October 25 - William Higinbotham

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On this day, in 1910, William Higinbotham, contributing inventor of the atomic bomb and early video game designer, was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. William did most of his growing up in Caledonia, New York before moving to Massachusetts to attend Williams College. After earning his undergraduate degree in 1932, he really stepped out of his comfort zone, hiking all the way to New York City to continue his studies at Cornell University. His area of expertise was the burgeoning field of electronics. When World War II started with a bang, William began working for the federal government at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, helping to develop a radar system for the military, including the display found in B-28 bombers. After two years on that project, he was moved out to New Mexico in 1943 to become part of the top secret group creating the nuclear bomb. As head of the electronics team for the Manhattan Project, William was responsible for the bomb’s ignition system. He was present at the Trinity Test, the first detonation of a nuclear bomb, and it profoundly affected his worldview.

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William immediately realized the implications of the Bomb and knew, now that the genie was out of the bottle, that everything must be done to contain him as much as possible. In February 1946, just months after the weapon he helped create ended World War II, he co-founded the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit group dedicated to the non-proliferation of nuclear devices. William served as the first Chairman of the FAS and over the next four decades would hold various positions including Executive Secretary, Council member and even Chairman again. The FAS counted among its major political victories the defeat of a bill that would have put nuclear research under the control of the military and the creation of the US Atomic Energy Commission.

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In 1947, William began working at Brookhaven National Laboratory for the AEC in the job he would hold for the rest of his career. Eleven years into his tenure, he was in charge of the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven and created something that was years ahead of its time. The laboratory held an annual exhibition it called Visitor Days. William noticed that most of the displays were fairly static and dry (a nice way to say boring). He thought it might liven things up a bit if there was a game people could play that would showcase some of the work being done at Brookhaven and be entertaining at the same time. Enlisting the help of two colleagues, David Potter and Robert Dvorak Sr, he created a tennis simulation that involved separate controllers for each player and displayed the ball bouncing over a net on an oscilloscope screen (the round screen that you always see radar on in the movies). He says it took about two hours for him to make a rough design of the system and Potter and Dvorak about two weeks to build and debug it.

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Tennis for Two, considered by many to be the world’s first video game (it preceded Pong, the first video game anyone remembers, by fourteen years), debuted at the 1958 Visitor Days and was an instant hit. Hundreds of visitors lined up to play the game throughout the entire event. One of the interesting aspects of Tennis, at least from a post-Pong perspective, is that the action was viewed from the side rather than from above. That means that players watched the ball arc up and over a stationary net rather than seeing the ball simply move from one side of the screen to the other and back. When the exhibition rolled around the following year, a second version of Tennis for Two was created which incorporated a bigger screen and options to do things like increase or decrease the effect of gravity on the ball to simulate playing on other planets. And then the game quietly disappeared. Since William amassed more than 20 patents during his lifetime for various ideas relating to electronics, he was asked near the end of his life why no one ever patented Tennis. He said he had no personal reason to as the patent would have belonged to the government, not him and the government thought the whole idea was a lot of silliness with no practical value (never mind the fact that the video game industry had sales of more than $43 Billion just in the US in 2018).

In 1974, William began acting as technical director on the Journal of Nuclear Materials Management, a quarterly publication of Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (Brookhaven is one of the sustaining members of the INMM). While he retired from the Lab in 1984, he would continue to assist with the Journal for the rest of his life. He passed away on November 10, 1994 in Gainsville, Georgia, hoping that he would be remembered more for his work on nuclear nonproliferation than for his work in creating video games, but we don’t always get what we want. Not that his son didn’t try. Every time someone contacted him about Tennis for Two, he would insist that they mention the FAS alongside it. At least the FAS itself was listening. Shortly after William’s death they named their national headquarters Higinbotham Hall.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Walt Disney World

October 24 - Blanche Scott

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On this day, in 1910, Blanche Stuart Scott became the first woman to fly a plane in a public event. Born on April 8, 1884 in Rochester, New York, Blanche fell in love with powerful machines at an early age. Her father, a successful manufacturer and salesman of patent medicine, bought one of the early American car models. Blanche used to gleefully drive it around the city, drawing the attention and ire of the Rochester City Council, but at that time there was no minimum driving age and the thirteen year old was allowed to continue. By 1900, Blanche’s parents were worried about their daughter’s wild, tomboyish tendencies and packed her off to a finishing school. Whether or not she was turned into a more socially acceptable example of the feminine sex, one thing is certain: her finishing did nothing to dampen her adventurous spirit.

1910 was a big year for Blanche. In the first part of the year she became the second woman in America to drive a car from coast to coast. The trip was sponsored by the Willys-Overland Company, later known for its design of Jeeps for the military, and intended to show that a woman could not only travel from New York City to San Francisco, but could make all the necessary repairs to her car herself. Blanche’s only travelling companion was a reporter, Gertrude Phillips. It isn't clear what needed to be done to the car on the trip (or whether Blanche fixed things herself) but the two women did arrive unscathed in San Francisco 68 days after leaving New York. Why did it take so long? Maybe because outside of cities, America only had a grand total of 218 miles of paved roads at the time. 

