Calendar: March 31

Year: Day to Day Men: March 31

Changing His Tunes

The thirty-first of March in 1889 marks the official opening date of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The wrought-iron lattice tower was constructed as the centerpiece for the 1889 Paris Exposition, and as a memorial to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the French Revolution.

Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, two senior engineers employed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel’s company Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel, produced a sketch of a great metal pylon, narrowed as it rose, for the centerpiece of the Paris Exposition. With the assistance of Stephen Sauvestre, the company’s head architect, the men refined the design with the addition of decorative arches at the base of the tower and a glass pavilion on the first level. Gustave Eiffel approved the design and bought the patent rights for their design. This design for the Eiffel Tower was on display at the 1884 Exhibition of Decorative Arts under the company’s name.

On the thirtieth of March in 1885, Gustave Eiffel presented his plans to the Society of Civil Engineers at which time he discussed the technical difficulties and emphasized both the practical and symbolic aspects of the structure. Little progress on a decision was made until Édouard Lockroy was appointed Minister of Trade in 1886. A budget for the Paris Exposition was passed and requirements for the competition being held for the exposition’s centerpiece were altered. All entries were now required to include a study for a three-hundred meter, four-sided tower on the Champ de Mars. A judging commission set up on the twelfth of May found all proposals, except Eiffel’s design, either impractical or lacking in details.

Gustave Eiffel signed the January 1887 contract in his own capacity rather than as a representative of the company. The contract granted him 1.5 million francs toward the construction cost, less than a quarter of the expected cost. Eiffel was to receive all income from the commercial exploitation of the structure during the Paris Exposition and for the following twenty years. To manage the construction, he established a separate company for which he provided half the necessary capital.

The French bank, Crédit Industriel et Commercial, CIC, helped finance the Eiffel Tower’s construction through acquiring funds from predatory loans to the National Bank of Haiti. As a result, the Haitian government was sending nearly half of all taxes collected on its exports to finance the construction of the tower. While the tower was being built as a symbol of France’s freedom, the newly independent Haiti’s economy was hindered in its ability to start schools, hospitals and other basic establishments necessary for an established country.

Work on the Eiffel Tower’s foundations began at the end of January in 1887 with the formation of the four concrete slabs for the legs of the tower. While the east and south legs were easily done; the west and north legs, being closer to the Seine River, needed pilings twenty-two meters deep to support their concrete slabs. All four slabs supported blocks of inclined limestone for the ironwork’s supporting shoes. The foundation structures of the Eiffel Tower were completed at the end of June.

An enormous amount of preparatory work was done for the assemblage of the ironwork. Seventeen hundred general drawings and over thirty-six hundred detailed drawings of the eighteen thousand separate parts were needed. The task of drawing the components was complicate by the complex angles in the design and the degree of precision required; the position of the rivet holes were specified to within one millimeter. No drilling or shaping was done on site; all finished components, some already partially assembled, arrived on horse-drawn carts from the factory. If any part did not fit, it was sent back to the factory. The entire structure was composed of over eighteen thousand pieces joined with two and a half million rivets.

The main structure of the Eiffel Tower was completed at the end of March in 1889. On the thirty-first of March, Gustave Eiffel led a group of government officials and members of the press to the top of the tower. As the lifts were not yet in operation, the ascent by foot took over an hour; most of the party chose to stay at the lower levels. Gustav Eiffel, Émile Nouguier, the head of construction, Jean Compagnon, the City Council president, and the reporters from “Le Figaro” and “Le Monde Illustré” completed the ascent. Eiffel hoisted a large Ticolor flag as a twenty-five gun salute was fired at the first level.

The Eiffel Tower was not opened to the public until the fifteenth of May, nine days after the opening of the Paris Exposition. The lifts, however, were still not completed. Nearly thirty-thousand visitors climbed the seventeen thousand steps to the top before the lifts opened on the twenty-sixth of May. Notable visitors to the tower included inventor Thomas Edison, Edward VII the Prince of Wales, stage actress Sarah Bernhardt and “Buffalo Bill” Cody whose Wild West show was part of the Exposition.

Calendar: March 27

Year: Day to Day Men: March 27

The Slithering Snake

The twenty-seventh of March in 1902 marks the birth date of Charles Bryant Lang Jr., one of the outstanding cinematographers of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Modest and yet a perfectionist, he spent the majority of his career at Paramount Studios where he contributed to its reputation for visual style.

Born in Bluff, Utah, Charles Lang studied law at the University of Southern California, but soon joined his father, photographic technician Charles Bryant Lang Sr., at an East Los Angeles film laboratory in 1918. Lang apprenticed as a laboratory assistant and still photographer before becoming an assistant cameraman. He worked with cinematographers Harry Kinley Martin and Lesley Guy Wilky who often collaborated with William C. DeMille. Quickly promoted, Lang soon worked with William DeMille and, later, followed him to Paramount Studios.

In 1929, Lang became a full director of photography at Paramount Studios. He was part of a team of cinematographers working at the studio that included such craftsmen as Victor Milner, Karl Struss and Lee Garmes. At this time, Paramount dominated the Academy Awards for cinematography, especially in the genre of black and white romantic and period film. The style of lighting that Lang introduced in Fred Borzage’s 1932 “A Farewell to Arms” became heavily identified with all of Paramount’s films during the 1930s and 1940s.

Charles Lang excelled in the use of chiaroscuro, light and shade, and was adept at creating a mood for every genre. His film work in this period included Henry Hathaway’s 1935 drama-fantasy “Peter Ibbetson”. Frank Borzage’s 1936 comedy drama “Desire” with Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper, and Mitchell Leisen’s 1939 screwball comedy “Midnight”, scripted by Billy Wilder and starring Claudette Colbert and Don Ameche. Lang was especially appreciated by female stars, such as Dietrich, Hepburn and Helen Hayes, due to his ability to photograph them to their best advantage, often with subdued lighting and diffusion techniques.

Lang’s lighting effects adapted perfectly to the expressionist neo-realism of the 1950s film noir. His expert techniques strongly contributed to the mood in such films as Billy Wilder’s 1939 “Ace in the Hole” with Kirk Douglas as the exploitive newspaper reporter, and Sydney Boehm’s 1953 crime drama “Big Heat” with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. The success of such films as the 1954 “Sabrina” and the 1959 “Some Like It Hot”, all nominees for Lang’s cinematography, owed much of their success to his camera work.

