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The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF unnerving article or story: Why is everything always so fucking weird
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Never forget the great Australian Ice Cream Cart Jihad of 1915

https://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/an-ice-cream-war/

quote:

The war seemed a very long way away to the citizens of Broken Hill that January 1.

It was the height of the southern summer, and the Australian silver-mining town baked in the outback desert heat, 720 miles from Sydney and half a world away from the mud and blood of the Western Front. The First World War was less than five months old, and only a fool would have accused the hardened miners of Broken Hill of lacking patriotism, but on that first day of 1915 they wanted nothing more than to enjoy a rare holiday with their families and forget about their troubles—not just the war, which Australia had joined alongside Britain on the day it was declared, but also the grim economic times that were closing mines and putting miners out of work.

More than 1,200 men, women and children clambered aboard the makeshift train that would take them a few miles up the line to Silverton for the annual town picnic. But for Broken Hill that New Year’s Day, war was not 12,000 miles away; it was just over a ridge a mile or two along the track, where a couple of Afghans had raised the Turkish flag over an ice cream cart and were preparing to launch a two-man war.

The townspeople saw the men as their train pulled slowly up the hill; some even waved, thinking that the two Muslims touting rifles must be going rabbiting on their day off. But as the distance between the ice cream cart and the excursioners closed to only 30 yards, the Afghans crouched, took aim—and opened fire.

Bullets peppered the side of the train, which consisted of nothing more than flat wagons crudely converted for passenger use with temporary benches. The wagons’ low sides left the picnickers’ upper bodies and heads completely exposed, and at such short range they offered a target too big to miss. Ten passengers were hit before the train driver realized what was happening and pulled out of range; three of those were killed and seven wounded, three of whom were women. The dead were two men, William Shaw and Alf Millard, and a 17-year-old girl named Elma Cowie, who had joined the excursion with her boyfriend on a date.

As the train slowed further along the track, some passengers leaped down and ran for cover, and two headed back to Broken Hill to raise the alarm. Meanwhile, the Afghans took their rifles and and trudged off toward a quartz formation on the horizon. They had chosen it long before as the place where they would make their last stand.

To understand why what is known as the Battle of Broken Hill took place at all means understanding why such an isolated outback town had a Muslim population in the first place, and why at least some of the Afghans in Broken Hill felt utterly alienated from the people that they lived among, and loyal to a country—Turkey—that was not their own.

The answer to the first question is simple: Afghans had been coming to Australia for almost 50 years because Australia had discovered that camels, not horses, were the best form of transportation in the desert in the years before the coming of the truck. The Afghans knew all about working with camels, minded less about the discomfort and smell, and could be paid far less than white Australians to do the dirty work of shifting goods to desert towns across the outback.

This last point was, of course, a crucial one. Muslim immigrants took jobs that Australians felt were theirs by right, and the local teamsters were highly unionized and made angry by a potent cocktail of fear, racism and hatred. The racism was a product of a deep-rooted sense of white superiority, which crumbled in the face of the Afghans’ competence and toughness; the fear sprang from the way what was loudly proclaimed as “unfair” competition was costing jobs at a time when the economy was shrinking. The simple fact was that most businessmen and farmers cared only that camels could journey through the outback in less than half the time it took a teamster’s wagon, and at a lower price. To make matters worse, the teamsters could not even work alongside the Afghans; their horses were so revolted by the appearance and the odor of the camels that they would frequently bolt on sight of them.

Long before 1914, relations between the Afghans and the teamsters had deteriorated across Australia to the point where it was not uncommon for Muslims to have their camps raided and their camels crippled. Fistfights between the two groups became common on roads leading from the main rail heads and ports. Records show that there were also at least six murders committed in Australia as a result of these disputes—one by a white mob and five by one Afghan—and that as early as 1893 the people of Broken Hill had lodged a formal protest against the “unrestricted immigration” of Afghans into New South Wales. The militant socialist editor of the local Barrier Miner newspaper campaigned for years against their presence in the town, publishing a series of incendiary articles in his attempt to drive the cameleers out of the Barrier mining district.

Add to all that the Afghans’ different ethnicity and religion, and it is scarcely surprising that they soon became what the historian Christine Stevens terms “the untouchables in a white Australia,” never welcome in the outback towns in which they had to make their homes. Instead they formed their own distinct communities—settlements, known colloquially as “ghantowns,” that clung uncomfortably to the edges of white communities, rarely mixing in any way with them, and certainly not spending the little money that they had with white storekeepers. Each ghantown would have its mullah and its halal butcher, and in Broken Hill the same man performed both these functions. His name was Mullah Abdullah, and he was the leader of the two men now making their way across the desert scrub toward the safety of the quartz formation.

Mullah Abdullah had been born somewhere near the Khyber Pass in 1855. He had had at least some education—he spoke and wrote Dari, the formal language of Afghanistan—and must have received some training at a madrasa school before arriving in Australia in about 1899. “As spiritual head of a group of cameleers,” Stevens writes, “he led the daily prayers, presided at burials, and killed animals al halal for food consumption.”

It was this last part of Mullah Abdullah’s job that had caused him problems. The teamsters were not the only powerful workers’ group in heavily unionized Broken Hill; the butchers, too, had organized. In the last few weeks of 1914, the Afghan had been visited by the chief sanitary inspector and prosecuted not only for slaughtering animals illegally, but also for not belonging to the butchers’ union. It was a second offense. Fined an amount he could not afford to pay, Mullah Abullah was deeply angered and insulted.

His companion, known by the Anglicized name of Gool Mohammed [Gul Mohamed], was an Afridi tribesman who had gone to Australia as a cameleer some time after 1900. At some point early in the 1900s his religious convictions had taken him to Turkey, where he enlisted in the army of the Ottoman Empire. In doing so, he was committing to serve a sultan who—as master of the Muslim Holy Places of Arabia—also claimed to be the caliph, or spiritual leader, of all Muslims. Gool served in four campaigns with the Turks before returning to Australia, this time to work in the mines of Broken Hill. Losing his job there as the economy worsened, he had been reduced, at the age of about 40, to working as an ice cream man, hawking his wares through the town’s dusty streets.

News of the outbreak of the First World War—and of Turkey’s declaration of war on Great Britain and its empire—reached Broken Hill soon after it occurred. Gool Mohammed’s loyalty to his sultan never wavered; he wrote immediately to the Minister of War in Istanbul, offering to re-enlist, and (an impressive testimonial to the efficiency of the Ottoman war department and the laxness of Australia’s postal censors, this) actually received a reply. For a man in Gool’s position, however—impoverished, far from home and likely to be intercepted long before he could reach the Middle East—the idea of fighting in Australia must have held considerable appeal. The letter from the Ottomans encouraged him to “be a member of the Turkish Army and fight only for the Sultan,” without specifying where or how.

A note carried by Gool suggests that it was he who inflamed Mullah Abdullah with his zeal to strike back against the Australians. But it was certainly Mullah Abdullah who hand-wrote the suicide notes the two composed before they set out to ambush the picnic train. “I hold the Sultan’s order,” Gool’s note read, “duly signed and sealed by him. It is in my waist belt now, and if it is not destroyed by cannon shot or rifle bullets, you will find it on me. I must kill your men and give my life for my faith by order of the Sultan [but] I have no enmity against anyone, nor have I consulted with anyone, nor informed anyone.” Mullah Abdullah’s letter explained his grievance against the chief sanitary inspector and said it was his “intention to kill him first.” (The inspector was on the picnic train but survived the attack.) Other than that, though, he repeated his companion’s sentiments: “There is no enmity against anybody,” he insisted.

After the initial attack, it took the best part of an hour for the authorities in Broken Hill to respond. The police were mustered and armed, and a small force from a nearby army base was summoned. The locals, inflamed by the attack and greatly angered by the Afghans’ firing on women and children, seized whatever weapons they could find in the local rifle club. “There was,” the Barrier Miner wrote, “a desperate determination to leave no work for the hangman, or to run the risk of the murderers of peaceful citizens being allowed to escape.”

All three groups—police, army and impromptu militia—converged on the rocks where the two Muslims had taken cover. Writer Patsy Smith describes the police response as

"as close a parallel to the Keystone Cops of silent comedy days as this country is ever likely to see. One of their two cars broke down and they crowded into the other. They thundered off, standing on running boards, crouched in the seats and approached two men and asked for directions to the enemy lines. When bullets came for answers, they knew that they were close."

Gool Mohammed and Mullah Abdullah each wore a homemade bandolier with pockets for 48 cartridges, and each had discharged only half his rounds into the picnic train. Between them they had managed to shoot dead a fourth Australian—Jim Craig, who had been chopping wood in his back yard—as they headed for cover. The two men were also armed with a pistol and knives, and none of the men who formed up to attack them were anxious to close against adversaries who had all the advantages of cover. Instead, a steady harassing fire was started from a distance and kept up for some hours; the Battle of Broken Hill, as it is known, opened at 10:10 a.m. with the attack on the picnic train, and only ended shortly after 1 p.m.

The indications are that Mullah Abdullah was hit in the head and killed early on, leaving his friend to fight on alone. None of the attackers were killed, and it was not until all fire from the rocks had ceased that Gool Mohammed was found lying badly injured alongside his dead companion. He had been wounded 16 times.

Gool was carried back to Broken Hill, where he died in hospital. By then the public mood was turning ugly, and the local authorities posted guards to prevent attacks on the other Afghans in the ghantown. Few of the men there seem to have shown much sympathy for Mullah Abdullah or Gool Mohammed; at least one earned the thanks of the town for carrying water to the men attacking them. Denied the opportunity to wreak vengeance on Broken Hill’s few Muslims, though, the mob instead turned to the town’s German Club. It stood empty—every German in Australia had been rounded up and interned when the war broke out—and it was swiftly burned to the ground.

As for the bodies of Gool Mohammed and Mullah Abdullah, two men who had died so very far from home, they were denied to the mob and buried hastily and in secret beneath an explosives store. The Battle of Broken Hill was over, but the war in which the two Afghans had played such a tiny part was still only just beginning.
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
The Worst Job In the World is a apt description.

https://allkindsofhistory.wordpress.com/2012/07/05/the-worst-job-there-has-ever-been/#more-1686

quote:

To live in any large city during the 19th century, at a time when the state provided little in the way of a safety net, was to witness poverty and want on a scale unimaginable in most Western countries today. In London, for example, the combination of low wages, appalling housing, a fast-rising population and miserable health care resulted in the sharp division of one city into two. An affluent minority of aristocrats and professionals lived comfortably in the good parts of town, cossetted by servants and conveyed about in carriages, while the great majority struggled desperately for existence in stinking slums where no gentleman or lady ever trod, and which most of the privileged had no idea even existed. It was a situation accurately and memorably skewered by Dickens, who in Oliver Twist introduced his horrified readers to Bill Sikes’s lair in the very real and noisome Jacob’s Island, and who has Mr. Podsnap, in Our Mutual Friend, insist: “I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!”

Out of sight and all too often out of mind, the working people of the British capital nonetheless managed to conjure livings for themselves in extraordinary ways. Our guide to the enduring oddity of many mid-Victorian occupations is Henry Mayhew, whose monumental four-volume study of London Labour and the London Poor remains one of the classics of working-class history. Mayhew–whom we last met a year ago, describing the lives of London peddlers of this period–was a pioneering journalist-cum-sociologist who interviewed representatives of hundreds of eye-openingly odd trades, jotting down every detail of their lives in their own words to compile a vivid, panoramic overview of everyday life in the mid-Victorian city.

Among Mayhew’s more memorable meetings were encounters with the “bone grubber,” the “Hindoo tract seller,” an eight-year-old girl watercress-seller and the “pure finder,” whose surprisingly sought-after job was picking up dog mess and selling it to tanners, who then used it to cure leather. None of his subjects, though, aroused more fascination–or greater disgust–among his readers than the men who made it their living by forcing entry into London’s sewers at low tide and wandering through them, sometimes for miles, searching out and collecting the miscellaneous scraps washed down from the streets above: bones, fragments of rope, miscellaneous bits of metal, silver cutlery and–if they were lucky–coins dropped in the streets above and swept into the gutters.

Mayhew called them “sewer hunters” or “toshers,” and the latter term has come to define the breed, though it actually had a rather wider application in Victorian times–the toshers sometimes worked the shoreline of the Thames rather than the sewers, and also waited at rubbish dumps when the contents of damaged houses were being burned and then sifted through the ashes for any items of value. They were mostly celebrated, nonetheless, for the living that the sewers gave them, which was enough to support a tribe of around 200 men–each of them known only by his nickname: Lanky Bill, Long Tom, One-eyed George, Short-armed Jack. The toshers earned a decent living; according to Mayhew’s informants, an average of six shillings a day–an amount equivalent to about $50 today. It was sufficient to rank them among the aristocracy of the working class–and, as the astonished writer noted, “at this rate, the property recovered from the sewers of London would have amounted to no less than £20,000 [today $3.3 million] per annum.”

The toshers’ work was dangerous, however, and–after 1840, when it was made illegal to enter the sewer network without express permission, and a £5 reward was offered to anyone who informed on them–it was also secretive, done mostly at night by lantern light. “They won’t let us in to work the shores,” one sewer-hunter complained, “as there’s a little danger. They fears as how we’ll get suffocated, but they don’t care if we get starved!”

Quite how the members of the profession kept their work a secret is something of a puzzle, for Mayhew makes it clear that their dress was highly distinctive. “These toshers,” he wrote,

" may be seen, especially on the Surrey side of the Thames, habited in long greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity, and their nether limbs encased in dirty canvas trousers, and any old slops of shoes… [They] provide themselves, in addition, with a canvas apron, which they tie round them, and a dark lantern similar to a policeman’s; this they strap before them on the right breast, in such a manner that on removing the shade, the bull’s eye throws the light straight forward when they are in an erect position… but when they stoop, it throws the light directly under them so that they can distinctly see any object at their feet. They carry a bag on their back, and in their left hand a pole about seven or eight feet long, one one end of which there is a large iron hoe."

This hoe was the vital tool of the sewer hunters’ trade. On the river, it sometimes saved their lives, for “should they, as often happens, even to the most experienced, sink in some quagmire, they immediately throw out the long pole armed with the hoe, and with it seizing hold of any object within reach, are thereby enabled to draw themselves out.” In the sewers, the hoe was invaluable for digging into the accumulated muck in search of the buried scraps that could be cleaned and sold.

Knowing where to find the most valuable pieces of detritus was vital, and most toshers worked in gangs of three or four, led by a veteran who was frequently somewhere between 60 and 80 years old. These men knew the secret locations of the cracks that lay submerged beneath the surface of the sewer-waters, and it was there that cash frequently lodged. “Sometimes,” Mayhew wrote, “they dive their arm down to the elbow in the mud and filth and bring up shillings, sixpences, half-crowns, and occasionally half-sovereigns and sovereigns. They always find these the coins standing edge uppermost between the bricks in the bottom, where the mortar has been worn away.”

Life beneath London’s streets might have been surprisingly lucrative for the experienced sewer-hunter, but the city authorities had a point: It was also tough, and survival required detailed knowledge of its many hazards. There were, for example, sluices that were raised at low tide, releasing a tidal wave of effluent-filled water into the lower sewers, enough to drown or dash to pieces the unwary. Conversely, toshers who wandered too far into the endless maze of passages risked being trapped by a rising tide, which poured in through outlets along the shoreline and filled the main sewers to the roof twice daily.

Yet the work was not was unhealthy, or so the sewer-hunters themselves believed. The men that Mayhew met were strong, robust and even florid in complexion, often surprisingly long-lived–thanks, perhaps, to immune systems that grew used to working flat out–and adamantly convinced that the stench that they encountered in the tunnels “contributes in a variety of ways to their general health.” They were more likely, the writer thought, to catch some disease in the slums they lived in, the largest and most overcrowded of which was off Rosemary Lane, on the poorer south side of the river.

"Access is gained to this court through a dark narrow entrance, scarcely wider than a doorway, running beneath the first floor of one of the houses in the adjoining street. The court itself is about 50 yards long, and not more than three yards wide, surrounded by lofty wooden houses, with jutting abutments in many upper storeys that almost exclude the light, and give them the appearance of being about to tumble down upon the heads of the intruder. The court is densely inhabited…. My informant, when the noise had ceased, explained the matter as follows: “You see, sir, there’s more than thirty houses in this here court, and there’s no less than eight rooms in every house; now there’s nine or ten people in some of the rooms, I knows, but just say four in every room and calculate what that there comes to.” I did, and found it, to my surprise, to be 960. “Well,” continued my informant, chuckling and rubbing his hands in evident delight at the result, “you may as well just tack a couple of hundred on to the tail o’ them for makeweight, as we’re not werry pertikler about a hundred or two one way or the other in these here places.”

No trace has yet been found of the sewer-hunters prior to Mayhew’s encounter with them, but there is no reason to suppose that the profession was not an ancient one. London had possessed a sewage system since Roman times, and some chaotic medieval construction work was regulated by Henry VIII’s Bill of Sewers, issued in 1531. The Bill established eight different groups of commissioners and charged them with keeping the tunnels in their district in good repair, though since each remained responsible for only one part of the city, the arrangement guaranteed that the proliferating sewer network would be built to no uniform standard and recorded on no single map.

Thus it was never possible to state with any certainty exactly how extensive the labrynth under London was. Contemporary estimates ran as high as 13,000 miles; most of these tunnels, of course, were far too small for the toshers to entert, but there were at least 360 major sewers, bricked in the 17th century. Mayhew noted that these tunnels averaged a height of 3 feet 9 inches, and since 540 miles of the network was formally surveyed in the 1870s it does not seem too much to suggest that perhaps a thousand miles of tunnel was actually navigable to a determined man. The network was certainly sufficient to ensure that hundreds of miles of uncharted tunnel remained unknown to even the most experienced among the toshers.

It is hardly surprising, in these circumstances, that legends proliferated among the men who made a living in the tunnels. Mayhew recorded one of the most remarkable bits of folklore common among the toshers: that a “race of wild hogs” inhabited the sewers under Hampstead, in the far north of the city. This story­–a precursor of the tales of “alligators in the sewers” heard in New York a century later–suggested that a pregnant sow

"by some accident got down the sewer through an opening, and, wandering away from the spot, littered and reared her offspring in the drain; feeding on the offal and garbage washed into it continually. Here, it is alleged, the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous."

Thankfully, the same legend explained, the black swine that proliferated under Hampstead were incapable of traversing the tunnels to emerge by the Thames; the construction of the sewer network obliged them to cross Fleet Ditch–a bricked-over river–“and as it is the obstinate nature of a pig to swim against the stream, the wild hogs of the sewers invariably work their way back to their original quarters, and are thus never to be seen.”

A second myth, far more eagerly believed, told of the existence (Jacqueline Simpson and Jennifer Westwood record) “of a mysterious, luck-bringing Queen Rat”:

"This was a supernatural creature whose true appearance was that of a rat; she would follow the toshers about, invisibly, as they worked, and when she saw one that she fancied she would turn into a sexy-looking woman and accost him. If he gave her a night to remember, she would give him luck in his work; he would be sure to find plenty of money and valuables. He would not necessarily guess who she was, for though the Queen Rat did have certain peculiarities in her human form (her eyes reflected light like an animal’s, and she had claws on her toes), he probably would not notice them while making love in some dark corner. But if he did suspect, and talked about her, his luck would change at once; he might well drown, or meet with some horrible accident."