Image courtesy airandspace.si.edu

Significantly, Blanche's cross country route went through Ohio, where she got to see the Wright Brothers and their flying machine in action outside of Dayton. If that wasn't thrilling enough, she accepted an offer in California to actually ride in an airplane. By the time she got back to New York, Blanche knew exactly what her next challenge was going to be: training as a pilot. The publicity from her car exploits was enough to catch the attention of Glenn Curtis, one of the country's pioneers in aviation. He reluctantly agreed to teach Blanche how to fly a plane. In August 1910, the lessons began. To basically keep her grounded until she knew what she was doing, a block of wood was installed under the gas pedal. Theoretically, that meant the plane would never get enough speed to take off. It's unclear what happened on September 2, but Blanche was alone in the plane when it soared to a height of about 40 feet. After a few moments in the sky, she brought the aircraft in for a gentle landing. It was the first time, albeit entirely unintentional, that a woman had solo flown an aircraft. That is also an unofficial first because of dubious reporting issues. Because it isn't possible to pinpoint whether Blanche took her solo hop on September 2 or September 9 or somewhere in between, the Aeronautical Society of America officially credits Bessica Medler Raische with the first female solo flight on September 16 of the same year. Since they don't deny that Blanche took a hop, the just object to the lack of an exact date, I think it's a moot point. All of the dates that Blanche may have done it on precede Bessica's date, so she wins.

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What isn't in dispute is that Blanche became the first woman to pilot an airplane in a public event. Impressed with her skills, Curtis offered her a position in his flying exhibition team. Her first event took place just weeks after her lessons in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Dubbed the Tomboy of the Air (a nickname I'm sure mortified her parents), Blanche became quite the stunt flyer, perfecting the "death dive" maneuver which involved soaring to 4000 feet, plummeting to 200 feet and pulling up at the last possible moment. She didn't relegate herself to just air shows though. She also began setting distance records for women, flying 10 miles in July 1911 and then 25 miles less than a month later. In 1912 she signed on with another aviation pioneer, Glenn Martin, becoming the first female test pilot for him. She flew most of his prototypes that year, many of them before the blueprints were even close to being finalized. By 1916, amid a growing concern over the public's appetite for plane crashes (she'd had one herself in 1913 that kept her out of the air for several months) and disgust with the lack of positions available in the industry for women, Blanche exited the pilot's seat for the last time. Not that she was done with firsts by a long shot.

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What does a girl do when she's done flying planes? She turns to screenwriting, of course. It's not as far fetched as it seems because she'd already starred in the first film about flying, The Aviator's Success, and a second flying movie, The Aviator and the Autoist Race for a Bride, both in 1912. Reaching out to her Hollywood contacts, she began writing scripts for RKO Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal. During the early Twenties, she was the studio manager for an outfit in Long Island, New York. Throughout the Thirties, she also starred in, wrote and produced various radio shows that aired on networks in California and her native Rochester. Then she decided to get back into aviation, sort of.

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On September 6, 1948, Blanche chalked up another first when she became the first female to ride in a jet plane (and it was piloted by none other that Chuck Yeager to boot). Following that historic flight, the accolade period of her life began. The Aeronautics Association of the United States honored her in 1953. A year later, she was hired on as a consultant to the United States Air Force Museum, eventually helping them gather together over $1,000,000 worth of early aviation memorabilia. And in 1960, the Antique Airplane Association honored her on the fiftieth anniversary of her first flight (they clearly agreed with me about her and Bessica). Blanche passed away at Genesee Hospital in the same city she entered life, Rochester, New York, on January 12, 1970. Since her passing she has continued to rack up accolades including a United States postage stamp (air mail of course) issued on December 30, 1980 and induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2005.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Lucille Martin

October 23 - Op Art

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On this day, in 1964, Time magazine first used the term Op Art to describe the craziness your eyes were seeing in that painting. Optical Art actually started appearing on the art scene decades before Time coined the phrase and was an amalgamation of influences from several different other art styles. Think about what you might create if you took your cues from Neo-Classicism (Surat's Sunday in the Park), Cubism (Picasso's, well, almost anything), the shock value of Dadaism, the speed and youth of Futurism and a Russian Architecture style known as Constructivism. Personally, I would create an absolute mess but artists far better than me came up with the picture seen here, one of Victor Vasarely's series of zebra paintings.

As you might notice if you google images of op art, most of them (but certainly not all) are done in black and white and most of them involve some sort of optical illusion. They seem simple at first but as you look at them, you get the feeling that part of picture is moving or there is a hidden image trying to come out of the depths. Most op art is also abstract, with plenty of lines and geometric shapes but not a whole lot of discernible figures (the above example being the exception that proves the rule).

Image courtesy theartstory.org

Op Art should not be confused with Pop Art, which was also hitting its stride in the 1960s, but used pop culture icons like comic books and advertising as inspiration. It should also not be confused with the works of M.C. Escher, which also involved a lot of optical illusions, but was based more on mathematics rather than abstract aesthetics.

Perhaps the height of Op Art in America occurred in early 1965 when the Museum of Modern Art in New York City put on an exhibition called The Responsive Eye. It featured prominent works by American artists such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Anuszkiewicz and the Cleveland based Anonima Group. The public loved what they saw with over 180,000 people visiting MoMA in two months. The critics dismissed most of it as being mind tricks suitable for kitschy roadside tourist traps rather than art museums. No one paid much attention to the critics and Op Art continued to grow in popularity and commercialism (which is exactly what the critics hate to have happen to art).