Though he preferred black and white photography, Lang became equally proficient in color photography. He worked with different processes, including Cinerama and VistaVision, on richly-textured and sweeping outdoor westerns such as John Sturges’s 1960 “The Magnificent Seven” and John Ford and Henry Hathaway’s 1962 “How the West Was Won’. Lang also did the cinematography for romantic thrillers such as Stanley Donen’s 1963 romantic mystery “Charade” with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and William Wyler’s art theft film “How to Steal a Million” with Audrey Hepburn, Peter O’Toole and Charles Boyer.

Charles Lang won an Academy Award Oscar, the second time he received a nomination, for his work on “Farewell to Arms”. He was nominated eighteen times which tied him with cinematographer Leon Shamroy who did most of his work for 20th Century Fox. In 1991, Lang received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographer for a career that included one hundred and fourteen feature films. Charles Lang died in Santa Monica, California in April of 1998 at the age of ninety-six.

Calendar: March 26

Year: Day to Day Men: March 26

Light Casts Shadows

The twenty-sixth of March in 1911 marks the birth date of Tennessee Williams, an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of American drama in the twentieth-century.

Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams attended the University of Missouri at Columbia, where he studied journalism. Bored by his classes, he began entering his poetry, essays, stories and plays in writing contests. His first two submitted plays were the 1930 “Beauty is the Word” and the 1932 “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning”. For his 1930 play, which discussed rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman at the university to receive honorable mention in a writing contest.

After studying a year at St. Louis’s Washington University, Williams transferred in the autumn of 1937 to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938 with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He later studied at The New School’s Dramatic Workshop in New York City. In acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots, Williams adopted the professional name Tennessee Williams in 1939. After working a series of menial jobs, he was awarded a small grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition for his play “Battle of Angels”.

Using these funds, Tennessee Williams relocated to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration of the government’s New Deal Program. He lived for a time in New Orlean’s French Quarter, specifically at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting for his 1977 play “Vieux Carré”. Due to his receiving the Rockefeller grant, he was given a six-month contract as a writer for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio.

During the winter of 1944-1945, Williams’s memory play “The Glass Menagerie” based on his short story “Portrait of a Girl in Glass”, was produced in Chicago to good reviews. The play moved to New York City where it became an instant, long-running hit on Broadway. With this success, he traveled widely with his partner Frank Merlo, often spending summers in Europe. For Williams, the constant traveling to different cities stimulated his writing.

Between 1948 and 1959, Tennessee Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: “Summer and Smoke” (1948), “The Rose Tattoo” (1951), “Camino Real” (1953), “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955), “Orpheus Descending” (1957), “Garden District” (1958), and “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959). For these, he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award. All of these plays, except for “Camino Real” and “Garden District”, were adapted into motion pictures. Williams’s 1957 one-act play “Suddenly, Last Summer” was adapted by William and Gore Vidal into the 1959 film of the same name. His play “Night of the Iguana”, which premiered on Broadway in 1961, was later adapted by John Huston and Anthony Veiller into the 1964 film of the same name.

After the successes of the 1940s and 1950s, Williams went through a period of personal turmoil and theatrical failures. Although he continued to write, his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption. On the twentieth of September in 1963, Williams’s partner of forty-two years, Frank Merlo, died from inoperable lung cancer. Depressed by the loss as well as the time spent in and out of treatment facilities, he felt increasingly alone despite a short relationship with aspiring writer Robert Carroll. Tennessee Williams was discovered dead at the age of seventy-one in his suite at New York’s Hotel Elysée on the twenty-fifth of February in 1983 from a toxic level of Seconal.

Notes: Beginning in the late 1930s,Tennessee Williams had several short-term relationships with men he met in his travels. In 1948 at the Atlantic House in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he met Italian-American actor Frank Melo who was leaning against the porch railing. According to his memoirs, Williams felt his time with Melo in his Manhattan and Key West homes were some of his happiest and most productive years. However, William’s alcohol, drug use and promiscuity put a strain on their relationship. In 1962 after Melo was diagnosed with lung cancer, Williams move Melo into the Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side until his death in 1963.

Calendar: March 25

Year: Day to Day Men: March 25

Brushstrokes of Light

The twenty-fifth of March in 1939 marks the birth date of Dorothy Catherine Fontana, an American novelist and television script writer and story editor. She is best known for her work on the original “Star Trek” series.

Born in Sussex, New Jersey, Dorothy Catherine Fontana attended New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University where she graduated with an Associate Degree as an Executive Secretarial major. After graduation, Fontana relocated to New York City where she became junior secretary at the Screen Gems Studios office. She later relocated to Los Angeles where she gained employment at Revue Studios as secretary to Samuel A. Peeples, the scriptwriter for the 1960 television Western “Overland Trail”.

After the series was cancelled, Samuel Peeples and Fontana began work on the 1960 Western series “The Tall Man” for Revue Productions. Fontana wrote the story for episode six “A Bounty for Billy” and episode thirty-three “The Cloudbusters”. She worked with Peeples on “Frontier Circus” and, for producer Nat Holt, on “Shotgun Slade”. All of Fontana’s stories at this time were created under the name of Dorothy C. Fontana.

In 1963, Dorothy Fontana saw an opportunity for a position on NBC’s new Marine Corps series “The Lieutenant”. She began working as a secretary for NBC producer Del Reisman who had previously edited for Rod Sterling’s “The Twilight Zone”. As one of only a few female writes at NBC, Fontana adopted the gender-blind pen name, D. C. Fontana, to prevent her stories from being prejudged. She became secretary for Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Lieutenant series, who encouraged her writing. As the series came to an end in 1964, Fontana published her first novel “Brazos River” written in collaboration with Harry Sanford.

In mid-1964, Gene Roddenberry began work on “Star Trek”. Encouraged by associate producer Robert H. Justman, Roddenberry assigned Fontana the task of writing the teleplay for an episode he called “The Day Charlie Became God”. She created the script for “Charlie X”, the second episode of the first season, for which she received credit for the teleplay. Fontana wrote episode nineteen of the first season, “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, that became the first “Star Trek” episode solely written by a woman. She also rewrote “This Side of Paradise”, the twenty-fourth episode in which flower spores induce Spock to fall in love. In September of 1966, Fontana was promoted to story editor by Roddenberry and the NBC network.

