Almanac for January 15th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 15: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-15th-O4O7ZOP2Q

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Martin Luther King Day

Bummer January 15th

January 15, 1890: 26-year-old circus performer Lucía Zárate, who was born with Majewski osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II that gave her an extremely small stature, is traveling on a circus train with her fellow performers when the train breaks down in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Zárate, who weighed only 4.7 pounds (2.1 kg) at age 17, dies of hypothermia while the train is stranded.

January 15, 1919: More than two million gallons of molasses spill from a tank that bursts in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts, flooding the streets. Over 150 people are injured; 21 people and an unknown number of horses die.

January 15, 1947: Betty Bersinger takes her 3-year-old daughter for a walk in their South Los Angeles neighborhood. Bersinger spots what she initially thinks is a mannequin lying in an empty lot. To her horror, she soon realizes the naked, bisected figure is a woman’s corpse. Bersinger phones the police from a nearby home.

The victim of this hideous crime is Elizabeth Short, 22 years old, last seen alive on the 9th of January. The murderer of the Boston native has never been arrested. 

Some family members of Dr. George H. Hodel suspect their relative was involved in the crime; Hodel died in 1999 and this cannot be proven.

As of 2026, Michael Connelly, the journalist-novelist known for the Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer novels series, hosts a podcast called Killer In the Code. It looks into a theory that the killer of Elizabeth Short and the self-named Zodiac Killer are the same person. 

January 15, 1951: Mount Lamington on the island of Papua begins to erupt, spouting tall plumes of smoke. Its eruptions will continue until July 1956, resulting in the deaths of approximately 3,000 people. Many of them are residents of the village of Sangara, and most of their deaths come about either by burns from the dense pyroclastic flow or by inhaling and breathing superheated gases and toxic materials.

January 15, 2008: 25-year-old actor Brad Renfro dies of an accidental heroin overdose.

January 15, 2018: Limerick, Ireland’s alternative rock band The Cranberries’s lead singer Dolores O’Riordan dies at age 46 after becoming intoxicated with champagne and five small bottles of liquor and then accidentally drowning in a London hotel bathtub.

Dolores O'Riordan at Dorothy Surrenders: https://dorothysurrenders.blogspot.com/2020/06/music-monday_22.html

Almanac for January 14

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 14: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-14-O5O2ZOOYF

French Republican Calendar Day Name (25 Nivôse): Cat

Bummer January 14

January 14, 1898: Mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll, dies of pneumonia while suffering from influenza.

Lewis Carroll, photographed by Oscar Gustav Rejlander in 1863. Public domain.

January 14, 1957: Actor Humphrey Bogart dies of esophageal cancer after unsuccessful surgery that removed his esophagus, two lymph nodes, and a rib. He receives chemotherapy, but lapses into a coma. At the time of his death his weight is reduced to around 85 pounds.

January 14, 1986: Actress Donna Reed dies of pancreatic cancer. She’s been diagnosed with the disease only three months earlier.

January 14, 1990: A 31-year-old man from the Chicago suburb of Roselle suffered an apparent medical condition that caused him to behave impulsively while on vacation in Trinidad and Tobago. A friend who’d been staying in a Trinidad hotel with the man said he, the friend, was awakened that morning by the man trying to strangle him. They struggled and the man ran off, nude. After this, the man apparently scaled a barbed wire fence, entered the airport, struggled with security guards, and stole a vehicle. He drove the vehicle directly into a British Airways jet with its engines running, then jumped into an engine, killing himself immediately.

Almanac for January 13th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 13: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-13-Y8Y1ZOODI

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Edmund Spenser

Bummer January 13th

January 13, 1908: One hundred seventy-one people die as a result of a fire that started during the intermission of a stage play at Rhoads Opera House in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. The audience was in its seats to watch a Magic Lantern show. A Magic Lantern machine was a technology somewhat in between a slide show and a movie projector, with slide-like images that gradually faded into the next image.

The gases used to run the Magic Lantern caught fire after someone knocked over one of the kerosene lamps being used to light the stage. The dead include 170 audience members and one firefighter killed while responding. This tragedy spurs the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a variety of safety laws governing indoor public spaces.

Incidentally, the playwright of the drama being performed was Harriet Earhart Monroe. Mrs. Monroe was not present, but her sister Della Earhart Meyers was on stage as the narrator or chorus of the drama. Della Earhart Myers was among those who perished. Harriet and Della were the sisters of Samuel Stanton Earhart, who was the father of aviator Amelia Earhart.

January 13, 1985: Actor Carol Wayne, perhaps best remembered by American tv viewers as the Matinee Lady on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, dies of an apparently accidental drowning after walking by herself along the beach. Wayne is visiting Manzanillo, Mexico, with a companion. The two argue and Wayne goes for a walk by herself. Her body is found by a fisherman three days later.

Almanac for January 12th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 12th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-12-V7V0ZONPA

Artist Birthday: Melanie C

Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4jB1IFi

Beatles Trivia
January 12, 1963: The Beatles release their second single, “Please Please Me,” which goes on to be their first #1 single in the U.K. My Baby Boomer parents are each 10 years old on this date.