Image courtesy op-art.co.uk

Since the Sixties, the art world in general has, of course, turned its collective eye towards other movements. It might not be a good time to start a career in Op Art, but there are still artists creating new pieces and some of their paintings are still commanding seven figure prices at auctions. Bridget Riley, a British artist, had works in The Responsive Eye and also enjoyed a retrospective of her work this year at the Scottish National Gallery. And in 2008, one of Bridget’s paintings, Chant 2, sold for $5.1 million at Sotheby’s, a price that, like the painting itself, only feels like an optical illusion.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Dumbo

October 22 - Pretty Boy Floyd

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On this day, in 1934, the bank robber known as Pretty Boy Floyd was gunned down in a cornfield outside of East Liverpool, Ohio. Charley Arthur Floyd was born in Bartow County, Georgia on February 3, 1904. His family moved to Oklahoma when he was seven and he lived an uneventful life for the next eleven years. His life of crime started in a fairly small way: he stole $3.50 from the post office (the equivalent of about $51 today). He was caught, served a minimal sentence and pretty much disappeared for the next three years. I think it’s safe to assume that he engaged in multiple petty thefts in multiple places before getting caught again, this time in St. Louis, Missouri. Floyd had moved up to payroll theft by this point and this time his sentence was for five years. He was parolled after three and a half years in early 1929. His incarceration didn’t seem to have the desired effect on him as things only escalated from there.

Floyd drifted into Kansas City following his release from prison and found willing partners in criminal elements within that metropolis. He began robbing banks and was suspected in a series of robberies over the next several years, although actual evidence linking him to the crimes seemed to be hard to come by. In 1929 alone, he was arrested and released three different times: twice in Kansas City, once in March in connection with a robbery and again in May for vagrancy, and then once in Pueblo, Colorado, again for vagrancy. He might have looked like a hobo during this period of his life but it was during the same time that he earned his nickname, Pretty Boy.

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Floyd briefly did some legitimate work in the oil industry around Oklahoma (although it may have simply been him casing the joint in preparation of robbing it). For reasons only known to him, he insisted on wearing a button down shirt and dress slacks to work in the oil fields. The rougher workers naturally noticed this and began calling him a pretty boy. If that was the only place it was ever used, that would have been the beginning and the end of his nickname. When he did finally steal the payroll however, the payroll master inserted it firmly into the story by describing Floyd as “a pretty boy with apple cheeks” in the official police report. For the record, Charley hated his nickname (and probably would have shot anyone dumb enough to use it in his hearing) but the press loved it and the name stuck.

Had he stuck to merely robbing banks, Pretty Boy Floyd might have stayed a low to mid-level criminal, bouncing in and out of jail for decades. His status, as it were, became elevated because people started dying whenever his gang pulled a job. It started with an Akron, Ohio police officer, killed in a robbery on March 8, 1830. Pretty Boy was arrested for that murder but couldn’t be proven to have been at the robbery and released. He was arrested for a Sylvania, Ohio robbery a few months later and actually convicted of the crime. Sentenced to 15 years in an Ohio prison, he served none of it, escaping from custody. All of this activity brought him to the attention of the FBI and landed Pretty Boy Floyd on their 10 Most Wanted list. He proved to be a slippery character to catch again.

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The killings (and the robberies) continued. In March 1931, Pretty Boy was suspected in the murder of two rum runners. His gang killed a patrolman in Bowling Green in April. He himself killed a federal agent in July. The following April, the sheriff of McIntosh County, Oklahoma was killed trying to arrest Floyd. With all that going on, you might think that law enforcement would be throwing everything they had into taking him down. And it isn’t that they weren’t. They just had a bigger obstacle standing in their way then they could overcome: public opinion. People saw Pretty Boy Floyd and his gang as modern day Robin Hoods and did all they could to aid and abet him. Why? Somehow a myth got started that whenever the Floyd gang robbed a bank, they would destroy mortgage documents while they were there. To common citizens wallowing in the Great Depression, the chance to get out of debt like that was the stuff that dreams were made of. The fact that there is zero evidence of any mortgages being even accidently destroyed during one of their heists wasn’t enough to quash those dreams either. But the myth was strong enough to keep Pretty Boy out of the clutches of the law.

Image courtesy fbi.gov

Federal pressure to bring Pretty Boy in reached a boiling point on June 17, 1933 after a shootout that became known as the Kansas City Massacre. When the smoke cleared from the fight, four law enforcement members lay dead, including one federal agent. Pretty Boy and his associate, Adam Richetti, became the prime suspects. Both men would deny with their dying breaths that they had anything to do with the incident and there was only sketchy evidence that they were even in Kansas City on the day in question, but J. Edgar Hoover was convinced of their guilt. As a result Pretty Boy moved up to the number two slot on the List. It would still be another 16 months before he was finally caught.

