I forgot to mention that yesterday was the anniversary of the first human footstep on ground that is not Earth (July 20, 1969).
Go get Quicktime if you don’t already have it installed, and then go get this.
UPDATE: Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings had a good roundup, and some thoughts of his own.
Hmm – let’s see I was 13 years old living in Panama at the time. Since all we had was Armed Forces radio and TV the media coverage was minimal to say the least. However we did make a big event about it in the classroom though.
On the subject of anniversaries, July 22 marks the anniversary of the 1916 Preparedness Day Parade and bombing in San Francisco. For its day it was a major terrorist incident and it was the precursor to the infamous Mooney-Billings case, where two local labor activists were framed for the bombing. (Who really did it is still unknown, though one theory points to Imperial German saboteurs).
It’s a good object lesson in the dangers of trial by press and of wartime hysteria.
Good post, Bob. Reading through an “abstract of this travesty”:http://baseportal.com/cgi-bin/baseportal.pl?htx=/zpub2000/sfentries&cmd=list&range=0,50&Title~=P&cmd=all&Id=160 makes me wonder if Pacific Gas and Electric were not the real culprits. It is also good to have a perspective that terrorism is something our courts have been compelled to confront before, albeit disasterously.
obelus, It was possible; utilities detective Martin Swanson was mixed up in the frame-up, and Tom Mooney had been involved in previous labor protests against the utility. However, theories involving Swanson usually suggest that Swanson and DA Fickert were the culprits: i.e., that the frame-up and the bombing were one and the same. The conspiracy theories are reviewed in Curt Gentry’s “Frame-Up”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005VYW7/qid=1090567959/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-5499771-0426407?v=glance&s=books in the appendix, “Whose Bomb?” (Gentry thought the Imperial German consulate was a possible suspect).
BTW, July 17 was the 60th anniversary of another San Francisco-area explosion: the “Port Chicago disaster”:http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/07/17/MNGGL7N6IQ1.DTL, noteworthy in that it was the single greatest loss of African-American servicemen in WWII, and it sparked a major civil-rights case because of the mutiny trial that followed.