Calendar: December 11

A Year: Day to Day Men; 11th of December

Handstand at Window

December 11 was the birthdate of American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon.

Born in Dover, Delaware to Wilson Cannon, a shipbuilder, and Mary Jump, Annie Jump Cannon was encouraged by her mother to follow her own interests and suggested studies in chemistry, biology and mathematics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Taught by her mother to identify stars at an early age, Cannon decided to pursue her love of astronomy. She also made the choice not to marry or bear children.

In 1880, Annie Cannon attended Wellesley College, one of the top academic schools for women, where she studied under Sarah Francis Whiting, one of the few women physicists in the United States at that time. Cannon graduated as the valedictorian of the college in 1884 with a degree in physics. She returned for a decade to Delaware where she developed skills in the new art of photography. Cannon traveled through Europe in 1892 taking photographs, later published along with her prose in a pamphlet, “In the Footsteps of Columbus”. This pamphlet was later used as a souvenir for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Stricken with scarlet fever, Cannon became nearly deaf and immersed her self in her work. She became a junior physics teacher at Wellesley College in 1894 and took graduate courses in both physics and astronomy. In order to gain access to a more powerful telescope, Cannon enrolled at Radcliffe College as a special student; she was able to attend lectures by Harvard professors and gained access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896 Cannon was hired as an assistant to the observatory’s astronomer and physicist Edward C. Pickering. In 1907, she graduated with her Masters Degree from Wellesley in 1907.

In 1896, Annine Cannon became a member of Pickering’s Harvard Computers, a group whose goal was to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, a mapping and definition of every star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of nine. When Cannon first started cataloging stars, she was able to classify one- thousand stars in three years. By 1013, she was able to accurately classify two-hundred stars an hour by looking at their spectral patterns.

Cannon is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperature and spectral types. She initially started by examining stars in the southern hemisphere and divided them into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M based on the Balmer absorption lines that describe the spectral line emissions of the hydrogen atom. After this was understood, her initial classification system was rearranged to avoid updating previous star catalogues.

In 1911, Annie Jump Cannon was made Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard. Three years later, she became an honorary member of England’s Royal Astronomical Society. In 1922, the International Astronomical Society adopted Cannon’s classification system; except for a few minor changes, it is the basis of star classification to this date. Throughout her forty year career, Cannon manually classified more stars in a lifetime then anyone else, a total of approximately three-hundred and fifty thousand stars.

Calendar: December 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of December

An Anchor on Black Cord

The animated television special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” made its television debut on the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS, on the ninth of December in 1965. Produced by Lee Mendelson and directed by Bill Melendez, it was the first television special based on the comic strip “Peanuts”, written and drawn by American cartoonist Charles Schulz. The television special won an Emmy Award in 1966.

Charles Schulz is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists in history and a major influence for other cartoonists. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in November of 1922, he always loved drawing through his early formative years. Drafted into the United States Army, Schulz served as a staff sergeant with the 20th Armored Division in the European theater during World War ii. For being under fire, he received the Combat Infantry Badge.

In late 1945 upon his return to Minnesota, Schulz did lettering work for a Roman Catholic comic magazine “Timeless Topix”. In July of 1946, he was employed at Art Instruction, Inc. where he reviewed and graded students’ artwork. Schulz’s first group of regular cartoons, a weekly series of one-panel jokes called “Li’l Folks”, was published from June of 1947 to January of 1950 in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It was in this series that a character with the name Charlie Brown and a dog quite like Snoopy first appeared.

In January of 1950, United Feature Syndicate became interested in Schulz’s “Li’l Folks”. Schulz had expanded the strip to four panels, a version the syndicate preferred. However, due to legal reasons, the syndicate changed the name to “Peanuts”. The comic strip’s first appearance was in seven newspapers on the second of October in 1950. Its appearance on the weekly Sunday page debuted on the sixth of January in 1952. The “Peanuts” strip eventually became one of the most popular comic strips of all time, as well as one of the most influential.