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On July 23, 1934, federal agents gunned down Public Enemy #1, John Dillinger, outside a theater in Chicago and Pretty Boy moved into the top spot. He would elude capture for three more months only to be finally done in by a foggy night. On their way west from Buffalo, New York on October 18, 1934, Pretty Boy, Richetti and two women slid into a telephone pole in eastern Ohio because of the reduced visibility. Nothing was injured except the car. Floyd and Richetti sent the two women into nearby Wellsville to get a tow truck and have the car put back into working order, while the men whose faces were in every post office in the country waited by the side of the road. It turned out to be a fender bender both men would quickly regret.

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Just after dawn the next morning, two motorists saw a couple of guys in suits (and not threadbare hobo suits but obviously classy duds) sleeping near the road and thought that was a little suspicious. They informed the Wellsville chief of police, John Fultz, when they got into town. Fultz took two of his officers out to the sight to investigate. As soon as Floyd and Richetti saw the law, Richetti took off for the woods. Pretty Boy drew a gun and engaged in a brief battle with the officers, wounding Fultz, before entering the tree cover himself. Other members of the force joined the hunt. Richetti was captured fairly quickly but Pretty Boy remained on the lam. The FBI gladly added their own agents to the search shortly thereafter.

It’s hard to know where exactly Floyd hid out for the next couple of days. What we do know for sure is that he made his way to East Liverpool, about five miles away, by October 22. He had a friend who owned a pool hall there, where Pretty Boy reportedly had his last meal. He was then hitching a ride out of town when officers spotted him and he tried to make a run for it on foot, through a nearby cornfield. What you think happened next depends entirely on which version of the story you want to believe. Some say that local police fired first and wounded him enough to drop him in his tracks. The FBI’s official report said the locals weren’t even there. The locals claim the FBI says that because they ordered a local man to finish Floyd off at point blank range and then tried to cover it up. Whatever way it happened, the outcome was the same: Pretty Boy no longer matched his hated moniker and would never have a chance to destroy anyone’s mortgage ever again.

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Since his demise, most portrayals of Pretty Boy Floyd have tended to romanticize him and his actions. Woody Guthrie even wrote a song in 1939 about his exploits that compared foreclosing bankers to outlaws, with the moral edge given to the outlaws. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Floyd’s crimes were just a natural result of the crushing economic forces of the Great Depression (in spite of the fact that his started stealing stuff several years before the stock market crash). When really he was just a spectacular example of a ruthless criminal who got what he deserved in the end. Which, of course, doesn’t make him any less entertaining.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Roger E. Broggie

October 21 - First Transatlantic Voice Transmission

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On this day, in 1915, words spoken in Arlington, Virginia were almost instantly heard in Paris, France for the first time. In 1915, telephone calls were nothing new. Alexander Graham Bell had first asked his assistant to come to his office in 1876 and the first wireless call had traveled over 650 feet between buildings at Bell's Laboratory complex just four years later.The first telephone exchange was established in Hartford, Connecticut in 1877 and calls were zinging back and forth between Boston and New York by 1883. The first pay phone was established in 1889. But even though the technology of telephones was making leaps and bounds throughout the turn of the twentieth century, it was still pretty limited in scope. You could only call someone who was part of the network and the network was still slowly expanding out of the Northeast part of the United States. Your aunt down in Alabama or your cousin in California or your business partner in France were still unavailable by phone. Not that technicians at the American Telegraph and Telephone Company weren't hard at work trying to fix that.

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A good deal of the success of early radio (and therefore early telephone) innovations can be given to the ego of Alexandre Gustav Eiffel. When he designed and built his famous tower for the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, he got pretty attached to it. He knew that it would have to remain useful if it was going to be allowed to stick around so, in 1898, he added an antenna to the top of it. Paris agreed that he'd made a good addition and, rather than tear it down for scrap metal, allowed the Eiffel Tower to remain. Not only was that an aesthetically good decision in the long run, it also provided a boost to tinkerers in radio waves around the world. Nothing like having the tallest man made structure to work with.

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AT&T technicians had developed equipment powerful enough to jump the Atlantic by 1913 when they made the first radio transmission between their labs in Virginia and the Eiffel Tower. That was simply a series of signals testing the difference in longitude of the two end points. Two more years would pass before technology was able to handle the human voice. On the morning of October 21, 1915, an AT&T engineer by the name of B.B. Webb said "hello" into a radio mouthpiece in Arlington and had it beamed into the atmosphere. Shortly thereafter, two other technicians at the Eiffel Tower, A.M. Curtis and H.E. Shreeve, heard not only Webb's greeting but several other phrases ending with "Goodbye, Shreeve." A new era in communication had begun. Sort of.