One such tradition was handed down in the family of a tosher named Jerry Sweetly, who died in 1890, and finally published more than a century later. According to this family legend, Sweetly had encountered the Queen Rat in a pub. They drank until midnight, went to a dance, “and then the girl led him to a rag warehouse to make love.” Bitten deeply on the neck (the Queen Rat often did this to her lovers, marking them so no other rat would harm them), Sweetly lashed out, causing the girl to vanish and reappear as a gigantic rat up in the rafters. From this vantage point, she told the boy: “You’ll get your luck, tosher, but you haven’t done paying me for it yet!”

Offending the Queen Rat had serious consequences for Sweetly, the same tradition ran. His first wife died in childbirth, his second on the river, crushed between a barge and the wharf. But, as promised by legend, the tosher’s children were all lucky, and once in every generation in the Sweetly family a female child was born with mismatched eyes–one blue, the other grey, the color of the river.

Queen Rats and mythical sewer-pigs were not the only dangers confronting the toshers, of course. Many of the tunnels they worked in were crumbling and dilapidated–“the bricks of the Mayfair sewer,” Peter Ackroyd says, “were said to be as rotten as gingerbread; you could have scooped them out with a spoon”–and they sometimes collapsed, entombing the unwary sewer hunters who disturbed them. Pockets of suffocating and explosive gases such as “sulphurated hydrogen” were also common, and no tosher could avoid frequent contact with all manner of human waste. The endlessly inquisitive Mayhew recorded that the “deposit” found in the sewers

"has been found to comprise all the ingredients from the gas works, and several chemical and mineral manufactories; dead dogs, cats, kittens, and rats; offal from the slaughter houses, sometimes even including the entrails of the animals; street pavement dirt of every variety; vegetable refuse, stable-dung; the refuse of pig-styes; night-soil; ashes; rotten mortar and rubbish of different kinds."

That the sewers of mid-19th-century London were foul is beyond question; it was widely agreed, Michelle Allen says, that the tunnels were “volcanoes of filth; gorged veins of putridity; ready to explode at any moment in a whirlwind of foul gas, and poison all those whom they failed to smother.” Yet this, the toshers themselves insisted, did not mean that working conditions under London were entirely intolerable. The sewers, in fact, had worked fairly efficiently for many years–not least because, until 1815, they were required to do little more than carry off the rains that fell in the streets. Before that date, the city’s latrines discharged into cesspits, not the sewer network, and even when the laws were changed, it took some years for the excrement to build up.

By the late 1840s, though, London’s sewers were deteriorating sharply, and the Thames itself, which received their untreated discharges, was effectively dead. By then it was the dumping-ground for 150 million tons of waste each year, and in hot weather the stench became intolerable; the city owes its present sewage network to the “Great Stink of London,” the infamous product of a lengthy summer spell of hot, still weather in 1858 that produced a miasma so oppressive that Parliament had to be evacuated. The need for a solution became so obvious that the engineer Joseph Bazalgette–soon to be Sir Joseph, a grateful nation’s thanks for his ingenious solution to the problem–was employed to modernize the sewers. Bazalgette’s idea was to build a whole new system of super-sewers that ran along the edge of the river, intercepted the existing network before it could discharge its contents, and carried them out past the eastern edge of the city to be processed in new treatment plants.

Even after the tunnels deteriorated and they became increasingly dangerous, though, what a tosher feared more than anything else was not death by suffocation or explosion, but attacks by rats. The bite of a sewer rat was a serious business, as another of Mayhew’s informants, Jack Black–the “Rat and Mole Destroyer to Her Majesty”–explained.”When the bite is a bad one,” Black said, “it festers and forms a hard core in the ulcer, which throbs very much indeed. This core is as big as a boiled fish’s eye, and as hard as stone. I generally cuts the bite out clean with a lancet and squeezes…. I’ve been bitten nearly everywhere, even where I can’t name to you, sir.”

There were many stories, Henry Mayhew concluded, of toshers’ encounters with such rats, and of them “slaying thousands… in their struggle for life,” but most ended badly. Unless he was in company, so that the rats dared not attack, the sewer-hunter was doomed. He would fight on, using his hoe, “till at last the swarms of the savage things overpowered him.” Then he would go down fighting, his body torn to pieces and the tattered remains submerged in untreated sewage, until, a few days later, it became just another example of the detritus of the tunnels, drifting toward the Thames and its inevitable discovery by another gang of toshers–who would find the remains of their late colleague “picked to the very bones.”
* # ¿ Feb 25, 2015 20:00
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Centripetal Horse posted:

Stories of grand voyages on tiny vessels always hit me in a primal spot. Thor Heyerdahl gets poo poo on a lot, but sailing across anything wider than a bathtub on the Kon-Tiki takes brass balls.


He does, why?

For content have a article about the - now forgotten- Most Famous Man in America, Henry Ward Beecher, the first celebrity pastor and guy who tried to move American Christianity away from a punishing, Calvinist theology. (And started the fine American tradition of religious sex scandals)

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/books/review/16kazin.html?_r=0

quote:

Few great preachers in American history have been well served by their biographers. Authors tend to smother princes of the pulpit like Charles Grandison Finney, Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham in tones so erudite and deferential that they end up understating just how controversial these men once were — and fail to explain their remarkable, if somewhat capricious, hold over the hearts and minds of millions of followers. In recent years, only Martin Luther King Jr. has received the dramatic, critical treatment he deserves — from Taylor Branch in particular. But that is due more to King's leading role in a world-changing social movement than because of any talent he had for saving souls.


Henry Ward Beecher is a splendid subject for any writer who aims to break the tradition of literary mediocrity. From the 1840's to the 1870's, he enthralled audiences at home and in Britain with an emotional "gospel of love" that challenged the sober Calvinism on which he and most other American Protestants had been raised. Beecher's fame on the lecture circuit won him the editorship of several religious magazines, as well as large advances for a novel and a biography of Jesus. He also lent his matchless eloquence and prestige to the causes of abolition and woman suffrage — while finding time to campaign for the presidential nominees of the new Republican Party.

Along with thousands of ordinary worshipers, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln crowded into Beecher's huge Plymouth Church in Brooklyn to witness his energetic performances. In Lincoln's view, no one in history had "so productive a mind." Twain, a lifelong skeptic, marveled at the pastor "sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point." In an era that included Lincoln, Grant and Lee, Beecher was probably not "the most famous man in America." But, in his prime, he did seem to embody the promise of Christian happiness better than anyone in the nation. As Debby Applegate writes in this excellent biography, "what Beecher brought to American culture in an era of bewildering change and fratricidal war was unconditional love so deep and so wide that the entire country could feel his warmth, like it or not."

Soon after his 60th birthday, Beecher became a celebrity of a far less exalted kind. Theodore Tilton, his longtime friend and sometime journalistic collaborator, accused the preacher of committing adultery with his wife, Elizabeth. One could be sued for that in Victorian America; "criminal conversation" it was called, in one of law's more elegant euphemisms. The six-month trial in 1874 stirred up the sort of obsessive reporting endured in the next century only by defendants named Scopes, Hauptmann and Simpson. Several times, Elizabeth Tilton confessed everything and then retracted her confession, which only helped stoke the melodrama, as did the steadfast loyalty of Beecher's unloved wife, Eunice, the mother of his 10 children. In the end, the jury was too confused and divided to render a verdict. Beecher kept up a full schedule of preaching and writing until his death in 1887. During these years he championed the theory of evolution, helping persuade liberal Christians that one could believe both in Darwinism and the Bible. But the Tilton scandal had branded him forever.

In "The Most Famous Man in America," Applegate, a Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, tells this grand story with aplomb, intelligence and a sure feel for historical context. The contradictions of Beecher's crowded and prosperous life, she explains, stemmed directly from his desire to straddle the warring enthusiasms of his family and his time. Henry was the son of the famous evangelist Lyman Beecher — whose updated Calvinist theology combined the old belief that "human fate was preordained by God's plan" with a faith in the capacity of rational men and women to purge society of its sinful ways. As a stern patriarch, Lyman forbade his 12 children to celebrate either Christmas or their own birthdays; as an aggressive reformer, he encouraged them to fight against intemperance, prostitution and slavery.

Born in 1813, Henry came of age during the Second Great Awakening and quickly earned a reputation as a militant abolitionist; at one point, he publicly shipped guns to antislavery settlers in Kansas. Yet, breaking with his father, he also preached a buoyant Protestantism that banished the concept of hell and made the process of redemption seem as simple as asking for it. For Beecher, sinfulness was a temporary malady, which the love of God could burn away as a fierce noonday sun dries up a noxious mold. "Man was made for enjoyment," he assured parishioners. If he sought his own pleasure in the arms of one or more members of his flock, it should not have been too surprising.

Besides her deep knowledge of 19th-century culture and politics, Applegate adeptly gets to the core of her subject's character, often with telling quotations. I doubt one could find a more succinct statement of Beecher's youthful rebellion against his father's severe theology than his recollection that "I supposed myself to be a sinner in the very fact that I did not feel sinful." And with a single anecdote, Applegate captures the pastor's embrace of the new culture of mass consumption: "He developed a passion for jewels, which he carried, unset, in his pockets, taking them out for comfort when he was tired or in low spirits."

At times, however, her narrative loses its force in a thicket of personal details. This is especially true when she writes about Beecher's erotic adventuring — or at least the multiple accusations of same. The muscular, long-haired Beecher grew close to a series of attractive young women, and Applegate is not always good at distinguishing each of his female intimates from the others. She also rushes through the story of the notoriously complex adultery trial, leeching it of the theatrical qualities that captivated newspaper readers at the time. Perhaps Applegate was wary of imitating Richard Wightman Fox's brilliant study of the event, "Trials of Intimacy," published in 1999.

Yet by illuminating Beecher's position in history, Applegate has produced a biography worthy of its subject. She both evokes and explains how Beecher took advantage of an opportunity no longer available to men — or women — of the cloth. His career took place during what one scholar has called the Protestant Century, when an eloquent preacher could be a sexy celebrity, the leader of one or more reform movements and a popular philosopher — all at the same time. The famous scandal decisively dimmed Beecher's star power, but it would soon be impossible for any cleric to claim a similar spot in the culture, admired by most Americans, fascinating to them all.

Today, Henry Ward Beecher is best known as the younger brother of Harriet, the author of the most important "message" novel in American history. But, as Applegate observes, that auxiliary status is a measure of his success. "Mainstream Christianity is so deeply infused with the rhetoric of Christ's love," she writes, "that most Americans can imagine nothing else, and have no appreciation or memory of the revolution wrought by Beecher and his peers." Whenever you hear a sentimental sermon — whatever the preacher's denomination, race or political leanings — echoes from Beecher's Plymouth Church are actually ringing in your ears.
* # ¿ Feb 26, 2015 02:02
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Alain Perdrix posted:

According to this, he survived the wreck and was eventually recovered from the island, later working as a missionary. I guess that period where he was marooned counts as comeuppance, but he certainly made out better than most of his companions.

We can all watch the upcoming movie to find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSGcocTLMlk

Or just read the book by Nathaniel Philbrick

* # ¿ Feb 26, 2015 03:28
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Lets talk about something terrible!

http://www.damninteresting.com/the-remains-of-lady-be-good/





quote:

In early November, 1958, a British oil exploration team was flying over North Africa's harsh Libyan Desert when they stumbled across something unexpected... the wreckage of a United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) plane from World War 2. A ground crew eventually located the site, where a quick inspection of the remains identified it as a B-24D Liberator called the Lady Be Good, an Allied bomber that had disappeared following a bombing run in Italy in 1943. When she failed to return to base, the USAAF conducted a search, ultimately presuming that the Lady and her crew perished in the Mediterranean Sea after becoming disoriented.

The British oil surveyors found that the desert environment had preserved the aircraft's hardware astonishingly well; the plane's 50 caliber machine guns still operated at the pull of the trigger, the radio was in working condition, one of the engines was still functional, and there were still containers filled with water on board. But the remains of the crew were nowhere to be seen.

It took the US military over a year before they took the sighting seriously, but eventually they dispatched a search operation which scoured the desert for the remains of the crew. The search teams found several improvised arrow markers at varying distances to the northwest-- one made of boots, others made from parachutes weighed down with rocks-- but the markers stopped at the edge of the vast, shifting sea of sand known as Calanscio. The group was unsuccessful in finding any further trace of the crew.

The Lady Be Good had been crewed by nine men:


1st Lieutenant William J. Hatton, Pilot
2d Lieutenant Robert F. Toner, Copilot
2d Lieutenant Dp Hays, Navigator
2d Lieutenant John S. Woravka, Bombardier
Technical Sergeant Harold J. Ripslinger, Flight Engineer
Technical Sergeant Robert E. LaMotte, Radio Operator
Staff Sergeant Guy E. Shelley, Gunner & Assistant Flight Engineer
Staff Sergeant Vernon L. Moore, Gunner & Assistant Radio Operator
Staff Sergeant Samuel R. Adams, Gunner

The official search was eventually called off on account of equipment problems from the harsh environment. But quite by accident, all but one of the crew were located during the year of 1960, over sixteen years after the Lady had disappeared into the desolation. Combined with the findings from the crash site, the clues found with the remains of the crew told the story of men's final days.

The April 4th, 1943 bombing run on Naples had been the first call to action for Lady Be Good and her crew. That afternoon they launched from the Benina air strip in the city of Soluch in Libya. They departed amidst a sandstorm which incapacitated two other bombers in the flight group, forcing them to return to base. Lady's engines ingested some of the airborne sand as well, but seemed to be running normally, so Lieutenant Hatton opted not abort the mission. En route to the target, the aircraft was buffeted by severe winds that pushed her off course and further away from the bomber group, forcing numerous course corrections on the way to Naples. By the time they neared the target, the other Liberators had long since come and gone, and visibility was reportedly poor. So the pilot turned back, dumping their bombs into the Mediterranean Sea.

The last contact from the crew of Lady Be Good was a radio transmission from her pilot, William Hatton: "My ADF has malfunctioned. Please give me a QDM." This indicated that his position-finding equipment had failed, and due to the thick cloud cover he had become disoriented. For reasons unknown, Lt. Hatton never received a response to this request for a position report, but it has been suggested that the radio tower suspected a German trick. Later, in the darkness, the distinct droning sound of a B-24 emanated from the clouds over Benina airport. Flares were launched to signal the bomber, but the engine sound passed overhead, and faded into the distance.

Realizing that they were hopelessly disoriented, several members of the Lady's crew made notations in their logs indicating that they had become lost. A notepad belonging to bombardier Lt. John Woravka revealed one side of a written conversation, probably penciled so their pilot wouldn't hear them over the intercom. It suggests that there may have been some disagreement in the cockpit:

"What's he beeching (bitching) about?"
"What's going to happen?"
"Are we going home?"

Running dangerously low on fuel and probably believing they were over the Mediterranean Sea, the nine men donned parachutes and ditched the aircraft to take their chances. It's likely that the men were surprised when their boots hit sand rather than water. Using revolvers and flare guns, the seven scattered survivors managed to find one another in the desert. They decided to get underway immediately, knowing that the unforgiving Libyan desert reached daytime temperatures of up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit.

Lady Be Good flew on through the dark night, slowly descending to crash-land sixteen miles from the men's gathering place. Not realizing that their plane and its supply of food and water were a scant sixteen miles away, the men estimated that travelling northwest would bring them back to the airbase in Soluch. They set out on foot with what supplies they carried. By their calculations, they were no more than 100 miles from the base. In reality, the distance was over 400 miles.

When the plane's wreckage was located in 1958, desert survival experts predicted that the airmen could only have moved up to thirty miles on foot, particularly considering the fact that they were unprepared for the unforgiving desert environment. Much to the amazement of investigators, the remains of the first group of men were found about eighty miles north of the wreck. A British oil survey team discovered the five bodies, closely grouped together in an area strewn with personal effects such as wallets, flashlights, pieces of parachutes, flight jackets, first-aid kits, and most importantly, the diary of Lieutenant Robert Toner which described his final eight days with a sober brevity:

" Sunday, Apr. 4, 1943
Naples--28 places--things pretty well mixed up--got lost returning, out of gas, jumped, landed in desert at 2:00 in morning. no one badly hurt, cant find John, all others present.

Monday 5
Start walking N.W., still no John. a few rations, 1/2 canteen of water, 1 cap full per day. Sun fairly warm. Good breeze from N.W. Nite very cold. no sleep. Rested & walked.

Tuesday 6
Rested at 11:30, sun very warm. no breeze, spent P.M. in hell, no planes, etc. rested until 5:00 P.M. Walked & rested all nite. 15 min on, 5 off.

Wednesday, Apr. 7, 1943
Same routine, everyone getting weak, cant get very far, prayers all the time, again P.M. very warm, hell. Can't sleep. everyone sore from ground.

Thursday 8
Hit Sand Dunes, very miserable, good wind but continuous blowing of sand, every[one] now very weak, thought Sam & Moore were all done. La Motte eyes are gone, everyone else's eyes are bad. Still going N.W."

On 9 April, Lieutenants Hatton, Toner, Hays and Sergeants Adams and LaMotte ended their trek, too exhausted to continue. Sergeants Shelley, Moore and Ripslinger continued northward in search of help. There was no further written record for the three men who departed, but with negligible water, no food, and temperatures as high as 130 degrees, the misery of their last few days is difficult to imagine. Lieutenant Toner continued to keep his diary as they waited:

" Friday 9
Shelly [sic], Rip, Moore separate & try to go for help, rest of us all very weak, eyes bad, not any travel, all want to die. still very little water. nites are about 35, good n wind, no shelter, 1 parachute left.

Saturday, Apr. 10, 1943
Still having prayer meetings for help. No sign of anything, a couple of birds; good wind from N. --Really weak now, cant walk. pains all over, still all want to die. Nites very cold. no sleep.

Sunday 11
Still waiting for help, still praying. eyes bad, lost all our wgt. aching all over, could make it if we had water; just enough left to put our tongues to, have hope for help very soon, no rest, still same place.

Monday 12
No help yet, very cold nite"

The entry from Monday, April 12 was the last, written in thick pencil lines.

Of the three men who continued on, the remains of two were eventually found; Staff Sergeant Guy E. Shelley was discovered twenty-one miles north of his five crewmates, and Technical Sergeant Harold J. Ripslinger may have been the last to fall, having crossed an incredible 109 miles of open desert. Radio operator Moore has never been located.

Later that year, the remains of the bombardier, 2nd Lt. Woravka, were found a few miles from the crash site. His parachute was still attached but appeared to have malfunctioned during evacuation, causing him to fall to his death. Under the circumstances, he was probably the most fortunate of his crew.

When they set out after evacuation, had the survivors trekked southeast towards the wreckage of Lady Be Good, they would have greatly increased their chances of survival by retrieving the food and water stored there, and using the radio to call for help. But they had no way to know how far Lady had glided before landfall. And had their emergency maps included the area where they bailed out, they might have realized the severity of their predicament, and instead headed for an oasis to the south. Good fortune certainly did not favor the crew of Lady Be Good on her first-- and last-- battle mission. But the toughness of the crew is unquestionable, surviving days of marching across unforgiving desert with only a half-canteen of water to share between them.

