Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement; and Derek W. Black, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy.
The review is titled “The Dark History of School Choice.” It appears in the New York Review of Books, which is the most prestigious literary journal in the U.S.
You can read the opening paragraphs, then it goes behind a paywall. However, you can request to read review in full for free.
With 33 days until he is out of office, Donald Trump appointed the members of his absurd 1776 Commission, who are tasked with restoring patriotism into all public spaces and presumably into history textbooks, although any federal interference with curriculum, textbooks, or instruction is forbidden by law. I wrote about this silly commission here.
This is Trump’s (or Stephen Miller’s) attempt to refute the New York Times’ 1619 Project and to debunk “critical race theory,” which Trump himself never heard of and can’t explain.
If Trump were a real patriot, he would follow the dictates of the Constitution and hail Joe Biden as the President-Elect. But because he puts self above country, he can’t do that, and he is no patriot at all. He is an insurrectionist.
Politico reported:
President Donald Trump is still trying to advance “patriotic education,” announcing 33 days before his departure from office his intent to appointmembers of a 1776 Commission.
The group will be led by the president of the conservative Hillsdale College, Larry Arnn, a longtime Trump ally, who will serve as chairman, the White House said Friday. Matthew Spalding, vice president for the college’s Washington, D.C., operations and dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government, has been appointed executive director of the Commission, according to the college.
The commission is part of Trump’s defense against critical race theory and the 1619 Project, directed by The New York Times Magazine, which revisits the country’s history with a focus on slavery and Black Americans’ contributions. Trump has said he hopes to counter lessons that he believes divide Americans on race and slavery and teach students to “hate their own country.”
Along with Arnn, others to be appointed to the 18-member panel include activist Charlie Kirk, who founded the conservative campus group Turning Point USA; Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, who has declared his state “Trump Country;” Silicon Valley CEO and Trump fundraiser Scott McNealy; Brooke Rollins, Trump’s domestic policy adviser; and Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow.
“The 1776 Committee was formed to advise the President about the core principles of the American founding and how to protect those principles by promoting patriotic education,” Spalding said in a statement. “The path to a renewed and confident national unity is through a rediscovery of our shared identity rooted in those principles.”
Spalding took a temporary leave of absence from his duties at Hillsdale for the appointment, according to the college.
Presumably, Spalding’s leave of absence will last for 33 days.
GregB. is one of our best-read commenters. He is well-informed and wise.
He writes:
I’ve posted this a few times over the years of commenting here, so I figure this is a good place to do it again. It’s a summation of my opinion of my favorite book on science, Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:
In this valedictory statement of scientific philosophy, Sagan elevates the idea and relevance of the scientific method in our daily and public lives. It is not something to “believe in,” it is a way of looking at the world with healthy skepticism and pragmatic attention to systematic, verified observation. “Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions.” (We don’t “believe in,” for example, climate change; we make decisions to accept the validity about the prevailing scientific research and interpretation of its findings.) Sagan uses examples in history including UFOs, superstitions, dragons and other mythical monsters, and a variety of other topics to explain how science has demonstrated these things do not exist and why we should not live in fear of them. He tackles those who promote anti-science such as fake approaches to treating and “curing” diseases, how to engage in the “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” and how public figures use these things to distort public dialogues about policy.
But the one thing that makes this book so special to me is Sagan’s connection of science to the civic education and engagement that is required of citizens in the modern world, which are essential if we are to be free. I think it worth quoting the final paragraph of this, the last book he wrote in his life, something he wrote when he knew had, at best, a few short months to live. These are quite literally the last public words of the greatest scientific communicator who has ever lived:
“Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen—or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. (emphasis added)”
This is a fascinating collection of the best photographs of the year taken by AP photographers. Coronavirus figures mightily. The images of the year from around the world remind us of an annus horribilus.