AT&T put out a press release touting the decidedly one way conversation. It was only one sided in that the guys in Paris couldn't respond though. The same transmission had been detected in the opposite direction in Honolulu, Hawaii. The company did acknowledge, however, that atmospheric conditions had to be pretty perfect and that existing equipment needed to be improved quite a bit, but it was a good start. And indeed it would take eleven more years before the first two way conversation spanning an ocean would occur between New York and London. Can you guess what the topic of that 1926 chat was about? The weather, of course.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Mary Blair

October 20 - Eugene V. Debs

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On this day, in 1923, Eugene V. Debs, America’s preeminent Socialist, passed away in Elmhurst, Illinois. The son of French immigrants, Eugene was born in Terre Haute, Indiana on November 5, 1855. He dropped out of high school at the age of 14 and began working for the local railroad, earning 50 cents a day degreasing engines. After two years of cleaning duty (as well as occasionally painting freight cars), he had the opportunity to move up to the position of fireman (the guy who kept the engine’s boiler stoked) which more than doubled his pay. He spent most nights for the next three and a half years  travelling between Terre Haute and Indianapolis. In early 1875, Eugene became a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and remained active in the union for almost twenty years. He was elected to represent his local brothers at national conventions and help various offices (including editor of the monthly newsletter, Grand Secretary and Treasurer) until 1893. And that was in spite of the fact that just six months after joining the union, Eugene left the railroad to pursue a degree in business administration.

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If the business interests of Eugene weren’t enough to brand him a capitalist at this point, his writings as editor of the BLM newsletter did. The early days of railroad unions were all about how members could improve their lives through things like honesty and temperance. The founders and leaders of the BLM were strongly against using strikes as a way to get what workers needed. Of course Eugene expected that railroad management would also treat workers with respect and equality. You can probably already see where circumstances are going to break down and change the course of his thinking. Eugene was proud of the fact that the BLM had never authorized a strike from its inception in 1873 up until 1887.

 After the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888 in Chicago (a complete defeat for the unions), he began to realize that unions needed to organize along industry lines rather than around specific jobs. After stepping down as General Secretary of the BLM in 1893, he organized the American Railway Union, which was open to every railway laborer regardless of skill level or discipline. The ARU was a much more united front and quickly won its first strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894. Buoyed by a relatively painless success, the ARU went on strike again in 1895, this time against the Pullman Palace Car Company. Things did not go so well. Pullman was much more powerful than Great Northern and had the ear of President Cleveland. Eugene tried to argue against the strike at an ARU convention. It wasn’t until the number of strikers doubled that he gave in and supported it. In spite of 80,000 ARU members joining in the strike with legitimate grievances against Pullman, the federal government was able to get an injunction against them (because Pullman cars did business with the Postal Service, the official charge was obstruction of the US mail, a felony). Cleveland sent the Army in to enforce the injunction and force it they did. In the end, 30 strikers were killed, $80 million worth of property damage occurred and Eugene found himself sitting in federal prison.

image courtesy democraticunderground.com

Prior to the Pullman Strike, Eugene was pro-business and pro-working man. He truly believed that solutions could be found to benefit both sides. He’d even spent a tern in the Indiana State Senate as a Democrat trying to do just that. The six months he spent in prison completely transformed his position. Not only was the ham handed way the government had handled the strike still fresh in his mind, but he was soon inundated with books and pamphlets from virtually every Socialist in the country, all of whom thought he might be sympathetic to their cause. He was. And he had nothing but time to digest all the material coming his way. When Victor L. Berger, a socialist newspaper editor from Milwaukee, paid Eugene a visit, he almost found that he was preaching to the choir. Eugene emerged from captivity a fired up convert to Socialism.

The American Railway Union had been effectively destroyed by the Pullman Strike. In 1896, Eugene met with remnants of the ARU, convincing them to join forces with the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth, a purely Socialist organization that was intent on building a Socialist colony in the state of Washington. The merged group was called the Social Democracy of America. The SDA was a house divided from the very beginning. The majority felt it best to develop colonies to show by example that their ideas worked. A vocal minority, including Eugene, wanted to form a political party and win the country over through the ballot box. By 1898, the minority had split from the SDA to create the Social Democratic Party of the United States with Eugene as the chairman of its board.

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Eugene’s first campaign for President of the United States, as the SDP candidate, happened in 1900. He only garnered 0.6% of the popular vote. In the summer of 1901, the SDP would join forces with a group that split off from the Socialist Labor Party of America (the oldest Socialist party in the country) to establish the Socialist Party of America, again with Eugene at its head. He would run for President as a SPA candidate in each of the next four elections. In 1904, he received 3% of the vote and doubled that to 6% in 1912, the biggest vote a Socialist candidate has ever received in the United States (he actually came second in Florida that year, pushing the incumbent, President Taft, into third in that state). His final run, in the 1920 election, would net him over 913,000 votes, his best total ever, in spite of the fact that he wasn’t actually eligible to run. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

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In between his runs at the Oval Office, Eugene continued trying to unionize every worker in not just America, but the entirety of Earth. In 1905, he was instrumental in creating the Industrial Workers of the World. At its peak in 1917, the IWW would boast over 150,000 members in three countries, but it regularly came into conflict with the other major union, the American Federation of Labor. The IWW considered the AFL to be too conservative, and the AFL considered the IWW to be too willing to embrace both socialism and anarchism. Both organizations still exist today but in radically different forms. The AFL-CIO is one of the world’s largest, most influential unions with over 12,000,000 members. The IWW can barely scrape together a total of 5,000 members spread across five countries. It’s not hard to see which approach is more sustainable, even if it’s highly debatable which is more effective.

