Calendar: December 16

A Year: Day to Day Men: 16th of December

Observing the Street Below

The sixteenth of December marks the beginning of the 1631 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a conical Italian volcano built up by many layers of hardened lava and unconsolidated material. The eruption, marked by columns of volcanic debris, ash and hot gases, buried many villages under the resulting lava flows. It is estimated that four-thousand people were killed by the eruption, which was so intense that it lowered the summit of Vesuvius by four hundred and fifty meters.

Located on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Mount Vesuvius has a long historic and literary tradition. At the time of the 79 AD eruption, the volcano was considered a divinity of nature. The Roman cities surrounding the volcano regarded Mount Vesuvius as being devoted to Hercules. This was particularly true for the city of Herculaneum ,which was named after its mythical founder. Frescoes depicting Vesuvius as a serpent decorated many of the household shrines in Pompeii; inscriptions on walls linked the power of the god Jupiter to the volcano, IOVI VESVVIO, or Jupiter Vesuvius.

Mount Vesuvius has erupted multiple times with varying grades of severity. All of its eruptions included explosive outbursts named Plinian after the Roman writer Pliny the Younger, who published a detailed account of the 79 AD eruption that killed his uncle. That eruption was largest and most destructive of all Vesuvius eruptions. Its cloud of super-heated gases and particles reached a height of thirty-three kilometers. The molten rock, pumice and hot ash ejecta reached sped at a rate of one and a half million tons per second. This volcanic event destroyed several Roman towns and completely obliterated Pompeii and Herculaneum under massive pyroclastic surges and ash fall deposits.

Today, Mount Vesuvius is considered the world’s most dangerous volcano. This is due to two main factors: it has erupted violently and frequently through the years and the large number of people living in its vicinity. The area surrounding Mount Vesuvius is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world. Three million people live near enough to be affected by an eruption, with at least six-hundred thousand in the danger zone. Mount Vesuvius is among the most closely monitored volcanoes in the world. The network consists of a number of fixed seismic stations on the surface of the earth with sensors that detect the motion of the soil, changes in the gravimetric field and indicative shifts in the magnetic masses in the subsurface.

Calendar: December 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of December

Garçon Model Briefs

On December 15, 1939, the drama film “Gone with the Wind”, directed by Victor Fleming and starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, premiered in Atlanta at the Loew’s Grand Theatre.

On September 9, 1939, David O. Selznick, his wife, Irene, investor John Witney and film editor Hal Kern drove out to Riverside, California to preview it at the Fox Theater. The film was still a rough cut at this stage, missing completed titles and lacking special optical effects. It ran for four hours and twenty-five minutes, but would later be cut down to under four hours for its proper release. A double bill of “Wild Nights” and “Beau Geste” was playing, and after the first feature it was announced that the theater would be screening a preview; the audience were informed they could leave but would not be readmitted once the film had begun, nor would phone calls be allowed once the theater had been sealed.

When the title appeared on the screen the audience cheered, and after it had finished it received a standing ovation. In his biography of Selznick, David Thomson wrote that the audience’s response before the film had even started “was the greatest moment of Selznick’s life, the greatest victory and redemption of all his failings”, with Selznick describing the preview cards as “probably the most amazing any picture has ever had.”

About 300,000 people came out in Atlanta for the film’s premiere on December 15, 1939. It was the climax of three days of festivities hosted by Mayor William B, Hartsfield, which included a parade of limousines featuring stars from the film, receptions, thousands of Confederate flags and a costume ball. Eurith D. Rivers, the governor of Georgia at that time, declared December 15 a state holiday. Residents and visitors to Atlanta lined the streets for up to seven miles to watch a procession of limousines bring the stars from the airport.

Only Leslie Howard and Victor Fleming chose not to attend: Howard had returned to England due to the outbreak of World War II, and Fleming had fallen out with Selznick and declined to attend any of the premieres. Hattie McDaniel was also absent, as she and the other black cast members were prevented from attending the premiere due to Georgia’s Jim Crow laws, which would have kept them from sitting with their white colleagues. Upon learning that McDaniel had been barred from the premiere, Clark Gable threatened to boycott the event, but McDaniel convinced him to attend.

Calendar: December 14

A Year: Day to Day Men: 14th of December

Crouching in Socks and Sneakers

On the fourteenth of December in 1782, the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne, performed the first test-flight of an unmanned hot air balloon in France.

The Montgolfier brothers were born into a family of paper manufacturers. Joseph-Michel was the twelfth child of Pierre Montgolfier and Anne Duret; Jacques-Étienne was the fifteenth child and was later sent to Paris to train as an architect. After the death of the eldest son who was his father’s business successor, Étienne was recalled from Paris to long the family’s paper manufacturing business.