I am a 1956 graduate of San Jacinto High School in Houston, Texas. The school no longer exists; it is now part of the campus of Houston Community College. When I attended San Jac, it was a thriving community of about 1500 students. Most of the teachers were old-timers. There were many clubs for after-school activities and many sports teams. We were known as the Golden Bears. As a senior, I was editor of the yearbook, the El Oroso. When my older sister went to San Jac, she was a “Golden Gaucho,” which was a girls’ marching group. The school was racially segregated, but it had a program for students with disabilities, which was unusual at the time. After the Brown decision was announced, I went to see our principal, Mr. Brandenburger, to ask why our school had not integrated. He told me that if we did that, all the black principals would lose their jobs. He did not mention that we had a very rightwing school board who opposed desegregation. I have many fond memories of San Jacinto. I am on the mailing list for alumni and saw this story by a woman who graduated 12 years after me. I was so moved by her story that I asked her for permission to put it on the blog. There is a message here about public education and its potential to change lives.
What San Jac Means To Me
By Annette Mazur Zinn, ‘68
zinn802@sbcglobal.net
I know I sometimes sound a little too passionate about San Jac, but there’s a reason for it. My circuitous path to where I now find myself gave me an appreciation for education, my classmates, teachers and others that I am forever grateful for.
As the eldest of 7 siblings, I grew up with a tremendous amount of responsibility. During the day, I was a surrogate Mom and, at night, I made money by cleaning offices and scrubbing bathrooms. My family was homeless most of the time, so attending school was not a priority. But I always wanted to go. I missed a lot of school starting in elementary school. My homeroom teacher at George Washington Junior High told me, “Education is the key to freedom.” At the time I had no clue what that meant, but I never forgot her words.
Somehow, I finished junior high and made it to Reagan High School. I attended when I could, but I was truant much of the time. I remember hiding from the truant officers because I knew that if I was caught, someone would go to jail. I suspected it would be me!
The Reagan years were especially hard because of my difficult home life and the stress and embarrassment that resulted. I had impetigo infections on my arms and legs, hair lice, dirty clothes that didn’t fit, and cockroaches sometimes crawled out of my school bag. I finally decided that I couldn’t stay at Reagan. I was too ashamed and embarrassed. Someone told me about San Jacinto High School.
Somehow, I managed to transfer, even though I didn’t know where the school was or how I would get there. It seemed like a world away. I got on the bus. When I began at San Jac, I didn’t know anyone. I was overwhelmed and afraid I would not last. During one of my truancy periods my counselor said, “If it’s true what you said about your home life, and you don’t move out, you’ll NEVER graduate!”
Fortunately, a friend offered me a place to stay. I continued working to support my family, but I began doing whatever I could to graduate. No one in my family understood why I needed to finish school.
Fortunately, for me, the San Jac students were more forgiving than those at Reagan. I kept doing childcare/housework and going to school when I could. I cleaned offices at night and lived with the constant threat that I would not have enough hours to graduate. At the same time, I wanted to be “normal”. I tried to make up for lost experiences and joined as many groups as I could – drama, speech, choir, and library club. Tim Zinn, a San Jac student, helped me tremendously with moral support, bus fare, and even lent me his yearbook so I could collect autographs. I graduated!
In the years that followed I married Tim and graduated from The University of Houston. In 1978, Tim and I separated and I became a single mom. Our daughter, Tara Zinn, was 7 at the time. I knew I had to set the right example for being independent and self-sufficient. Ultimately, I applied to graduate school at The University of Texas School of Public Health (UTSPH). Afterwards, I became an epidemiologist and then took a regulatory position at Intermedics, Inc. where I was responsible for obtaining approvals for cardiac pacemakers worldwide.
I applied to law school and graduated from South Texas College of Law in 1992. I practiced law for a few years – including business, intellectual property, immigration, personal injury, family, and criminal cases – and even had a murder case! Ultimately, I went back to medical devices at Cyberonics, Inc., where I was responsible for obtaining approvals for neurostimulators worldwide and handling legal matters. I also taught FDA-law for three years at University of Houston and started my Ph. D in health law/policy at UTSPH. In 2008, I began a career as a regulatory adviser for medical product start-up companies and finished my Ph.D. I also began volunteering in educational institutions and mentoring students, including my daughter, who just graduated from South Texas College of Law!
So, to my San Jac family, I owe so much — because of San Jac — I’ve had a rich life of learning and opportunity. I will be passionately and forever grateful!
Political reporter David Sanger wrote a fascinating analysis of Trump’s attempt to reverse the results of the election. Trump lost the electoral college; Biden won 306 votes, surpassing the necessary 270. Trump lost the popular vote by nearly six million votes. He obviously forgot that he swore an oath on the Bible to defend the Constitution. He is actively subverting it.