The remains of the eight crewmembers which were found were all returned to the United States. Today the wreckage of the plane is stored in a compound in Libya, but many of the crew's personal effects and a few parts from the plane are on display at the Army Quartermaster Museum at Fort Lee, Virginia.
* # ¿ Feb 27, 2015 23:30
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
I'm not sure who's more incompetent here, the Nazis or the FBI?






http://www.damninteresting.com/operation-pastorius/

quote:

Just after midnight on the morning of June 13, 1942, twenty-one-year-old coastguardsman John Cullen was beginning his foot patrol along the coast of Long Island, New York. Although this particular stretch of beach was considered a likely target for enemy landing parties, the young Seaman was the sole line of defense on that foggy night; and his only weapon, a trusty flashlight, was proving ineffective against the smothering haze. As Cullen approached a dune on the beach, the shape of a man suddenly appeared before him. Momentarily startled, he called out for the shape to identify itself.

"We’re fishermen from Southampton," a voice responded. A middle-aged man emerged from the soupy fog, and continued, "We’ve run ashore." This sounded plausible to Cullen, so he invited the fisherman and his crew to stay the night at the nearby Coast Guard station. The offer appeared to agitate the man, and he refused. “We don’t have a fishing license,” he explained.

Just as Cullen's suspicions began to grow, a second figure appeared over the dune and shouted something in German. The man in front of Cullen spun around, yelling, “You drat fool! Go back to the others!” Then he turned back to Cullen with an intensity in his expression that left the Seaman paralyzed—for he was now almost certain that he was alone on the beach with a party of Nazi spies.

The German agent stood close, and hissed, "Do you have a mother? A father?" As Cullen nodded, he continued, "Well, I wouldn’t want to have to kill you." He held out a wad of cash. "Forget about this, take this money, and go have a good time." Cullen, realizing this might be his only chance to walk away alive, decided to accept. As he reached for the roll of bills, the man suddenly lunged forward and seized Cullen’s flashlight. He then pointed the light toward his own face. “Do you know me?” he asked.


“No sir, I never saw you before in my life.”

“My name is George John Davis. Take a good look at me. You’ll be meeting me in East Hampton sometime.” With that, he released his grip on the flashlight and the money, and disappeared back into the fog. The shocked coastguardsman took a few hesitant paces backward, then whirled around and set off at a run for the Coast Guard station to inform his superiors that their fears had been realized.

Cullen’s suspicion was correct, but the man he’d confronted was no hardened military commander. His real name was George John Dasch, a waiter and dishwasher who’d come to the attention of the German High Command for the time he’d spent living in America before the war. He and a team of three similarly inexperienced agents had been given several weeks of intense training at a secret farm near Berlin before being ushered onto a U-boat bound for the US coast. Their mission, led by Dasch, was to sabotage America’s manufacturing and transport sector, and to terrorize the country’s civilian population. It would be known as Operation Pastorius.

The evening's events had already damaged Dasch’s tenuous hold on the group. Unbeknownst to Seaman John Cullen, two armed sailors had been crouched in the darkness during the conversation on the beach, awaiting the signal to attack. The landing party had been left with standing orders to kill anyone who confronted them during the landing. But Dasch had chosen to let the man go, and his assurances that he had “buffaloed” the coastguardsman did not convince his men. After some nervous arguing back and forth, the saboteurs finished burying their supplies in the sand, and set out for the nearby Long Island Railroad Station.

In the meantime, John Cullen reached the Coast Guard post and breathlessly recited what he’d seen, handing over the bribe money as evidence. Though skeptical, and concerned about raising a false alarm, his superiors agreed to send out an armed patrol to investigate. They were led back to the site by Cullen, where any doubts were quickly dispelled; in the pre-dawn light, the men could see the outline of a German submarine dislodging itself from a sandbar just offshore. Once it had gone, a quick search of the area revealed a series of small crates buried under a shallow layer of sand. Inside were large quantities of explosives, detonation equipment, Nazi uniforms, and quality German liquor.

Once the news reached FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover around noon, his excitement could hardly be contained. As Attorney General Francis Biddle later recalled, “All of Edgar Hoover’s imaginative and restless energy was stirred into prompt and effective action. He was determined to catch them all before any sabotage took place.”


Here at last was a chance for Hoover to prove his organization’s value to the war effort. But the situation was delicate; making the story public would put every American citizen on the lookout for the Germans, but it would also alert the suspects to the hunt and might cause public hysteria—not to mention considerable embarrassment for Hoover and his Bureau if the search should fail. It was therefore decided that a media blackout be imposed. Quietly, with only the most professional degree of panic, the FBI began the largest manhunt in its history.

By this time, the four would-be terrorists were settled in New York City, preparing for their task from the comfort of fancy hotels and fine restaurants. They had $84,000 in mission funds to enjoy—equivalent to over $1 million today—and in the great melting pot of New York City their German accents raised nary an eyebrow. They remained completely unaware that their essential supplies had already been confiscated and that the entire might of the FBI was secretly on the lookout for them.

But George John Dasch, the group’s daring leader, had a secret of his own. The day after the landing he called Ernst Peter Burger, the most guarded and disciplined member of the team, into the upper-storey hotel room the two men shared. He walked over to the window and opened it wide.

“You and I are going to have a talk,” Dasch said, “And if we disagree, only one of us will walk out that door—the other will fly out this window.”

He then revealed the truth to Burger: he had no intention of going through with the mission. He hated the Nazis, and he wanted Burger on his side when he turned the entire plot over to the FBI. Burger smiled. Having spent seventeen months in a Nazi concentration camp, his own feelings for the party were less than warm. He, too had been planning to betray the mission. They were agreed.

The two men were uncertain how best to proceed with their plan. They were reluctant to contact the authorities, having been told by their handlers that the Nazis had infiltrated the FBI. Eventually, Dasch concluded that their best option was an anonymous phone call to test the waters and arrange for further contact. He called the FBI’s New York Field Office, and after several transfers was put in touch with a special agent. Identifying himself as “Pastorius,” the name of the mission, Dasch carefully recited his story. Then, ominously, the man on the other end of the line hung up. Dasch was stricken with panic. Had he just exposed himself to a Nazi spy? Had the call been traced?


In fact, he had been speaking to the office’s “nut desk,” the post responsible for fielding calls from Cleopatra and the wolf-man. In the midst of the most important case in the Bureau’s history, the agent on duty had dismissed their only lead as a prank.

Shaken but not discouraged, Dasch ordered Burger to stay put and keep an eye on the other men while he headed for Washington D.C. to set things straight. The morning of June 19, a week after his landing at Long Island, Dasch stepped into the FBI’s headquarters carrying a briefcase. He explained who he was and asked to speak with Director Hoover.

The agents in the building, however, were too busy catching spies to be bothered with every crackpot off the street who happened to know classified details about secret Nazi landings. Dasch was bounced from office to office until finally Assistant Director D.M. Ladd, the agent in charge of the manhunt, agreed to humor him with five minutes of his time. Dasch angrily repeated his story, only to find himself greeted once again with patronizing nods and glances toward the door. Fed up at last, he lifted the briefcase he had been carrying, tore open its straps, and dumped the entire $84,000 of mission funds onto the Assistant Director’s desk. Ladd blinked with astonishment and began to reconsider Dasch’s claims.

For the next week, Dasch was the subject of an intense interrogation, and he happily revealed all he knew. His operation, he explained, was just the first of a long series of sabotage missions planned by the Germans to cripple the American war effort. They were scheduled to land every six weeks, with the second team expected imminently. Dasch exposed the targets he had been instructed to hit as well as the methods he had been trained to use. He revealed key information about German war production, plans, and equipment. He turned over a handkerchief upon which the names of local contacts had been written in invisible ink—although Dasch, who had snoozed his way through spy school, couldn’t remember how to reveal it. Most important of all, Dasch disclosed the locations of his three accomplices and their aliases, taking care to note Burger’s role in the defection.

The three men who had landed with Dasch were quickly located using the information he’d supplied. Dasch knew little about the second four-man team, but with the help of his handkerchief contacts—which the FBI’s lab quickly discovered could be revealed by ammonia fumes—they were soon tracked down and arrested. Just two weeks after the first landing, and without a single attempt at sabotage, all eight men were in custody.


Hoover broke the media blackout on the evening of June 27. Across the nation, American citizens were astonished to wake up to front-page headlines declaring “U-BOATS LAND SPIES; EIGHT SIEZED BY FBI.” But it wasn’t the story known to those on the inside. Hoover reasoned that letting the truth be known now would do nothing to discourage the Germans from making further sabotage attempts. It was better to perpetuate the myth of an invincible FBI that had halted the plot through its own ingenuity and all-seeing eye—a story that also happened to fit nicely into Hoover’s personal agenda.

At his press conference, Hoover therefore made no mention of the defection of Dasch, or indeed of any details on how the case was broken. He opted instead to praise the brilliance and efficiency of his FBI. “The detective work of the century,” Hoover called it, referring perhaps to agent Ladd’s astute observation of $84,000 cash bouncing off of his forehead. Further details, he explained, would have to wait until after the war. The unsatisfied press room erupted with speculations about elite FBI agents infiltrating the Gestapo and the High Command. Hoover refused to confirm any such wild theories, but his triple-eyebrow raises, exaggerated winks, and menacing cackles encouraged the reporters to adopt their own conclusions.

With the last of his accomplices rounded up, it was time at last for Dasch to get his due. On July 3, his contacts at the FBI greeted him with smiles and handcuffs, and tossed him into a cell alongside his men. It was not the response Dasch had been expecting, but the arresting agents assured him it was little more than a formality. If he just went along with it, he was told, J. Edgar Hoover would ensure that he received a presidential pardon within 6 months.

Hoover had indeed already spoken to President Roosevelt about the arrest, but his conversation had nothing to do with advocating Dasch’s release. The president was given an account similar to the one furnished to the press, with no mention of Dasch or Burger’s role in the investigation. According to Hoover, Dasch had been “apprehended” two days after his accomplices; and the arrest had been made in New York, not Washington, implying that the arrest of the subordinates had led to the capture of their leader rather than the other way around. Hoover’s revisions to the story may have had something to do with the river of letters and telegrams later received by the president urging him to award the FBI Director with the Congressional Medal of Honor. As it turned out, the majority of these messages came from the FBI’s own Crime Records Division, the office just a few doors down from Hoover's. The campaign, however, was unsuccessful.
Explosive supplies recovered from the landing beach
Explosive supplies recovered from the landing beach

Whether Operation Pastorius’s slapdash team of blue-collar workers and government pencil-pushers ever posed much of a threat is somewhat debatable. At the time of their capture, most of the saboteurs were too busy visiting gambling establishments and prostitutes to be planning any major acts of sabotage. Several were reuniting with family they’d left behind in America, while another had met up with an old girlfriend and was in the process of planning his wedding. The German High Command had perhaps misjudged the wisdom of sending naturalized citizens to attack their own adopted country. Nevertheless, the only concern of the US government was in reassuring its citizens and sending a powerful message to the Nazis. Since the men hadn’t actually committed any crime, a normal court could sentence them to at most a few years in prison—or even acquit them entirely. To President Roosevelt, this was unacceptable. In a memorandum sent to Attorney General Biddle, he wrote: “Surely they are as guilty as it is possible to be and it seems to me that the death penalty is almost obligatory.” A military tribunal, he felt, was the only way to ensure this outcome. “I won’t give them up,” he told Biddle, “I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus.”

He would find no objections among the American populace. As shown in polls and editorials across the country, the general public was overwhelmingly in favor of execution for all eight terrorists. A letter printed in one newspaper called for the men to be fed to Gargantua, the Ringling Brothers’ famous giant circus gorilla.

Within a month of the initial landing at Long Island, the eight saboteurs were put before a closed-door US military tribunal—the first to be assembled since the days of the Civil War. It was presided over by a panel of seven generals; there would be no jury, no press, and no appeal. During the trial, none of the defendants denied their involvement with the plot, instead claiming that they were forced into the mission by the Nazis, or that they had joined as a means to escape from Germany. Due to his unique circumstances, Dasch was defended separately. His counsel argued competently in his favor, noting that the case would never have been broken without him, that the FBI had promised him his freedom, and that he clearly had been planning to betray the mission from the start. Not only had he disobeyed orders by sparing coastguardsman Cullen, he had also deliberately revealed his face and assigned name—George John Davis—to the man.
Explosive delay devices disguised as pens, submitted as evidence
Explosive delay devices disguised as pens, submitted as evidence

After 16 days in session and two rejected constitutional appeals from the defense, both sides had said their piece. A verdict was signed and sent directly to the president, who was to be the final arbiter of the sentencing. It was unanimous: the Germans, all eight of them, were guilty. The recommended sentence was death.

It was only upon reading the transcript of the trial that Roosevelt learned how Hoover had misled him. Regardless, it apparently didn’t shake the foundation of his opinion on the case. At the urging of defense counsel, FDR gave only enough ground to commute Dasch's sentence to 30 years of hard labor, and Burger's to life. George John Dasch, a man who had envisioned himself being welcomed as a hero by the American people and perhaps earning his own Medal of Honor, would instead spend what was likely to be the rest of his life in prison. His six accomplices were not so fortunate. Five days after the trial’s end, they were marched to the electric chair in alphabetical order. Within two months of landing in America, the men had been captured, charged, tried, and executed. The official verdict of the tribunal wouldn’t be released for another three months.

Dasch and Burger were locked away in a federal penitentiary, their true story only known to a handful of military and government officials. But as ethically suspect as J. Edgar Hoover’s deception may have been, his cover-up worked. Hitler was infuriated at the news of his men’s capture, and he refused to risk another submarine for further missions. Just as he had intended, Hoover effectively stopped any attempts at German sabotage for the remainder of the war.

Burger and Dasch’s stories didn’t end in prison. After the Allied victory in Europe, the documents pertaining to their case were released to the public despite the strenuous objections of J. Edgar Hoover. With the truth out in the open, and after a further three years of squirming, President Harry S. Truman finally agreed to commute the two men’s sentences. Having spent six years in federal prison, they were released and deported to Germany.


The consequences of the 1942 Nazi sabotage plot remain very much present today. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the United States government approved the use of military tribunals to try captured terrorist suspects. The major precedent for these tribunals is the case of Ex parte Quirin—the trial of George John Dasch and his seven Nazi agents. Their hastily assembled tribunal will also be looked to as the model for any future prosecution of "unlawful combatants."

Stepping off the plane onto German soil, Dasch and Burger found themselves two men without a home: criminals in America and traitors in Germany. Burger turned against his former commander, publicly blaming him for the entire debacle before disappearing several years later. For his part, Dasch refused to run; he spent the rest of his life campaigning for acceptance in Germany and for a chance to return to America. He never received either. Dasch died in Germany in 1992, still awaiting the pardon promised him by J. Edgar Hoover half a century earlier.

Edit: FDR comes off pretty badly too “I won’t give them up,” he told Biddle, “I won’t hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus.”

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 19:46 on Mar 2, 2015

* # ¿ Mar 2, 2015 16:34
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

DumbparameciuM posted:

The dreaded torture method of Lingchi ("Death by a Thousand Cuts") was only banned in 1905



Nope. Nope nope nope.

North Korea's there to one up things.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/north-koreas-horrors-as-shown-by-one-defectors-drawings/283899/
* # ¿ Mar 6, 2015 05:14
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

DumbparameciuM posted:

So I was thinking I'd do a post on a specific massacre of Indigenous Australians, but I was having trouble finding a wikipedia article for the specific incident I was searching for.

That's when I found this: A list of massacres of Indigenous Australians


As an Australian, something which really shocked me about that list was the time scale. I was always under the impression that the frontier war was bloody but over relatively quickly. However large scale massacres occurred from the 1780's until 1928. Also the bullshit excuses given by the whitey to excuse their actions:


This flavour of bullshit was, unfortunately, a fairly common one:


This is the incident I was initially hunting for. Let's dig a little deeper:

As the Murdering Gully Massacre page mentions, Aboriginals did kill european settlers livestock - usually because the settlers had encroached on their land and removed their access to food. The article specifically mentions Kangaroo and Emu, but food sources varied across the country. Even things which the Europeans saw as being straightforward, such as scrub clearing, could seriously endanger local Aboriginal food sources.

So, the settlers retaliate:


The evidence that Taylor and his murderous goons had was tenuous at best:


You may recall that in my first mention of the Murdering Gully massacre, it was noted how much qualitative evidence there was. Many of these massacres are disputed because of the lack of evidence, witnesses, or accurate counts of the dead. So, with so many people on hand - both European and Aboriginal - surely the peice of poo poo that co-ordinated it all went down.

No, loving of course not:


Now, go back and have a look at that list of massacres. This poo poo, again and again and again. And as a country how did we attempt to make up for this widespread slaughter? The Federal government decided to take as many Aboriginal children as possible, and re-home them or put them in institutions! Aboriginal Australians weren't allowed to vote or be included in the Census until 1962 (link), and the first land rights were not established until the early part of the 1970's.


Happy to go into more detail on anything if people are curious/want to know more. I don't want to get too rambling or overly political - at least not without some form of prompting.

e:
loving around with some tag/formatting stuff. Also, sorry if I am super derailing by popping in every day to post some new poo poo which is totally off topic to the current conversation. I hope that interesting information and my presentation makes up for it. </garbagedick>



http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/03/send-cask-arsenic-exterminate.html

quote:

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA
POSTMASTER-GENERAL'S DEPARTMENT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

20 JUL 07

TELEGRAM from Broome Station
Addressed to H. Princep Esq, prot. of aborigines

Send cask arsenic exterminate aborigines letter will follow

Chas Morgan
* # ¿ Mar 9, 2015 21:08
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Since the thread's moved away from Wikipedia to "interesting/creepy trivia" (not a bad thing!) I hope it would be alright if i copied some posts in GBS i made on unbuilt buildings.











quote:

The Beacon was a towering monument intended for the site in Chicago, Illinois of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. Despradelle designed the Beacon to represent the founding of America, and so it consisted of thirteen obelisks which he said represented the original thirteen colonies. The group of obelisks merged to form a single spire soaring 1,500 feet (approximately 457 metres) above Chicago. This is similar to the height of the Sears Tower, built in the city in 1973.

The Beacon would also represent the future with its benefits to be drawn from "technological leaps forward" in the approaching century. At the apex was to be a brilliant beacon of light with a figurative sculpture called Spirit of Progress to embody what Despradelle called the upward-looking Christian in America. The figure would face Lake Michigan as a monument to the genius of the people and to the dominant feature of their life.









quote:

The National American Indian Memorial was a proposed monument to American Indians to be erected on a bluff overlooking the Narrows, the main entrance to New York Harbor. The major part of the memorial was to be a 165-foot-tall (50 m) statue of a representative American Indian warrior atop a substantial foundation building housing a museum of native cultures, similar in scale to the Statue of Liberty several miles to the north. Ground was broken to begin construction in 1913 but the project was never completed and no physical trace remains today...


On George Washington’s Birthday (Feb. 22, 1913), President Taft attended the dedication ceremony, which was to be his last trip as President. Taft used a silver tipped spade to break ground which was followed by Wooden Leg, a Cheyenne Chief, who “hacked at the soil” with a stone ax which had been discovered on Stated Island some 30 years previously. According to the New York Times, the ax-head was thought to have “been in use before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.” Amongst the dignitaries and press there on that rainy day were over thirty Indian chiefs representing fifteen tribes, including Chief Two Moons, a Northern Cheyenne who fought at Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn.