Both Joseph-Michel and Étienne were talented innovators and inventors. Joseph-Michel invented the self-acting hydraulic ram in 1796 and Étienne founded the first paper-making vocational school in France. For their business, the brothers together invented a process to manufacture transparent paper vellum, suitable for use in situations where tracing was required. As avid balloonists, they invented the Montgolfière-style hot air balloon, a globe aèrostatique, with which Jacques Étienne made the first piloted ascent by humans in 1783.

Interested in aeronautics, Joseph-Michel had built parachutes as early as 1775. Watching the embers rising from a fire, he wondered is the same force could be used for a military air assault. Joseph-Michel believed that the smoke was the buoyant force which lifted the embers; from that assumption he preferred to use smoldering fuel for his experiments. He built a test structure of a very thin wood box with a light-weight taffeta cloth lid. After lighting crumbled paper in the box, the structure lifted off the stand and touched the ceiling.

After recruiting Étienne through an urgent message, the brothers built a similar structure but three times the size with a volume twenty-seven times greater. On December 14th of 1782, they ignited the wood and hay in the fire box; the lifting force was more than expected and they lost control of the craft. The device floated nearly two kilometers but was destroyed after landing by a passing citizen.

Calendar: December 13

A Year: Day to Day Men; 13th of December

Black Leather Sofa with Pillow

On the thirteenth of December in 1577, the English explorer and privateer Francis Drake set sail from England on a mission to circumnavigate the world aboard the “Pelican”.

Born in Tavistock, Devon, Francis Drake was the eldest of twelve sons of Edmund Drake and Mary Mylwaye. As his birth date was not formally recorded, the date of 1540-1541 derives from two portraits painted in his later life. Drake was placed at an early age into the household of sea-captain William Hawkins and began his life as an apprentice sailor on Hawkins’s boats. A purser by the age of eighteen, Drake was given a position with the owner and master of a small trading vessel along the coast of England, France and the Low Countries. Satisfied with Drake’s conduct, the ship’s master, at his death, bequeathed the vessel to Drake.

Beginning in 1562, Drake became involved with the West African slave trade. There is some anecdotal evidence to support his sailing on several slaving voyages with Sir John Hawkins, considered the first English merchant to profit from the Triangle Trade which sailed enslaved people from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the West Indies during the sixteenth-century. It is known that he sailed on a slave voyage under John Lovell’s command, sponsored by Hawkins, in 1566 and, in 1567, accompanied Hawkins on his last voyage around Cape Verde; the voyage was considered unsuccessful as more than ninety enslaved Africans were released without payment. Although not a member of the consortium of investors, Drake was in his twenties and a member of the crew which shared in the ship’s profits, thus being culpable for his participation in the slaving enterprise.

In the period from 1572 to 1573, Francis Drake attacked the Spanish colonies as a privateer under English authority. After a failed attempt in July of 1572 to capture the Spanish town of Nombre de Dios, the storage point for the gold and silver treasure of Peru, Drake raided Spanish galleons along the coast of Panama. He also looted the mule trains that transported the gold, silver and trade goods from Panama City. Drake eventually captured the Spanish silver train at Nombre de Dios in April of 1573 which made him both rich and famous. From the heavily laden mule train, they had captured approximately twenty tons of silver and gold. It was during this expedition that Drake and his lieutenant John Oxenham became the first Englishmen to see the Pacific Ocean from the central mountains of the Isthmus of Panama.

Queen Elizabeth I likely invested in Drake’s 1577 voyage to South America but never issued him a formal commission. This was the first circumnavigation in fifty-eight years, the last one being Garcia Jofre de Loaisa’s Spanish expedition 1525 to1536. Drake and his fleet set out from Plymouth on the fifteenth of November but were forced by bad weather and repairs to return to Plymouth. Drake set sail again on the thirteenth of December aboard the Pelican with four other ships and one hundred sixty-four men.

On the twenty-sixth of September in 1580, the “Golden Hind”, formerly the Pelican, sailed into Plymouth with Drake and a crew of fifty-nine men, along with a rich cargo of spices and captured Spanish treasure. The queen’s half-share of the cargo surpassed the rest of the crown’s income for that entire year. Drake was the first Englishman to circumnavigate the Earth; his voyage was also the second to arrive back home with at least one intact ship. All written records of the voyage were to be become the queen’s secrets of the Realm; Drake and other participants were sworn to secrecy on pain of death. Elizabeth I wanted the voyage kept hidden from Spain, England’s rival.