Dorothy Fontana worked on “Star Trek” through the entire second season as both story editor and rewriter. She was responsible for the ideas behind second season’s episodes “Journey to Babel” and “Friday’s Child”. Instrumental in the rewrite of the 1968 “The Ultimate Computer” episode, Fontana was one of four writers who made initial changes in Harlan Ellison’s “The City on the Edge of Forever”. The script was ultimately rewritten three more times by Roddenberry before it was aired. Fontana left the “Star Trek” team prior to the third season but wrote scripts for it on a freelance basis. Among these were the episodes “The Way to Eden”, “The Enterprise Incident” and “That Which Survives”.

During the 1970s, Fontana took on many roles: scriptwriter, story editor, and associate producer. She wrote the script for Roddenberry’s 1973 “Genesis II” and was both story editor and associate producer on “Star Trek: The Animated Series” which won the 1975 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Series. Fontana worked briefly on the 1977 “Fantastic Journey” and wrote for several series including “The Six Million Dollar Man”, “The Waltons”, and “The Streets of San Francisco”. For the first season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, she worked as both story editor and associate producer; however, her relationship with Roddenberry became strained so she left the series in May of 1988.

Dorothy Fontana continued to work within the “Star Trek” universe. She wrote the 1989 “Vulcan’s Glory”, a “Star Trek: The Original Series” novel published by Pocket Books. Fontana wrote the “Dax” episode of “Star Trek; Deep Space Nine”, sharing a joint credit with Peter Allan Fields. For the show “Babylon 5”, she wrote “The War Prayer” and “Legacies” episodes for the first season as well as “A Distant Star”, a second season episode that featured her character Neroon. Fontana also created scripts for Bethesda Softworks’s “Star Trek: Legacy” and “Star Trek: Tactical Assault” video games.

A board member of the Writers Guild of America and a twice-inducted member of the American Screenwriters Association Hall of Fame, Dorothy Catherine Fontana died of cancer at the Burbank Hospital in California on the second of December in 2019.

Calendar: March 21

Year: Day to Day Men: March 21

Cool and Refreshed

The twenty-first of March in 1867 marks the birth date of Florenz Edward Ziegfeld Jr. who was an American Broadway impresario.

Born in the Illinois city of Chicago, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was the son of Roselie de Hez, the Belgian grandniece to General Count Étienne Maurice Gérard, and German-born Florenz Ziegfeld, son of the mayor of Jever, the capital city of the Friesland district, Germany. The father founded Roosevelt University’s Chicago Academy of Music 1n 1867 and later opened the Trocadero nightclub to profit from the 1893 World’s Fair.

During a trip to London in 1896, Florence Ziegfeld Jr. met the Polish-French singer Anna Held and brought her to the United States as his common-law wife. Held enjoyed several successes on Broadway including the 1901 “Little Duchess” and 1906 “A Parisian Model”. One of Broadway’s celebrated leading ladies, she became both a well-known and wealthy woman. It was Held who presented the idea of an American version of the Parisian Folies Bergère to Ziegfeld.

Ziegfeld’s stage spectaculars, which became known as the Ziegfeld Follies, began with ‘Follies of 1907’ which opened in July of that year and continued annually until 1931. These productions with their elaborate costumes and sets featured beautiful women, the Ziegfeld Girls, chosen personally by Ziegfeld. The extravaganzas were choreographed to the works of such popular composers as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. The Follies featured many well-known theatrical performers including Fanny Brice, W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, Will Rogers, Bert Williams and Ann Pennington.

In 1927, the sixteen-hundred seat Ziegfeld Theater opened on the west side of Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue between 54th and 55th Streets. Designed by architects Joseph Urban and Thomas W. Lamb, the Art Deco theater’s auditorium was egg-shaped with the stage at the narrow end. A large medieval-styled mural by Lillian Gaertner, “The Joy of Life”, covered the walls and ceiling. To finance the construction cost of of 2.5 million dollars, Ziegfeld borrowed money from newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, who took control of the theater after Ziegfeld’s death.

The Ziegfeld Theater’s opening production in February was Ziegfeld’s “Rio Rita” which ran for almost five hundred performances. The second production, “Show Boat” with stage sets by Urban and a score by Jerome Kern, was a success with a run of five hundred seventy-two performances. This musical continues to be revived on Broadway and has won multiple Tony Awards. In May of 1932 during the Depression, Ziegfeld staged a revival of “Show Boat” that ran for six months. In the same year, a production with the Follies’ theatrical stars entitled “The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air” was broadcast on CBS Radio.

Anna Held divorced Florenz Ziegfeld in January of 1913. In April of 1914, he married stage and screen actress Billie Burke; they had one child, Patricia Burke Ziegfeld. The Ziegfeld family lived at their New York estate in Hastings-on-Hudson and their residence in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1932 after spending a period in a New Mexico sanitarium, Florenz Ziegfeld traveled to Los Angeles, California. A few days later, he died in Hollywood from an existing lung infection, pleurisy, on the twenty-second of July in 1932.

Ziegfeld’s death left Billie Burke with substantial debts, one of the reasons that she steered her career toward film acting. She moved to Beverly Hills and returned to a successful career as an actress with such films as George Cukor’s “Dinner at Eight”, Norman Z. McLeod’s 1937 “Topper”, Victor Fleming’s 1939 “The Wizard of Oz”, and William Keighley’s 1942 “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. In the late 1950s, failing memory led to Burke’s retirement from show business; she died of natural causes at the age of eighty-five in May of 1970. Burke is interred beside Ziegfeld at Kensico Cemetery in Valhall, New York.

Calendar: March 18

Year: Day to Day Men: March 18

A Reflection on Life

The eighteenth of March in 1899 marks the birth date of Majorie Abbatt, an English toy maker and businesswoman. Abbatt Toys was founded on the philosophy that children’s toys should be functional in design and educational in play.

Born Norah Majorie Cobb to a wealthy and educated family in Surbiton, a neighborhood of South West London, Majorie Abbat received her initial education at Roedean School, an independent boarding and day school on the outskirts of Brighton, East Sussex. She continued her studies at Oxford’s Somerville College and earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1923. Majorie gave up her postgraduate work in psychoanalysis at London’s University College with her marriage to Cyril Paul Abbatt in December of 1930.