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As part of the leadership of the IWW and the SPA, Eugene frequently gave charismatic speeches to rally people to his causes. As President Wilson guided America into World War I, Eugene’s speeches became more and more against Wilson, his policies and the US involvement in Europe. Even after the Espionage Act of 1917 was passed, effectively limiting the free speech of anyone who spoke against the government, he didn’t stop with his rhetoric, he merely chose his words more carefully. The semantic tiptoeing didn’t mitigate the fact that he’d made an enemy of the President. After a speech on June 18, 1918 in which he urged resistance to the military draft, Eugene was arrested and charged with ten counts of sedition. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison. He appealed his case all the way to the Supreme Court but his conviction was upheld.

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As a result of his incarceration, Eugene was also disenfranchised, meaning he no longer had the right to vote or run for office. That didn't stop him from running a presidential campaign from his prison cell in 1920. He assured everyone that being disenfranchised wouldn't be a problem because he would pardon himself once he'd won. It was, of course, a moot point. Before, during and after the election, Eugene repeatedly petitioned the Oval Office for clemency (or a pardon would be fine, too) but his requests fell on deaf ears. Wilson wasn't interested. Once Warren G Harding was in the White House in 1921, Eugene found more sympathetic ears and his sentence was commuted to time served, ending on December 25, 1921.

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While his prison term may have been shortened, his incarceration had already taken its toll on Eugene's health. He would never recover from his time behind bars even though recovery became his main occupation for the remainder of his life. The one highlight of his final years was probably in 1924 when he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, by a Finnish Socialist, for his work opposing the Great War (even though it was admitted he only did what he did because he considered the war a capitalist tool). Spoiler alert: he didn't win, but not necessarily for the reasons you think. A Nobel Peace Prize wasn't awarded to anyone in 1924. Which means it probably is for the reasons you think as the committee decided giving it to no one was preferable to giving it to Eugene. But, as they say, it's nice to be nominated.

Eugene entered Lindlahr Sanitarium in Elmhurst, Illinois in 1926. He would pass away from congestive heart failure there in October. Since then, Eugene's views have crept further and further into mainstream thinking. Popular current Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has long proclaimed himself to be an admirer. Eugene's house, located on the campus of Indiana State University, has become a museum and is listed as a National Historic Landmark. And, love him or hate him, in 1990 he was added to the Department of Labor's Labor Hall of Fame, completing his transformation from fringe seditionist to champion of the people.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Frank Churchill

October 19 - Anna Lee Aldred

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On this day, in 1939, Anna Lee Mills became the first licensed female jockey in the United States. Born April 19, 1921, in Montrose, Colorado, Anna Lee was part of a large family that included just as many horses as it did people. Her father and mother bred, trained and raced horses and four of her siblings became rodeo performers and champions. Anna Lee naturally began riding shortly after she learned to walk and had already won her first race (on a pony, of course) by the time she was six. Before she was a teenager, she was racing (and winning) on tracks all over Colorado and Wyoming as an amateur. As she neared adulthood, she looked around and thought, why couldn’t I do this professionally? All she needed was a license. Surely that wouldn’t be too hard to get, right?

As it turns out, not terribly easy either. Anna Lee had to actually leave the United States in order to get a license. She travelled south to the Agua Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana, Mexico and applied there. Even though Agua Caliente had already been running all female amateur races as a gimmick, track officials were still reluctant to give her what she wanted. They scoured the rule book but couldn’t find anything that prohibited women from being professional jockeys (and apparently nothing they could conceivably misinterpret instead). So they concluded that, yes, she could be licensed and handed over the small wooden shield that granted her a place on the starting line of professional races.

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Anna Lee jumped right into the racing circuit, apparently losing her first race by a nose. She more than made up for that in auspicious beginning by winning dozens of races over the next several years at state and county fairs all over the country. She wasn’t done growing however. By 1945, she’d shot up to 5’ 5” and weighed 18 pounds more than the even 100 she’d been when she got her license. You might still think she was still pretty petite, but in the racing world every inch and pound is crucial. So Anna Lee retire from racing and, after teaching herself some riding tricks, joined the rodeo circuit. For the next five years she wowed audiences as she rode around arenas actually standing on the saddle of a galloping horse or switching things up and hanging off the side of a horse by one foot. It’s hard to say what initially attracted the attention of Wayne Aldred of Raton, New Mexico but, in 1950, Anna Lee consented to marry him and retired.

Anna Lee didn’t stop riding horses when she began helping her new husband on his cattle ranch. She would continue to ride most days for the next 51 years. She would occasionally head up riding schools for local youngsters and, after she and Wayne split up after 35 years of marriage, she moved back to Montrose and helped move horses around before the races there every year. Right up until she fell from a horse and broke her hip at the age of 80. Only then did Anna Lee give up the thing she loved most in this world. Even after she moved into a nursing home, though, she continued to sleep under the comfort of a horse blanket. In 1983, she’d been inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame and you can see her 1939 license and a pair of her riding silks at their museum in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2004, she was honored with a spot in the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame.  And on June 12, 2006, the racing pioneer and woman who once said “God forbid I should go to any heaven where there are no horses” breathed her last in the same town she’d breathed her first. She was 85.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Body Wars

October 18 - Candy Cummings

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On this day, in 1848, William Arthur Cummings, inventor of the curveball, was born in Ware, Massachusetts. William made his sort of professional baseball debut at the age of seventeen when he became a pitcher for the Brooklyn Excelsiors. I say sort of because the Excelsiors were one of the teams in the National Association of Base Ball Players, an organization that predated true professional leagues. All teams in the NABBP (notice the two Bs, signifying that the name of the sport was considered to be two separate words at this point) started out as amateur. As baseball increased in popularity and teams began secretly paying some of their star players in order to keep them on the roster, the NABBP decided in 1869 that teams could become professional as long as they declared that they were and therefore somehow upheld the integrity of the sport. The Exelsiors never went professional but continued to play against the teams that did. It was an arrangement that didn’t last for long.

