Early info on Hillary

 t’s the birthday of Hillary Clinton, born Hillary Rodham in Chicago (1947), the daughter of a man who sold draperies and was so frugal that even on the coldest winter nights in Illinois, he would turn the heat in the house off, and then wake up early in the morning to warm the house back up before everyone else arose.

Hillary’s father was a Republican, and she started her political life as one also, campaigning for Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Her first year of college, she was president of the Wellesley Young Republicans. But she was influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, and she shifted her political views. As a junior in college, she campaigned for Eugene McCarthy.

Her senior year, she wrote a thesis about the strategies and tactics of a radical community activist — which, while she was First Lady, the White House suppressed. She was the first student at Wellesley to deliver the formal graduation address, and people in the audience clapped for seven minutes.

She went to law school at Yale, where she met Bill Clinton. They started dating. They lived together and spent a summer campaigning together for George McGovern. They were married in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the living room of a house that they had just bought together. She’s the author of It Takes A Village (1995) and an autobiography, Living History (2003). The book sold more than a million copies within the first month it was published.

Thanks Writer's Almanac 2008 (thus it doesn't include anything about her run for the Presidency!)

Bolshevik revolution in Russia

 I didn't know that...

"It was on Nov 9,1917 that Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia overthrew the government and formed a new government that would eventually become the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Just four years earlier, Czar Nicholas II had celebrated a big anniversary: his family, the Romanovs, had ruled Russia for 300 years. He ruled over 150 million people in an empire that covered one-sixth of the landmass of the planet. But the empire was struggling. In 1905, frustrated workers had gone on mass strikes and forced Nicholas to agree to a series of reforms — most of which he didn't actually enact. Then World War I devastated Russia. The government printed money to finance the war, so inflation was sky-high and the economy was in shambles. Russian casualties were the highest of any nation ever in any war. In March of 1917, riots broke out over the scarcity of food. Nicholas was forced to abdicate. In his place, a weak provisional government took over, but they didn't make any major changes and people were still unhappy.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin returned to Russia after a decade in exile. He had been living in Switzerland, and he had to cross Germany to return to Russia. But Lenin opposed Russia's involvement in World War I, so the German authorities decided to let Lenin return to Russia in the hopes that he would undermine the Russian war effort.

Lenin rallied people with the slogan "Peace, land, and bread!" and gained popular support for his Bolshevik Party. Between February and September of 1917, the Bolshevik Party grew from 24,000 members to 200,000. The Bolsheviks planned an overthrow of the government for early November. There were many secret meeting between Party leaders, and the first step for Lenin was to convince the majority of the Bolshevik Party leaders that the time was right for an armed uprising. It was no easy task — one fellow revolutionary declared: "The strategic plan proposed by Comrade Lenin is limping on all four legs." But eventually they agreed by vote to proceed. They made their headquarters at the Smolny Institute, which had originally been commissioned by the Society for Education of Noble Maidens as an all-girls school for wealthy families.

On this day, the uprising began. Bolsheviks took over post offices, bridges, train stations, government organizations, and the state bank without a single shot being fired. People were ready for a change, and most of the military was away fighting. At 2 a.m. the next morning, the cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot toward the czar's home, the Winter Palace, to signal that it was time to attack the palace. The revolutionaries found it basically deserted, wandered around for a while, and finally discovered a few members of the provisional government hiding out in the czar's breakfast room. The revolutionaries arrested the members of the government, but since the revolutionaries couldn't read or write, they made the prisoners write their own arrest papers.

The whole coup was so bloodless and undramatic that Soviet propaganda later changed many of the facts to make it look more like a heroic and violent battle. In 1920, outside the palace, a huge performance was staged for 100,000 spectators to show everyone what had happened during the revolution. In this official version, The Storming of the Winter Palace, huge groups of demonstrators bravely battled government forces, and the leader of the provisional government leapt from a palace window. The Storming of the Winter Palace involved thousands of performers, including 125 ballet dancers and 500 musicians.

Even though the Bolshevik uprising took place on November 7th, the Russians were still using the old Julian calendar. And according to the Russians, the revolt took place on October 25th — and so it was called the October Revolution."

Writer's Almanac

North Carolina home of Pepsi Cola

 Pepsi was first invented in 1893 as "Brad's Drink" by Caleb Bradham, who sold the drink at his drugstore in New Bern, North Carolina.