Dr. George Federick Kunz, the president of the American Scenic and Historical Preservation Society, had a special treat for those present at the ceremony. He had convinced Director Robert of the Mint to make the ground breaking the occasion for distributing the new nickel, which bore an Indian head on one side and a buffalo on the other. The first of these coins was given to President Taft and then to the remainder of the guests. It was said that the American Indian depicted on the coin could have been any of the 32 chiefs present at the ceremony.

Sadly, this grand monument was to be never more than a pipe dream. Wanamaker went from being the funder to the fundraiser, Daniel Chester French left to work on other projects, and the First World War turned people’s attentions away from such follies. Even the bronze tablet which had been erected during the ground breaking ceremony vanished decades ago.







quote:

In 1963, the Defense Department proposed a solution: the Deep Underground Command Center, or DUCC.

Studies of a DUCC had been percolating since at least 1962. But it was in 1963 that the proposal reached the president's desk, with the approval of both Secretary of Defense McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. The DUCC would be a capsule buried 3,500 feet under the Pentagon. Two versions were proposed, a “Moderate” version offering space for 300 people, and an “Austere” version with space for 50, and which could be expanded to the Moderate version if necessary. Elevators would descend from the White House, Pentagon, and State Department to the facility depth, where horizontal tunnels would lead to the capsule.

Officials could descend to the DUCC without leaving their buildings, so there would be no external signs of evacuation – the president could take shelter without the political consequences of visibly leaving Washington, D. C. It was even suggested that officials on the presidential succession list might spend one day a week in the DUCC. That way, no matter what, at least one successor would survive, and be in a position to quickly reestablish control of the military.

It was claimed that the system could withstand multiple direct hits by 200 to 300 megaton nuclear weapons, or by 100 megaton weapons that penetrated to a 70 to 100 foot depth. For comparison's sake, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated had a yield of about 50 megaton, and the largest ever produced in numbers was about 25 megatons. But, in the early 60s, nuclear weapon yields had been steadily growing since their introduction, and 300 megatons seemed like a pessimistic but reasonable extrapolation of Soviet capabilities in the early 70s.

Few details are available on the capsule itself, but some extrapolation is possible based on Army engineering manuals and similar but less extreme facilities. We know the austere version would offer only 5,000 square feet of space, equivalent to a 10' x 10' square for each occupant. The moderate version would be slightly better at 50,000 square feet, or a 13' x 13' square per occupant. The occupied area would be contained within a larger chamber of double the area, and would probably be mounted on gigantic springs to ride out ground shock, which would be the main threat to the system.

It would be theoretically possible to blast out enough dirt to physically breach the DUCC. But a 300 megaton weapon digs only a 967 foot deep crater in granite, requiring four such bombs landing precisely on top of each other to dig out a breach. This sort of accuracy would be difficult even for modern ballistic missiles, although not impossible.

The main damaging mechanism would be the shock wave that is generated in the rock, which would act similarly to an earthquake. Ground shock could directly injure or kill the DUCC's occupants – hence the springs – or it could cause spalling, in which fragments of the chamber roof fall off. To prevent this, the tunnels would probably be lined with cast iron or even stronger materials.

Supplies would be stashed in the capsule for 30 days of “buttoned-up” occupancy, which would hopefully be enough time for surface radiation to cool to survivable levels. Although the main elevator access shafts would probably be collapsed by bombing, multiple tunnels would provide hardened exits outside the likely attack area. In addition, unspecified “hardened communications” would be provided.

In the event of a missile warning, the president and other key officials would reach the protected depths via elevator in only ten minutes, and the capsule in another five. This would be ten minutes less than the time to reach safe distance aboard NEACP. Nonetheless, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were, at best, unenthusiastic about the plan.

In the view of the JCS, the main failing of the DUCC was that it was simply too small. Even the moderate version did not have enough space for an adequate staff. While the president might survive, he would not have the personnel with him to properly analyze the situation and disseminate orders. The JCS estimated that, of the 300 people that could be crammed into the moderate DUCC, at least 175 slots would be filled with personnel for maintenance, communications, housekeeping, and otherwise just keeping the shelter running. The JCS themselves would require a staff of 50 to execute orders received from the president. That left only 75 slots for the president, his advisors, and civilian personnel from the Defense Department, State Department, and other key organizations.





quote:

In May 1908, Edward T. Carlton, an American hotelier, and William Gibbs McAdoo, the president of the New York and New Jersey Railroad Company, traveled to Spain to meet with the renowned Spanish architect, Antoni Gaudi (1852-1926) studied architecture in Barcelona, where he was surrounded by neo-classical and romantic designs. Gaudi became famous by reinterpreting these designs and working in the Art Nouveau and Art Moderne styles, and Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is considered to be his greatest work. Carlton and McAdoo sought to add a building based on Gaudi’s unique vision to the New York City skyline. He was asked to design a hotel that would be situated in Lower Manhattan. Gaudi designed multiple sketches of an 980 to 1,100 foot high hotel called the Hotel Atraccion (Hotel Attraction). It contained an exhibition hall, conference rooms, a theater, and five dining rooms, symbolizing the five continents. Had the hotel been built, it would have been the tallest building in New York City, and therefore in the United States. Sadly, this building would never be built (except in an alternative version of New York depicted in the television show fringe). Carlton wanted the hotel to serve the City’s wealthiest and most elite clientele. Gaudi’s remained true to his communist ideals, and he abandoned the project. According to another version of the story, Gaudi fell ill in 1909 and that brought about the end of the project. All that survive are conceptual sketches by Juan Matemala.




quote:

In 1923, the Reverend Christian Reisner of the Methodist Church in Washington Heights conceived of a grand church complex to be located at Broadway and West 173rd Street. Reverend Reisner developed a 40-story church which would have contained a 2,000-seat nave, a five-story basement, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, and would have been topped off with a 75-foot-high rotating cross. John D. Rockefeller Jr. donated $100,000 for the church’s construction. Like the other buildings, the Depression stopped Reverend Reisner from realizing his dreams.



New York City Hall proposal




quote:

John D. Rockefeller Jr. proposed this new civic center which included a space for the Metropolitan Opera. When the stock market crashed the Metropolitan Opera was unable to secure funding for a new building. As a result, Rockefeller redesigned his civic center into the Rockefeller Center we know today



"The Fashion Building"




quote:

This design by Emery Roth for the National Penn Colosseum was never built:




lol

quote:

The Coney Island Globe Tower was conceived of in 1906 as the largest steel structure ever erected. Samuel Friede designed the 700 foot high globe whose 11 floors were to be filled with restaurants, a vaudeville theater, a roller skating rink, a bowling alley, a slot machines, an Aerial Hippodrome, four large circus rings, a ballroom in the world, an observatory, and weather observation station. Public money poured into the project with claims of 100% returns on investments. After two years of almost no construction, the Globe Tower was revealed to be a grand fraud.





quote:

In 1929, the Metropolitan Life Bldg, comprising the 1893 12-story construction, the 1909 campanile-like tower and the 1919 north annex, was becoming too small to house the continual growing activities of the biggest insurance company. A new building was considered for the full block site between E24th and E25th Streets, designed by Corbett and Waid... which missed to be the highest in the world. The proposed 100-story telescoping tower would have reached a climax in the mountain-like style, with fluted walls, rounded façades, like a compromise between the Irving Trust Bldg and the visionary Hugh Ferriss's drawings. But the 1929 crisis exploded and... was erected only what was previously considered as the base. From a rectangular pedestal rise multiple recessed volumes which have the particularity to become 30-degree angled from the 16th floor on each side of the building, resolving at last in an original dumbell-plan shape from the last setback. As the magnificent Ralph Walker's Irving Trust Bldg, the new Metropolitan Life Annex resembles as a complex structure, covered by a limestone-clad drapery, renouncing to the sacrosanct rigid orthogonal geometry. A brilliant success.

Lured to the project by the client's offer of a high salary and the chance to build a mile-high tower of steel, stone and glass, the, Columbia University-educated architect Harvey Wiley Corbett left his position on the Rockefeller Center design team in order to take up this project in 1928. While construction of this steel-framed structure proceeded through the Depression, the crash of 1929 ultimately reduced the scope of the project. The current office block was once intended to be the base of a mammoth skyscraper, but Corbett's longed-for skyscraper was never built. Clad in Alabama limestone with marble details and richly appointed marble lobbies, the vertically striated surfaces and streamlined undulating masses of this Art Deco building give it a slick if somewhat sinister appearance.

Only the base was built, between 1932 and 1950.






quote:

Proposed in 1925, the Larkin Building would have contained up to 110 stories at 1,208 ft. and was to be located on West 42nd Street (the McGraw Hill Building currently occupies the site)

Hard times fell on this proposal as well as the Larkin Company, which went bankrupt in the 1930s.



Sounds reasonable!

http://longstreet.typepad.com/thesciencebookstore/2010/02/rootop-airport-east-river-nyc.html

quote:

First published in Life Magazine 1946:

The airport would have covered 144 city blocks from 24th to 71st Streets and from Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River. (The view above is looking south.) That's approximately 990 acres 200-feet above the streets of Manhattan.

To quote Life, Zeckendorf thinks the $3 billion price tag "can be paid off by rental income within 55 years after the project is completed." Further, and quite optimistically, "although the Manhattan terminal is still in the drawing-board stage and has not yet had approval of New York officials, the planners expect that the increasing tide of air travel will make their idea a necessity."





quote:

After the victory of America and her “co-belligerents” in the First World War, a temporary victory arch was erected out of wood and plaster to welcome the troops home from Europe. After the arch was dismantled, however, discussions soon arose on how to permanently commemorate the war dead of New York, with a surprising variety of suggestions made. A beautiful water gate for Battery Park was suggested, with a classical arch flanked by Bernini-like curved colonnades, so that a suitable place existed to welcome important dignitaries and visitors to New York. (Little did they know how soon the airlines would replace the ocean lines). Another proposal was for a giant memorial hall located at the site of a shuttered hotel across from Grand Central Terminal, while others suggested a bell tower.

An entirely different proposal, however, was made by the New York architect Alfred C. Bossom (later ennobled as Baron Bossom of Maidstone)....Bossom envisioned a massive work of engineering and transportation: a ‘Memorial Bridge’ spanning the Hudson at Manhattan. As memorials go, however, it was suggested that the ‘Memorial Bridge’ was too large, too impersonal, and too utterly convenient as a public work to serve as a memorial to the dead, and so Bossom promptly rebranded his idea as the ‘Victory Bridge’. The floor of the bridge was described as very high, in accordance with the requirements of the War Department for ocean-going vessels to pass beneath it, but also allowing the New Jersey side to rest upon the heights of Weehawken. The lower level was to hold ten railway tracks side-by-side.



Wonder whatever happened to this idea.

http://money.cnn.com/1996/08/13/bizbuzz/trump/

quote:

Trump plans NYSE tower
August 13, 1996: 6:18 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (CNNfn) -- Donald Trump is planning to build the world's tallest building at the end of Wall Street to house the New York Stock Exchange, according to published reports.
The 140-story New York Stock Exchange Tower, as the building would be named, would have 31/2 million square feet of office space, house up to 100,000 office workers and take 31/2 years to build.
At 1,792 feet tall, the proposed building would extend far above the neighboring World Trade Center, currently the fifth tallest building in the world.
"For Trump this is the ultimate," the New York Post quoted a Trump family friend as saying. "Donald is obsessed with that fact that New York should have the world's tallest building."
On Monday, the NYSE said it was mulling a move from its historic Wall Street headquarters, a 93-year-old building.
Both City Hall and NYSE Chief Executive Richard Grasso reportedly greeted the plan with "huge enthusiasm," citing the advantages of bringing the tallest building status back to the Big Apple.
Trump's NYSE plan is designed by architects Kohn Pedersen Fox, the same firm that designed Malaysia's skyscrapers.



NYC Federal Reserve Bank Proposal 1969

:stare:








Grand Central Terminal concept




Bonus stupidity.








The Monument to Democracy- Port of Los Angeles





Two designs for Bank of The Southwest Tower, Houston TX






Spring/Peachtree Street Mega-Project , "Just North of the Bank of America Tower"- Atlanta GA

quote:

Way back in '91, Swedish architect G. Lars Gullstedt announced plans for two 65-story towers, a new park and other amenities surrounding the Biltmore Hotel. It would've been a multi-BILLION dollar project. Mayor Maynard Jackson headed the press conference; it would BEAT Rockefeller Center. By '93, Swedish debtors were calling on loans. Gullstedt didn't have the dough





Santiago Calatrava's design for the Atlanta Symphony Center.




1960's Atlanta Baseball Stadium Proposal




Tower Place 400- Atlanta GA




quote:

Circa 2006, real estate tycoon Wayne Mason — whose supposed Midas Touch with residential investments helped transform the pastures of Gwinnett County — got really inspired by then-nascent Atlantic Station. Working with a group of Korean investors, Mason bought up two ailing shopping centers totaling 42 acres near Gwinnett Place Mall in Duluth. He called the vision "Global Station." It promised to reshape the suburban skyline and introduce mixed-use living on a scale never seen in suburban Atlanta.

Mason's answer to Atlantic Station was set to include as many as 10 towers, to be built over several years. Early concepts showed the $700 million retail, condo and commercial village with a huge central entertainment area, replete with an amphitheater and exotic architecture. In 2006, Mason projected that construction could start the following year.

Instead, the Recession happened.

The whole shebang went kaput in 2008, when Mason declared that his South Korean counterparts just couldn't line up the financing. And the long, slow decline of Gwinnett Place Mall continued.

http://atlanta.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/04/whatever-happened-to-the-gigantic-global-station.php



Lets build a mall at the foot of the WTC, what could go wrong?

quote:

In 1992 the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, owner of the World Trade Center, commissioned Davis Brody & Associates to develop a master plan for the redevelopment of the Center’s public spaces. The public spaces of the World Trade Center complex included the large open-air plaza plus 500,000 square feet of interior retail and circulation space on four different levels.

In 1994 a schematic design was developed to better define the architectural components of the master plan. These components included a monumental screen covering the existing plaza, new plaza structures adding restaurant and retail space and providing new access to the concourse level below, new street-level retail space along the Center’s perimeter and a new public park surrounding the complex.

A major feature of the redevelopment project, the plaza screen was designed to accomplish the following tasks: (1) visually define and unify a three-dimensional multi-purpose outdoor space; (2) mediate the strong cross winds created by the twin towers; (3) serve as a staging element for temporary plaza events. Hung with support cables from the adjacent towers, the plaza screen would require no additional vertical supports on the plaza or concourse levels. Visible from well outside the immediate vicinity, the support cables would serve as a symbol of the New World Trade Center.

Another principle feature of the Center’s redevelopment is the crescent shape North Plaza Building. The 60-foot tall, fully glazed structure would contain dining and interior circulation space along the northern edge of the open plaza. The design successfully creates an appropriately scaled focal point for the Plaza as it provides a single, unified identity to the various tenants and functions of the building.

The schematic design also included a refinement of the master plan’s new concourse level shopping complex. This work included the enhancement of circulation patterns and user orientation, the development of the architectural aesthetics and the integration of structural, mechanical and lighting systems throughout the retail complex.









ISKCON Temple-Planetarium Theater of the Vedic Science and Cosmology

(Surprisingly under construction)

quote:

The Temple of the Vedic Planetarium will be a stunning spritiual monument, dwarfing the already huge Srila Prabhupada Samadhi Mandir and featuring three giant gold domes. The middle, and largest, dome will house three different altars: one for the Gaudiya Vaishnava line of teachers and disciples, ranging from the Six Goswamis of the 15th century all the way to Srila Prabhupada; one for the Pancha-tattva of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and his associates; and one for Sri-Sri Radha-Madhava and their eight principal gopi servants.


What’s so special about the TOVP? Well, it was back in the 1970s that ISKCON’s founder Srila Prabhupada first expressed his desire to build a Vedic Planetarium at his society’s headquarters in Mayapur, India. “Within the planetarium we will construct a huge, detailed model of the universe as described in the text of the fifth canto of Srimad Bhagavatam,” he said.
Of course, as with everything he did, Srila Prabhupada was acting in fulfillment of the desires of previous spiritual teachers. A grand temple for Mayapur was predicted by none other than Lord Nityananda, the most intimate associate of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, some five hundred years ago. Speaking to Srila Jiva Goswami, the Lord said:
“When our Lord Chaitanya disappears, by His desire, the Ganges will swell. The Ganges water will almost cover Mayapur for a hundred years, and then the water will again recede. For some time only the place will remain, devoid of houses. Then again, by the Lord’s desire, this place will again be manifest, and the devotees will build temples of the Lord. One exceedingly wonderful temple (adbhuta-mandira) will appear from which Gauranga’s eternal service will be preached everywhere.”
Srila Prabhupada wanted this great temple to have a specific look. In July 1976, during a visit to Washington D.C., he instructed Yadubara Dasa and Visakha Dasi to take photographs of the domed Capitol building there, as a basis for the TOVP. And in the early days of ISKCON in London, he gave further detailed instructions on what different parts of the temple should look like, directing many senior devotees make drawings and models of the building.



The Temple of the Vedic Planetarium will be a stunning spritiual monument, dwarfing the already huge Srila Prabhupada Samadhi Mandir and featuring three giant gold domes. The middle, and largest, dome will house three different altars: one for the Gaudiya Vaishnava line of teachers and disciples, ranging from the Six Goswamis of the 15th century all the way to Srila Prabhupada; one for the Pancha-tattva of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and his associates; and one for Sri-Sri Radha-Madhava and their eight principal gopi servants.



In the center of the middle dome, hanging from the ceiling, will be a huge rotating model of the universe as described in sacred texts such as the Srimad-Bhagavatam. Described by Srila Prabhupada in his letters, the model will be in the form of a chandelier, two hundred feet across, and will feature displays explaining how Vedic cosmology corresponds to the visible universe of our experience.
A smaller dome on the TOVP’s right hand side will serve as a separate temple for Krishna’s half-man half lion form, Lord Nrsimhadeva. And on the left hand side of the main temple, another dome will offer an enlivening tour of the various regions of the cosmic creation. Beginning from the lower planets, pilgrims will be able to travel up through the earthly realm and then on to the higher planetary systems, before passing beyond the boundary of the material universe. Within the spiritual realm, visitors will view the various spiritual planets, before finally arriving at the topmost spiritual abode of the Supreme Lord Sri Krishna.










Center of India Tower

(can't find any English language info)




Birmingham Civic Center

Part of it was built and still stands today.








The Albert Tower, London




No idea.




The Newton Cenotaph




Self Explanatory.
* # ¿ Mar 25, 2015 00:57
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
:stare:


Have more architecture before fetus-chat takes over.

http://ghostsofdc.org/2013/06/20/the-unbuilt-ulysses-grant-memorial-bridge/

quote:

Here is an article from the Baltimore Sun, published on February 12th, 1887.

