Bulls make money.
Bears make money.
Pigs get slaughtered.
Day: September 17, 2008
September 17th should be a national holiday
… because it’s the birthday of the Constitution and Hank Williams. And also these folks.
Football hall-of-fame inductee George Blanda is 81 today. I’m surprised he doesn’t suit up. Blanda played his last game on January 4, 1976, the 1975 AFC Championship. He was 48.
Supreme Court Justice David Souter is 69.
Coach Phil Jackson is 63. Lots of good people born in 1945 (and we are not Baby Boomers, we are War Babies).
Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is 57. That’s Cassandra Peterson.
Rita Rudner is 52.
Ken Kesey was born on September 17, 1935. The Writer’s Almanac had a great little essay last year that you should just go read. It begins:
Ken Kesey … was born on this day in La Junta, Colorado (1935). He was a champion wrestler in high school and voted most likely to succeed. He married his high school sweetheart and almost went to Hollywood to be an actor and then accepted a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford, where, as part of a VA experiment, for $75 a day, which was good money, he became one of the first Americans to be exposed to a new drug called LSD.
Maureen Connolly was born on this date in 1934. Connolly was the first woman to win the tennis grand slam (1953). She died of cancer at age 34.
The 15th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, was born 101 years ago today.
William Carlos Williams was born on this date in 1883. Williams was a physician and poet.
He thought that poetry shouldn’t be full of fancy allusions and abstract ideas, and that there should be “no ideas but in things.” His poems were inspired by the townspeople of Rutherford, especially his patients. A lot of his patients didn’t even know that their hardworking doctor — who delivered more than 2,000 babies — spent his nights and weekends writing poems. Those poems were published in books that include Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and the epic five-volume poem Paterson (1946, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958) about Paterson, New Jersey, the nearest city to his hometown of Rutherford.
David Dunbar Buick was born on September 17th in 1854. Didn’t know Buick was someone’s name, did you?
Hey Good Lookin’
Hiram Williams was born on this date 84 years ago. We know him as Hank.
Hank Williams is an inductee of both the Country Music and Rock and Roll halls of fame.
Hank Williams’s legend has long overtaken the rather frail and painfully introverted man who spawned it. Almost singlehandedly, Williams set the agenda for contemporary country songcraft, but his appeal rests as much in the myth that even now surrounds his short life. His is the standard by which success is measured in country music on every level, even self-destruction.
The words and music of Hank Williams echo across the decades with a timelessness that transcends genre. He brought country music into the modern era, and his influence spilled over into the folk and rock arenas as well. Artists ranging from Gram Parsons and John Fogerty (who recorded an entire album of Williams’ songs after leaving Creedence Clearwater Revival) to the Georgia Satellites and Uncle Tupelo have adapted elements of Williams’ persona, especially the aura of emotional forthrightness and bruised idealism communicated in his songs. Some of Williams’ more upbeat country and blues-flavored numbers, on the other hand, anticipated the playful abandon of rockabilly.
Hank Williams died in the back seat of his Cadillac. He was found and declared dead on New Year’s Day 1953. He was 29.
America’s Bloodiest Day
“Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible by almost any measure was September 17, 1862. The battle waged on that date, close by Antietam Creek at Sharpsburg in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded on any other single day in the nation’s history. So intense and sustained was the violence, a man recalled, that for a moment in his mind’s eye the very landscape around him turned red.”
Stephen W. Sears
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
The New York Times coverage from 1862 is online.
Antietam gave Lincoln the military victory he needed to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22nd. It stated that slaves in states or parts of states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared free. The objective of the war had changed.
America’s bloodiest day:
| Killed: | Union 2,000 | Confederate 1,550 | Total Killed: 3,650 |
| Wounded: | Union 9,550 | Confederate 7,750 | Total Wounded: 17,300 |
| Missing/Captured: | Union 750 | Confederate 1,020 | Total Missing: 1,770 |
| Total: | Union 12,400 | Confederate 10,320 | Total Casualties: 22,720 |
As a rule of thumb, about 20% of the wounded died of their wounds and 30% of the missing had been killed (in the days before dog-tags to identify the dead). Accordingly, an estimate of the total dead from the one-day battle: 7,640.
Source: National Park Service
The best single volume on Antietam is Stephen Sears’s Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam. Sears wrote a good article on the battle in 1989: Antietam: The Terrible Price of Freedom.
Constitution Day
221 years ago today the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met for the last time to sign the document and send it to the 13 states for ratification. In Gouverneur Morris’s immortal preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