Paul Abbatt, born into a Quaker family in 1899, was a graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a teacher at the private Quaker-owned boarding and day Sidcot School near Winscombe, Somerset. Influenced by Woodcraft Chivalry, a scouting and woodcraft movement in the United Kingdom, Paul Abbat and Majorie Cobb met at a 1926 gathering of the organization at Godshill, Hampshire. With the intent to establish a progressive kindergarten, they travelled to Vienna for research on its educational facilities.

Majorie and Paul Abbatt met painter and art education reformer Franz Cižek at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts. Cižek had founded Vienna’s Child Art Movement and was the director of the Vienna School’s Department of Experimentation and Research. The Abbatts attended his classes as well as classes at the city’s Montessori kindergartens. They also became acquainted with psychoanalyst Milan Morgenster and developmental educator Helena Löw-Beer, both of whom were working in the field of special education for severely handicapped children.

In 1932, Majorie and Paul Abbatt founded Abbatt Toys, a manufacturer for functional and educational toys. Part of a pioneering generation, they designed toys to stimulate the imagination of children as well as their physical skills. Working within their Bloomsbury, London apartment, they made a small exhibition space and developed a mail-order business from an illustrated catalogue created by painter and designer John Skeaping. By 1934, Abbatt Toys was progressing well and a new catalogue was published with photographs by Bauhaus-trained Edith Tudor-Hart who had previously been a Montessori teacher.

In 1934, Hungarian-born architect and designer Ernö Goldfinger moved to London and met Majorie and Paul Abbatt; this meeting led to a collaboration with Abbatt Toys throughout the company’s early years. In 1934, Goldfinger designed Abbatt Toys’s first showroom on central London’s Endsleigh Street, a place that encouraged children to touch and play with the displayed toys. In 1935, Goldfinger created a logo for Abbatt Toys as well as a children’s alphabet. The next year, he designed a second store on Wimpole Street and redesigned the couple’s apartment. In 1937, the now established Abbatt Toys had an exhibition space, designed by Goldfinger and the Abbatts, at the International Exposition of Arts and Technology in Modern Life held at Paris.

In 1951, Majorie and Paul Abbatt founded Children’s Play Activities Limited, a research organization with the aim of understanding play as an element of mental and social education. A report that criticized the practices of the British industry’s toy manufacturing sector was produced by the CPA, Limited in 1957. The Abbatts founded the International Play Association in 1961 to protect and advance the role of play in children’s lives.

Majorie Abbatt was a member from an early age of the West London Ethical Society, one of the founding groups of the Union of Ethical Societies, now the Humanists UK. After the death of Paul Abbatt in 1971, she sold Abbatt Toys and remained active in all the organizations she had supported. Honored in 1981 by a Master of Arts from University of Nottingham, Majorie Abbatt died at her home at Oxford ten years later in November of 1991 at the age of ninety-two.

Calendar: March 17

Year: Day to Day Men: March 17

Morning’s Red Splendor

The seventeenth of March in 1916 marks the birth date of Ray Ellington, an English singer, drummer and bandleader. He specialized in jazz but experimented with many other genres. Ellington’s musical style was heavily influenced by songwriter and saxophonist Louis Jordan’s up-tempo hybrid of jazz, blues, and boogie-woogie.

Born Henry Pitts Brown in Kennington, London, Ray Ellington was the youngest of four children to Eva Stenkell Rosenthal and Harry Pitts Brown, an African-American music hall comedian. After his fathe’s death in 1920, he was raised as an Orthodox Jew and, beginning in 1924, attended the South London Jewish School until 1930. Ellington entered show business at the age of twelve with his first acting appearance on a London stage.

In 1937, Ellington joined Harry Roy and His Orchestra as the band’s drummer. At his first session with the band, he did vocals along with his drumming for the 1937 song “Swing for Sale”. In May of 1940, Ellington was called for military service. He joined the Royal Air Force and became a physical training instructor for the course of the war. Ellington also played in service bands including the RAF’s Blue Eagles in 1945.

After demobilization, Ray Ellington resumed his music career with a group of his own musicians that played at London’s The Bag O’Nails club. After rejoining Harry Roy’s orchestra for a couple of months, he formed the Ray Ellington Quartet in 1947. Ellington’s band was one of the first in the United Kingdom to feature the simple guitar, bass, drums and piano format that became the basis of rock and roll. The band was also one of the first jazz bands in the United Kingdom to feature an amplified guitar.

The guitarist in the Ray Ellington Quartet was Trinidadian Lauderic Rex Caton, an autodidact on guitar who played professionally from the age of seventeen. He was also proficient on saxophone, double bass and banjo. Jazz pianist Dick Katz studied at the Peabody Institute, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School. He became the favorite pianist of Benny Carter, Coleman Hawkins and vocalists Carmen McRae and Helen Merrill. Jamaican-born George Coleridge Goode was the bassist and had recorded with Django Reinhardt the year before the quartet was formed. He had a long collaboration with alto saxophonist Joe Harriott and became involved with Harriott’s pioneering blend of jazz and Indian music, the Indo-Jazz Fusions.

From 1951 to 1960, the Ray Ellington Quartet had a regular music segment on “The Goon Show”, a radio comedy program broadcast by the BBC Home Service and occasionally the BBC Light Program. Musical performances alternated with scripted comedy segments. Occasionally Ellington would have small speaking roles in many of the episodes; no attempt was made to change his normal accent regardless the role.

Ray Ellington was married to British actress Anita West, who also co-hosted the BBC children’s program “Blue Peter”. They had two children, Nina and Lance. Lance Ellington became a singer who recorded several jazz-oriented albums. After a prolific forty-year recording career, Ray Ellington died of cancer on the twenty-seventh of February in 1985.

Notes: The online “The Seagoon Memoirs” has a short May 2022 article on Ray Ellington by Nick Reeves. The article includes photos, newspaper reviews and several videos including the Ray Ellington Quartet performing “Pink Champagne”. The article is located at: https://www.theseagoonmemoirs.com/post/ray-ellington

Jasmine Records issued a thirty-song collection in 2019 entitled “Ray Ellington: That Rock’n’Rollin’ Man” which contains several songs from his early to mid 1950s Columbia 78 rpm records.