The Grant Memorial Bridge.– There has been sent to us from Washington an admirably engraved representation of the memorial bridge which it is proposed to construct across the Potomac from Washington to Arlington, in honor of Gen. U.S. Grant. A bill to carry the proposition into effect was introduced in the House of Representatives on Wednesday last by Mr. Curtin, of Pennsylvania, was read twice, and referred to the committee on public buildings and grounds. According to the pans submitted by Captain Symons, of the United States corps of engineers, and Architects Smithmeyer and Pelz, the starting point of the bridge on the Washington side would be Observatory Hill, near the foot of New York and New Hampshire avenues, and thence across the Potomac to some point near Arlington, as may ultimately be determined upon by a commission, to be composed of the Secretary of War, the chief justice [sic] of the United States, the engineer-in-chief of the United States army, and one member of the Senate and another of the House, to be chosen by the respective presiding officers of those bodies. The preamble to the bill declares it to be “the desire of the people of the United States that a monument of imperishable material should be erected in honor of its greatest soldier of a design suitable to commemorate his distinguished services;” and that the most appropriate design is a grand monumental bridge to connect Washington with the sacred grounds of Arlington, where fifteen thousand Union soldiers lie buried.” The object of the bridge appears to be to afford easy access to the thousands who go to Arlington from year to year to scatter flowers on the graves of those who lost their lives in defense of the Union. The bridge it is proposed to build for this purpose, as represented by the engraving of it, is what might be called a medieval structure of granite and steel, with square and round towers and turrets, arches of different spans, and a drawbridge over the main channel to admit the passage of vessels. Its total length, including the approach, is to be 4,650 feet, or 630 feet less than a mile. The carriage-way is to be forty feet wide and the sidewalks each ten feet wide. The main arch spans are to be 240 feet in the clear, the bascule span 160 feet and the smaller spans 120 feet each. no such elaborate and imposing structure of the bridge kind has ever been built or even contemplated before in the United States, and its resemblance to the causeway of a great fortress, approached by a series of fortified outworks, is kept up by the bold arches spanning the roadway and their supporting towers and turrets. Although the cost of such a work of the strength and elaborateness proposed is not given, it must necessarily be very great, for to simply commence the construction of the bridge the bill calls for an appropriation of half a million of dollars.


The spot where this bridge would have been built is now traversed by Arlington Memorial Bridge.





Lincoln Memorial Design




I guess we got the Chunnel instead.











Not a real proposal but interesting to look at.











London Underground ad 1926




Library of Congress Proposal



quote:

Rendering of the Proposal for the Washington Monument grounds, by the Senate Park Commission, 1901-02.The wide steps, the circular pool, and the terraced gardens were all intended to provide a more dignified base for the monument, while resolving the awkward geometry resulting from its placement off the axis from the White House.



Monument to Columbus in Madrid






MONUMENT TO THE GLORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, 1886




Conversion of Tower Bridge in London (1943)





91m tall pyramid for London's Trafalgar Square (1815)


Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 00:52 on Mar 26, 2015

* # ¿ Mar 26, 2015 00:48
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

benito posted:

They've been added at various phases of construction and repair ever since it started, and some as recent as the 1980s:

pdf catalog of stones



Wow,thanks for this! I visited the monument when I was 8 or 9. I was scared of heights (and elevators!) so while taking the elevator up so I asked the Army CoE guy if there was a chance the elevator would fall and kill us all. He replied that the Lincoln Memorial's elevators were lovely but the ones at the WM were safe.

Here's a random DC trivia post I made a week back.


http://ghostsofdc.org/

The Lincoln Memorial swamp, 1917




A letter from a future president to the then current one.



The unbuilt Teddy Roosevelt Memorial

quote:

Washington Post December 13th, 1925

“200-Foot Fountain Plan of Memorial Here to Roosevelt.”

A shaft of water rising 200 feet in the air from a flat island of white marble surrounded by water and flanked by two majestic white marble colonnades is the plan for the Roosevelt memorial, which was submitted to Congress yesterday by the Roosevelt Memorial association.

The memorial, the work of John Russell Pope, follows the idea of the park commission plan of 1901 and fills in about one half of the present Tidal basin. The site of the memorial is a spot on Sixteenth street northwest, projected southward to about where the old white bathing beach was situated. The site was selected by the commission largely because of President Roosevelt’s part in the creation of the park plan which the general design follows.

The island from which the fountain rises is to be 280 feet in diameter and the basin surrounding it 600 feet in diameter. The colonnades, which will be a little short of semicircles will flank the basin and be 800 feet between centers. They will be 670 feet long and 60 feet high.

The column of Potomac water that will form the fountain will be forced to the height of 200 feet by an automatic electric pump which will make it entirely independent of Washington’s water supply. The water from the basin will enter the pump from the west and pass through the ponds to the east, serving to cleanse the Washington channel through tidal gates.



Early Washington Monument proposal




The New Willard Hotel, where in 1922 a fairly amusing incident occurred

quote:

There was a small fire at the New Willard Hotel and, for safety’s sake, all the guests were ordered down from their rooms. After it appeared that the danger had passed, Coolidge started up to his suite.

A fire marshall challenged him. “Who are you?”

“I’m the Vice President,” responded Coolidge.

“All right, go ahead,” he was told.

Before taking more than a few steps upstairs, Coolidge was again challenged by the marshal. “What are you vice president of?”

The answer was, “I am Vice President of the United States.”

“Come right down,” declared the fire official. “I thought you were the vice president of the hotel.”




Officer Sprinkle saves the Old Masonic Temple,

quote:

Washington Post -July 1st, 1914

It’s a dynamite bomb all right,” one man emphatically announced.

“Does look like an infernal machine,” declared another.

Then the police were notified that an attempt to blow up the Old Masonic Temple, at Ninth and F streets northwest, last night, had been frustrated by the timely discovery of an explosive device hidden in a telephone booth adjoining the large auditorium on the second floor.

There was to be a mass meeting of citizens held in the hall, the purpose of which was to protest against the colored man enjoying franchise.

When the police arrived they found an excited group near the telephone booth, wherein reposed to the deadly machine. A detective approachel [sic] the booth stealthily, and gingerly lifted the suspected object out. The crowd backed away.

There were many conjectures as to the object of the person who planted the bomb. There appeared to be several fuses issuing from it. The thing was about the size of a shoe box, made of wood, painted black, and embellished with strange copper appliances.

The police exercised the greatest of care in handling it at the First precinct station, where “it” was taken. Lieut. J. L. Sprinkle examined the thing, but did not accept a challenge to take a kick at it. During the deliberations Frank S. Hammersley, 940 Thirteenth street southeast, an electrician, came rushing into the station, and said he had been robbed.

“Yes, robbed,” he continued. “I’ve been working on a new model for an electric battery. This afternoon I left my battery in a telephone booth up at the Old Masonic Temple, and now it’s gone.”

Lieut. Sprinkle pointed to the “infernal machine.” “Is that it?” he asked.

Hammersley’s face beamed with joy. He pounced upon his invention and hugged it in his arms.

“That’s it,” he said. “Some durn fool stole it, but I knew the police would find it for me all right.”




"Claude Grahame-White landing his biplane on West Executive Avenue October 14th, 1910 "




Remember when the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee was mugged and shot infront of his own house?

quote:

Senator John Stennis was shot both in the chest and the leg, after he was mugged in front of his North Cleveland Park house (3609 Cumberland St. NW). He was returning home in the evening after work on January 30th, 1973

The Washington Post reported the following on the incident:

"After driving home alone and parking in front of his house, as was his custom, he stepped out of the auto and was approached by two youths in their late teens, according to police accounts.

While he was standing in the roadway, the youths demanded money, “Get ‘em up,” one demanded. Offering no resistance, according to accounts, the senator turned over his wallet, which contained credit cards, a gold pocket watch, his Phi Beta Kappa key and a 25-cent piece.

“Now we’re going to shoot you anyway,” the youths were quoted by the senator. Or, the police reported, it might have been “We ought to shoot you anyway.”"


The ambulance was called from Adams Morgan to race up the three miles to the senator’s home. Two ambulance attendants, Pvt. William Taylor and Pvt. Robert Adams, didn’t know the gravity of the situation, nor the that the victim was a senator until they were a few blocks away.

In the meantime, Stennis had staggered into his home and sat down on the couch in his living room, bleeding profusely from his wounds and when the ambulance finally arrived, the senator was conscious, but fading.

As the ambulance made its way to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, President Nixon was notified and the FBI were informed — a 1971 law made it a federal crime to assault, kidnap or kill a member of Congress.

His condition was extremely tenuous, having serious wounds, both under his lower rib cage and in his left thigh. Senator Stennis underwent 6 1/2 hours of surgery and the press conference the following day labeled his chances as “guarded” that he would recover. The bullet had ripped through part of his stomach, pancreas and cut through a major vein that empties blood into the intestines. The bullet was not removed from the senator as they patched him up.

Two Washington teenagers were charged in the shooting, Tyrone Marshall and his brother John. Derrick Holloway was granted immunity in the case for turning state’s evidence against the brothers. Tyrone received a sentence of 10-to-30 years under the federal congressional assassination statue, armed robbery and assault with intent to kill while armed. John received a sentence of 15 years.



On a more cheerful note...

quote:

This is a serious case of right place, right time. The Class of ’75 at Holton-Arms had a notable classmate in Susan Ford, the daughter of President Gerald Ford.

Susan’s final years of high school lined up perfectly with her father’s rise to the Oval Office. Partly for security, but more likely for the awesome factor, she hosted the senior prom at her house … the White House. No big deal, she only lived in the most recognizable (and heavily guarded) home in America.

On May 31st, 1975, the East Room of the White House was filled with over 70 teenage girls and their dates. This had to be the best prom ever in the history of proms. Not many proms are covered by the Washington Post, or frankly any local newspaper. This one was.

Young Susan had just split with her beau, Gardner Britt (of the Ted Britt Ford clan), and invited a college junior she just met three weeks earlier. Billy Pifer was a pre-med student at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, and the two met earlier that May at the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival. That is a serious stroke of luck for Billy, given that three weeks later he was tearing it up on the dance floor in the White House.


Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 02:22 on Mar 26, 2015

* # ¿ Mar 26, 2015 02:17
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Frostwerks posted:

Would love to see this thing just covered with AAA like a flak bridge.

It's a interesting idea

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 04:21 on Mar 26, 2015

* # ¿ Mar 26, 2015 04:19
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Josef K. Sourdust posted:

>Nckdictator, can you dig up anything for us on a crazy rear end project? City planners decided that to provide illumination at night instead of providing individual streetlights in every street, they would build a giant lighthouse in the centre of Paris. Real plan. Kind of a shame they came to their senses in the end. :(

Most of the info/stuff i'm finding is from here.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/

I'll see if i can find anything on the Paris Lighthouse though.

Edit: a quick google search isn't finding anything whatsoever.

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 18:01 on Mar 26, 2015

* # ¿ Mar 26, 2015 17:58
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone


http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9E05E3D81E39E133A25755C1A9649D946395D6CF


Anyone mind if i make another architecture post?

* # ¿ Mar 27, 2015 02:24
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

AdjectiveNoun posted:

I'd just like to request if at all possible that you use [timg] tags rather than [img], because the huge number of images loading can be a bit irritating IMO - that aside, it's pretty drat fascinating.

Will do.

* # ¿ Mar 27, 2015 04:04
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Now everyone needs to watch Charlie Victor Romeo

* # ¿ Apr 9, 2015 05:02
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Here's a few pages from The Day After World War III by Edward Zuckerman (it's been out of print since the 1980's but is well worth reading) dealing with Cold War continuity of government. You will all be pleased to note that the bureaucracy will indeed survive.














I didn't scan the pages but somewhere else the book notes that the A-Teams have a very short life expectancy.

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 23:14 on Apr 16, 2015

* # ¿ Apr 16, 2015 17:10
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Skyway_Bridge


This wiki article led me to this :stare:

(apologies for the Cracked watermark, largest version i could find)






http://www.sptimes.com/News/050700/TampaBay/Horrific_accident_cre.shtml

quote:

...Anthony Gattus didn't like what he saw at all.

"It was a lousy day to start with," Gattus recalled. "It started raining hard 2 or 3 miles before we got to the Skyway. It got really dark. I don't like rain and cold and darkness. Didn't then. Don't now."

Gattus, now 81, was a passenger in a yellow Buick headed south with three other men to ferry cars back for sale in Pinellas County. Richard Hornbuckle, the owner of the Buick, was behind the wheel. Jim Crispin sat beside Hornbuckle in the front seat. Kenneth Holmes sat beside Gattus in back.

"Hornbuckle was a real good driver," Gattus said. "I always felt safe with him. When the rain started hard, he slowed way down. Twenty. Don't think he could have been going faster than 20 mph. "I remember a blue pickup passed us.

"I remember a bus passed us."

....

One hundred and fifty feet above, the yellow Buick with Anthony Gattus in the back seat began to skid. The tires fought to obey the brakes and grab traction on the wet grating.

Hornbuckle, the driver, had not seen the center span of the roadway disappear. But as his car neared the crest of the bridge, he realized the upper superstructure was missing. That was the tip that saved their lives, he told Gattus later. He realized something was terribly wrong and started braking immediately.

The car slowed reluctantly. It stopped with the left front tire 14 inches from oblivion.

"The doors flew open," Gattus recalled. "We all got out. We were on a sharp incline toward the water. I stuck my fingers through the grating and began to crawl away. I looked back, and Hornbuckle was still by the car. I yelled at him, "What are you still doing there?' He said he was going back for his golf clubs."
* # ¿ Apr 21, 2015 18:35
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

effervescible posted:

Stuff like this goes through my head pretty much every time I go over a bridge. And will continue to, thanks to the country's "Pay for infrastructure? Wha?" attitude.

To be fair it wasn't that the bridge was poorly built or maintained, it was more of the fact that a ship crashed into it.


quote:

At 7:25 a.m. on May 9, 1980, with the Greyhound approaching Pinellas Point a few miles from the north end of the Sunshine Skyway bridge, Capt. John Lerro tensed at the helm of the freighter Summit Venture, a ship as long as two football fields. Lerro, 37, an experienced harbor pilot from Tampa, shouldered the responsibility of guiding the Summit Venture from the Gulf of Mexico 58.4 miles up Tampa Bay to the Port of Tampa. It is one of the longest shipping channels in the world, and one of the most treacherous, given the shallow waters of the bay and the ambush style of Florida weather.

With the ship's belly empty of cargo and her tanks nearly empty of ballast, she rode high in the water.

She ran through intermittent fog and rain along the first 19 miles of her journey. Then southwest winds exploded to tropical-storm force. Rain sheeted at rates exceeding 7 inches an hour. Visibility plunged to near zero, and shipboard radar failed.

It couldn't have happened at a worse point. Lerro faced the most critical course change of the run, a 13-degree turn that would take him between the two main piers of the Skyway bridge.

It was at almost this exact spot that the Coast Guard cutter Blackthorn had been rammed four months earlier by the tanker Capricorn. The Blackthorn sank. Twenty-three men died.

Lerro approached the critical bend on a ship weighing nearly 20,000 tons battered by winds of nearly 60 mph.

And he approached it blind....

On the water below, Lerro considered his options.

Visibility was so bad he could no longer see the bow of his ship. He judged it too risky to turn the Summit Venture out of the shipping channel to the north to anchor and ride out the storm because the outbound Pure Oil had been approaching. Without radar or visibility to locate the tanker, Lerro feared he might ram her if he steered across her path.

If he tried to stop, or if he turned south out of the channel, the winds could usurp control of the ship and hurl him into the bridge.

Thinking the wind was still from the southwest, his right, Lerro judged it would push the Summit Venture safely through the main spans of the Skyway.

He made the decision to proceed.

Lerro didn't know the squall had forced the wind around to the west-northwest, his left. Instead of keeping him in the channel, it pushed his high-riding vessel off course.

At 7:32, the weather cleared marginally. Lerro saw part of the bridge superstructure directly ahead. With heartstopping clarity, he realized he was no longer in the shipping channel
He ordered a series of maneuvers, including emergency reversal of the engines and the deployment of the anchors. But it was too late.

At 7:33, the bow of the Summit Venture collided with bridge pier 2S. The pier toppled, taking the roadway with it.

On the bridge above and in the water below, terror of such magnitude no one could have dreamed filled the final seconds of 35 lives. In the hours that followed, it changed dozens more lives forever.

The horror in Lerro's voice is painful to hear:

Lerro: Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Coast Guard. Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Coast Guard.

Coast Guard: Vessel calling Mayday, vessel in distress. This is the United States Coast Guard, St. Petersburg, Florida. Request your position, the nature of distress and the number of persons on board. Over.

Lerro: Get emergency . . . all the emergency equipment out to the Skyway bridge. Vessel has just hit the Skyway bridge. The Skyway bridge is down! Get all emergency equipment out to the Skyway bridge. The Skyway bridge is down. This is Mayday. Emergency situation. (Nearly screaming) Stop the traffic on that Skyway bridge!"

CG: This is Coast Guard St. Petersburg, roger. What size is the vessel that hit the bridge? Over.

Lerro: It's a large vessel. Stop the traffic on the Skyway bridge. There's some people in the water. Get emergency equipment out to the Skyway bridge. Now.

CG: This is the Coast Guard, St. Petersburg. Roger. What vessel are you on? Over.

Lerro: Summit Venture. Summit Venture.

CG: Summit Venture, Coast Guard St. Petersburg, roger. What is the size of your vessel and can you assist? Over.

Lerro: Cannot assist. We're 606 feet long, light draft. We cannot assist here. We're on an abutment. Stop all the traffic on the bridge. Send some vessels out here to render assistance. People are in the water.

....

Tampa civil lawyer Steven Yerrid reached the Summit Venture soon after the accident, looking for Lerro. His firm, Holland & Knight, represented many of the harbor pilots.

"When I first saw the scene, this huge ship in the middle of a carnival merry-go-round of small boats with bodies floating up, I thought I would never forget it," Yerrid recalled. "I was right. I never have.

"When I went aboard the ship and saw John, I thought I had never seen a soul so lost."

Before they could get off the ship, Yerrid and Lerro had to run a gauntlet of officials wanting to interview the pilot.

"They all wanted to question him, and I understood that," Yerrid said. "I kept telling them, "Yes, but not today.' "

He hid Lerro, his wife and son in a hotel under the name Yerrid, where they remained for weeks. But it didn't shield them from public reaction.

"Over the weeks and months, John heard himself called an alcoholic, a homosexual, a murderer," Yerrid said. "His life was threatened. My life was threatened. Someone stole my Irish setter and kept her for three days. They beat her and urinated on her and then put her back on my porch.

"That's the kind of atmosphere it was."


A state inquiry cleared Lerro of negligence. A Coast Guard inquiry found Lerro's decision to proceed in zero visibility contributed to the crash.

But it also found a litany of situations beyond Lerro's control: The localized storm "of enormous proportions" was not forecast. The tanker Pure Oil had turned out of the channel itself to lay at anchor during the storm, making way for the Summit Venture to do the same, but no one told Lerro. The pilot of a ship that had passed the Summit Venture and encountered the fierce storm never warned Lerro to expect it, though the pilot knew there were other ships in the storm's path. The position of the Summit Venture denied Lerro the chance to sense the wind had changed.

"I still try to imagine what Lerro felt," said Paul Scotti, a retired Coast Guard official who ran media operations during the aftermath of the disaster. "He's standing on the bridge, and he's suddenly blind. He doesn't know where other traffic is. He thinks he's going straight, but the wind is pushing him sideways.

"It's like somebody put a black hood over his head and said, "Go ahead, navigate now.' "
* # ¿ Apr 22, 2015 00:21
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

canyoneer posted:

They beat up and pissed on his dog? :staredog::wtf:

They beat up and pissed on his lawyer's dog.

* # ¿ Apr 22, 2015 00:40
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

RCarr posted:

gently caress that choked me up. What a hopeless feeling.

Yeah, the poor guy didn't have a chance.




