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RMS Titanic departing Southampton on 10 April 1912
On this date in 1861 -- Abraham Lincoln, expecting the Civil War to be a short conflict, calls for only 75,000 volunteers to serve for 3 months.
On this date in 1865 -- Abraham Lincoln dies from the bullet wound inflicted by John Wilkes Booth, six days after Lee surrendered at Appomattox.
In an alternate universe, he survives, though his wife does not --- for which he blames the Texas Ranger, Samuel McCord --
sending him on a lifelong quest for revenge.
The RMS Titanic went down 112 years ago today. Though polished by a century of narratives, the tragedy retains its impact in the eyewitness records:
An account dictated to the New York Times by the Titanic’s twenty-two-year-old junior wireless operator, Harold Bride:
Bride’s description begins in humor, he and the senior wireless operator cracking jokes about the mishap.
Then the bow tilts, the “great scramble aft” begins, and Phillips, the senior man, begins hours of urgent messaging:
"He was a brave man. I learned to love him that night, and I suddenly felt for him a great reverence to see him standing there sticking to his work while everybody was raging about….
…I saw a stoker leaning over Phillips from behind. He was too busy to notice what the stoker was doing. The man was slipping the lifebelt off Phillips’s back. I suddenly felt a passion not to let that man die a decent sailor’s death.
I wished he might have stretched rope or walked a plank. I took a lead pipe and did my duty. I hope I finished him. I don’t know."
Then chaos:
The Captain giving the ‘abandon ship,’
Phillips refusing to leave his post,
Bride jumping, eventually being rescued,
And helping to hand up from the floor of his life-raft the body of a dead sailor — Phillips.
Just in 2013 -- those terrible bombings at the Boston Marathon.
2014 -- Total Lunar Eclipse. This year we missed matching it by only a few days.
1923 -- Insulin became widely available. Insulin had only been proven to work the year before; before that, diabetes was essentially a death sentence, especially for children.
1955 -- Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald's restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, on this day.
Within five years, there were over 100 McDonald's in the US, and less than 20 years later the company passed the $1 billion US Dollars (USD) profit mark.
1942 -- The George Cross is the highest civil award given in the United Kingdom, and is rarely awarded.
The island of Malta and all its residents were awarded the George Cross because of their behavior during a long-term siege in World War II,
and the cross is now sewn into the Maltan flag.
The "Oliver Twist" of my SAME AS IT NEVER WAS is awarded it by King George himself:
M could stand for Christopher Moore:
“If you think anyone is sane you just don't know enough about them.”
― Christopher Moore, Practical Demonkeeping
M could stand for John D MacDonald
"The only thing in the world worth a damn is the strange, touching, pathetic, awesome nobility of the individual human spirit."
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