Bruce Willis is 51 today, Glenn Close is 59 and Ursula Andress is 70.
Congress approved Daylight Saving Time on this date in 1918. Word hasn’t reached Indiana and Arizona.
Bob Dylan’s first album was released on this date in 1962.
Wyatt Earp was born on this date in 1848. He died in 1929, age 80. Larry McMurtry has an essay on Wyatt, Back to the O.K. Corral, in the current New York Review of Books.
I am talking, of course, about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, which, for starters, wasn’t fought in the O.K. Corral—the shooting occurred across the street in a vacant lot adjacent to the local photographer Camillus Fry’s rooming house. Some say the shooting only lasted fifteen seconds; others give it twenty seconds, or even thirty. Local estimate was that some thirty shots were fired, at close if not quite point blank range. Three men were killed and three wounded. The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was neither more nor less violent than a number of shootings that had occurred in Tombstone or its environs in the few short years of the community’s existence. It solved nothing, proved nothing, meant nothing; and yet, 123 years later, the gunfight at the O.K. Corral is reenacted every day in Tombstone, Arizona, to paying customers—lots of paying customers.
The most recent O.K. Corral movie stars Kevin Costner as Wyatt; the next most recent, released a few months earlier, stars Kurt Russell as Wyatt, with Val Kilmer as Doc. There are so many gunfight-at-the O.K.-Corral movies that they constitute a kind of subgenre of the western. In the most lyrical version, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp.
What I’m wondering is why, in this day and time, anyone should care about Wyatt Earp, or any Earp, or the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, either. The Battle of the Little Bighorn at least offers heroism, spectacle, and mass, whereas the gunfight at the O.K. Corral was merely a bungled arrest. Virgil Earp, not Wyatt, was the peace officer in charge that day. How do we get from a bungled arrest to Henry Fonda, Hugh O’Brian, Burt Lancaster, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, and all the other movie land Wyatts? I’d like to know.
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[Reposted from 2005 with some added items.]
YES IT HAS YES IT HAS! Indiana will be going on DST with (almost) everyone else next week.
Unfortunately, the great Indiana tradition of “one step forward, two steps back” continues. We’ll be in the Eastern Time Zone, even though the whole state lies within the natural Central Time Zone. Yes, Indianapolis will be closer (time-wise) to Bangor, ME than Chicago.