Video with audio of mayday call here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMjBGLxMdP4

* # ¿ Apr 22, 2015 00:56
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
While not involving death the fact that this almost became a thing is fairly scary.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney%27s_America

http://www.disneydrawingboard.com/DA%20Haymarket/DAHaymarket.html


quote:

Disney's America Theme Park would have been built on 3,000-acres in Haymarket, VA. The project was officially announced on November 11th, 1993. The park would have been centered on the history of the United States. The park would become Michael Eisner’s, Disney’s CEO at the time, dream project. Eisner loved the idea and rallied support of the then outgoing Governor of Virginia, L. Douglas Wilder and the incoming Governor, George Allen. Although the local government could have been won over, citizens would not be. They did not agree a Disney could represent the history of the United States, as well as their own town and eventually because of this and other financial reasons Disney’s America was canceled

Disney’s America was designed and planned as a complement to the monuments, museums, and national treasures of Washington D.C. Disney described the park as a venue for people of all ages, to discuss the future of and learn more about our nation’s history by living it. The park would offer guests rides, shows and interactive experiences about the history, present, and future of America. The park was designed as timeline, starting in the mid-1860s and going back in history or forwards into the future. Plans for Disney’s America consisted of nine themed areas relating to a specific time period in history.


Crossroads USA

Crossroads U.S.A. would have been a Civil War-era village and the hub of Disney's America. The entrance to the park would have taken guests under a replicated 1840s train trestle complete with replicated steam trains that would circle the park.

Native America (1600 to 1810)

Native America would have been a recreated Powhatan Native American village; specifically themed to Disney’s Pocahontas Movie, being released at that time. Several Mid-Atlantic tribes of Native Americans would have been represented, with interactive experiences, exhibits, and arts and crafts.

Civil War Fort (1850 to 1870)

The Civil War Fort would recreate an authentic fort of that time complete with a replica of a battlefield, providing for Civil War re-enactments. The area would also provide recreations of battleships; specifically, The Monitor and The Merrimac, where recreated water fights would have been fought on Freedom Bay. This would have possibly served as the nighttime spectacular.

We The People (1870 to 1930)

We The People would feature a replica of building at Ellis Island, which served as the gateway for immigrants into America in the 19th and early 20th century. The Ellis Island Building would have showcased a Muppets musical show about immigration.

State Fair (1930 to 1945)

The State fair area would recreate a 1930’s Coney Island theme complete with carnival rides and a live show about baseball.

Family Farm (1930 to 1945)

The Family Farm would recreate an authentic farm and give guests the opportunity to experience the different types of food production industries as well as have the opportunity to participate in hands-on experiences like making ice cream and milking a cow.

President's Square (1750 to 1800)

President’s Square would celebrate the efforts of America’s founding fathers and the birth of democracy.

Enterprise (1870 to 1930)

Enterprise, would been a recreation of an American factory town. The area would have played tribute to American ingenuity, featuring exhibits of technology that defined the development of America's industry.

Victory Field (1940 to 1945)

Victory Field would have introduced guest to the experiences that American soldiers faced during the two world wars. The area would have been themed after a typical airfield complete with hangars, which would feature virtual reality attractions based on America's military flight. Victory Field would have also featured airplane exhibits from different periods.

Disney’s America would offer more than just a theme park. The project also called for a water park, a twenty-seven-hole golf course, 300 campsites, and 1.3 million square feet retail and entertainment district. In addition the park would feature an in-park hotel with 1,340 -rooms and a convention center. The hotel would be themed after a 19th-century Civil War era lodge and would also include accommodations scattered throughout the crossroads village area.
* # ¿ Apr 23, 2015 04:13
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Double Plus Good posted:

I kept waiting for the description of the park area based on plantation fields with cast members dressed as slaves or a trail of tears monorail tour or something, but… it just seems like a regular theme park? Other than being a big theme park what's the scary part?


Look at the location. It's not the park itself (I would have loved to visit it) but building it so close to a battlefield really upsets the preservationist in me.

* # ¿ Apr 23, 2015 04:36
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

pookel posted:

Thanks to this thread, I spent last night reading about some of the biggest and most horrible plane crashes:

Tenerife Airport Disaster


Can't talk about that without posting this. The actor they got playing the KLM pilot is the epitome of :smug:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaFO9dEeCBQ

* # ¿ May 5, 2015 19:15
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Here's a interview with the Second Office on the Titanic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzqJiowdwhA

His accent's a joy to listen to and his role in the shipwreck is pretty crazy.


quote:

During the evacuation, Lightoller took charge of lowering the lifeboats on the port side of the boat deck. He helped to fill several lifeboats with passengers and launched them. Lightoller interpreted Smith's order for "the evacuation of women and children" as essentially "women and children only". As a result, Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board.[8]

When he attempted to launch Lifeboat 2, he found it to be occupied already by 25 male passengers and crewmen. He ordered them out of the boat at gunpoint, telling them: "Get out of there, you damned cowards! I'd like to see every one of you overboard!". He then filled the boat with women and children, but could not find enough of them to fill the boat. When Boat 2 was lowered, there were only 17 people aboard, out of a capacity of 40.[9]

He then got swept overboard when the ship went down and made his way to a capsized lifeboat

quote:

Lightoller climbed on the boat and took charge, calming and organising the survivors (numbering around thirty) on the overturned lifeboat. He led them in yelling in unison "Boat ahoy!" but with no success. During the night a swell arose and Lightoller taught the men to shift their weight with the swells to prevent the craft from being swamped. If not for this, they likely would have been thrown into the freezing water again. At his direction, the men kept this up for hours until they were finally rescued by another lifeboat. Lightoller was the last survivor taken on board the RMS Carpathia.

Later on he had a fairly distinguished career with the Royal Navy in WW1 and retired to become a innkeeper, only to return to the sea in 1940 when he sailed his yacht to Dunkirk and helped with the evacuation there.

* # ¿ May 6, 2015 22:25
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
So, i'm reading Killer Show about the 2003 Station nightclub fire and ugh. Everything that could go wrong did: Sleezy club owners using low quality material and cutting corners, a neighbor complaining about sound so some doors were blocked, a bricked up fire door from decades before, a very narrow front door. And on top of that you have this unfortunate conversation only hours before the fire.


quote:

Interviewed about a stampede that killed 21 people at a Chicago nightclub three days earlier, state Fire Marshal Irving J. Owens says Rhode Island’s fire codes all but eliminate the chance of a catastrophic nightclub fire in the Ocean State. “It’s very remote something like that would happen here. Interviewed about a stampede that killed 21 people at a Chicago nightclub three days earlier, state Fire Marshal Irving J. Owens says Rhode Island’s fire codes all but eliminate the chance of a catastrophic nightclub fire in the Ocean State.

If anyone's curious the nightclub's website is still online

http://web.archive.org/web/20030214163647/http://thestationrocks.com/
* # ¿ May 8, 2015 21:55
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Reading more about the Station Fire. It's mind boggling how fast the fire spread. Book claims if you you didn't escape the building before 90 seconds then you were likely dead.

Also, the media is scum.

quote:

In order to keep reporters from accosting families a tthe Crowne Plaza, the Rhode Island State Police and West Warwick police closed the main door of the ballroom and allowed access to families only through a side door. Nevertheless, some enterprising out-of-state journalists rented guest rooms at the hotel and attempted to enter the Family Assistance Center under false pretenses. They were detained by police, then evicted from the hotel.

quote:

Several victims lay in the parking lot, still smoldering. Hoping to cool them down, Vannini grabbed extinguishers from fire trucks, wielding one and handing others to civilians. When he pointed his extinguisher at one badly burned victim, its stream came out too hard, tearing burned skin off the man’s body.Vannini tried applying snow, instead.


quote:

"Be absolutely certain of the identity of the deceased. . . .All notifications should be made in person. . . .More than one person should be present to make the notification.
DO NOT NOTIFY CHILDREN, LEAVE NOTES, OR TELL NEIGHBORS
. . . .Do not use ambiguous terms such as “we have lost John Smith” or “he has expired.” . . .Use terms such as “killed,” “died,” and “dead,” as these leave no questions.— from the “Protocol for Death Notification” furnished to Station Fire Family Assistance Center personnel
* # ¿ May 11, 2015 02:15
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Celery Face posted:

When I read the article some years back, I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that 100 people died. It just seemed so insane. Then when the even worse Kiss nightclub fire happened, I saw a video a journalist took of the Station fire. Big mistake to have watched that right before bed.

:nms:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOzfq9Egxeo:nms:

The screaming at 5:30 from the people being burned alive is what horrified me the most.

Yeah, don't click this. The book gives a vivid enough description of the video. One of the things the author points out is there are several recordings of the fire in various forms: Brian Butler was a local WPRI news reporter who filmed the above mentioned video. Morbidly enough he was there to film a story on fire safety at the urging of one of the club's owners, a news reporter at his station.. Dan Davidson was amateur photographer who snapped several photos before escaping. Joe Cristina was there with Matt Pickett and snapped a single photo before escaping. Matt Pickett died in the fire but the Sony Walkman he was carrying in his pocket to record the concert survived. The ATF was able to salvage the burned recorder then piece together the whole thing using computers.

quote:

The Pickett audiotape continues for another ten minutes. Its contents are probably worse than most of us would care to imagine. As fire science suggests, many victims were instantly rendered unconscious by smoke,and thereby spared suffering. However, Matthew Pickett’s audiotape also teaches that pain and despair do not discriminate by sex, and pleas to be rescued by God or man may go unheard. In the end, its only sounds are the crackle, hiss, and pop of flames,indistinguishable from those of logs in a fireplace —sounds that in a different setting can be so comforting,but are here so profoundly disturbing.

One thing that stood out to me was how long it took for people to realize "Hey, this fire is not under control" and just fail to escape. The book offered the explanation that humans are used to being near controlled fire ( fireplaces, bonfires,etc) and that the sudden appearance of a dangerous, out of control fire simply causes many people to freeze up.

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 19:38 on May 11, 2015

* # ¿ May 11, 2015 04:22
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Really?

quote:


It would be years before many of the most seriously burned Station fire victims could concern themselves with the third priority of burn care, cosmetic appearance. For them, surgeries to release function-impairing scar contractures would long take precedence over aesthetics. For others who may have a played a role in theStation tragedy, however, priorities were not so constrained.On May 24, 2006, Jack Russell appeared on an episode of TV’s entertainment tabloid Extra. The “news hook” for the story was Russell’s showing off the results of his recent face-lift:

Voiceover: “He’s the lead singer for the ’80s metal band Great White, but for Jack Russell, the past three years have not been great.His life unraveled when a Rhode Island nightclub caught fire during a concert and . . . one hundred lives were lost. . . .

Russell: “My drinking really, really started getting really bad after that.”

Voiceover: “The forty-five-year-old checked into rehab. Now, he’snine months clean and sober and ready for a fresh start.”

Russell: “I’m feeling so good inside. I look in the mirror and it justdoesn’t represent how I feel inside, so I, you know, I thought it was time for a change."

Voiceover: “That change? A face-lift.”

. . .Voiceover: “Four weeks later, check out the results! Before andafter. Jack got the subtle, not-overdone look he wanted. His eyes,more refreshed. Jowls gone, and no more turkey neck!”
Russell: “Most of my friends go, ‘Have you lost weight?’ and I’m like,‘Well, yeah, about ten pounds in the face,’ you know?” [laughs]

Three thousand miles to the east, Joe Kinan began his day. It was difficult for him to line up his newprosthetic ears with the magnets that had beenimplanted under his grafted skin to hold them in place.But he managed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8GIuNs8EpM

* # ¿ May 12, 2015 18:13
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Tired Moritz posted:

Talking about books, what's the best books if I want to read up on hosed up crimes or serial murderers?

True Crime: An American Anthology published by Library of America does a admirable job at not being sleazy.


https://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?RequestID=289

http://www.amazon.com/True-Crime-Anthology-Harold-Schechter/dp/1598530313

Here's the Washington Post review

quote:

Murder, let's face it, is as American as cherry pie.

That's the unavoidable conclusion one reaches after reading the Library of America's huge, bloody, fascinating, often depressing yet sometimes grimly funny anthology of 350 years of true-crime writing.



Admirably edited by Harold Schechter, the book opens with "The Hanging of John Billington," Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford's 1651 account of the first recorded American murder, and ends with "Nightmare on Elm Drive," Dominick Dunne's 2001 report on the conviction of the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, for murdering their parents. The anthology's 50 nonfiction pieces, most originally published in newspapers and magazines, include some by authors as celebrated as Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Thurber, Theodore Dreiser and Truman Capote. Many of the crimes are obscure, while others are notorious, such as those involving Leopold and Loeb, Richard Speck and Charles Manson.

We encounter the Ghastly Find (often a body, or pieces of one, floating in a river); the Wayside Tavern, "where the solitary traveler comes but never departs"; and a multitude of women seeking to rid themselves of husbands by means of arsenic or various blunt instruments, some getting away with it, others not. We are reminded of just how incompetent most murderers are. Damon Runyon called Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray the Dumbbell Murderers when they were tried in 1927 for killing Snyder's husband, and the same could be said of a dozen others in this book, including Leopold and Loeb and the Menendez brothers, who fancied themselves superior creatures who could bring off the perfect crime.

Often, the stories from the 18th and 19th centuries are the most gripping, because we are unlikely to have encountered them before. Two early chapters describe separate murders in 1781 and 1782, wherein a farmer and a shopkeeper took up the ax and murdered their families, one because God told him to, the other because of business reversals. Mark Twain explains that the many shootings in America's Wild West came about because "a person is not respected until he has 'killed his man.' " An anonymous piece called "Jesse Harding Pomeroy, the Boy Fiend," tells of a lad in South Boston who in the 1870s tortured and killed younger children, and at age 14 was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted, and he died in prison 60 years later.

The Cuban patriot José Martí reports on the trial of Charles Guiteau, the disgruntled office-seeker who assassinated President James Garfield in 1881 and claimed in court that God had told him to. Why? "To unite the factions within the Republican party," the killer explained. His insanity defense was rejected, and he was executed.

The reporter and future novelist Susan Glaspell tells how in 1900 an Iowa farmer's abused wife, Margaret Hossack, apparently used an ax to crush the skull of her sleeping husband but after two trials emerged a free woman. Not so fortunate was Cordelia Botkin of San Francisco, who when rejected by her married lover in 1898 sent his wife a box of poisoned chocolates, which killed both the wife and another woman. Botkin, too, was a dumbbell and wound up in San Quentin.

One does not typically look to true-crime reporting for outstanding writing -- just the facts will suffice -- but there is plenty of class in this volume. The New Yorker's Annals of Crime series has employed the talents of Alexander Woollcott, James Thurber, A.J. Liebling and Calvin Trillin; their articles collected here include Liebling's classic "Case of the Scattered Dutchman," which concerns body parts found floating in the East River.

Three dramatically different selections struck me as exceptionally well crafted.

"The Eternal Blonde," Damon Runyon's day-by-day account of the 1927 trial of Snyder and Gray for the murder of her husband, Albert Snyder, "under circumstances that for sheer stupidity and brutality have seldom been equalled in the history of crime," is often hilarious. Example: "[Snyder] is not bad looking. I have seen much worse. She is thirty-three and looks just about that, though you cannot tell much about blondes." Gray is dismissed as "the little corset salesman." After the lovers bashed in the sleeping husband's skull with a five-pound sash weight, Gray tied up Snyder, who later told the police that two foreigners had broken in and killed her husband. That story held up for about 30 seconds, whereupon the lovers turned on one another, a legal strategy that, as Runyon gleefully relates, did not save them from the electric chair.

At a little after 9, on the morning of Sept. 6, 1949, in Camden, N.J., a World War II veteran named Howard Unruh, armed with a Luger pistol, left his home and proceeded to kill or wound 16 neighbors and passersby in their shops, homes and cars. He later explained that his neighbors were making "derogatory remarks" about him. New York Times reporter Meyer Berger soon arrived on the scene and spent six hours retracing Unruh's steps and interviewing some 50 witnesses. He then returned to the Times office and wrote a 4,000-word story that was published the next day under the headline "Veteran Kills 12 in Mad Rampage on Camden Street." It was a dazzling example of deadline reporting and won Berger the Pulitzer Prize. Among the many bits of memorable dialogue he recorded was this exchange between an indignant Unruh and one of the policemen who arrested him: "You a psycho?" "I'm no psycho. I have a good mind."

Possibly the most remarkable piece of writing in this anthology is the African American novelist and journalist Zora Neale Hurston's account of the 1952 trial in Suwannee County, Fla., of Ruby McCollum, a black woman who had shot and killed her white lover, Clifford Adams Jr., a doctor and state senator. The trial, Hurston wrote, "amounted to a mass delusion by unanimous agreement." The well-to-do McCollum had given birth to one child by Adams and was pregnant with another when she shot him. She was allowed to say in court that Adams was the father of her child, but the prosecution called that "preposterous" and the judge refused to let her offer any details or mitigating circumstances. She was a black woman who had killed a white man, and there was nothing more to be said. The official story was that she shot him in a dispute over an unpaid $6 medical bill. Covering the trial for an African American newspaper and watching from the balcony reserved for blacks, Hurston found this charade astonishing, and she gives a powerful account of both the trial and the way local blacks, fearful of white authority in a Klan stronghold, were unanimous in condemning McCollum. It's a painfully candid piece of writing in which one reporter sees with perfect clarity the reality that everyone else denies.

Editor Schechter refers to a previous crime anthologist as having "served up true-crime tidbits for the delectation of a sensation-craving public." There are many delicious tidbits here, but I think no one would accuse Schechter of base motives. His seriousness is reflected in the Hurston selection, in Elizabeth Hardwick's eloquent protest against the 1960 execution of Caryl Chessman and in many other pieces. The anthology is almost obscenely entertaining, if one has a strong stomach and a certain mind-set, but it is also a searching look at the dark underside of American reality, at an aspect of the human condition that both horrifies and fascinates us.


Here's two excerpts

quote:

Benjamin Franklin -The Pennsylvania Gazette, October 24, 1734

Saturday last, at a Court of Oyer and Terminer held here, came on the Tryal of a Man and his Wife, who were indicted for the Murder of a Daughter which he had by a former Wife, (a Girl of about 14 Years of Age) by turning her out of Doors, and thereby exposing her to such Hardships, as afterwards produced grievous Sickness and Lameness; during which, instead of supplying her with Necessaries and due Attendance, they treated her with the utmost Cruelty and Barbarity, suffering her to lie and rot in her Nastiness, and when she cried for Bread giving her into her Mouth with a Iron Ladle, her own Excrements to eat, with a great Number of other Circumstances of the like Nature, so that she languished and at length died.

The Evidence against them was numerous, and in many Particulars positive; but the Opinion of the Physician who had visited the Child, that whatever Usage might be given her, the Distemper she laboured under was such, as would of itself in all Probability have ended her Life about the Time she died, it is thought weighed so much with the Jury, that they brought in their Verdict only Man-slaughter. A Verdict which the Judge, (in a short but pathetic Speech to the Prisoners before the Sentence) told them was extreamly favourable; and that, as the Relation of their hitherto unheard-of Barbarity had in the highest Manner shocked all that were present; so, if they were not perfectly stupified, the inward Reflection upon their own enormous Crimes, must be more terrible and shocking to them, than the Punishment they were to undergo: For that they had not only acted contrary to the particular Laws of all Nations, but had even broken the Universal Law of Nature; since there are no Creatures known, how savage, wild, and fierce soever, that have not implanted in them a natural Love and Care of their tender Offspring, and that will not even hazard Life in its Protection and Defence. — But this is not the only Instance the present Age has afforded, of the incomprehensible Insensibility Dram-drinking is capable of producing. — They were sentenced to be burnt in the Hand, which was accordingly executed in Court, upon them both, but first upon the Man, who offer’d to receive another Burning if so be his Wife might be excused; but was told the Law would not allow it.


quote:


CAMDEN, N.J., Sept.6—

Howard B. Unruh, 28 years old, a mild, soft-spoken veteran of many armored artillery battles in Italy, France, Austria, Belgium and Germany, killed twelve persons with a war souvenir Luger pistol in his home block in East Camden this morning. He wounded four others.