David Sanger wrote:
President Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election are unprecedented in American history and an even more audacious use of brute political force to gain the White House than when Congress gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency during Reconstruction.
Mr. Trump’s chances of succeeding are somewhere between remote and impossible, and a sign of his desperation after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by nearly six million popular votes and counting, as well as a clear Electoral College margin. Yet the fact that Mr. Trump is even trying has set off widespread alarms, not least in Mr. Biden’s camp.
“I’m confident he knows he hasn’t won,” Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del., on Thursday, before adding, “It’s just outrageous what he’s doing.” Although Mr. Biden dismissed Mr. Trump’s behavior as embarrassing, he acknowledged that “incredibly damaging messages are being sent to the rest of the world about how democracy functions.”
Mr. Trump has only weeks to make his last-ditch effort work: Most of the states he needs to strip Mr. Biden of votes are scheduled to certify their electors by the beginning of next week. The electors cast their ballots on Dec. 14, and Congress opens them in a joint session on Jan. 6.
Even if Mr. Trump somehow pulled off his electoral vote switch, there are other safeguards in place, assuming people in power do not simply bend to the president’s will.
The first test will be Michigan, where Mr. Trump is trying to get the State Legislature to overturn Mr. Biden’s 157,000-vote margin of victory. He has taken the extraordinary step of inviting a delegation of state Republican leaders to the White House, hoping to persuade them to ignore the popular vote outcome.
“That’s not going to happen,” Mike Shirkey, the Republican leader of the Michigan State Senate, said on Tuesday. “We are going to follow the law and follow the process.”
Beyond that, Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, could send Congress a competing electoral slate, based on the election vote, arguing that the proper procedures were ignored. That dispute would create just enough confusion, in Mr. Trump’s Hail Mary calculus, that the House and Senate together would have to resolve it in ways untested in modern times.
Federal law dating to 1887, passed in reaction to the Hayes election, provides the framework, but not specifics, of how it would be done. Edward B. Foley, a constitutional law and election law expert at Ohio State University, noted that the law only required Congress to consider all submissions “purporting to be the valid electoral votes.”
But Michigan alone would not be enough for Mr. Trump. He would also need at least two other states to fold to his pressure. The most likely candidates are Georgia and Arizona, which both went for Mr. Trump in 2016 and have Republican-controlled legislatures and Republican governors.
Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona has said he will accept the state election results, although only after all the campaign lawsuits are resolved. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, where a hand recount reaffirmed Mr. Biden’s victory on Thursday, has not publicly said one way or another who won his state.
Mr. Trump has said little in public apart from tweets endorsing wild conspiracy theories about how he was denied victory. Yet his strategy, if it can be called that, has become clear over two days of increasingly frenetic action by a president 62 days from losing power.
In just that time, Mr. Trump has fired the federal election official who has challenged his false claims of fraud, tried to halt the vote-certification process in Detroit to disenfranchise an overwhelmingly Black electorate that voted against him, and now is misusing the powers of his office in his effort to take Michigan’s 16 electoral votes away from Mr. Biden.
In many ways it is even more of an attempted power grab than the one in 1876. At the time, Hayes was governor of Ohio, not president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant was, and when Hayes won — also by wrenching the vote around in three states — he became known as “His Fraudulency.”
“But this is far worse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian and author of “Presidents of War.” “In the case of Hayes, both sides agreed that the outcome in at least three states was in dispute. In this case, no serious person thinks enough votes are in dispute that Donald Trump could have been elected on Election Day.”
“This is a manufactured crisis. It is a president abusing his huge powers in order to stay in office after the voters clearly rejected him for re-election.”
He added: “This is what many of the founders dreaded.”
Mr. Trump telegraphed this strategy during the campaign. He told voters at a rally in Middletown, Pa., in September that he would win at the polls, or in the Supreme Court, or in the House — where, under the 12th Amendment, every state delegation gets one vote in choosing the president. (There are 26 delegations of 50 dominated by Republicans, even though the House is in the hands of the Democrats.)