Calendar: March 16

Year: Day to Day Men; March 16

The Darkness of the Night

The sixteenth of March in 1621 marks the day Samoset, an Abenaki sagamore, made contact with the Pilgrims of the recently established Plymouth Colony, the first permanent English colony in New England.

Samoset was a sagamore, or subordinate chief, of an Eastern Abenaki tribe that resided in Maine. The Abenaki, ‘People of the Dawn Land’, are indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands of Canada and the United States. The are an Algonquian-speaking people and part of the Wabanaki Confederacy of the five principal Eastern Algonquian Nations.

Samoset had learned some English from visiting an earlier settled fishing camp in the Gulf of Maine; English fishermen would fish cod off the coast of Mohegan Island. In March of 1621, Samoset was visiting Massasoit, the sachem or leader of the Wampanoag Confederacy. Massasoit’s people had been seriously weakened by a series of epidemics and were vulnerable to attacks by the Narragansetts, the most powerful tribe in the region when the English colonists arrived in 1620. Massasoit Sachem sought an alliance with the Plymouth colonists as a way to protect his people.

On Friday, the sixteenth of March in 1621, Samoset entered the settlement at Plymouth alone and greeted the colonists in English. He was the first indigenous person with whom the colonists could converse. Samoset told the colonists about the land, the sagamores, and his people’s strength and numbers. He was also acquainted with many of the captains and fishermen who visited the colony. Samoset and the colonists communicated and, in the evening, lodged at colonist Stephen Hopkin’s house.

The next morning, the Plymouth colonists gave Samoset a knife, bracelet and a ring before he left with a promise to return. On the twenty-second of March, Samoset returned with Tisquantum, commonly known as Squanto, the last known member of the Wampanoag Patuxet tribe. Squanto, who spoke a greater degree of English, arranged a meeting between the leaders of the colonists and Massasoit.

Massasoit forged critical personal and political ties with colonial leaders William Bradford, Stephen Hopkins, Edward Winslow, John Carver and Myles Standish, which grew from the peace treaty negotiated on the twenty-second of March in 1621. The alliance assured the neutrality of the Wampanoag Confederacy during the 1636 Pequot War.

Notes: In the fall of 1621, the Narragansetts sent a sheaf of arrows wrapped in a snakeskin to Plymouth Colony as a threatening challenge. Plymouth governor William Bradford sent the snakeskin back filled with gunpowder and bullets. The Narragansetts understood the message and did not attack them.

English Sea Captain Christopher Levett entertained Samoset and other tribal leaders in 1624 onboard his ship at harbor in Portland, Maine. Samoset is believed to have died circa 1653 in Pemaquid, Maine.

Calendar: March 14

Year: Day to Day Men: March 14

Aries the Ram

The fourteenth of March in 1878 marks the birth date of Louis Nikola, a British magician, actor, director and author. Born Walter James Obree Smith in Southampton, he performed under the stage name of Louis Nikola, a persona he found in Australian novelist Guy Newell Boothby’s series of occultist criminal mastermind Dr. Nikola, an early Victorian forerunner to Fu Manchu.

Louis Nikola began his career as a professional magician in 1901. Known for his painstaking perfection and inventive illusions, he performed throughout the world. Nikola’s “Card Castle” was one of the many highlights in his performances. After spreading a deck of cards on a tray, he would cover it with a silk scarf and slowly raise the scarf. At its height, the scarf would be removed to reveal a standing castle built from the cards. He would deliberately jog the tray and the castle would collapse due to its delicate construction.

Nikola published some of his magic through a series entitled “The B.O.P. Magician” that appeared in the 1898-1899 Volume XXI of “The Boy’s Own Paper”, a British story-paper run by the Religious Tract Society to provide young male readers with a positive moral influence. In 1927, Nikola published “The Nikola Card System: A New Power for Magicians”, a card system for magic tricks more advanced than the previous “Si Stebbins” or “Eight Kings” stack systems. Even on close examination, the pre-arrangement of cards was seemingly impossible to detect.

In 1934, Louis Nikola published a compendium of articles on fifty magic illusions entitled “Magical Masterpieces” in a collaboration with magic historian Will Goldston. Among the illusions in the volume were “The Incorrigible Cigars”, “A Message from Mars”, and “The Topsy Turvy Tea Table”. Nikola is credited with the invention of two major magic illusions: the “Magic Melding” in the early 1930s and, in collaboration with magician Roy Enoc, the “Milk Pitcher” circa 1917.

In addition to his magic illusions, Louis Nikola was also an entertainer proficient in the art of hand shadows. Using a light source and his two hands, he would create shadow representations of animals as well as historic and fictional characters. In 1913, Nikola published a small volume entitled “Hand Shadows: The Complete Art of Shadowgraphy” that contained, along with the illustrations of fifty hand shadows, instructions on lighting and hand exercises. A second edition was printed in 1921.

Beginning in 1913, Nikola was discovered by the British film industry who cast him in several films as a magician and a spiritualist. He was an actor in director Charles Raymond’s short 1913 “The Seer of Bond Street”, a six character story of a fake medium attempting to steal money from an heiress. Nikola was screenwriter, director and actor for the 1914 “Magic Squares”, an animation of paper squares and hand shadows.

Walter James Obree Smith died at the age of fifty-eight in South Harrow, London on the eleventh of November in 1936.

Calendar: March 13

Year: Day to Day Men: March 13

Perched

The thirteenth of March in 1930 marks the discovery of Pluto, the ninth largest and tenth most massive known object to directly orbit the sun of this system. Like other objects in the Kulper belt, the circumstellar disc in the outer solar system, Pluto primarily consists of rock and frozen volatiles such as methane, ammonia and water.

In the 1840s, French astronomer and mathematician Urbain Le Verrier used Newtonian mechanics to predict the position of the, as yet, undiscovered planet Neptune after analyzing deviations in the orbit of Uranus. Subsequent observations of Neptune in the late 1800s led astronomers to speculate that Uranus’s orbit was being affected by another planet beside Neptune.

In 1906, wealthy astronomer and mathematician Percival Lowell began an extensive project at the Lowell Observatory to search for a possible ninth planet, that he termed Planet X. Lowell and astronomer William H. Pickering had by 1909 suggested several possible celestial coordinates for this Planet X. Lowell continued his search, with calculations established by mathematical genius Elizabeth Langdon Williams, without any success until his death in 1916.