During the entire run of “Peanuts”, Charles Schulz took only one vacation, a five-week break in late 1997 to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. Many of the ideas for the characters in the strip were taken from family members and close friends, such as Peppermint Patty who was inspired by his cousin Patricia and the peppermint candies Schulz kept in his house. Charles Schulz was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian medal the United States legislature can bestow. He also received the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America, as well as a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, adjacent to the Star of Walt Disney.

Calendar: December 8

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of December

Saturday Morning After Shower

On the eighth of December in 1881, Vienna’s Ring Theater was destroyed by a gaslight fire that killed three hundred and eighty-four people.

The popular Ring Theater in Vienna, Austria was built between 1872 and 1874 by architect Heinrich von Förster from plans drawn by Emil Ritter. Opening in January of 1874 under the direction of operatic tenor and actor Albin Swoboda Sr, it was originally the Opéra Comique. In September of 1878, it changed its name to the Ring Theater and its focus to spoken plays and variety presentations as well as German and Italian operas.

As the footprint of the theater was small and it was intended for an audience of seventeen hundred, the architect designed the theater with four levels. On the eight of December in 1881, a fire began shortly before a performance of “Les Contes Fantastiques d’Hoffmann”, a French libretto written by composer Jacques Offenbach. The theater’s entire interior was engulfed in flames and collapsed; three hundred and eight-four people perished. In 1882, new regulations for theaters were passed regarding public safety provisions, including outward-opening doors, safety curtains and the fireproofing of the theater sets.

The Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary Franz Joseph used his private funds to build an apartment building on the site of the demolished Ring Theater. Although a private residence, it supported worthy public causes. This building also suffered a fire in 1945 with heavy damages and eventually collapsed in 1951.

Between the years 1969 and 1974, an office building occupied the site and served as the federal headquarters for the Vienna police and federal security guards: a plaque commemorating the fire is installed on the police headquarters. The original Attic-styled statues from the Ring Theater are now in Vienna’s Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark, a sprawling natural preserve with statues, wildlife areas and a small farm.

Calendar: December 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of December

Doffed Pants of Purple Hue

On December 7th in 1995, the unmanned Galileo spacecraft arrived at the planet Jupiter on its mission to study the planet and its moons. It had been launched six years earlier by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on October 18th of 1989.

The Galileo was an American robotic space probe which consisted of an orbiter and an entry probe. It was named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Called the father of observational astronomy, Galilei studied speed, velocity, gravity and free fall, inertia, projectile motion and the principle of relativity. He also improved military compasses and the telescope that he used to observe the four largest satellites of Jupiter.

The U. S. Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Galileo spacecraft and managed the Galileo program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. Its propulsion unit was supplied by West Germany’s aerospace manufacturer Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. The Ames Research Center of NASA managed the atmospheric probe that was built by the Hughes Aircraft company. The combined mass of the orbiter and probe was 2,562 kilograms and had a height of 6.15 meters.

The nuclear powered Galileo orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. After ten months of operating and sending information to Earth, the Galileo was intentionally destroyed in Jupiter’s atmosphere on the 21st of September in 2003. Its successor, Juno, part of the New Frontiers program, entered the polar orbit of Jupiter on the 5th of July in 2016. The Juno is powered by three solar panels, the largest ever deployed on a planetary probe at the time of its launching.

Calendar: December 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of December

Amazon River Boat

The fifth of December in 1901 marks the birthdate of Walter Elias Disney. He was an American animator, film producer and entrepreneur who was a pioneer of the American animation industry. Interested in drawing from an early age, Disney was employed as a commercial illustrator at the age of eighteen. In the early 1920s, he relocated to California and co-founded with his brother Roy the Disney Brothers Studio, now the Walt Disney Company.

Disney developed, with the design work of American animator Ubbe Ert Iwerks, the character of Mickey Mouse in 1928. In the early years, he provided the voice for this highly popular character. As the studio grew, Disney introduced synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, technical developments for cameras, and the introduction of full-length cartoons. The results of these additions can be seen in the Disney Studio’s many popular animated films.

