On October 4…
“That man was a philosopher, who said that the history of the world was a history of ruin. It is so. Wherever we turn our eyes, we cannot fail to behold some magnificent ruin.”
~Charles Lanman
1777 – 11,000 Patriots under General George Washington attempted an early morning attack on British General William Howe’s 9,000 British troops at Germantown, Pennsylvania, five miles north of the British-occupied capital city of Philadelphia.
Washington’s Continental forces were poorly trained, poorly fed and poorly clothed. Washington still thought them ready to fight and had planned to send four columns into battle with bits of white paper tucked into their hats to help them identify each other in the darkness of early morning. His elaborate plan was thrown into disarray, however, when two columns got lost in heavy morning fog as they approached the Benjamin Chew House.
By 10 a.m., the battle was over. Although the Americans were forced into a retreat (both sides suffered heavy losses – 152 dead, 521 wounded and 400 captured for the Patriots and 71 dead, 450 wounded and 14 missing for the British), the battle demonstrated Washington’s strategic abilities.
1927 – Sculpting began on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. It would take another 12 years for the impressive granite images of four of America’s most revered and beloved presidents – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt – to be completed.
1943 – Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler addressed the squad leaders of his Nazi secret police, attempting to fill them with pride for the work they had “accomplished” – the murder of more than 1 million Jews in German occupied Russia during a one-and-a-half-year period. “Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand,” claimed Himmler. “To have stuck it out and at the same time to have remained decent fellows, that is what has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and shall never be written.”
It was Himmler, of course, who oversaw the establishment of the Auschwitz concentration camp cluster, as well as the Warsaw ghetto massacre. The organizing of some prisoners for slave labor and the inflicting of gruesome medical experimentation on others can also be attributed to him. Consequently, it is little wonder that he could so blithely say, “Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.”
1944 – Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributed to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that revealed the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat.
“The danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces of psychiatric patients is enough to convince most observers of this fact.” The Surgeon General’s report went on to lament the fact that a “wound or injury is regarded, not as a misfortune, but a blessing.”
On the basis of this evaluation, as well as firsthand experience, American commanders judged that the average soldier could last about 200 days in combat before suffering serious psychiatric damage.
1957 – The Soviet Union inaugurated the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite. With a diameter of 22 inches and weighing 184 pounds, Sputnik circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes.
Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset (its farthest point from Earth was only 584 miles), Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik’s orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.
1964 – President Johnson issued the order to reactivate North Vietnamese coastal raids by South Vietnamese boats as part of Oplan 34A. The raids had been suspended after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in early August. On August 2, North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox, which was conducting an intelligence gathering mission in the same general area that had just come under attack by several Oplan 34A raids. Two days after the first attack, there was another incident, the details of which remain unclear. The Maddox, joined by destroyer USS C. Turner Joy, engaged what were believed to be more attacking North Vietnamese patrol boats.
Although it was questionable whether the second attack actually happened – and there isn’t much proof that it ever did – the incident provided the rationale for retaliatory air attacks against the North Vietnamese and the subsequent Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which became the basis for the initial escalation of the war in Vietnam and ultimately, the insertion of U.S. combat troops into the area.
1966 – Pope Paul VI addressed 150,000 people in St. Peter’s Square in Rome and calls for an end to the war in Vietnam through negotiations. Although the Pope’s address had no impact on the Johnson administration and its policies in Southeast Asia, his comments were indicative of the mounting antiwar sentiment that was growing both at home and overseas.
1988 – Televangelist Jim Bakker was indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud and of conspiring to defraud the public. The case against the founder of Praise the Lord (PTL) Ministries and three of his aides exploded in the press when it was revealed that Bakker had a sexual encounter with former church secretary Jessica Hahn.
Bakker eventually paid Hahn over $350,000 to remain silent. When the arrangement became public, the scandal helped to bring down the entire PTL ministry. Bakker was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The sentence was later reduced to eight years, and he was released in 1994.
1989 – Secretariat, who, in 1973 became the first Triple Crown winner in 25 years, was euthanized at the age of 19, due to laminitis – a painful and debilitating hoof condition. His record-breaking win in the 1973 Belmont Stakes, where he left the field 31 lengths behind him (photo above), is widely regarded as one of the greatest horse races of all time.
1989 – Graham Chapman, English comedian, writer, actor, and one of the six members of the surreal comedy group Monty Python, died of cancer at the age of 48. Chapman played the lead role in two Python films, Monty Python and The Holy Grail and Life of Brian.
1997 – The second largest cash robbery in U.S. history occurred at the Charlotte, North Carolina office of Loomis, Fargo and Company. An FBI investigation eventually resulted in 24 convictions and the recovery of approximately 95% of the $17.3 million stolen cash.
2011 – Michael Morton, who had spent 25 years in prison for his wife’s murder, was released after DNA evidence implicated another man in the crime. Ken Anderson, the prosecutor in the case, was later accused of withholding evidence indicating that Morton was innocent.
In October 2012, after a nearly year-long investigation, the State Bar of Texas filed a disciplinary petition against Anderson (who became a Texas district judge in 2002), alleging he withheld various pieces of evidence from Morton’s attorneys, including a transcript of an August 1986 taped interview between the case’s lead investigator and Morton’s mother-in-law, in which she stated that Morton’s 3-year-old son had told her in detail about witnessing his mother’s murder and said his father was not home at the time.
Anderson agreed to serve 10 days in jail, perform 500 hours of community service, give up his law license and pay a $500 fine.
10 days in jail seems like a damn small price to pay for putting an innocent man behind bars for 25 years.
And Finally … If you want to play great oldies from the 60s and 70s (with NO commercials), here’s the link to the our Internet Oldies station (remember to move that green volume line on the player all the way to the right once you click the link!)
OLDIES STREAM
Or if you want oldies just from the 50s (with NO commercials), we’ve got you covered with the best Internet 50s station anywhere! (once again, remember to move that green volume line on the player to the right once you click the link!)
FIFTIES STREAM
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2016 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.