Unknown to Lowell, his research surveys had captured two faint images of Pluto on March 19th and April 7th of 1915; however, these images were not recognized as being of Pluto. There exists fourteen other known observations of Pluto which predate its discovery, the earliest being that of the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory on the 20th of August in 1909.

In 1919, Percival Lowell’s widow, Constance Lowell, entered into a ten-year legal battle with the Lowell Observatory over her husband’s legacy. The search for the unknown planet did not resume until 1929. American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, at the age of twenty-three, continued Lowell’s quest. His task was to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs. Each pair would be examined to determine if any objects had shifted position. This was done through the use of a blink comparator that shifts back and forth between photographs to create the illusion of movement for any object that had changed position in the photographs.

On the 18th of February in 1930, after a year of searching, Tombaugh detected a possible moving object on the photographic plates taken on January 23rd and 29th. A photograph of lesser quality taken on the 21st helped confirm the movement. After the Lowell Observatory had taken additional photographs to confirm the discovery, a telegram with the news was sent to the Harvard College Observatory on the 13th of March in 1930.

The name Pluto came from the Roman god of the underworld; it is also an epithet for Hades, the Greek equivalent of Pluto. As one Plutonian year corresponds to 247.94 Earth years, Pluto will be back in the same position of its discovery in 2178. On the twenty-ninth of July in 2005, astronomers at Caltech announced the discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object, named Eris, which is substantially more massive than Pluto and the most massive object discovered in the solar system since Neptune’s moon, Triton, in 1846.

Calendar: March 12

Year: Day to Day Men: March 12

Gazing into Space

The twelfth of March in 1925 is the birth date of Harry Harrison, an American science fiction author. A longtime resident in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, he assisted in the founding of the Irish Science Fiction Association and was co-president with author Brian Aldiss of the Birmingham Science Fiction group.

Born Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Stanford, Connecticut, Harry Harrison was drafted into the United States Army Air Force upon graduating from high school in 1943. He served during World War II as a gunsight technician and as a gunnery instructor. Harrison eventually became a specialist in prototypes for computer-assisted bomb-sights and gun turrets. After leaving military service in 1946, he enrolled in New York City’s Hunter College and later operated a studio that sold illustrations to both comic and science fiction periodicals.

Harrison initially worked in the science fiction field as an illustrator, primarily with two comic anthologies, “Weird Fantasy” and “Weird Science” published by William Gaines’s “EC Comics”. His illustration work was mostly done in collaboration with comic book artist Wally Wood; Harrison’s layouts would usually be inked by Wood. The two men freelanced together for several publishers until their partnership ended in 1950.

Harry Harrison worked under several pseudonyms during his career including Philip St. John, Wade Kaempfert, Felix Boyd and Hank Dempsey. He was hired to write the 1964 “Vendetta for the Saint”, one of the long mystery series featuring novelist Leslie Charteris’s character The Saint. Harrison also wrote for syndicated comic strips, most notably for the “Rick Random: Space Detective” series created by Conrad Frost and Bill Lacey. His first short story was 1951 “Rock Diver”, a classic Western plot with a sci-fi twist that described the effect of passing through matter.

Harrison was the main writer during the 1950s and 1960s for the “Flash Gordon” newspaper strip. His most popular and best known works are his later satirical science fictions and his reconstructions of the traditional space-opera adventures. Harrison’s twelve volumes of “The Stainless Steel Rat” series featured the futuristic con-man and thief, James Bolivar diGriz. This series ran from 1957 to 2010. He published “Bill, the Galactic Hero” in 1965. This was a satirical science fiction novel of Bill, a farm boy on a small agricultural planet who is shanghaied into the Space Troopers to fight a reptilian race named Chingers.

Harry Harrison wrote many stories on serious themes. The best known is his novel about overpopulation and consumption of the planet’s resources, the 1966 “Make Room! Make Room!”. This novel provided the basic idea for the 1973 science fiction film “Soylent Green”, written by Stanley R. Greenberg and directed by Richard Fleischer.

Harrison and author Brian Aldiss collaborated on a series of anthology projects and, in 1973, instituted the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. They also published the first of two issues of “SF Horizons”, the world’s first serious journal of science fiction criticism. Harrison and Aldiss edited nine volumes of “The Years Best Science Fiction” anthology series as well as three volumes of the “Decade” series that collected stories from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Although he did not win a major award for any specific work, Harry Harrison was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2004. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers named him the 26th Grand Master in 2008. Harrison became a cult hero in Russian with the winning of the 2008 Golden Roscon Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction.

Harrison spent most of his later years residing in Ireland, having gained citizenship through his Irish grandparent. He had also kept apartments in London and Brighton, England. Upon the death of his wife Joan Merkler Harrison in 2002 from cancer, Harrison made his Brighton home his permanent residence. He died in his Brighton apartment in August of 2012.

Calendar: March 11

Year: Day to Day Men: March 11

Juxtaposition

The eleventh of March in 1887 marks the birth date of Raoul Walsh, an American film director, actor, and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Born Albert Edward Walsh in New York, Raoul Walsh studied at Seton Hall College, a private Roman Catholic research university in New Jersey. In 1909, he began an acting career in New York City theaters. Walsh became an assistant to film director David Wark Griffith in 1914. He acted in his first full-length feature film, D.W. Griffith’s 1914 silent drama “The Life of General Villa”. Shot on location in Mexico, the film starred Pancho Villa as himself in actual as well as recreated filmed battles; Walsh played the role of Villa as a younger man.

In 1915, Walsh served as assistant director on D.W. Griffith’s silent epic “The Birth of a Nation”, the first non-serial American twelve-reel film ever made. In the film, he had the role of John Wilkes Booth, the stage actor who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. Walsh and Carl Harbaugh created the screenplay for Walsh’s directorial debut from an adaptation of Owen Kildare’s 1903 memoir “My Mamie Rose”. This critically acclaimed 1915 silent drama “Regeneration”, shot on location in Manhattan’s Bowery district, was the first full-length feature gangster film.

After his service in the United States Army during World War I, Raoul Walsh directed United Artist’s 1924 silent “The Thief of Bagdad” which starred and was produced by Douglas Fairbanks. One of the most expensive films of the 1920s, the film was lavishly staged on a Hollywood studio set and contained state of the art special effects. In 1926, Walsh directed “What Price Glory?”, a synchronized sound film with a music score and sound effects, that starred Dolores del Rio and Victor McLaglen.