The first full-length traditionally animated feature film was the 1937 musical fantasy “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, which was based on the Brothers Grimm 1812 German fairy tale. “Pinocchio” and the animated musical anthology film “Fantasia” followed in 1940. “Dumbo”, released in 1941, was based on a storyline about a young elephant with big ears by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. This film is one of the shortest animated features for the studio; it was also one of the few features to use wateroolor paint to render the backgrounds.

In 1942, the Disney Studio released “Bambi”, based on the 1923 novel by Austrian author Felix Salten. Great lengths were taken to animate the deer more realistically; reference studies were made at the Los Angeles Zoo as well as in the Vermont and Maine forests. The film received three Academy Award nominations and was inducted into the National Film Registry. Following World War II, Disney produced both new animated and live-action films, among which were “Cinderella” and the 1964 “Mary Poppins”.

In the 1950s, Walt Disney expanded into the amusement park industry and opened Disneyland in Anaheim, California in July of 1955. To fund the large project, he diversified into television with “The Mickey Mouse Club” and “Walt Disney’s Disneyland”. Disney was also involved in planning for the 1959 Moscow Fair, the 1960 Winter Olympics, and the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Another theme park, Disney World, started development in 1965; the center of the park was to be a new type of city, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT.

A shy, self-depreciating man with an outgoing public image, Walt Disney died of lung cancer in December of 1966, five years before the opening of Disney World.

Calendar: December 4

A Year: Day to Day Men: 4th of December

Lost in Thought

On the fourth day of December in 1872, the American-registered merchant brigantine, Mary Celeste, was discovered adrift and deserted in the Atlantic Ocean off the Azores Islands.

The Mary Celeste was built in Spencer’s Island, Nova Scotia, and launched in 1861 under British registration as the “Amazon”. Seven years later, she was transferred to American ownership and renamed the “Mary Celeste”. She was a brigantine, a two-masted sailing vessel with a fully square-rigged foremast and at least two sails on her main mast: a square topsail and a gaff sail behind the mast. The Mary Celeste had a single deck, tonnage of 198.42 gross tons and a length of 30.3 meters. After her salvage in 1872, the Mary Celeste was rebuilt with a second deck and additional depth; her tonnage was increased to 282.28 gross tons.

In October of 1867, the “Amazon” was driven ashore during a storm and was so badly damaged that her owners abandoned her as a wreck. She was eventually acquired by a New York mariner Richard Haines who restored her and registered with the Collector of the Port of New York as an American vessel named “Mary Celeste”. The ship was seized by Haines’s creditors and sold to a consortium headed by James H. Winchester. Early in 1872, the Mary Celeste underwent a major refit which enlarged her considerably.

In October of 1872, Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs took command of the Mary Celeste for her first voyage following her extensive refit. As the voyage was to Genoa, Italy, Briggs arranged for his wife and infant daughter to accompany him, but left his school-aged son in the care of his grandmother. Satisfied with his ship and crew, the Mary Celeste was loaded on the twentieth of October with a cargo of seventeen-hundred barrels of alcohol. On November 5th, the ship left the pier with Briggs, his wife and daughter and seven crew members.

On November 15th in 1872, the Canadian brigantine “Dei Gratia” left New York harbor with a cargo destined for Genoa, Italy. She followed the same general route as the Mary Celeste, only eight days behind. On December 4th at a point midway between the Azores and the coast of Portugal, the helmsman of the Dei Gratia reported a vessel with an odd set to her sails heading erratically towards their ship. Seeing no one on deck and receiving no replies to their signals, Captain Morehouse sent the first and second mates to investigate. The ship was deserted, the sails poorly set with some missing, and much of the rigging was damaged.

While the main hatch was secure, the other hatches of the Mary Celeste were open with the covers on deck. The ship’s single lifeboat was gone and the glass cover of the ship’s compass was shattered. There was a meter of water in the hold but that was not an alarming amount for the size of the vessel. The last entry in the daily log was November 25th, nine days earlier. While personal items in Captain Brigg’s cabin was scattered, gallery equipment was neatly stowed and there were ample provisions in the stores. With no signs of fire or violence, the missing lifeboat indicated an orderly departure from the ship.