Bummer January 12

January 12, 1888: The so-called Schoolhouse Blizzard strikes the Great Plains of the United States. The unexpected severe weather on what had been a relatively warm day in the morning catches many by surprise, resulting in 235 deaths. Most of these people died of hypothermia or from frostbite and complications of frostbite.

January 12, 1965: Author Lorraine Hansberry dies of pancreatic cancer at the age of 34.

Affiliate Link: https://amzn.to/4pE9aBc

January 12, 2000: Bobby Phills, a professional basketball players for the Charlotte Hornets, drives his Porsche at over a hundred miles per hour, following teammate David Wesley (who is driving at a similar speed). Phills loses control of his car, crosses the center line, and hits a car head-on, causing that car to be rear-ended by a minivan. The drivers of the other car and the minivan are injured, but recover; Phills is killed at the scene of the accident.

January 12, 2007: 28-year-old Jennifer Strange dies of acute water intoxication in her Rancho Cordova, California, home. Strange had taken part in the “Hold Your Wee of a Wii” competition hosted by radio station KDND 107.9, which offered a Nintendo Wii video game system as its prize. Participants were encouraged to drink as much water as they could without going to the bathroom. Hours after the contest, Strange went to work, but told coworkers she had a headache and went home. 

The amount of water she’d ingested is unknown, but in general, drinking more than one liter of water per hour can cause water intoxication, in which the body loses more electrolytes than it needs to sustain bodily functions. KDND’s parent company was ultimately ordered to pay $16,577,118 to Strange’s family for failing to inform her of the dangers of drinking too much water.

January 12, 2010: The second-deadliest earthquake in recorded history (as of 2022) occurs near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An estimated 316,000 die as a result of building collapses and lack of access to basic necessities. A cholera outbreak in October 2010 among survivors contributes to the death toll. 

In unrelated and less tragic news (we'll talk about how he died later), it's Tim Horton's birthday.

Almanac for January 11th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 11th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-11-B0B8ZOF4O

Britain’s appetite for books increases

London, January 11th, 1926, A.P. The average Briton’s appetite for reading has grown remarkably, or authors have been putting in some overtime. More books were printed during 1925 than in any previous year in the history of British book production. The total published was thirteen thousand, two hundred eight, or four hundred ninety-six more than in 1924.

Fiction apparently holds first place in public taste, for two thousand, seven hundred sixty-nine volumes of it were published last year. Religious books came second.

Books First Published in 1926:

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9780156628709

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781400034215

The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9780062986443

Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Woodhouse https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781959891406

Simon the Coldheart by Georgette Heyer https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781773236346

Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9781950330720

Portrait of a Man with Red Hair by Hugh Walpole https://bookshop.org/a/118698/9789361471872

French Republican Calendar Day Name (22 Nivôse): Salt

Bummer January 11

January 11, 1879: The Birmingham Central Library in England catches fire and loses about 49,000 of its 50,000 books and other circulating materials.

January 11, 1979: Louisiana State University student Bruce Wiseman is struck by a car and killed while being guided, blindfolded, across a street by members of the Theta Xi fraternity as part of a hazing ritual. To their credit, the fraternity members did attempt to get Wiseman out of harm’s way in time. Two others suffer broken bones.

January 11, 2020: Officials in Wuhan, China, announce the first recorded human death from the COVID-19 virus.

January 11, 2024: Ballet dancer Órla Baxendale, age 25, dies of a severe allergic reaction. Baxendale eats a vanilla Florentine cookie made by the Cookies United company and sold at a Stew Leonard’s grocery store. The box the cookies came in didn’t list peanuts as an ingredient. Baxendale was allergic to nuts and carried an Epipen in case of allergic reaction. Sadly, in this case, even though she receives the epinephrine injection in time, her body’s reaction is too severe for this to work.

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Almanac for January 10th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 10: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-10-O5O1ZOED8

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann https://amzn.to/4aTuPl4 (affiliate link)

Bummer January 10th

January 10, 1860: Pemberton Mill, a factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts, collapses. An unknown number of factory workers, many of them young women, are killed in the tragedy. Their number is estimated to be between 88 and 145 people.

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Almanac for January 9th

Erin O'Riordan's almanac for January 9: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-9th-U6U8Z4TVA

Beatles Trivia

January 9, 1968: Look Magazine publishes Richard Avedon’s photographs of The Beatles.

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Simone de Beauvoir

Bummer January 9

January 9, 1927: A crowd of about 250 people, many of them unaccompanied children, watches an afternoon comedy at the Laurier Palace movie theater in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. A discarded cigarette sparks a fire. In the ensuing fire and stampede to exit the theater, 78 children are killed.

January 9, 1946: Poet Countee Cullen dies at age 42 of high blood pressure and uremic poisoning (kidney failure).

Countee Cullen

January 9, 1953: Marguerite Pitre is executed by hanging, the last woman in Canada to be subjected to the death penalty. She’s been convicted of conspiring to blow up an airplane with dynamite, resulting in 23 fatalities.

January 9, 2015: About 230 attendees at a funeral in Tete Province, Mozambique, drink home-brewed pombe beer, a traditional beer variety brewed with Schizosaccharomyces pombe yeast, from a drink stand. They become ill and 75 of them die, including the woman who owns the drink stand. The beer has accidentally been contaminated with Burkholderia gladioli bacteria, which produces deadly bongkrekic acid in the beer batch.

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