Calendar: December 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of December

The Library’s Leather Armchair

Born at Haggerston, Middlesex in November of 1656, Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. Very interested in mathematics as a child, he studied at London’s St. Paul’s School where he developed an interest in astronomy. In July of 1673, Halley began studying at Queens’ College, Oxford where he was influenced by the work of the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s effort to catalogue the stars of the northern hemisphere. While still an under graduate, he published papers on the solar system and sunspots.

In 1676, Halley published his first paper about planetary orbits. He later dropped out of school to travel to the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena, west of Africa, to observe and chart the stars of the southern hemisphere with cross-references to the northern stars. Supported in his endeavor by King Charles II, he set up an observatory and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun. From the solar parallax of the planet, he determined it was possible to trigonometrically to determine the distances between the Earth, Venus and the Sun.

Edmond Halley produced his chart of the southern stars and, with the assistance of Charles II, was awarded his Master of Arts degree from Oxford in December of 1678; a few days later, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-two. In September of 1682, Halley conducted a series of observations on what would be known as Halley’s Comet. Because of his work on the orbit, he was able to predict its return in 1758.

In 1691, Halley sought the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. While a candidate, he faced the opposition of both John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, and the Anglican Church which questioned his religious views, specifically because he has questioned the Earth’s age as given in the Bible. Halley, also opposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. was unsuccessful in his attempt.

On December 12th in 1696, Edmond Halley was censured by the Royal Society for suggesting in a 1694 paper. titled “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge”, the story of Noah’s flood in the Bible could be an account of a cometary impact. It should be noted that a similar theory was suggested three centuries later; however, it has generally been rejected by geologists of the present day.

Halley eventually succeeded John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in 1720, a position he held until his death in 1742 at the age of eighty-five. He was interred at the old church of St. Margaret’s, Lee Terrace, Blackheath; he lies within the same vault as Astronomer Royal John Pond and close to the unmarked grave of Astronomer Royal Nathaniel Bliss.

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 10

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of December

Warmth of the Sun

December 10th turned out to be an amazing day for film viewers.

On December 10, 1962, David Lean’s film “Lawrence of Arabia”, based on the life of Thomas Edward Lawrence, premiered at Odeon Leicester Square Academy. The epic historical drama is considered one of the most influential films in the history of cinema. The desert scenes were shot in Jordan and Morocco, as well as Almeria and Doñana in Spain. During the filming of the Aqaba scene, Peter O’Toole was nearly killed when he fell from his camel, but it fortunately stood over him, preventing the horses of the extras from trampling him. Coincidentally, a very similar mishap befell the real Lawrence at the Battle of Abu El Lissal in 1917. The film was nominated for ten Oscars at the 35th Academy Awards in 1963; it won seven in total including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score.

On December 10, 1978, “Superman: The Movie, directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman and Margot Kidder, premieres at the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC.

“Out of Africa” based on the book by Isak Dinesen, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, premiered in Los Angeles on December 10th, 1985. This film won Best Picture at the Awards in 1986.

On December 10th, 2001, “The Fellowship of the Ring” directed by Peter Jackson and starring Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen premiered in London at the Odeon Leicester Square Theater. It became the second highest-grossing film for that year in the US and worldwide. In 2007, the film was voted Number 50 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Film

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 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of December

Apple Picker

On December 6, 1421, Henry VI was born. The only child of Henry V, he succeeded to the English throne at the age of nine months upon his father’s death, and succeeded to the French throne on the death of his maternal grandfather Charles VI shortly afterwards.

Completely unlike his aggressive father, Henry had a timid, shy, and passive personality, seemed mostly well-intentioned, and disliked warfare and violence; he was also at times mentally unstable. This resulted in various nobles (who often had diverging interests among themselves) attempting to establish control over him, throughout his reign. He proved an indecisive and ineffective ruler, overall incapable of leading his country in times of adversity.

As the situation involving the contesting of the claims to the throne in France worsened, political instability in England also increased. General misrule brought in waves of civil unrest and a breakdown in law and order. Parts of the English nobility began to resent the king’s favouritism, his inability to defend their lands in France, and some of his overall policy decisions.

Partially in the hope of achieving peace, in 1445 Henry married Charles VII’s niece, Margaret of Anjou, an ambitious and strong-willed woman who would come to influence much of the King’s decisions and become an effective power behind the throne and whose scheming would widen the rift among the English aristocracy. The peace policy failed, leading to the murder of William de la Pole, one of Henry’s key advisors. By 1453, Calais was Henry’s only remaining territory on the continent.

Henry VI was deposed from the throne on March 29, 1461 by Richard of York’s son who took the throne as Edward IV and imprisoned Henry in the Tower of London in 1465. Henry was restored to the throne in 1470 only to be imprisoned again in the Tower in 1471 where he died on May 21, 1471, possibly killed on the orders of Edward IV.