By 1871, all of the professional teams of the NABBP no longer wanted to be burdened with having to play amateurs and they formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Only one team that made the transition between those two organizations still survives today: the Chicago Cubs (although they were called the Chicago White Stockings during those years). As many as thirty teams were part of the NAPBBP during its five year run. The problem was that many of them were based in towns that were simply too small to support a professional team, places like Rockford, Illinois and Middletown, Connecticut. As a result, in 1876, six teams from the NAPBBP (Chicago, Boston, Hartford, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis) joined with two independent teams (Cincinnati and Louisville) to form the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs. The National League still exists today as one half of Major League Baseball but there is disagreement over which group is actually the first professional sports league in the world (MLB doesn’t recognize the NAPBBP even though it technically came first).

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But getting back to William. He played with the Excelsiors for two seasons before switching to the Brooklyn Stars, another amateur team, for three more. His pitching prowess earned him the nickname “Candy” which was often given to young men of the era who were considered experts at whatever it was they did. Candy made his NAPBBP debut on April 22, 1872 as a pitcher for the New York Mutuals. He would play for three other teams over the next four years: the Baltimore Canaries, the Philadelphia White Stockings and the Hartford Dark Blues. He stayed with Hartford when the team joined the National League in 1876, racking up a 16-8 record with the team before switching to the Cincinnati Red Stockings for his final season in 1877.

Following a disappointing 5-14 year with the Reds, Candy left the National League to become the first president of the International Association of Professional Base Ball Players. The IAPBBP was a short lived rival to the National League that could call itself international because it included two teams from Canada. Perhaps the only claim to fame that the IAPBBP can genuinely muster is that in 1878, Pitcher Bud Fowler became the first known African-American to play organized professional baseball, 69 years before Jackie Robinson.

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Candy credited the invention of his famous curveball to hours spent at the Massachusetts shore hurling seashells into the ocean with his cousins. Noticing that the shells had a distinct curve to their trajectory when thrown a certain way, Candy, already a baseball aficionado at that point, wondered if he could get a baseball to do the same thing. With a bit of practice, he found that he could. He supposedly used a curveball for the first time in 1867 with the Brooklyn Excelsiors but he couldn’t use it effectively until he was with the Brooklyn Stars and partnered with a catcher named Nat Hicks. Up until that point, catchers stood about 20 feet behind a batter making it nearly impossible to field anything other than a straightforward pitch. Nat stood directly behind the batter and could field curveballs with ease. Of course this is just Major League Baseball’s official version of how the curveball came to be. Other people claim that Harvard University pitchers were doing it as early as 1863 and some say it didn’t come about until Fred Goldsmith did it in 1870. While it’s not possible to definitively prove any one theory and the debate will most likely rage on for several more generations, most of the credit across the board is given to Candy.

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Candy ended his career with a 145-94 record, a 2.49 ERA and 259 strikeouts. He was also the first pitcher to record two complete games on a single day, September 9, 1876, when the Hartford Dark Blues beat the Cincinnati Red Stockings 14-4 and 8-4 in a double header. Following baseball, Candy owned a paint shop in Athol, Massachusetts and received royalties from a railroad coupling that he invented. He passed away on May 16, 1924 in Toledo, Ohio at the age of 74. Fifteen years later he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

 Also on this day, in Disney history: The Jungle Book

October 17 - Evel Knievel

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On this day, in 1938, Robert “Evel” Knievel was born in Butte, Montana. Robert’s parents divorced before he was even two years old and both of them moved out of Butte, leaving Robert and his new brother, Nicolas, with his paternal grandparents. He liked to say that his later choice of career was due to those grandparents bringing him to a Joie Chitwood Thrill Show when he was eight, but he had a rebellious, daredevil streak in him from the beginning. He dropped out of high school halfway through to get a job in the nearby copper mines. He was fired from that job after he popped a wheelie with one of the mine’s earth movers and severed the city’s main power line. His unemployment status only exacerbated his recklessness. He crashed his motorcycle after a highspeed police chase in 1956 and ended up in jail on charges of reckless driving. It was then that he gained the nickname Evel. In the next cell over that night was another chronic troublemaker who already had a nickname, William “Awful” Knofel. The police started calling him “Evil” Knievel by association. Robert leaned into the name but deliberately changed the spelling because he didn’t want people to think he was the bad guy, something that would have an ironic bent to it for at least the next several years.