“I don’t want to end up in the Supreme Court, and I don’t want to go back to Congress, even though we have an advantage if we go back to Congress,” he said then. “Does everyone understand that?”
Now that is clearly the Plan B, after the failure of Plan A, an improvisational legal strategy to overturn election results by invalidating ballots in key states. In state after state, the president’s lawyers have been laughed out of court, unable to provide evidence to back up his claims that mail-in ballots were falsified, or that glitches on voting machines with software from Dominion Voting Systems might, just might, have changed or deleted 2.7 million votes.
Those theories figured in a rambling news conference that Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, held with other members of his legal team on Thursday. The group threw out a series of disconnected arguments to try to make the case that Mr. Trump really won. The arguments included blaming mail-in ballots that they said were prone to fraud as well as Dominion, which they suggested was tied to former President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela (who died seven years ago), and had vague connections to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, the philanthropist and billionaire Democratic fund-raiser.
“That press conference was the most dangerous 1hr 45 minutes of television in American history,” Christopher Krebs, who was fired Tuesday night by Mr. Trump as the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of the Department of Homeland Security, tweeted Thursday afternoon.
“And possibly the craziest,” he went on. “If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re lucky.”
Mr. Krebs has often noted that the purpose of a reliable election system is to convince those who lost elections that they have, indeed, lost.
Even some of Mr. Trump’s onetime enthusiasts and former top aides have abandoned him on his claims, often with sarcastic derision. “Their basic argument is this was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there’s no evidence of it,” said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s third national security adviser, who was ousted last year.
“Now if that’s true, I really want to know who the people are who pulled this off,” he said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “We need to hire them at the C.I.A.”
On this subject, here is another excellent article:
WHY TRUMP IS LIKELY TO FAIL IN HIS EFFORTS TO UNDERMINE DEMOCRACY.
Denis Smith is a retired educator, now living in Ohio. He remembers here a day that will forever haunt him.
“I’m alive. Nobody else is … they’re all dead.” It Happened Fifty Years Ago Today.
The other evening, I had a dream about hearing sirens in the distance, shrill sounds which break the silence of an otherwise uneventful and quiet night.
Lest you think I’m in need of clinical attention, there was an underlying reason for me to be dreaming about the sounds of sirens. Let me explain.
It is said that each generation constructs a series of markers which serve to catalog collective life experiences for the purpose of identifying the most significant events of a particular era. For my parents’ generation, the markers were the Great Flu of 1918, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and World War II. And for their children, it was the assassination of President Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the Lunar Landing, and, now, the Great Pandemic of 2020.
But there is another marker that is somewhat exclusive to me, not shared by my family but felt resoundingly in a small city in West Virginia, a marker established exactly 50 years ago.
It was a catastrophe that remains stored in that hard drive called memory, for November 14, 1970 will remain forever in my mind, as it followed that usually dreaded day before.
On the late afternoon of Friday, November 13, after struggling with being ill for a few days, I ended the week by locking the school office door and heading home. It was a 100-mile round trip each day to and from work, and then back to my tiny apartment near the campus of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. At the time, I was employed as a too young, first-year junior high school principal and carrying a full-load as a graduate student in the history department at Marshall. The location of my apartment was within walking distance from school, an ideal situation, for I had need to continually use the library and other enticements the university offered.
After arriving home around 6:00pm, I grabbed something from the refrigerator and made a cup of hot tea to soothe the flu-like symptoms I was experiencing. I
was so ill that I slept most of Saturday but was awakened around 8:00pm by the incessant sound of sirens coming from emergency vehicles racing down nearby streets.
As I became more awake, I realized that the sirens were not heading toward campus or downtown, but instead were moving in the opposite direction. Since I lived on a one-way street, that fact proved helpful in figuring out the flow of the emergency vehicle traffic.
So what was happening in this small university town of about 70,000 that awakened me from a near-coma, a weekend evening when I was so sick that I hadn’t left the apartment in more than 36 hours?
Shortly after 8:00pm, I turned on the radio to find out. And no, I didn’t even own a television back then, and recall that there weren’t any cable news networks yet either. Though I was working, the meager circumstances of being a grad student was at play, as evidenced by the absence of a TV and an assortment of food in the tiny refrigerator.