Walsh directed the 1928 “Sadie Thompson”, which starred Gloria Swanson, and appeared in the role of Swanson’s boyfriend; this was his first acting role since 1915 and his last as well. While directing and acting in the 1928 western “In Old Arizona”, Walsh was in a car crash that resulted in the loss of his right eye; he would wear an eye patch for the rest of his life. Walsh directed his first widescreen film for Fox Studios in 1930, the epic wagon train western “The Big Trail” which starred the then unknown John Wayne, a former prop man. In 1933, he directed “The Bowery”, a historic drama of residents in New York’s Bowery district during the 1890s. The first film produced by Twentieth Century Pictures, it starred Wallace Beery, George Raft, Fay Wray, and child actor Jackie Cooper.

After an undistinguished period with Paramount Pictures, Raoul Walsh’s career soared with his work at Warner Brothers from 1939 to the end of his contract in 1953. During this period, he directed many of the major studio stars in Hollywood. Among his films were the 1939 “Roaring Twenties” with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart; the 1940 crime western “Dark Command”, made under Republic Pictures, with Claire Trevor, John Wayne, Walter Pidgeon and Roy Rogers; the 1941 “High Sierra” with Bogart and Ida Lupino: the 1941 “Manpower” with Edward G. Robinson, George Raft and Marlene Dietrich; and the 1949 “White Heat” with James Cagney.

Walsh made his last films as a freelancer for five different studios. Among these were the 1952 “Blackbeard the Pirate” with Robert Newton in the lead role; the 1953 “The Lawless Breed” with Rock Hudson in an early starring role as gunman John Wesley Hardin; the 1958 “The Naked and the Dead”, an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s World War II novel; and Walsh’s first Cinemascope production, the 1955 “Battle Cry” starring Tab Hunter, Aldo Ray and Hugh Van Heflin with a screenplay by author Leon Uris.

By the early 1960s, Raoul Walsh was suffering from physical difficulties, most notably fading sight in his good eye. He retired from the film industry in 1964. Walsh died from a heart attack on the last day of December in 1980 in Palm Springs, California at the age of ninety-three. His legacy of sixty-nine sound pictures as well as the many earlier silent films remains among the most-impressive bodies of work submitted by any Hollywood director.

Calendar: March 10

Year: Day to Day Men: March 10

Tiny Bubbles

The tenth of March in the year 1831 marks the creation of the French Foreign Legion, a corps of the French Army that consists of infantry, cavalry, engineers and airborne troops. Unique in that it is open to foreign recruits willing to serve in the French Army, its training currently focuses on traditional military skills as well as its strong esprit de corps.

Created by King Louis Philippe of France, the French Foreign Legion allowed foreign nationals into the French Army from the foreign regiments of the Kingdom of France. These recruits included soldiers from the disbanded German and Swiss foreign regiments of the Bourbon monarchy that was overthrown in 1830 during the reign of Louis XVI. Philippe’s Royal Ordinance specified that recruited foreigners could only serve outside France.

During the nineteenth-century, the French Foreign Legion was primarily used to protect and expand the French colonial empire. Initially stationed in Algeria with detachments from the French port city of Toulon, the Legion took part in the pacification and development of that colony. It was later deployed in a number of conflicts, including the Crimean War in 1854, the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the Second Madagascar expedition of 1895. The Foreign Legion fought in many critical battles on the Western Front in World War I and took part in the Norwegian, Syrian and North African campaigns of World War II.

By the middle of the 1960s, the Foreign Legion was no longer stationed in French Algeria after the country’s independence in July of 1962. President Charles de Gaulle originally considered totally disbanding the Legion; however after considering its performance over the years, he chose instead to downsize the Legion from forty thousand to eight thousand men that would be relocated to France’s metropolitan regions. Legion units continued to be assigned overseas but no longer to North Africa.

Besides ongoing global rapid deployments, the Foreign Legion stationed forces on various continents while operating different function units. From 1965 to 1967, the Legion operated several companies, which included the 5th Heavy Weight Transport Company. Ongoing operations and rapid deployments in the following years included, among others, peacekeeping operations around the Mediterranean during the Global War on Terror; peacekeeping along with the United Nations Multinational Force during the Lebanese Civil War; and the 1990 Gulf War where a Legion force made up of twenty-seven different nationalities was attached to the French 6th Light Armored Division. After the ceasefire, the Legion conducted a joint mine clearing operation with the Royal Australian Navy divers.

As of 2021, French Foreign Legion members are composed from one hundred-forty countries. In the past, new recruits enlisted under a pseudonym in order to allow recruits who wanted to restart their lives to enlist without prejudice. As of September of 2010, new recruits have the option of enlisting under their real name or a declared name that, after a year, may be changed to their real name. After serving in the Foreign Legion for three years, a legionnaire may apply for French citizenship. He must be serving under his real name, have no issues with the authorities, and must have served with honor and fidelity. Women, who had been barred from service previously, were admitted after 2000.

Calendar: March 9

Year: Day to Day Men: March 9

The Cross Bearer

The ninth of March in 1940 marks the birth date of actor Raúl Rafael Carlos Juliá y Arcelay known for his intense and varied roles on stage and screen. For each of his film roles, Raúl Julia did extensive character research to familiarize himself with their experiences and ideologies. During his life, he did charitable work mostly focused on at-risk youth, the Latin-American community and the arts.

Born in a suburb of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Raúl Julia attended a private Catholic school in Hato Rey. He later attended Colegio San Ignacio de Loyola where. interested in the works of Shakespeare, he organized and performed in plays of “Julius Caesar”, “Hamlet’, “King Lear”, and “The Tempest’. Julia studied for a year at New York City’s Fordham University before attending the University of Puerto Rico where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree. Although his parents wanted him to have a career in law, Julie chose acting as full-time career.

In Puerto Rico, Julia performed in several Shakespearean plays including “Macbeth” and “Othello” at San Juan’s theaters. He was subsequently recruited by actress and comedian Lillian Hurst to perform alongside her. During one of their performances, Julia was noticed by actor Orson Bean who suggested he continue his acting career in New York City. After working a variety of odd jobs in Manhattan, he sought work in both Broadway and off-Broadway productions.