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: December 3

A Year: Day to Day Men: 3rd of December

The Dark Blue Suit

December 3, 1857 was the birthdate of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad.

Joseph Conrad, born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzenlowski, was a member of the second generation of the intelligentsia, a social class that was at that time starting to play an important role in Central and Easter Europe. He had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native Poland to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to his adoptive country of Britain. it was the tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and grew in his adulthood abroad that gave rise to Conrad’s literary achievements.

Joseph Conrad started a merchant-marine career in 1874, serving for four years on French ships before joining the British merchant-marines. He spent a total of nineteen years working in ships, including long periods in ports, for over ten years and just over eight years at sea. Most of Conrad’s stories and novels. as well as his characters, were drawn from his seafaring career.

In 1894, aged 36, Joseph Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. His first novel “Almayer’s Folly”, set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895, marking the first use of his pen name “Joseph Conrad”. While Conrad had only limited personal acquaintance with the inhabitants of Maritime Southeast Asia, the area figures prominently in his early works. he was intrigued by the struggles of its people aimed at preserving their national independence.

The literary critic Edward Garnett urged Conrad to begin a second novel, and so “Almayer’s Folly” was followed in 1896 by “An Outcast of the Islands”, which repeats the theme of a foolish and blindly superficial character meeting the tragic consequences of his own failings in a tropical region far from the company of his fellow Europeans. Conrad was interested in writing about the feelings of mankind: its feelings of guilt, responsibility, and insecurity.

It was this purpose, rather than a taste for the outlandish or exotic locations, that distinguishes Conrad’s work from that of many novelists of the 19th and early 20th century. Conrad’s work was aimed at the isolation and concentration of tragedy. Conrad’s view of life is indeed deeply pessimistic. In every idealism are the seeds of corruption, and the most honorable men find their unquestioned standards totally inadequate to defend themselves against the assaults of evil. This despairing vision gains much of its force from the feeling that Conrad accepted it reluctantly, rather than with morbid enjoyment.

Joseph Conrad’s life as an author was plagued with poor health developed from his travels abroad, near poverty, and difficulties of temperament. It was not until 1910, after he had written what are now considered his finest novels that his financial situation became relatively secure. These novels were: “Lord Jim” published in 1900; “Nostromo” published in 1904; the 1907 “Secret agent”; and “Under Western Eyes” published in 1911; the last three were novels of political intrigue and romance.

Calendar: December 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of December

The Craving of Human Touch in Form

December 2, 1933 was the release date of Fred Astaire’s first film, “Dancing Lady”.

“Dancing lady” is a 1933 pre-Code musical film directed by Robert Z. Leonard and produced by David O Selznick and John W Considine, Jr. It starred Joan Crawford and Clark Gable, and featured Franchot Tone, Fred Astaire, Robert Benchley, and Ted Healy and His Stooges, who later became the Three Stooges. It was also one of Eve Arden’s first uncredited appearances on film.

The film featured the film debut of extraordinary dancer Fred Astaire, who appears as himself, as well as the first credited appearance of actor and singer Nelson Eddy, a classically trained baritone who became the highest paid singer at that time in the world. The film was a box office hit upon its release, receiving many positive reviews from critics.

After appearing in “Dancing Lady” for MGM Studios, Fred Astaire returned to RKO Radio Pictures and received fifth billing In the 1933 Dolores del Rio film “Flying Down to Rio”. It was in this film that Astaire first danced with Ginger Rogers.Astaire was reluctant to become part of a dance team; however, the obvious public appeal of the pairing persuaded him. The Astaire-Rogers partnership, and the choreography of Astaire and collaborator Hermes Pan, helped make dancing an important element of the Hollywood film musical.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made nine films together at RKO, including the 1934 “Gay Divorcee”, “Top hat” in 1935, the 1936 “ Swing Time, and “Carefree” released in 1938. Six films of the nine became the biggest moneymakers for the RKO studio, bringing the studio the prestige and artistry it coveted. The Astaire-Rogers partnership elevated them both to stardom.

Fred Astaire was given complete autonomy over the dance production. He is credited with two important innovations in early film musicals: Astaire insisted that a closely tracking dolly camera film a dance routine in as few shots as possible, typically with just four to eight cuts, while holding the dancers in full view at all times. This gave the illusion of an almost stationary camera filming an entire dance in a single shot.

Astaire’s second innovation involved the context of the dance. Astaire was adamant that all song and dance routines be seamlessly integrated into the plot lines of the film. Instead of using the dance as a spectacle such as a Busby Berkeley routine, the dance was used to move the plot along. A typical Astaire film would include three dance routines in the plot: a solo by Astaire, a partnered comedy dance, and a partnered romantic dance routine.