Unruh, a slender, hollow-cheeked six-footer paradoxically devoted to scripture reading and to constant practice with firearms, had no previous history of mental illness but specialists indicated tonight that there was no doubt that he was a psychiatric case, and that he had secretly nursed a persecution complex for two years or more.

The veteran was shot in the left thigh by a local tavern keeper but he kept that fact secret, too, while policemen and Mitchell Cohen, Camden County prosecutor, questioned him at police headquarters for more than two hours immediately after tear gas bombs had forced him out of his bedroom to surrender.

Blood Betrays His Wound

The blood stain he left on the seat he occupied during the questioning betrayed his wound. When it was discovered he was taken to Cooper Hospital in Camden, a prisoner charged with murder.

He was as calm under questioning as he was during the twenty minutes that he was shooting men, women and children. Only occasionally excessive brightness of his dark eyes indicated that he was anything other than normal.

He told the prosecutor that he had been building up resentment against neighbors and neighborhood shopkeepers for a long time. “They have been making derogatory remarks about my character,” he said. His resentment seemed most strongly concentrated against Mr. and Mrs. Maurice Cohen who lived next door to him. They are among the dead.

Mr. Cohen was a druggist with a shop at 3202 River Road in East Camden. He and his wife had had frequent sharp exchanges over the Unruhs’ use of a gate that separates their back yard from the Cohens’. Mrs. Cohen had also complained of young Unruh’s keeping his bedroom radio tuned high into the late night hours. None of the other victims had ever had trouble with him. Unruh, a graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School here, had started a GI course in pharmacy at Temple University in Philadelphia some time after he was honorably discharged from the service in 1945, but had stayed with it only three months. In recent months he had been unemployed, and apparently was not even looking for work.

Mother Separated From Husband

His mother, Mrs. Rita Unruh, 50, is separated from her husband. She works as a packer in the Evanson Soap Company in Camden and hers was virtually the only family income. James Unrah, 25 years old, her younger son, is married and lives in Haddon Heights, N.J. He works for the Curtis Publishing Company.

On Monday night, Howard Unruh left the house alone. He spent the night at the Family Theater on Market Street in Philadelphia to sit through several showings of the double feature motion picture there--“I Cheated the Law” and “The Lady Gambles.” It was pass three o’clock this morning when he got home.

Prosecutor Cohen said that Unruh told him later that before he fell asleep this morning he had made up his mind to shoot the persons who had “talked about me,” that he had even figured out that 9:30 A.M. would be the time to begin because most of the stores in his block would be open at that hour.

His mother, leaving her ironing when he got up, prepared his breakfast in their drab little three-room apartment in the shabby gray two-story stucco house at the corner of River Road and Thirty Second Street. After breakfast, he loaded one clip of bullets into his Lugar, slipped another clip into his pocket, and carried sixteen loose cartridges in addition. He also carried a tear-gas pen with six shells and a sharp six-inch knife.

He took one last look around his bedroom before he left the house. On the peeling walls he had crossed pistols, crossed German bayonets, pictures of armored artillery in action. Scattered about the chamber were machetes, a Roy Rogers pistol, ash trays made of German shells, clips of 30-30 cartridges for rifle use and a host of varied war souvenirs.

Mrs. Unruh had left the house some minutes before, to call on Mrs. Caroline Pinner, a friend in the next block. Msrs. Unruh had sensed, apparently, that her son’s smoldering resentments were coming to a head. She had pleaded with Elias Pinner, her friend’s husband, to cut a little gate in the Unruhs’ backyard so that Howard need not use the Cohen gate again. Mr. Pinner finished the gate early Monday evening after Howard had gone to Philadelphia.

At the Pinners’ house at 9 o’clock this morning, Mrs. Unruh had murmured something about Howard’s eyes: how strange they looked and how worried she was about him.

A few minutes later River Road echoed and re-echoed to pistol fire. Howard Unruh was on the rampage. His mother, who had left the Pinners’ little white house only a few seconds before, turned back. She hurried through the door.

She cried, “Oh, Howard, oh, Howard, they’re to blame for this.” She rushed past Mrs. Pinner, a kindly gray-haired woman of 70. She said, “I’ve got to use the phone; may I use the phone?”

But before she had crossed the living room to reach for it she fell on the faded carpet in a dead faint. The Pinners lifted her onto a couch in the next room. Mrs. Pinner applied aromatic spirits to revive her.

Panic Grips Entire Block

While his mother writhed on the sofa in her house dress, and worn old sweater, coming back to consciousness, Howard Unruh was walking from shop to shop in the “3200 block” with deadly calm, spurting Luger in hand. Children screamed as they tumbled over one another to get out of his way. Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, man hoarse with fear. No one could quite understand for a time. what had been loosed in the block.

Unruh first walked into John Pilarchik’s shoe repair shop near the north end of his own side of the street. The cobbler, a 27-year-old man who lives in Pennsauken Township, looked up open-mouthed as Unruh came to within a yard of him. The cobbler started up from his bench but went down with a bullet in his stomach. A little boy who was in the shop hid behind the counter and crouched there in terror. Unruh walked out into the sunlit street.

“I shot them in the chest first,” he told the prosecutor later, in meticulous detail, “and then I aimed for the head.” His aim was devastating--and with reason. He had won markmanship and sharpshooters’ ratings in the service, and he practiced with his Lugar all the time on a target set up in the cellar of his home.

Unruh told the prosecutor afterward that he had Cohen the druggist, the neighborhood barber, the neighborhood cobbler and the neighborhood tailor on his mental list of persons who had “talked about him.” He went methodically about wiping them out. Oddly enough, he did not start with the druggist, against whom he seemed to have the sharpest feelings, but left him almost for the last.

Newlywed Wife Shot Dead

From the cobbler’s he went into the little tailor shop at 3214 River Road. The tailor was out. Helga Zegrino, 28 years old, the tailor’s wife was there alone. The couple, incidentally, had been married only one month. She screamed when Unruh walked in with his Luger in his hand. Some people across the street heard her. Then the gun blasted again and Mrs. Zegrino pitched over, dead. Unruh walked into the sunlight again.

All this was only a matter of seconds and still only a few persons had begun to understand what was afoot. Down the street at 3210 River Road is Clark Hoover’s little country barber shop. In the center was a white-painted carousel-type horse for children customers. Orris Smith, a blonde boy only 6 years old, was in it, with a bib around his neck, submitting to a shearing. His mother, Mrs. Catherine Smith, 42, sat on a chair against the wall and watched.

She looked up. Clark Hoover turned from his work, to see the six-footer, gaunt and tense, but silent, standing in the driveway with of the Luger. Unruh’s brown tropical worsted suit was barred with morning shadow. The sun lay bright in his crew-cut brown hair. He wore no hat. Mrs. Smith could not understand what was about to happen.

Unruh walked to “Brux”-- that is Mrs. Smith’s nickname for her little boy -- and put the Luger to the child’s chest. The shot echoed and reverberated in the little 12 by 12 shop. The little boy’s head pitched toward the wound, his hair, half-cut, stained with red. Unruh said never a word. He put the Luger close to the shaking barber’s hand. Before the horrified mother, Unruh leaned over and fired another shot into Hoover.

The veteran made no attempt to kill Mrs. Smith. He did not seem to hear her screams. He turned his back and stalked out, unhurried. A few doors north, Dominick Latela, who runs a little restaurant, had come to his shop window to learn what the shooting was about. He saw Unruh cross the street toward Frank Engel’s Tavern. Then he saw Mrs. Smith stagger out with her pitiful burden. Her son’s head rolled over the crook of her right arm.

Mrs. Smith screamed, “My boy is dead. I know he’s dead.” She stared about her, looking in vain for aid. No one but Howard Unruh was in sight, and he was concentrating on the tavern. Latela dashed out, but first he shouted to his wife, Dora, who was in the restaurant with their daughter Eleanor, 6 years old. He hollered, “I’m going out. Lock the door behind me.” He ran for his car, and drove it down toward Mrs. Smith as she stood on the payment with her son.

Latela took the child from her arms and placed him on the car’s front seat. He pushed the mother into the rear seat, slammed the doors and headed for Cooper Hospital. Howard Unruh had not turned. Engle, the tavern keeper, had locked his own door. His customers, the bartender and a porter made a concerted rush for the rear of the saloon. The bullets tore through the tavern door panelling. Engel rushed upstairs and got out his .38 caliber pistol, then rushed to the street window of his apartment.

Unruh was back in the center of the street. He fired a shot at an apartment window at 3208 River Road. Tommy Hamilton, 2 years old, fell back with a bullet in his head. Unruh went north again to Latela’s place. He fired a shot at the door, and kicked in the lower glass panel. Mrs. Latela crouched behind the counter with her daughter. She heard the bullets, but neither she nor her child was touched. Unruh walked back toward Thirty-second Street, reloading the Luger.

Now, the little street--a small block with only five buildings on one side, three one-story stores on the other--was shrill with women’s and children’s panicky outcries. A group of six or seven little boys or girls fled pass Unruh. They screamed, “Crazy man!” and unintellible sentences. Unruh did not seem to hear, or see, them.

Autoist Goes to His Death

Alvin Day, a television repair man, who lives in the near-by Mantua, had heard the shooting, but driving into the street he was not aware of what had happened. Unruh walked up to the car window as Day rolled by, and fired once through the window, with deadly aim. The repair man fell against the steering wheel. The front wheels hit the opposite curb and stalled. Day was dead.

Frank Engel had thrown open his second-four apartment window. He saw Unruh pause for a moment in a narrow alley between the cobbler’s shop and a little two-story house. He aimed and fired. Unruh stopped for just a second. The bullet had hit, but he did not seem to mind, after the initial brief shock. He headed toward the corner drugstore, and Engle did not fire again.

“I wish I had,” he said, later. “I could have killed him then. I could have put a half-dozen shots into him. I don’t know why I didn’t do it.”

Cohen, the druggist, a heavy man of 40, had run into the street shouting, “What’s going on here? What’s going on here?” but at sight of Unruh hurried back into his shop. James J. Huttton, 45, an insurance agent from Westmont, N.J., started out of the drug shop to see what the shooting was about. Like so many others he had figured at first that it was some car backfiring. He came face to face with Unruh.

Unruh said quietly, “Excuse me, sir,” and started to push past him. Later, Unruh told the police: “That man didn’t act fast enough. He didn’t get out of my way.” He fired into Hutton’s head and body. The insurance man pitched onto the sidewalk and lay still.

Cohen had run to his upstairs apartment and had tried to warn Minnie Cohen, 63, his mother, and Rose, his wife, 38, to hide. His son, Charles, 14, was in the apartment, too.

Mrs .Cohen shoved the boy into a clothes closet, and leaped into another closet herself. She pulled the door to. The druggist, meanwhile had leaped from the window onto a porch roof. Unruh, a gaunt figure at the window behind him, fired into the druggist’s back. The druggist, still running, bounded off the roof and lay dead in Thirty-second Street.

Unruh fired into the closet, where Mrs. Cohen was hidden. She fell dead behind the closed door, and he did not bother to open it. Mrs. Minnie Cohen tried to get to the telephone in an adjoining bedroom to call the police. Unruh fired shots into her head and body and she sprawled dead on the bed. Unruh walked down the stairs with his Luger reloaded and came out into the street again.

A coupe had stopped at River Road, obeying a red light. The passengers obviously had no idea of what was loose in East Camden and no one had a chance to tell them. Unruh walked up to the car, and though it was filled with total strangers, fired deliberately at them, one by one, through the windshield. He killed the two women passengers, Mrs. Helen Matlack Wilson, 43, of Pennsauken, who was driving, and her mother, Mrs. Emma Matlack, 66. Mrs. Wilson’s son John, 12, was badly wounded. A bullet pierced his neck, just below in the jawbone.

Earl Horner, clerk in the American Stores Company, a grocery opposite the drugstore, had locked his front door after several passing men, women and children had tumbled breathlessly into the shop panting “crazy man***killing people.***” Unruh came up to the door and fired two shots through the wood panelling. Horner, his customers, the refugees from the veteran’s merciless gunfire, crouched, trembling, behind the counter. None there was hurt.

“He tried the door before he shot in here,” Horner related afterward. “He just stood there, stony-faced and grim, and rattled the knob, before he started to fire. Then he turned away.”

Charlie Petersen, 18, son of a Camden fireman, came driving down the street with two friends when Unruh turned from the grocery. The three boys got out to stare at Hutton’s body lying unattended on the sidewalk. They did not know who had shot the insurance man, or why and, like the women in the car, had no warning that Howard Unruh was on the loose. The veteran brought his Luger to sight and fired several times. Young Petersen fell with bullets in his legs. His friends tore pell-mell down the street to safety.

Mrs. Helen Harris of 1250 North Twenty-eighth Street with her daughter, Helen, a 6-year-old blonde child, and a Mrs. Horowitz with her daughter, Linda, five, turned into Thirty-second Street. They had heard the shooting from a distance but thought is was auto backfire.

Unruh passed them in Thirty-second Street and walked up the sagging four steps of a little yellow dwelling back of his own house. Mrs. Madeline Harrie, a woman in her late thirties, and two sons, Armand, 16, and Leroy, 15, were in the house. A third son, Wilson, 14, was barricaded in the grocery with other customers.

Unruh threw open the front door and, gun in hand, walked into the dark little parlor. He fired two shots at Mrs. Harrie. They went wild and entered the wall. A third shot caught her in the left arm. She screamed. Armand leaped at Unruh, to tackle him. The veteran used the Luger butt to drop the boy, then fired two shots into his arms. Upstairs Leroy heard the shooting and the screams. He hid under a bed.

By this time, answering a flood of hysterical telephone calls from various parts of East Camden, police radio cars swarmed into River Road with sirens wide open. Emergency crews brought machine guns, shotguns and tear gas bombs.

Sergeant Earl Wright, one of the first to leap to the sidewalk, saw Charles Cohen, the druggist’s son. The boy was half out the second-floor apartment window, just above where his father lay dead. He was screaming “He’s going to kill me. He’s killing every body.” The boy was hysterical.

Wright bounded up the stairs to the druggist’s apartment. He saw the dead woman on the bed, and tried to soothe the druggist son. He brought him downstairs and turned him over to other policemen, then joined the men who had surrounded the two-story stucco house where Unruh lived. Unruh, meanwhile, had fired about 30 shots. He was out of ammunition: Leaving the Harrie house, he had also heard the police sirens. He had run through the back gate to his own rear bedroom.

Guns Trained on Window

Edward Joslin, a motorcycle policeman, scrambled to the porch roof under Unruh’s window. He tossed a tear-gas grenade through a pane of glass. Other policemen, hoarsely calling on Unruh to surrender, took positions with their machine guns and shotguns. They trained them on Unruh’s window.

Meanwhile a curious interlude had taken place. Philip W. Buxton, an assistant city editor on the Camden Evening Courier had looked Unruh’s name up in the telephone book. He called the number, Camden 4-2490W. It was just after 10 A.M. and Unruh had just returned to his room. To Mr. Buxton’s astonishment Unruh answered. He said hello in a calm, clear voice.

“This Howard?” Mr. Buxton asked.
“Yes, this is Howard. What’s the last name of the party you want?”
“Unruh.”
The veteran asked what Mr. Buxton wanted.
“I’m a friend,” the newspaper man said. “I want to know what they’re doing to you down there.”
Unruh thought a moment. He said, “They haven’t done anything to me---yet. I’m doing plenty to them.” His voice was still steady without a trace of hysteria.
Mr. Buxton asked how many persons Unruh had killed.
The veteran answered: “I don’t know. I haven’t counted. Looks like a pretty good score.” “Why are you killing people?”
“I don’t know,” came the frank answer. “I can’t answer that yet. I’ll have to talk to you later. I’m too busy now.”
The telephone banged down.

Unruh was busy. The tear gas was taking effect and police bullets were thudding at the walls around him. During a lull in the firing the police saw the white curtains move and the gaunt killer came into plain view.

“Okay,” he shouted. “I give up, I’m coming down.”
“Where’s that gun?” a sergeant yelled.
“It’s on my desk, up here in the room,” Unruh called down quietly. “I’m coming down.”

Thirty guns were trained on the shabby little back door. A few seconds later the door opened and Unruh stepped into the light, his hands up. Sergeant Wright came across the morning-glory and aster beds in the yard and snapped handcuffs on Unruh’s wrists.

“What’s the matter with you,” a policeman demanded hotly. “You a psycho?”
Unruh stared into the policeman’s eyes---a level, steady stare. He said, “I’m no psycho. I have a good mind.”

Word of the capture brought the whole East Camden populace pouring into the streets. Men and women screamed at Unruh, and cursed him in shrill accents and in hoarse anger. Someone cried “lynch him” but there was no movement. Sergeant Wright’s men walked Unruh to a police car and started for headquarters.

Shouting and pushing men and women started after the car, but dropped back after a few paces. They stood in excited little groups discussing the shootings, and the character of Howard Unruh. Little by little the original anger, born of fear, that had moved the crowd, began to die.

Men conceded that he probably was not in his right mind. Those who knew Unruh kept repeating how close-mouthed he was, and how soft spoken. How he took his mother to church, and how he marked scripture passages, especially the prophecies.

“He was a quiet one, that guy,” a man told a crowd in front of the tavern. “He was all the time figuring to do this thing. You gotta watch them quiet ones.”

But all day River Road and the side streets talked of nothing else. The shock was great. Men and women kept saying: “We can’t understand it. Just don’t get it.”

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 20:41 on Jun 12, 2015

* # ¿ Jun 12, 2015 19:08
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Irisi posted:

My god, that second piece is an astonishing piece of writing. Especially considering it was written by one man to a deadline, in a time and place where it must have been hellishly difficult to get any sense out of a very frightened neighbourhood.

It's so clear and precise and lacking in extreme sensationalism, in some places it almost reads like a well-honed précis for a book or film script. Puts to shame the reporting modern journalists do on mass shootings, no wonder it won an award.

http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/page/171-berger-award/172

"Berger was assigned to the story by The Times City Desk shortly before 11 A.M. He caught the first available train to Camden; personally covered the story and filed approximately 4,000 words. The last of his copy reached The Times office at 9:20 P.M., about one hour before the first edition closing."

I had never heard of Berger before I read his piece in the anthology but Google brought up another story by him.

quote:

WHEN WE COULD SEE THE COFFINS
by Meyer Berger in The New York Times, October 27, 1947


The first war dead from Europe came home yesterday. The harbor was steeped in Sabbath stillness as they came in on the morning tide in 6,248 coffins in the hold of the transport Joseph V. Connolly. One coffin, borne from the ship in a caisson, moved through the city's streets to muffled drumbeats and slow cadenced marches, and 400,000 New Yorkers along the route and at a memorial service in Central Park paid it the tribute of reverent silence and unhidden tears.