Within a few minutes, as the sounds of speeding emergency vehicles and their full-throated sirens continued to be heard in my apartment on the city’s leafy Fifth Avenue, an announcer broke in to inform listeners that there were reports of a plane crash at Tri-State Airport in nearby Wayne County, West Virginia. A few more sketchy reports later in the 8pm hour told the townsfolk that the aircraft was a charter flight.
That was the key for me. Huntington wasn’t the largest metropolis in the world, and a charter flight certainly had something to do with Marshall – “the franchise” in that college town, much as it is in any other college community.
Just minutes before 9:00pm, the announcer finally revealed that the charter flight in question was Southern Airways Flight 932, a DC-9 jetliner carrying the Marshall University football team as it returned from its game with East Carolina University. The plane hit a grove of trees just short of the runway, killing all 75 aboard, including 36 team members, 9 coaches and administrators, 25 team boosters, and the crew of 5.
There were no survivors, and the crash remains the deadliest sports-related tragedy in this country.
After hearing some more details on the radio, the sirens suddenly ceased to penetrate the dark November night. That in itself was a bad sign, as I would find out later – as in no survivors to take to the hospital.
With no more sirens to keep me awake, I made some more hot tea with honey and fell back into my coma, where I slept till daybreak. Luckily, neither the phone nor any other sound interrupted my sleep during that dreadful night of horror.
Sometimes, it seems healthy to delay hearing even more bad news.
Though still ill, I ventured out long enough on Sunday morning to go to a grocery store and pick up enough food to get me through the next few days and the work week ahead. It was then that I realized the full impact of this tragedy, where it seems that everyone in Huntington knew someone on that plane or, at the very least, knew someone who knew someone on that ill-fated flight.
I was in the latter category.
No matter what grocery store or other place you entered in Huntington, there was the sight of people crying, some even sobbing in their grief. The sight of moist and swollen eyes on the faces of the populace continued for a few weeks in that town on the banks of the Ohio River.
The History Channel website has this to say about Huntington in the aftermath of the Marshall University plane crash:
For Huntington, the plane crash was “like the Kennedy assassination,” one
citizen remembers. “Everybody knows where they were and what they
were doing when they heard the news.” The town immediately went into
mourning. Shops and government offices closed; businesses on the town’s
main street draped their windows in black bunting. The university held a
memorial service in the stadium the next day and cancelled Monday’s
classes. There were so many funerals that they had to be spread out over
several weeks. In perhaps the saddest ceremony of all, six players whose
remains couldn’t be identified were buried together in Spring Hill
Cemetery, on a hill overlooking their university.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/plane-crash-devastates-
marshall-university
Indeed it was a rerun of that dreadful Friday afternoon in Dallas just
seven years earlier, when nearly everyone you saw was crying, with the
same faces marked by profound grief.
In reviewing these strong memories, I was struck by this snippet about a
football player from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania who did not travel with the
team that weekend but called home from a phone booth in Huntington to
check in with his parents and reassure them:
“I’m alive. Nobody else is … they’re all dead.”
Years later, at an alumni function, I sat next to another player who also
did not make that trip to East Carolina. The memory of that lunch
conversation remains with me.
The tears that were shed fifty years ago were not only for the football
team but what the catastrophe meant for the entire community. This
description speaks volumes about the scope of the devastation brought by
this plane crash:
Among those on the plane, in addition to the players, coaching staff and
boosters, were three prominent physicians and their wives, a newly-elected
state legislator who also was one of Huntington’s wealthiest men, a past
president of Marshall’s alumni association, a city councilman, two past
presidents of the Marshall athletic boosters club, an industrialist and the
sports director of a local television station.
That paragraph says it all.
Just two months later, I relocated to Charleston, the state capital, which
provided a shorter commute to work, although I still had a 100-mile
commute to Marshall on those nights where I had classes to attend.
One more thing. To this day, I have never flown into or out of
Huntington’s hilltop Tri-State Airport, where the lives of 75 people were
snuffed out in an instant. The Charleston airport, also on a hilltop, is scary
enough.
In 2006, the film We Are Marshall retold that horrible tragedy of
November 14, 1970 while depicting how the university and its athletic
program recovered from adversity. Often, I think about those 75 people
whose lives were cut short in a jetliner which was, tragically, only twenty
feet lower than it should have been on its final approach to that runway.