It was renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898, "Pepsi" because it was advertised to relieve dyspepsia (indigestion) and "Cola" referring to the cola flavor. Some have also suggested that "Pepsi" may have been a reference to the drink aiding digestion like the digestive enzyme pepsin, but pepsin itself was never used as an ingredient to Pepsi-Cola.

The original recipe also included sugar and vanilla. Bradham sought to create a fountain drink that was appealing and would aid in digestion and boost energy.

In 1903, Bradham moved the bottling of Pepsi from his drugstore to a rented warehouse, and the Pepsi Cola company was formed on June 16th. That year, Bradham sold 7,968 gallons of syrup. The next year, Pepsi was sold in six-ounce bottles, and sales increased to 19,848 gallons.

Pictured: the birthplace of Pepsi.

Photos of a crash and good news of survivors

 October 16, 1956 : Pan American World Airways Boeing 377 Stratocruiser “Sovereign of the Skies” is past the point of no return over the Pacific Ocean on her route from Hawaii to San Francisco. Engine #1 has failed, and engine #4 begins to backfire.

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Captain Richard Ogg radios a message, “Pan Am 90943 Flight 6 declaring an emergency over the Pacific”

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Who answers this call? The US Coast Guard cutter Ponchartrain stationed hours away in the vast Pacific Ocean. The aircraft continued to fly during the night to deplete fuel and meet up with the cutter.

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The cutters log reflects the following... “The plane has ditched into the Pacific Ocean. Have four rafts in the water. All possible rescue gear. The plane broke off at the tail. There are survivors. The aircraft is sinking.”

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ALL PASSENGERS and CREW SURVIVED the impact, and were rescued and returned to shore by the crew of the US Coast Guard cutter Ponchartrain.

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The US Coast Guard filmed the rescue. Watch on YouTube : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HcekzTTadJ0

Million Man March

 The Million Man March was a large gathering of African-American men in Washington, D.C., on October 16, 1995. 

Paul Simon

 It’s the birthday of singer and songwriter Paul Simon, born in Newark, New Jersey, (1941). In 1964, he and his friend Art Garfunkel recorded a folk album, Wednesday Morning, 3 AM. It was a flop, and Paul Simon moved back in with his parents. But without telling Simon and Garfunkel, a producer added electric guitar, bass, and drums to the song “The Sound of Silence” and released it as a single. It went to No. 1 on the pop charts.

Eleanor Roosevelt

 It's the birthday of Eleanor Roosevelt, born in New York City in 1884. She was shy and awkward as a girl; her mother, a beautiful socialite, was disappointed in her daughter. Both Eleanor's parents died by the time she was a teenager. Then she met a distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they got married. Eleanor gave birth to six children, and she said, "I suppose I was fitting pretty well into the pattern of a fairly conventional, quiet, young society matron." But as her husband began his political career, she learned about politics too, and she was inspired by women's suffrage and started campaigning for women, for the labor movement, and for minorities. Eleanor became more and more independent, especially after her husband had an affair with her secretary. She held press conferences, traveled all over the country, gave lectures and radio broadcasts, and wrote a daily syndicated newspaper column called "My Day," where she expressed her political and social opinions. She also wrote four books: This is My Story (1937), This I Remember (1949), On My Own (1958), and Tomorrow Is Now, which was published posthumously (1963).

SOURCE: Writer's Almanac 2008

Thich Nhat Hanh

 It's the birthday of Vietnamese monk, writer, and activist Thich Nhat Hanh, born in 1926 in Tha Tien, Vietnam. He became a Buddhist monk when he was 16 years old. During the Vietnam War, he decided that monks shouldn't just stay in monasteries and meditate all day long while a war was going on. So he founded an organization that helped rebuild bombed villages, set up schools and medical centers, and organize agricultural cooperatives. He traveled to the United States to urge the American government to withdraw its troops, and he persuaded Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly oppose the Vietnam War. But both the non-Communist and Communist governments banned him from Vietnam in 1966, and it was just a few years ago, in 2005, that he was finally allowed to return for a visit. Since he was banned from Vietnam, he set up a monastic community in southern France, called Plum Village.

Thich Nhat Hanh has published more than 100 books, books of poetry and Buddhist thought. About 40 of them are in English, and many of those have been best-sellers, including Peace Is Every Step (1991), Call Me by My True Names (1993), and Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995).

Source: Writer's Almanac 2008

I post an inspiring statement by him often!