Almanac for March 31st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 31st: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-31-Slaughterhouse-Five-W7W31D6M5F

Bummer March 31st

March 31, 1855: Charlotte Brontë and her unborn child die, most likely due to hyperemesis gravidarum. In modern times, their lives could have been saved by something as simple as an IV injection of fluids and electrolytes.

March 31, 1931: While flying to participate in a movie called The Spirit of Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame head football coach Knute Rockne is killed when his Transcontinental & Western Air airliner crashes near Bazaar, Kansas. Seven other people are killed in the crash. Rockne is 43 years old.

March 31, 1995: Singer/fashion designer Selena (in full, Selena Quintanilla Pérez) is murdered by her hanger-on Yolanda Saldívar when it appears Selena is about to confront Saldívar about financial misdeeds. At a Days Inn motel in Corpus Christi, Texas, Saldívar shoots Pérez once in the right shoulder as Pérez walks away. Pérez is rushed into emergency surgery but is pronounced dead on the operating table.

March 31, 2019: Roman Catholic priests in Gdańsk, Poland, perform a “spring cleaning” that includes burning books and other objects they consider “harmful to our faithful.” These include Harry Potter books, books from the Twilight series, an African-style face mask, and a Hello Kitty umbrella. Exactly how Hello Kitty was thought to be attacking the Catholic faith is unclear.

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Almanac for March 30th

Erin O'Riordan's almanac for March 30th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-30-Van-Gogh-Z8Z81CNLUV

Beatles Trivia

March 30, 1967: The Beatles photograph the album cover photo of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Artists Jann Haworth and Peter Blake have designed the image, which portrays the group in colorful pseudo-military uniforms, surrounded by wax sculptures of themselves and numerous cardboard cutouts of famous people. Among those depicted by the cutouts are Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Stephen Crane, Bob Dylan, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Carl Jung, Marilyn Monroe, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas, H.G. Wells, Mae West, and Oscar Wilde.

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Vincent Van Gogh

Bummer March 30th

March 30, 1968: Former Disney child actor Bobby Driscoll, who appeared in Song of the South and Treasure Island, is found dead in an abandoned apartment in the East Village of New York City. He is 31 years old. He has died of heart failure related to his use of heroin. 

March 30, 1981: In an assassination attempt, U.S. President Ronald Reagan is shot by an assailant who also wounds Press Secretary James Brady, a Secret Service agent, and a Washington, D.C. police officer in the attack. Brady is severely injured, and when he dies in 2014, his death is classed as a homicide since it is directly related to his injuries. Police officer Thomas Delahanty suffers nerve damage that ends his career. Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy, shot in the liver, diaphragm, and lung, makes a full recovery. 

Reagan’s extremely low blood pressure when he reaches the hospital indicates he almost certainly would have died, had he not been rushed into emergency surgery so promptly. Special Agent Jerry Parr most likely saved Reagan’s life by ordering Reagan’s driver to take the president to George Washington University Hospital.

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Almanac for March 29th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 29th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-29-Pembertons-French-Wine-Cola-Q5Q01CMIWO

Today's Observance: Palm Sunday

Beatles Trivia
March 29, 1994, South Bend: I drove my neighbors Jay and Ryan to school this morning. We heard Aerosmith’s “Come Together” on the radio. They knew the Beatles original but had never heard the Aerosmith cover before.

Bummer March 29th

March 29, 1891: Artist Georges Seurat dies of unknown causes at the age of 31, leaving his painting The Circus unfinished.

March 29, 1911: The New York State Library, located inside the State Capitol building in Albany at the time, is badly damaged in a fire at the Capitol building. The fire destroys an estimated 450,000 books and 270,000 manuscripts, including many historical documents relating to early Dutch settlers in New York state.

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Almanac for March 28th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 28th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-28-Pippi-Longstocking-Z8Z51CMI8S

Artist Birthday: Lady Gaga

Bummer March 28th

March 28, 1941: Virginia Woolf, knowing that another bout of severe mental illness is coming on, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse. She is 59 years old. 

Most likely, her illness was bipolar disorder. 

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Almanac for March 27th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 27th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-27-Where-the-Streets-Have-No-Name-K3K61CMH37

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Paella

Bummer March 27th

March 27, 1977: The single deadliest aviation accident (as of this writing) occurs on the Spanish island of Tenerife when two jets collide on the runway. Both KLM Flight 4805 and Pan Am Flight 1736 had been diverted to Los Rodeos Airport (as Tenerife North Airport was known at the time) from Gran Canaria Airport. A terrorist group fighting for the Canary Islands’ independence from Spain had set off a bomb at Gran Canaria, injuring eight people and causing all airline traffic to be rerouted.