After receiving his Actors Equity card, Raúl Julia was able to get a role in the production of “Bye Bye Birdie”. In September of 1968 after four auditions, he debuted in his first Broadway production as the character Chan in “The Cuban Thing”. In the following two years, Julia appeared in playwright Arthur Kopit’s 1969 production “Indians” and Mel Arrighi’s 1970 “The Castro Complex”. Julia also worked in the medium of television in the early 1970s as Rafael the Fix-It Man, a recurring role in the third season of “Sesame Street”.

Julia performed in several major theatrical productions during the 1970s. For his role of Proteus in the 1971 rock musical “Two Gentlemen of Verona”. he was nominated for a Tony Award and won the 1972 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance. In 1974, Julia received his second Tony Award nomination for his role of Charley Wykeham in the 1974 Broadway revival of “Where’s Charley”. In 1976, he was nominated a third time for his role of Mack the Knife in “The Threepenny Opera”. From late October of 1978 to June of 1979, Julia played the role of Count Dracula in the Broadway revival of “Dracula” with Edward Gorey’s stage sets.

Raúl Julia’s film career began with roles in three films during the early 1970s: the crime thriller “The Organization”; the drama “The Panic in Needle Park”, his first feature film; and the film adaption of Richard Fariña’s novel “Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me”. The most notable of Julia’s film work at this time was his role of prison inmate Valentin Arregui, played opposite William Hurt as Luis Molina, in the 1985 drama “Kiss of the Spider Woman”. To understand his role, Julia traveled to South America where he interviewed rebels and ex-prisoners to familiarize himself with their experiences. He was nominated for the Golden Globe Award and won, along with William Hurt, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures Award for Best Actor.

In addition to being a distinguished actor in numerous film, television and theater productions, Julia continued the charitable work that had been done by his parents. Concerned about the rising levels of violence among teenagers, he sponsored screenwriting programs and supported young actors. Julia was constantly involved with the Latin American community and served as the chairman of the Joseph Papp Celebrity Coalition for Racial Harmony. As part of his work for The Hunger Project, he made monthly donations, promoted the program through advertisements and narrated its bilingual videos. Julia was given the Global Citizen Award for his work with The Hunger Project and, in 1992, received the Courage of Conscience Award.

Unknown to the public, Raúl Julia suffered from stomach cancer for three years prior to his death. During those years, he played the title role in the 1992 Broadway revival of “Man of La Mancha”, with performances eight times a week. Julia also reprised his role as Gomez Addams in the 1993 “Addams Family Values” and took a supporting role in the 1994 television series “Down Came a Blackbird”. In early 1994 during the filming of “The Burning Season” in Mexico, Julia was airlifted to a hospital in Los Angeles for medical attention. Upon his recovery, he finished the film.

On the sixteenth of October in 1994 after attending New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Julia was rushed by ambulance to the North Shore University Hospital in Long Island due to intense abdominal pains; his situation gradually worsened. On the night of the twentieth, Julia suffered a stroke, fell into a coma and was put on life support. Raúl Julia died on the twenty-fourth of October at the age of fifty-four from complications of a stroke, never having gained consciousness. His body was flown to Puerto Rico where a state funeral attended by thousands was held in San Juan.

Calendar: March 8

Year: Day to Day Men: March 8

Center Stage

The eighth of March in 1761 marks the birth date of Count Jan Potocki, a Polish nobleman, linguist, ethnologist, traveller and author of the Polish Age of Enlightenment.

Born into an aristocratic family that owned vast estates across Poland, Jan Potocki was educated in the Swiss cities of Geneva and Lausanne. He frequently visited the Paris salons and toured Europe before returning to Poland in 1778. As a soldier, Potocki served twice in the Polish Army, first in 1778 with the Austrian army during the War of the Bavarian Succession, and later in 1779 as a military engineer.

During his extensive travels across Europe, Asia and North Africa, Potocki as an early pioneer of travel literature documented prevailing customs, active wars, revolutions, and cultural awakenings. He was also one of the first ethnologists with his studies of early Slavic peoples from a linguistic and historical perspective. Fascinated with the occult, Potocki studied ancient cultures, secret societies and their rituals. As a member of the Polish Parliament, he participated in the Great Sejm, whose aim was to restore the sovereignty and reform the Commonwealth, both economically and politically.

In 1790, Jan Potocki became the first person in Poland to fly in a hot air balloon when he accompanied French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard on an ascent over Warsaw, an exploit that brought him public acclaim. After a period in France, he established in1788 a Warsaw publishing house, Drukamia Wolna (Free Press), and printed pamphlets and newspapers advocating for social reforms. Potocki also established Warsaw’s first free reading room.

Potocki’s most famous literary work, originally written in French, is the framed-tale “Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa)”. A framed-tale is a literary technique that serves as a companion piece to a story within a story; the introductory or main narrative sets the stage for either a second narrative or a set of shorter stories. Potocki’s novel is a collection of intertwining stories of Romani, thieves, inquisitors, princesses and the brave but foolhardy hero, the infantry guard Alphonse van Worden. The stories cover the wide range of Potocki’s interests: the gothic, the erotic, the historical and the supernatural.

The initial work of “Manuscrit Trouvé à Saragosse” were published in 1805 apart from the rest of the novel; the stories comprising the Gypsy chief’s tale were added later in 1810. Written incrementally, its final form was never exactly completed at the time of Potocki’s death. Sections of the original French version were lost but have been back-translated into the French from a Polish translation by Edmund Chojecki in 1847. In 1965, director Wojciech Has adapted the novel into a Polish-language black and white film “The Saragossa Manuscript”, that was admired by many 1960s counterculture figures such as Jerry Garcia, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Jan Potocki married twice and had five children; both marriages were the subjects of scandalous rumors, the first ended in divorce. In 1812, he retired, disillusioned and in poor health, to his estate in Uladivka in present-day Ukraine. Potocki worked on his novel during the last years of his life. Suffering from depression and clinical lycanthropy (believing he could transform into a werewolf), he committed suicide on the twenty-third of December in 1815 by shooting himself with a silver bullet blessed by his local Catholic priest.

For his contributions to Poland, Jan Potocki was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the highest award of merit for the Republic of Poland. He also awarded a knighthood in the Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st Class, as well as the Imperial Order of Saint Prince Vladimir, 1st Class, the highest award for continuous civil and military service.