In thinking about this date, it’s enough to make you dream.
Yes, it was a half-century ago. But then it was only yesterday.
The other evening, I had a dream about hearing sirens in the distance, shrill sounds which break the silence of an otherwise uneventful and quiet night.
Lest you think I’m in need of clinical attention, there was an underlying reason for me to be dreaming about the sounds of sirens. Let me explain.
It is said that each generation constructs a series of markers which serve to catalog collective life experiences for the purpose of identifying the most significant events of a particular era. For my parents’ generation, the markers were the Great Flu of 1918, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, and World War II. And for their children, it was the assassination of President Kennedy, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the Lunar Landing, and, now, the Great Pandemic of 2020.
But there is another marker that is somewhat exclusive to me, not shared by my family but felt resoundingly in a small city in West Virginia, a marker established exactly 50 years ago.
It was a catastrophe that remains stored in that hard drive called memory, for November 14, 1970 will remain forever in my mind, as it followed that usually dreaded day before.
On the late afternoon of Friday, November 13, after struggling with being ill for a few days, I ended the week by locking the school office door and heading home. It was a 100-mile round trip each day to and from work, and then back to my tiny apartment near the campus of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. At the time, I was employed as a too young, first-year junior high school principal and carrying a full-load as a graduate student in the history department at Marshall. The location of my apartment was within walking distance from school, an ideal situation, for I had need to continually use the library and other enticements the university offered.
After arriving home around 6:00pm, I grabbed something from the refrigerator and made a cup of hot tea to soothe the flu-like symptoms I was experiencing. I was so ill that I slept most of Saturday but was awakened around 8:00pm by the incessant sound of sirens coming from emergency vehicles racing down nearby streets.
As I became more awake, I realized that the sirens were not heading toward campus or downtown, but instead were moving in the opposite direction. Since I lived on a one-way street, that fact proved helpful in figuring out the flow of the emergency vehicle traffic.
So what was happening in this small university town of about 70,000 that awakened me from a near-coma, a weekend evening when I was so sick that I hadn’t left the apartment in more than 36 hours?
Shortly after 8:00pm, I turned on the radio to find out. And no, I didn’t even own a television back then, and recall that there weren’t any cable news networks yet either. Though I was working, the meager circumstances of being a grad student was at play, as evidenced by the absence of a TV and an assortment of food in the tiny refrigerator.
Within a few minutes, as the sounds of speeding emergency vehicles and their full-throated sirens continued to be heard in my apartment on the city’s leafy Fifth Avenue, an announcer broke in to inform listeners that there were reports of a plane crash at Tri-State Airport in nearby Wayne County, West
Virginia. A few
That was the key for me. Huntington wasn’t the largest metropolis in the world, and a charter flight certainly had something to do with Marshall – “the franchise” in that college town, much as it is in any other college community.
Just minutes before 9:00pm, the announcer finally revealed that the charter flight in question was Southern Airways Flight 932, a DC-9 jetliner carrying the Marshall University football team as it returned from its game with East Carolina University. The plane hit a grove of trees just short of the runway, killing all 75 aboard, including 36 team members, 9 coaches and administrators, 25 team boosters, and the crew of 5.
There were no survivors, and the crash remains the deadliest sports-related tragedy in this country.
After hearing some more details on the radio, the sirens suddenly ceased to penetrate the dark November night. That in itself was a bad sign, as I would find out later – as in no survivors to take to the hospital.
With no more sirens to keep me awake, I made some more hot tea with honey and fell back into my coma, where I slept till daybreak. Luckily, neither the phone nor any other sound interrupted my sleep during that dreadful night of horror.
Sometimes, it seems healthy to delay hearing even more bad news.
Though still ill, I ventured out long enough on Sunday morning to go to a grocery store and pick up enough food to get me through the next few days and the work week ahead. It was then that I realized the full impact of this tragedy, where it seems that everyone in Huntington knew someone on that plane or, at the very least, knew someone who knew someone on that ill-fated flight.
I was in the latter category.
No matter what grocery store or other place you entered in Huntington, there was the sight of people crying, some even sobbing in their grief. The sight of moist and swollen eyes on the faces of the populace continued for a few weeks in that town on the banks of the Ohio River.