As the Pan Am jet sat on the runway, the Dutch plane, unaware that the Pan Am was directly in its path, began its takeoff run. Conditions on the ground were foggy and it seems that the Dutch plane didn’t correctly identify the runway its crew was being asked to use. A lack of standardized language in the communication between the Dutch pilots and air traffic control may have caused the pilots to think they had been cleared for takeoff when they should have waited.

Both crews made valiant last-minute efforts to avoid collision, but it was too late. Everyone on the Dutch jet, 248 people, were killed, as were 335 people on the Pan Am jet. Of the 61 survivors on the Pan Am jet, almost all were in the nose section of the plane, including the pilot, first officer, and flight engineer. The full fuel tanks on both aircraft contributed to fires that made rescue efforts more difficult. 

On the bright side, the commercial aviation industry as a whole added regulations to standardize communications so that miscommunication of this type would be much less likely from then on.

March 27, 2004: Richard Lancelyn Green, a noted scholar of Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is found dead in his home at the age of 50. His sister, who worries when he doesn’t answer his phone, finds him face-down on this bed, garotted with a shoelace tightened with a wooden spoon. 

In his last days, Green has been observed acting erratically and complaining that an unnamed American was following him and that his apartment was bugged. Green’s paranoia seemed to stem from his actions in trying to stop an auction of Doyle’s papers, which Green believed were part of a collection Doyle’s daughter had intended to be donated to the British Museum rather than auctioned to the public. It remains unclear whether Green was murdered or staged his suicide to seem like a murder, as a character had done in the Sherlock Holmes story “The Problem of Thor Bridge.”

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Almanac for March 26th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 26th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-26-Stone-Feast-W7W11CMF64

Bummer March 26th

March 26, 1664: Samuel Pepys celebrates his Stone Feast, commemorating the day he had a kidney stone removed by the horrific, pre-anesthesia 17th century surgical method. He writes in his famous diary:

“This being my solemn feast for my cutting of the stone, it being now, blessed be God! this day six years since the time; and I bless God I do in all respects find myself free from that disease or any signs of it, more than that upon the least cold I continue to have pain in making water, by gathering of wind and growing costive, till which be removed I am at no ease, but without that I am very well.”

March 26, 1923: French actor Sarah Bernhardt dies of uremia, from which she has been suffering since 1916.

March 26, 1931: Five children and their bus driver die near Towner, Colorado when their bus is caught in a sudden spring blizzard. The unheated bus had two missing windows that were only covered by cardboard, so the bus offered no real protection from the elements. The driver left the bus to try to get help and apparently became lost in the snow and died, apparently of exposure. Three children died on the bus and an additional two children died that night.

March 26, 1995: Rapper Eric “Eazy-E” Wright dies of complications of HIV/AIDS at the age of 30.

March 26, 2018: California residents Jennifer Hart and her wife Sarah Hart drug their six adopted children (ages ranging from 12 to 19) with antihistamine, load them into a minivan with the mothers, and drive the van off a cliff in Mendocino County, California. All eight members of the family are presumed to have been killed when the van landed on its roof on a beach below the cliff, although as of 2022, only seven of the bodies had been found.

***

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Almanac for March 25th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 25th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-25-Click-Clack-Moo-D1D21CMEKW

Artist Birthday: Melanie Blatt of All Saints
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Aretha Franklin

Bummer March 25th

March 25, 1911: A fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village, New York City, kills 146 factory workers, most of them young women from Italian and Jewish immigrant families.

March 25, 1990: In the early hours of the morning, young people gather at the Happy Land social club, an unlicensed club, in The Bronx, New York City. They’re celebrating Carnival. Many of them are from Honduran immigrant families, and often of the Garifuna community (people of indigenous Caribbean and African descent). The club has no fire exits, sprinkler system, or alarms. 

Coat check worker Lydia Feliciano, working at the club that morning, is visited by her boyfriend, Julio González. They argue and Feliciano tells González she doesn’t want to see him anymore. González is thrown out of the club. He returns and sets fire to the club with gasoline, which he disperses at the bottom of the stairs below the club’s only exit. The fire kills 87 people. 

Lydia Feliciano survives the fire, one of only six survivors. Julio González is arrested, confesses to the arson, and is sentenced to life in prison. He dies in prison in 2016. 

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