Captain Morehouse divided his crew of eight men to sail the Mary Celeste and the Dei Gratia to Gibraltar. The weather was calm but the progress, being under-crewed, was slow. A series of hearings were held at the Salvage Court in Gibraltar beginning in the middle of December. Various theories, based on testimonies from the Dei Gratia crew, were presented from mutiny and murder to conspiracy of fraud, due to the fact that the Mary Celeste was heavily over-insured. Fact and fiction became entwined over the decades with no determination as to the cause of the missing crew. At Spenser’s Island, the site of Mary Celeste’s original construction, a commemorative monument for her lost crew was erected as well as a memorial outdoor cinema theater.

Calendar: October 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of October

Working in the Heat

October 20, 1854 was the birthdate of poet Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud.

Arthur Rimbaud was born in the provincial town of Charleville, France, to a father who was a military officer and a mother lacking in a sense of humor, who Rimbaud nicknamed “Mouth of Darkness”. Rimbaud was a writer from a young age; at the age of nine, he wrote a seven hundred word essay objecting to his having to learn Latin in school. In 1865, he and his brother were sent to the Collège de Charleville where he became a highly successful student able to absorb great quantities of knowledge. In 1869 Rimbaud won eight first prizes in the French academic competitions, and in 1870 won seven first prizes.

Arthur Rimbaud’s first poem to appear in print was “Les Étrennes des Orphelins” (“The Orphans’ New Year’s Gifts”), published in the January 2, 1870 issue of “La Revue Pour Tous”. At the age of fifteen Rimbaud was salready howing maturity as a poet. His poem “Ophelie” would be included in many anthologies and is regarded as one of Rimbaud’s three or four best poems. From late October in 1870, Arthur Rimbaud’s behavior at the age of sixteen became rebellious, drinking, stealing, and writing scatological poems. His friend Charles Auguste Bretagne advised him to write to the eminent Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine.

Arthur Rimbaud sent Verlaine two letters with poems, including his hypnotic and shocking “Le Dormeur du Val”. Verlaine was intrigued and sent Rimbaud a one-way ticket to Paris. Rimbaud arrived in late September of 1871 and resided briefly with Verlaine and his pregnant wife at their home. Verlaine and Rimbaud led a wild, vagabond-style life, a short and torrid affair filled with absinthe, opium and hashish. The Paris literary circle were scandalized by Rimbaud, who still writing poetry, was considered an archetypical enfant terrible. Their stormy relationship brought them to London in September of 1872, where Verlaine abandoned Rimbaud to return to his wire.

Arthur Rimbaud eventually returned to Charleville and completed his prose work “Une Saison en Enfer”, A Season in Hell, widely regarded as a pioneer work of modern Symbolist writing. He returned to London in 1874 with the French Symbolist poet Germain Nouveau, whose work was mostly published after his death. They lived together for three months while Nouveau finished his work “Illuminations”. By March of 1875, Rimbaud had given up his writing in favor of a working and traveling life.

In February of 1891, in Aden, Rimbaud developed what he thought was arthritis in his right knee. Failing to respond to treatment, he returned to France. On arrival in Marseille,, he was admitted to the Hôspital de la Conception where, a week later on the 27th of May, his right leg was amputated. The post-operative diagnosis was bone cancer. After a short stay at the family farm in Roche, he attempted to return to Africa, but his health deteriorated. He was re-admitted to the same hospital and received last rites from a priest before dying on November 10, 1891 at the age of thirty-seven.

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 28

A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of March

Tightly Stretched in the Sun

On March 28th in 1890, Paul Whiteman was born in Denver, Colorado. Originally a violinist, he became an American bandleader, later known as the King of Jazz for popularizing a musical style during the 1920s and 1930s that contributed to the introduction of jazz to mainstream audiences.

