Author: NewMexiKen

‘Wanted: Young, skinny, wiry fellows not over 18. Must be expert riders willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred.’

Starting on April 3, 1860, the Pony Express ran through parts of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and California. On an average day, a rider covered 75 to 100 miles. He changed horses at relay stations, set about 10 or 15 miles apart, transferring himself and his mochila (a saddle cover with four pockets or cantinas for mail) to the new mount, all in one leap.

The first mail by Pony Express via the central route from St. Joseph to Sacramento took 10 1/2 days, cutting the Overland Stage time via the southern route by more than half. The fastest delivery was in March 1861, when President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address was carried in 7 days and 17 hours.

From April 1860 through June 1861, the Pony Express operated as a private enterprise. From July 1, 1861, it operated under contract as a mail route until October 24, 1861, when the transcontinental telegraph line was completed, and the Pony Express became a legend.

History of the United States Postal Service 1775-1993

Title of this post taken from want ad placed in March 1860 for riders.

Union troops

. . . entered Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, on this date in 1865. The Confederate government and army had fled the night before. According to historian James M. McPherson, “Southerners burned more of their own capital than the enemy had burned of Atlanta or Columbia.”

The following day, April 4, President Lincoln, who had been “vacationing” at City Point, Virginia, near the front since March 24, toured Richmond (much of it on foot) with his 12-year-old son Tad (it was Tad’s birthday). At the capitol, Lincoln sat in Jefferson Davis’ chair.

Lincoln returned to Washington on April 9th (the date of Lee’s surrender). He was assassinated just five days later.

Wash. man, 101, passes driver’s test

LANGLEY, Wash. – Alden Couch just celebrated his 101st birthday. And he passed his Washington state driver’s test with flying colors, if you listen to him. “I haven’t parallel parked for 10 years and I sailed through it like nothing,” he said.

A resident of the Whidbey Island town of Langley, Couch planned to take a birthday drive — by himself — down to the local senior center, where his friends had a party planned for him. Then he planned to drive home — by himself again.

Yahoo! News

Good for him.

He’s a former lineman for Puget Power who is 95 years older than the Impala he now owns, which happens to be his all-time favorite car.

“It isn’t the cheapest one in the whole deal, but it’s a good one,” he said.

Couch used to be partial to Oldsmobiles until he outlived the make, which was discontinued in 2004. The first car Couch drove was an oldie but goodie, Ford’s Model T. It was his parents’ car.

I wonder if he has any bumper stickers on the Impala.

The Sheriff’s Back

Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano is back to blogging and has this, which NewMexiKen found interesting.

I am dismayed to learn the Governor vetoed the Red Light Camera Bill. The good thing is that all this attention has brought some light on the downfalls of Albuquerque’s Red Light Camera Program and may bring about needed change. Marty Chavez has hung his hat on this program and the amount of discontent it is brewing in Albuquerque could affect his poll numbers in his own district when the Democratic Primary for Governor comes around.

Balking at the First Pitch

This is a baseball story, so let’s get right to the stats.

Today is Washington’s 65th Opening Day since 1910, when William H. Taft gave us a tradition: the ceremonial first pitch by the president. Taft threw the inaugural one for the Senators that year. In the local club’s 63 home openers since, a dozen presidents have done the honors 45 times, from front-row seats or from the mound, making them 46 for 64 overall (.719). Pretty reliable.

President Bush kept up the tradition in 2005, celebrating baseball’s return to the nation’s capital after a 33-season absence. But he missed last year’s home opener — and he’ll miss today’s, too, when the Nationals host the Florida Marlins at 1:05 p.m. Except for when the world was at war, only two other presidents, Woodrow Wilson and Richard M. Nixon, missed Opening Day ceremonies two years in a row. And Wilson had suffered a stroke.