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Following his stint in jail, Evel began channeling his need for thrills into more productive areas. He began participating in rodeos and ski jumping competitions, going so far as to win the Northern Rocky Mountain Ski Association Class A Men’s championship in 1959. He then joined the army and learned to pole vault. After his discharge, he got married and started a semi-pro hockey team called the Butte Bombers. To promote the team, Evel convinced the Czechoslovakian Olympic team to play an exhibition game against them just prior to the 1960 Olympics in Squaw Valley, California. Evel was ejected from the game in the third quarter and left the stadium. When the game finished, the Czechs went to the box office to collect their share of the proceeds only to discover that all the money had disappeared. It couldn’t be proven what had happened to it and the US Olympic Committee ended up covering the expenses to avoid international embarrassment. Since his hockey dreams obviously weren’t playing out, Evel then started the Sur-Kill Guide Service, guaranteeing hunters that they would bag their big game or their money back. His business was highly successful, but only because he was poaching animals from Yellowstone National Park.

Evel decided that he needed to stop committing crimes after his latest run in with the law and began racing on the motocross circuit. He did reasonably well but couldn’t make enough money to support his family. After breaking his collarbone and shoulder in an accident, he did what anyone addicted to reckless behavior would do: he began selling insurance. He was good at it but didn’t feel like the company was willing to promote him fast enough, so he quit. The Kneivels moved to Washington and opened a Honda dealership. At a time when Japanese imports just couldn’t compete in the market. The business folded and Evel began working at a motorcycle shop in Sunnyside. It was there that the owner’s son, future World Motocross Champion Jim Pomeroy, taught him how to do stunts on a bike. You can guess where Evel’s plans went after that.

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Remembering the stunt show he saw as a child, Evel thought that could be his ticket to prosperity. Singlehandedly putting together his first gig, he jumped a 20 foot long box of snakes (with two mountain lions thrown in for good measure). He barely made it over the snakes with his back wheel hitting the far edge of the box, but he survived the stunt, a statement that would basically describe everything he did for the rest of his career. He also realized that the only way to make good money was to hire a crew to do all the planning and publicity so he could concentrate on the stunt. He found a sponsor, put together a group of mostly reliable people and got ready to take the stunt entertainment world by storm.

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Evil Knievel and His Motorcycle Daredevils debuted on January 3, 1966 in Indio, California and was an instant hit. The second show in Hemet was rained out but the third in Barstow was a go. Right up to when Evel jumped too late during a new stunt, was hit in the groin by a speeding motorcycle and flipped fifteen feet in the air. His injuries landed him in the hospital and broke up the group but they did not stop him from performing (or continuing to injure himself). While other stunt performers were jumping over water or animals, Evel began jumping over cars. And he would add more cars to the line each time he revisited a venue in order to get people to come back out and see him. Eventually his misses became even more legendary than his successes, most likely because he kept surviving incredible crashes. Evel finally gained some national attention when Joey Bishop had him as a guest on The Joey Bishop Show in March 1968. That appearance led to more fans and bigger paychecks for each stunt.

 

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With an eye towards publicity, Evel was willing to jump just about anything with a motorcycle. He attempted jumping the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas (a crash that landed him in the hospital for several weeks). He planned to jump the Grand Canyon but was denied access by the federal government so switched to jumping the Snake River in Idaho using private properties (his rocket, it wasn't a motorcycle this time, technically made it across that canyon but was blown back in by the wind; Evel only sustained minor injuries in spite of being strapped to a lead weight that hit the bottom of the gorge). In 1971 he set a world record that stood for 27 years by jumping 19 cars. He set another record that stood for 35 years when he jumped 50 stacked cars in November 1973. A third record was made in October 1975 when he jumped 14 buses at King’s Island Amusement Park. That record stood for 24 years and was one of the highest rated episodes of ABC’s Wide World of Sports ever.

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The King’s Island jump was also Evel’s final major jump. He planned to jump a tank of live sharks in 1977 (a stunt that may or may not have inspired Arthur Fonzerelli later that same year) but called it off when a crash during rehearsal injured a cameraman.  For the last few years of his career, he was content to play announcer while his son, Robbie, launched his own career in the family business. Of course his retirement may have had something to do with his assault conviction as well. A former promoter of his was publishing an unflattering book about him, accusing him, among other things, of being a batterer. Evel, his arms still in casts from the shark accident, tracked the man down at the movie studio he was currently working at and beat him unconscious with a baseball bat. The subsequent lawsuit and jail time caused Evel to rightly lose every endorsement deal he’d worked so hard for so long to obtain. With no one willing to partner with him anymore, he was bankrupt by 1981.

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It’s hard to say how much Evel learned from suffering the consequences of his bad behavior. He remained largely unapologetic about his actions for the majority of his life even as his health declined throughout the Nineties. He was diagnosed with Hepatitis C, most likely contracted from one of the dozens of blood transfusions he’d received during his career. A last minute liver transplant in 1999 saved his immediate life but it was already too late for the long term. He would be diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable lung disease, a few years later and that, along with diabetes, is what would ultimately end his life. In April of 2007, Evel appeared on Hour of Power with televangelist Robert Schuller to announce his newfound belief in Jesus Christ. Whether that signaled an actual change in his life or was just a man hedging his bets against imminent death, we’ll never really know. Just over six months later, Evel would pass away on November 30, 2007 in Clearwater, Florida at the age of 69.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Jack Wagner