During 1917 and 1918, Whiteman conducted a forty-piece United States Navy band and, after the war, formed the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. In 1920, he moved his popular dance band to New York City where they made recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Company. The popularity of these recordings led to national fame. Whiteman became the most popular band director of that decade. While most bands consisted of six to ten men, his band was more imposing with as many as thirty-five musicians. By 1922, Whiteman was overseeing twenty-eight ensembles on the East Coast and earning over a million dollars a year.

While most musicians and fans considered improvisation essential to the jazz style, Paul Whiteman thought that jazz could be improved by orchestrating the best of it with formal written arrangements. His recordings were popular both commercially and critically; his style was often the first form of jazz most heard during the era. Over the course of his career, Whiteman wrote over three-thousand arrangements.

Whiteman hired the best jazz musicians for his bands; these included such notables as Frankie Trumbauer, Joe Venuti, Steve Brown, Wilbur Hall, Jack Teagarden and Bunny Berigan. He encouraged talented and upcoming African-American musicians and planned to hire many of them; however, his management persuaded him not to do so due to America’s segregation at that time. In 1925, Whiteman hired the team of Bing Crosby and Al Rinker to perform intermittently with his band to break up the selections.

Paul Whiteman provided music for six Broadway shows and produced more than six-hundred phonograph recordings. in 1942, he joined Capitol Records and produced such records as “I Found a New Baby” and “Trav’lin Light” which featured Billie Holiday. Whiteman appeared in the 1945 George Gershwin bio-film “Rhapsody in Blue”, the 1947 Dorsey Brothers bio-film “The Fabulous Dorseys” and as himself in the 1940 “Strike Up the Band”, among others.

After a long and prolific career as a band leader, Whiteman disbanded his orchestra in the early 1940s. He worked as a music director for the ABC Radio Network and hosted several television shows for ABC. The Paul Whiteman’s TV Teen Club from Philadelphia and Grady and Hurst’s 950 Club proved to be the inspiration for WFIL-TV’s afternoon dance show called American Bandstand.

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 20

A Year: Day to Day Men: 20th of March

Hot Water with Bubbles

On March 20, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly” is published as a book.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Seminary and an active abolitionist. Her book featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. Stowe was inspired to write this anti-slavery book by the narrative story of Josiah Henson, a formerly enslaved black man who escaped slavery in Maryland by fleeing to Ontario, Canada. There he helped other fugitive slaves settle and become self-sufficient; and there he wrote his memoirs. In 1853 Stowe acknowledged that Henson’s writings inspired “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”.

Because of the story’s popularity when it appeared as a serial in ‘The National Era”, an abolitionist periodical, the publisher John P. Jewett contacted Stowe about turning the serial into a book. Published in book form on March 20, 1852, the novel sold 3000 copies on that day alone, and sold out its complete print run. A number of other editions were soon printed including a deluxe edition in 1853 with illustrations by the artist Hammatt Billings. In the first year of publication, 300,000 copies of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” were sold.

The book was translated into all major languages, and in the United States it became the second best-selling book after the Bible. A number of the early editions carried an introduction by Reverend James Sherman, a Congregational minister in London noted for his abolitionist views. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sold equally well in Britain, with the first London edition appearing in May 1852 and selling 200,000 copies. In a few years over 1.5 million copies of the book were in circulation in Britain.

In recent years, the negative associations with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical impact of the book as a vital anti-slavery tool. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the first widely-read political novel in the United States, was dominated by a single theme: the evil and immorality of slavery. While Stowe weaves other sub-themes throughout her text, such as the moral authority of motherhood and the redeeming possibilities offered by Christianity, she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery.

In 1853, Stowe went further in her fight against slavery by publishing “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in which she criticized how the legal system supported slavery and licensed owners’ mistreatment of slaves. Thus, she put more than slavery on trial; she put the law on trial. This continued an important theme of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”- that the shadow of law brooded over the institution of slavery and allowed owners to mistreat slaves and then avoid punishment for their mistreatment.

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.