The Washington Post

Making the world safe for democracy

From The New York Times report on President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war — 90 years ago today:

Before an audience that cheered him as he has never been cheered in the Capitol in his life, the President cast in the lot of American unreservedly with the Allies and declared for a war that must not end until the issue between autocracy and democracy has been fought out. He recited our injuries at Germany’s hands, but he did not rest our cause on those; he went on from that point to range us with the Allies as a factor in an irrepressible conflict between the autocrat and the people. He showed that peace was impossible for the democracies of the world while this power remained on earth. “The world,” he said, “must be made safe for democracy.”

April 2nd is the birthday

. . . of Leon Russell. He’s 65.

The ultimate rock & roll session man, Leon Russell’s long and storied career includes collaborations with a virtual who’s who of music icons spanning from Jerry Lee Lewis to Phil Spector to the Rolling Stones. A similar eclecticism and scope also surfaced in his solo work, which couched his charmingly gravelly voice in a rustic yet rich swamp pop fusion of country, blues and gospel. . . . As a member of Spector’s renowned studio group, Russell played on many of the finest pop singles of the 1960s, also arranging classics like Ike & Tina Turner’s monumental “River Deep, Mountain High”; other hits bearing his input include the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Gary Lewis & the Playboys’ “This Diamond Ring,” and Herb Alpert’s “A Taste of Honey.”

allmusic

. . . of jazz-rock guitarist of Larry Coryell. He’s 64.

. . . of Linda Hunt. The actress won an Oscar for playing a man in The Year of Living Dangerously. She did not play a woman posing as a man, like Barbra Streisand in Yentl. She actually played a male part. Ms. Hunt is 62. NewMexiKen liked Hunt particularly as the barkeep/saloon-owner in Silverardo.

. . . of baseball hall-of-famer Don Sutton. He, too, is 62. Sutton had 324 victories, 3,574 strikeouts (fifth best all-time) and a career ERA of 3.26. Sutton never lost a turn in the starting rotation due to illness or injury. (That’s impressive.)

. . . of Emmylou Harris. She’s 60 today.

Though other performers sold more records and earned greater fame, few left as profound an impact on contemporary music as Emmylou Harris. Blessed with a crystalline voice, a remarkable gift for phrasing, and a restless creative spirit, she traveled a singular artistic path, proudly carrying the torch of “Cosmic American music” passed down by her mentor, Gram Parsons. With the exception of only Neil Young — not surprisingly an occasional collaborator — no other mainstream star established a similarly large body of work as consistently iconoclastic, eclectic, or daring; even more than three decades into her career, Harris’ latter-day music remained as heartfelt, visionary, and vital as her earliest recordings.

allmusic

. . . of SVU Detective Elliot Stabler. Actor Christopher Meloni is 46.

The French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was born on April 2 in 1834. He is the creator of the Statue of Liberty. The statue’s face is said to be that of Bartholdi’s mother.

Walter Chrysler was born on this date in 1875.

After a successful career in the railroad industry that began as a sweeper, then a skilled machinist and finally the plant manager of the American Locomotive Company, Chrysler switched gears to enter the auto industry as the plant manager for Buick. After rising to the presidency of Buick, Chrysler moved to Willys-Overland in 1920, reorganizing and saving the company. While still at Willys-Overland, Chrysler was recruited to salvage the foundering Maxwell-Chalmers Company. After taking control of Maxwell’s assets and liabilities in June 1925, Chrysler became president of the company that bore his name, as did the automobiles manufactured by it. He remained as president until 1935, and served as chairman until his death in 1940.

Walter P. Chrysler Museum

In 1928 Chrysler was Time’s second-ever Person of the Year, following Lindbergh.

Another good read

NewMexiKen failed to mention a good book I read while visiting in the San Francisco area last month. It’s The Last Season by Eric Blehm.

Blehm tells the story of Randy Morgenson, a seasonal back country National Park Service ranger in California’s King’s Canyon National Park. During the summer of 1996 Morgenson went missing from his station high in the Sierra Nevada. The book tells of the search — and its eventual outcome — but also Morgenson’s life, family, devotion to the wilderness, life as a seasonal ranger and much more. Morgenson was a special, if not completely likable man. It’s an interesting story.