The History Channel website has this to say about Huntington in the aftermath of the Marshall University plane crash:
“For Huntington, the plane crash was “like the Kennedy assassination,” one
citizen remembers. “Everybody knows where they were and what they
were doing when they heard the news.” The town immediately went into
mourning. Shops and government offices closed; businesses on the town’s
main street draped their windows in black bunting. The university held a
memorial service in the stadium the next day and cancelled Monday’s
classes. There were so many funerals that they had to be spread out over
several weeks. In perhaps the saddest ceremony of all, six players whose
remains couldn’t be identified were buried together in Spring Hill
Cemetery, on a hill overlooking their university.“
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/plane-crash-devastates-
marshall-university
Indeed it was a rerun of that dreadful Friday afternoon in Dallas just
seven years earlier, when nearly everyone you saw was crying, with the
same faces marked by profound grief.
In reviewing these strong memories, I was struck by this snippet about a
football player from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania who did not travel with the
team that weekend but called home from a phone booth in Huntington to
check in with his parents and reassure them:
“I’m alive. Nobody else is … they’re all dead.”
Years later, at an alumni function, I sat next to another player who also
conversation remains with me.
The tears that were shed fifty years ago were not only for the football
team but what the catastrophe meant for the entire community. This
description speaks volumes about the scope of the devastation brought by
this plane crash:
Among those on the plane, in addition to the players, coaching staff and
boosters, were three prominent physicians and their wives, a newly-elected
state legislator who also was one of Huntington’s wealthiest men, a past
president of Marshall’s alumni association, a city councilman, two past
presidents of the Marshall athletic boosters club, an industrialist and the
sports director of a local television station.
That paragraph says it all.
Just two months later, I relocated to Charleston, the state capital, which
provided a shorter commute to work, although I still had a 100-mile
commute to Marshall on those nights where I had classes to attend.
One more thing. To this day, I have never flown into or out of
Huntington’s hilltop Tri-State Airport, where the lives of 75 people were
snuffed out in an instant. The Charleston airport, also on a hilltop, is scary
enough.
In 2006, the film We Are Marshall retold that horrible tragedy of
November 14, 1970 while depicting how the university and its athletic
program recovered from adversity. Often, I think about those 75 people
whose lives were cut short in a jetliner which was, tragically, only twenty
feet lower than it should have been on its final approach to that runway.
In thinking about this date, it’s enough to make you dream.
Yes, it was a half-century ago. But then it was only yesterday.
When I was in high school in Houston in the 1950s, we studied the Civil War. John Brown was portrayed in the American history textbook as a zealot and a terrorist.
I just read about a new film in which he is shown as a visionary far ahead of his times, a man who believed unconditionally in human equality.
Of the day following John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., in 1859 — now understood by scholars and schoolchildren alike to be one of the precipitating events of the Civil War — pioneering Black historian W.E.B. DuBois described a nation of doubters, uncertain of Brown’s legacy and hesitant to claim it. With the benefit of 50 years’ hindsight, though, DuBois himself had no such compunction.
“When a prophet like John Brown appears, how must we of the world receive him?” he asked in his 1909 biography of the antislavery crusader, combating Brown’s Jim Crow-era reputation as a bloodthirsty outlaw. “Only in time is truth revealed. Today at last we know: John Brown was right.”
Radical abolitionist and domestic terrorist, Confederate scoundrel and Union saint, Brown is among the most contested figures in American history, fated, perhaps, to be received as the world and the moment require. Which lends the earthy, slyly funny, utterly righteous portrait of Brown painted in Showtime’s “The Good Lord Bird,” based on James McBride’s raucous novel, its sense of urgency: We’ve rarely needed Brown the prophet more than we do now.
And in “The Good Lord Bird,” cocreated by Ethan Hawke and Mark Richard, Hawke’s Old Man Brown is neither the monster of Southern nightmares, nor the eccentric on the margins of Geraldine Brooks’ “March,” nor the martyr of Russell Banks’ “Cloudsplitter.” Here, as in DuBois’ analysis, he is our very own Cassandra, logic crystalline behind his cloudy eyes.
This is a film I want to see. I hope I get Showtime.