At the service on the Sheep Meadow, chaplains of three faiths prayed for the soldier dead. Their words, and the choking sadness of taps, suspended in quivering, unseasonal heat, evoked women's sobs and caught at men's throats.

The transport Joseph V. Connolly broke through the haze outside the narrows at 9 a.m., a shadowy hulk all gray and tan, with a funeral wreath at her forepeak. Nothing moved on her decks.

The Connolly's escort wheeled into line: the destroyers Bristol and Beaty, the gleaming white Coast Guard cutter Spencer; five of the city's fireboats and other small craft. The ship's ensign, half-masted, stirred in the wind, and at 9:15 A.M. foam flowed from the Connolly's prow and the craft moved toward the harbor.

The pace was slow, a bare ten knots. Buoys tolled and lapsed into quiet. There was a stir on the Bristol's fantail, and Corporal Carroll Ripley, a marine, raised his trumpet and Church Call, muted and tender, hung over the waters. Rear Admiral John J. Brady, retired, opened a prayer: "O, God -" but a wind tore the invocation to tatters.
* # ¿ Jun 12, 2015 20:44
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Quick, time for a wiki article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%8Dgaku_no_Gaijin_Hanzai_Ura_File_%E2%80%93_Gaijin_Hanzai_Hakusho_2007
* # ¿ Jun 19, 2015 02:46
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Guys, forget the serial killers, the most horrific criminal ever has been found.


quote:

Of all the things that thieves could have taken from inside the home of former President Warren G. Harding yesterday morning, they picked the one that hurt the most.

No one could put a dollar value on the leather and gold dog collar — the only item stolen in an overnight break-in — that once belonged to Harding’s beloved Airedale terrier, Laddie Boy.

But Sherry Hall, site manager of the historic Harding Home and Museum in Marion, called it priceless, though she wasn’t talking about monetary wealth.

“I don’t think there is a single item in this collection that matters more or is more important or special to the thousands of schoolchildren who pass through this home each year,” said Hall, who has overseen the Ohio Historical Site for going on 13 years. “It’s a real connection to history for them: They see that collar and learn about Laddie Boy and say, ‘Look. I have a dog, too. I’m just like the president.’  ”

Just before 8 a.m. yesterday, the groundskeeper arrived at the Harding Home, 380 Mount Vernon Ave., to find a ladder propped up to the second story, a window ajar and a pry bar close by.

When Hall arrived, she found a jewelry box belonging to Harding’s wife, Florence Kling Harding, broken and lying near the front door. Then she found one of the rooms in disarray. The collar, which had been sitting on a chest behind the ropes that keep guided visitors at bay, was missing.

Police quickly distributed photos of the heirloom, hoping that if a thief tried to pawn it or sell it, it would be quickly reported.

By last night, nothing had surfaced, and there had been no arrests.

Marion Police Lt. Mark Beaschler said the thief likely knew what he wanted.

“I would say whoever stole it had been in there before, knew what it was and where it was and went in to get that and only that,” Beaschler said.

The dog collar, made from Alaskan gold nuggets, was fashioned especially for Laddie Boy. The dog’s name is written in raised letters on the center, and a heart on the side bears the words From Alaska’s golden heart . Another heart reads, Fairbanks July 16 1923 .

Harding was the country’s 29th president, and Laddie Boy was something of a celebrity himself. He even had his own chair at the White House for cabinet meetings.

Anyone with information on the break-in is asked to call 740-387-2525 or the TIPS line at 740-375-TIPS (8477).

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/06/13/thief-takes-harding-keepsake.html

* # ¿ Aug 1, 2015 05:20
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Crossposting from the news headline thread.

19th Century tabloid "Illustrated Police News" had some pretty amazing headlines.















Found a site that gathers 19th century news stories.

https://extraordinaryincident.wordpress.com/

quote:

A silly mechanic, whose upper lip was adorned with a pair of monstrous mustachios, applied to Mr. Rawlinson, at Marylebone police-office, for an assault-warrant against his shopmates, who had laid violent hands upon his cherished hairy monstrosities. He stated, that having taken to wear mustachios, “cos it vos fashionable, and made him look like a man of courage and a gentleman,” his fellow-workmen declared that he must pay half-a-gallon of ale to wet them, or must have them cut off. He refused to comply with either one alternative or the other, and they therefore stole his dinner, hustled him about, and laid sacrilegious fingers on his darling mustachios. He begged of Mr. Rawlinson to tell him what to do. “Do!” said Mr. R. “why, go to a barber, and get shaved.” “Can’t part with a hair,” said the carpenter. “Well, you may have a warrant, if you like,” said Mr. Rawlinson, “but I think you’d better not.” The carpenter then walked off without a warrant, saying “that it was the most prowoking thing as ever vos heard on, and very haggrawating, that he couldn’t vear his mustachios in peace.”

The Leicester Chronicle, Saturday 30 September 1837

quote:

At a pic-nic near Keyport, New Jersey, yesterday a young couple, for the amusement of the party, went through a mock ceremony of marriage. The person who officiated was a stranger, and was selected for his clerical appearance. It was revealed after the ceremony that the stranger was an ordained minister, and that the marriage was entirely legal. The young couple were dismayed, and the proceedings were broken by lamentations of the bride, who was really engaged to be married to a gentleman who was not present at the pic-nic.

A divorce will be applied for.

The North-Eastern Daily Gazette, Thursday 18 September 1890

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 21:26 on Aug 3, 2015

* # ¿ Aug 3, 2015 21:22
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Dick Trauma posted:

An armed society is a polite society? :clint:

Any better?
* # ¿ Aug 3, 2015 23:15
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
http://strangeco.blogspot.com/2015/05/newspaper-clipping-of-day.html

quote:

"Andersonville Intelligencer," April 22, 1880.

South Bend, Ind., March 22. Several months ago the grave of Sarah Platts, a young lady who died of consumption, was found disturbed, and an examination showed that the head of the corpse was missing. What led to the discovery was the finding of a human jawbone by Fred Auer, a farmer, who lived near the county graveyard, some eight miles from the city, where the body was buried. The fact that only the head was taken threw suspicions on an amateur phrenologist named Gordon Truesdale. Truesdale occupied a small farm in the vicinity with his wife and family of four girls, the oldest not more than eight years old. He was a handsome, broad-shouldered fellow, with a fair education, but lazy and shiftless. His great hobby was phrenology, and he occasionally lectured on that subject in country school-houses. His ambition to possess a collection of skulls was well known in the neighborhood, and the desecration of the Platts girl's grave was laid at his door, although he was never openly charged with it.

About three weeks ago Truesdale went to a physician and asked if a person could become poisoned in handling a dead body. He received an affirmative reply and appeared to be much troubled. He complained to his wife that his nose was paining him terribly and he believed he was taking the erysipelas. He began doctoring himself with bread-and-milk poultices, but without success. His face began to swell rapidly, and in less than three days it and his head became twice their natural size and lost all semblance to human shape. A physician was called in against the wishes of Truesdale. He found the man suffering terribly. His lids were drawn by the tension of the skin and writhed themselves away from the teeth in unceasing pain. The cuticle across the bridge of the nose and over the forehead was so distended with the mattery substance underneath that it seemed as if it must burst every moment. The eyes were swollen almost to bursting from their sockets and were turned with pain until hardly anything but the whites could be seen. It was evident that a terrible poison was slowly but surely permeating the man's whole system.

The physician, after a careful examination of the unwilling patient, cut open his skin from about the center of his nose almost to the roots of his hair, and then made another across the forehead almost from temple to temple. From these incisions there oozed a mass of loathsome, detestable putrescence, so terrible in its stench that the attendants, save one, ran from the house. Other incisions were made in different parts of the scalp, from which the hair had been shaved, and from these this terribly offensive matter oozed constantly, until the swelling was reduced and the head and face assumed nearly their normal size. Attempts were then made to free the incisions of matter by injecting water into them. It was noticed that when water was forced into the cut in the forehead it poured out of the holes in the scalp. As one of the attendants said, "it seemed as if all the flesh between the skin arid bone had turned into corruption and ran out."

When Mr. Truesdale was told that he could not possibly recover, he called his wife into the room and confessed to her that he robbed the Platts girl's grave, and referred to a certain night when he left the house and refused to tell her where he went at the time when he committed the crime. He said that he dug down to the head of the coffin, broke it open and, taking his knife, cut around the neck of the corpse through the flesh to the bone. He then placed one of his feet on the breast of the corpse, and, taking the head in his hands, pulled and jerked and twisted it until it came off by mere force. He afterward disjointed the lower jaw and threw it where Fred Auer found it. He closed his confession by telling her where the skull would be found, under the straw in a certain manger in the stable. It was found there and given up to the Platts family.

The last three days of Truesdale's existence were terrible, not only to himself but to those who watched him. The poison from some corpse (for it is believed he had recently opened several graves,) which was communicated to his system by picking a raw spot on the inside of his nose, appeared to course through every vein in his body. Not only was his person offensive to the eye, but the odor and heat of his breath was so offensive that it was impossible for the attendants to wait on him properly. The breath was so poisonous that when one of the attendants held his hand six inches from the dying man's mouth it stung the flesh like hundreds of nettles. Those who waited on him were obliged
to wear gloves, as it was impossible to wash the odor from their hands. The day he died his flesh was so rotten that it seemed as if it would drop from the bones it touched, and his eyes actually decayed until they became sightless.

For two days before his death a coffin had been in readiness, and the orders of the physician were to place him in it as soon as the breath left his body and get him under the ground immediately. After his death none of the attendants had the temerity to touch the corpse, for fear of being poisoned, so they gathered the sheets on which the body lay at each end, and thus lifted it into the coffin. The lid was quickly screwed down, but before a wagon could be procured the body swelled and burst it off. It was then strapped on, but when the coffin was taken from the wagon at the graveyard, just at daylight, it again flew off, and the body appeared to swell visibly before the horrified attendants' eyes. The fetid, noisome stench from the putrid mass within was such that no one could attempt to replace the cover, and the coffin was covered from sight as hurriedly as possible.

The day after the funeral, or burial, rather, the wife of Truesdale was confined at a neighbor's house, this fifth child also being a girl. The Truesdale house will not be fit to occupy for several days, as all efforts to fumigate it thus far have failed. The doors and windows have been left open day and night, but the stench is still as bad as when he died. As one of the attendants said, "It still seems as if you could cut the air in that house with a knife."
* # ¿ Aug 4, 2015 19:06
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone

Asclepius Hot Rod posted:

Gas gangrene of the head. Nasty poo poo.

Theoretically, is there anything that could've been done to save the poor guy?

* # ¿ Aug 5, 2015 02:22
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
http://strangeco.blogspot.com/2014/12/newspaper-clipping-of-day_10.html

quote:

"New York Times" for July 28, 1856:

On Saturday night last, a man who resided in Twenty-ninth-street was killed in a most singular manner. The following are the peculiar circumstances, as far as our reporter has been able to learn them--for, in consequence of the opinion entertained concerning his relatives by the deceased, who was a man of considerable wealth and respectability, they have made great effort to keep the particulars from the public ear. It appears that nearly a year ago the deceased, who was fifty-three years of age, became strongly impressed with an idea that, when he should die, the parsimonious disposition of his relatives would lead them to put him in a cheap coffin, while he had a strong desire to be buried in one of polished rosewood, lined with white satin and trimmed with silver. Soon after this strange idea got possession of his mind, he discovered an elegant coffin in one of the principal warehouses, which suited him. He purchased it for $75; had it sent to his residence at nightfall, and stowed it away in a small closet adjoining his bed-room, where it remained until the time of the accident. How it occurred is not known to a certainty, for the first intimation the family had of the lamentable occurrence was from a servant, who, on going to call him to breakfast, found the door wide open and the deceased lying upon the floor, dead, with his coffin at his side. She screamed, which soon brought the family, and on raising the body the skull was found crushed in upon the brain. He was discovered about 8 o'clock yesterday morning, when, to all appearance, he had been dead several hours. On examining the closet, a bottle containing a quantity of sherry wine was found, and as Saturday night was excessively warm, he is supposed to have gone to the closet in order to procure the wine to use with some ice-water he had on a small table by his bedside. It is thought that he must have sought for it in the dark, and by some mistake upset the coffin, which stood nearly upright. Becoming sensible that it was falling, he probably made an effort to get away, when he fell, and the outer end struck his head with sufficient force to fracture his skull and cause almost immediate death. The inquest will be held with all possible secrecy. The unfortunate impression of the deceased concerning his relatives is a sufficient reason for withholding the names of the parties.

http://strangeco.blogspot.com/2014/07/newspaper-clippings-of-day-taking-fun.html

quote:

"Sheffield Independent," August 15, 1874:

An accident at a wake in Dublin again demonstrates the dangerous folly of these grim festivities, which are still popular among the lower classes in Ireland. The floor of a room fell, in which thirty persons were assembled round the body of a child only two months old, and ten persons were so seriously injured in consequence that they were removed to the hospital, where they lie, some with broken legs and arms. There has been no death.
* # ¿ Aug 5, 2015 18:04
  • Quote
Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
Beware of Chinese hoodoo


quote:

A strange story of a Chinese curse which laid a hoodoo on a ship, culminating in the mysterious disappearance of a French millionaire banker, was told at Plymouth yesterday by members of the crew of the 10,500 tons Glen Line steamer Samwater, which arrived from Vancouver.

For six months the Samwater had crossed and recrossed the Pacific, taking cargoes of wheat from Canada to China without incident, until on her last trip M. Henri Bar, 60-years-old president of the Franco-Chinoise Bank in Shanghai, embarked to return to Paris.

He took with him 25 crates containing Chinese antiques and treasures which he had collected during his 30 years in the Far East and told fellow passengers and ship's officers that among them were agate drinking cups looted during the Boxer riots from the Imperial Palace at Pekin, which carried a curse threatening disaster to anyone taking them out of the country.

Then began a series of mishaps. First of all. while the crates were being loaded into the ship's hold, one of them struck and seriously injured a Chinese coolie. Three days later one of the British members of the crew began to suffer from delusions and, acting on instructions from a warship, the Samwater put back to Yokohama, where the man was taken ashore for hospital treatment.

For sixteen days after leaving Shanghai on her way to Vancouver, the Samwater had to battle with heavy seas and fierce gales until one day the weather suddenly moderated. Then it was discovered that M. Bar had mysteriously disappeared. During the nine months we were away from England we had bad weather only on those 16 days during which M. Bar was on board." one of the crew told the "Western Morning News." "Apart from those 16 days we had a particularly lucky voyage."

Capt. F. Howe, master of the ship, whose home is at Middlesbrough, said: "The ship never stopped rolling after we left Shanghai until M. Bar disappeared. He left the saloon as usual that night announcing that he was going to retire.

"When it was found that his bed had not been slept in we made a thorough search of the ship, but there was no trace of him. It was a dark and windy night and we could only assume that while walking along the deck a heavy wave had washed him overboard.

"His luggage, including the treasures, which he told me were worth £50,000, were put ashore at Vancouver. From then until we reached Plymouth we had a pleasant and uneventful voyage, and apart from those 16 days I should call it a very lucky commission."

During one trip across the Pacific the Samwater came across the British steamer Empire Ouse which, with 10,000 tons of wheat on board, was lying disabled with a propeller missing.

The Samwater took her in tow and in 17 days brought her 3,200 miles across the ocean without mishap to Hong-kong, a feat of salvage which should bring rewards of thousands of pounds to owners and crew.

and cat hoodoo



quote:

Fifteen men on a dead man's chest,
Yo-ho! and a bottle of rum.
Drink and the devil had done for the rest.
Yo-ho! and a bottle of rum.

Since Andrew Lundberg signed as able seaman aboard the two-master schooner Sarah and Lucy in Bridgeport last Friday he dinned the words of Stevenson's pirates song in "Treasure Island" into the ears of his shipmates until they drove him from their quarters in the fo'castle, and made him share the ice-covered deck with a big black cat that went aboard before the schooner left Bridgeport for this port.

Early yesterday morning Lundberg, in a tipsy frenzy, lay on the deck, the cat on his shoulder and an empty bottle in his hand, mumbling the same old chorus while the schooner rolled at her anchorage off Red Hook. His shipmates were asleep, and the watch had curled himself up in a warm corner.

Two hours later Lundberg was found dead, hanging by a halyard from the foremast. The empty bottle was frozen to his fingers, and perched on his shoulder, as it swung like a pendulum in the breeze, was the hoodoo cat.

Lundberg lived at 1 Seeley street, Bridgeport. He told his mates the cat had followed him for miles, and that it meant his death. At times he cursed it, and once tried to kill it. The other seamen aboard prevented him, and for a time it looked as though Lundberg was going to start a killing on board.

A few hours sleep cleared his mind a little from the effects of the drink he had been swallowing, but he was not long awake before he found a bottle again, and once more he started raving and hunting for the cat. He found it and kicked it half the length of the schooner. The thought that he had killed it seemed to pacify him for a time, and he began to sing again.

The schooner dropped anchor off Red Hook on Tuesday, waiting for a tow to Perth Amboy. Then the cat, minus its tail, appeared on deck from nowhere and sat and blinked at Lundberg. With a curse the sailor tried to get on his feet, but the deck was like glass and he slipped down again. For an hour he lay, singing and cursing until he dozed off.

There his mates left him, with the black cat alongside, and went below to sleep. The man on watch gave him a glance of disgust, tossed a piece of bread to the cat, buttoned his coat, and sought out a corner where he would escape the sting of the icy northwester that blew steadily all night.

Lundberg cut a halyard, tied a hangman's noose, and slipped it around his neck. Then he climbed the rigging high enough to be sure the drop would break his neck. Whether the cat went with him or climbed on his shoulder after he had hanged himself is not known.

When the body was found it was shrouded in frozen spray; the fingers of the left hand showed they had been badly cut, and the sailor's coat was missing. The cat was dead.

The New York police were notified, and Lieut. Dwyer, of Harbor Squadron A., went out to the patrol and brought the body to the Battery. There it was taken to the morgue and information sent to Bridgeport.

http://strangeco.blogspot.com/2014/03/newspaper-clipping-of-day_19.html

quote:

On July 20, 1852, the "Elyria Courier" reprinted an item from the "Boston Atlas":

"Wonders will never cease--On the 5th inst., as a gentleman of this city was looking out of a window, he saw a black kitten fall past him, apparently from the top of a house, and expected to see it dashed dead upon the sidewalk; but contrary to his expectations when it reached the ground it began to walk. Some children supposing it to be injured, took it in and gave it some milk, when it lapped in the usual style. The next morning the lady of the house went into the cellar to give it some more milk, when strange to relate, it darted past her a distance of 20 feet, without touching the ground, and when out of the house, ascended upwards into the air more rapidly than it had fallen down the day before, and was soon lost to view among the clouds.--Improbable as these statements may appear they were made to us by a medical gentleman of whose sanity and love of truth we do not entertain a doubt. We recommend this singular phenomenon to the attention of the editor of the Spiritual Telegraph."

I'm going to guess that was probably a..bat? I don't know.

Nckdictator has a new favorite as of 23:10 on Aug 6, 2015

* # ¿ Aug 6, 2015 20:23
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# ¿ May 16, 2024 12:37
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Nckdictator
Sep 8, 2006
Just..someone
No idea, but hey, if you can't trust "Eight trustworthy citizens" (and Google isn't much help) then who can you trust?
* # ¿ Aug 7, 2015 22:21
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The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF unnerving article or story: Why is everything always so fucking weird
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