Getting the full picture

Sen. John McCain strolled briefly through an open-air market in Baghdad today in an effort to prove that Americans are “not getting the full picture” of what’s going on in Iraq.

NBC’s Nightly News provided further details about McCain’s one-hour guided tour. He was accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships overhead.” Still photographs provided by the military to NBC News seemed to show McCain wearing a bulletproof vest during his visit.

Think Progress, which has the video.

A best line and more

“If Republicans in this election vote in such a way as to say a candidate’s personal life and personal conduct in office doesn’t matter, then a lot of Christian evangelical leaders owe Bill Clinton a public apology.”

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a minister, who’s running for president himself. Guess he’s thinking about Rudy and Newt and St. McCain.

At Functional Ambivalent, Tom takes the side of the grumpy tourist who wouldn’t give the Starbuck’s barista his name.

Dan Neil gets to drive a Formula 1 car.

Some come to Vegas to visit the town’s fleshpots or to enrich its fleecing parlors, or simply to pass out by the pool. But in a nation obsessed with cars, sex, speed, diversion and the unholy mingling of same, it’s no surprise that the city of demiurges has become a major destination for people who want to get their wheel freak on.

Here you can rent a Ferrari by the hour, drive a rooster-tailing sand buggy, go roundy-round on the Las Vegas speedway in a 650-horsepower stock car, learn to ride the sickest racing motorcycle the deviants at Honda or Ducati can devise.

At the top of this particular pile of coin-operated thrills, however, is LRS Formula USA, a company that sells mere mortals the chance to wedge, and I do mean wedge, themselves into an full-on, honest-to-Odin F1 car.

“I don’t have little cars,” says LRS principal Pierre-Louis Moroni. “They’re not toys. These are as close to a race-ready F1 car as you can drive, unless you buy one yourself.”

Neil goes on to relate his experience — he’s so low to the ground and the car is so finely suspended, “I could read a newspaper if I ran over it.” $3,395 for four laps if you’re interested.

Glenn Greenwald reports on conversations National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru had with Cato Institute’s President Ed Crane.

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

These gentlemen are running to be President of the United States and they are unable to express an understanding of the basic tenets of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Gasoline in San Francisco

Gasoline in Albuquerque is $2.65/2.75/2.85 a gallon. Buy your gas early in the day so you can save the several cents a gallon it will go up by nightfall. We need an election to get the price back down again. Photo from Crooks and Liars. Don’t you just love the persistence of the 9/10ths?

The new NewMexiKen design is a work-in-progress, but then isn’t everything?

Sí Se Puede

César Chávez was born 80 years ago today.

Blending the nonviolent resistance of Gandhi with the organizational skills of his mentor, the social activist Saul Alinsky, Mr. Chavez captured worldwide attention in the 1960’s. Leading an initially lonely battle to unionize the fields and orchards of California, he issued a call to boycott grapes that soon became a cause celebre.

Mr. Chavez, who was described by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 as “one of the heroic figures of our time,” was widely acknowledged to have done more to improve the lot of the migrant farm worker than anyone else.

Fighting growers and shippers who for generations had defeated efforts to unionize field workers, and later fighting rival unionists, Mr. Chavez for the first time brought a degree of stability and security to the lives of some migrant workers.

Above from the 1993 obituary in The New York Times, which also had this:

Baby César Chávez

Cesar Estrada Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, near Yuma, Ariz., the second of five children of Juana and Librado Chavez. His father’s parents migrated from Mexico in 1880.

His early years were spent on the family’s 160-acre farm. But in the seventh year of the Depression, when he was 10, the family fell behind on mortgage payments and lost its farm.

Young César Chávez

Along with thousands of other families in the Southwest, they sought a new life in California. They found it picking carrots, cotton and other crops in arid valleys, following the sun in search of the next harvest and the next migrants’ camp.

Mr. Chavez never graduated from high school, and once counted 65 elementary schools he had attended “for a day, a week or a few months.”

Photos from César E Chávez Foundation.