Evel Knievel passed away today. He made quite an impact on us kids in the 70’s. Soon after we moved from California, we were eating dinner at Topinka’s, a long-closed restaurant at Seven Mile & Telegraph roads. It was September 8th, 1974, and Evel was attempting to jump the Snake River Canyon in Idaho. I just remember asking the waiter if he made it or not. I’ll never forget that.
Archive for November, 2007
One of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century may finally be solved.
The last Russian Imperial Family - Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia, and son Aleksei, were executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries. On July 17, 1918, the Romanov family was lined up, believing they were posing for a photo, in the basement of the house they were being held. They were then brutally shot and stabbed.
The remains of the family, with the exception of two of the children, were found in 1991. The bodies of Aleksei and one of the daughters, were not found. Because of this, there was speculation that the two may have survived. In fact since the killings in 1918, people from all over the world have claimed to be a Romanov survivor. The most famous was a woman named Anna Anderson. She died insisting that she was the real Anastasia, even though DNA evidence had dis-proven her claim.
So, 90 years after the brutal slayings, a group of amateur sleuths, working on their weekends, have seemingly solved the mystery. They analyzed secret reports in Soviet-era archives and came across a single phrase that gave a clue as two where the two bodies were buried.
The chief executioner, Yakov Yurovsky, said he had buried two corpses separately from the other nine bodies. People had searched the area where the other bodies were initially dug up, but didn’t find the missing two.
The sleuths focused on a Russian phrase Yurovsky used - “tut zhe,” which can mean “nearby.” It was originally translated a “right here”, meaning it was next to the others.
They figured out that this translation meant the two bodies were near the other graves, but not with them. Below a cover of trees, about 70 yards from where the others were buried, they found the final two Romanov bodies, believed to be Prince Aleksei and a sister. The sister is believed to be Maria, though that is not entirely clear.
Scientists in Russia and the US are DNA testing the newly discovered remains.
As Oklahoma celebrated its 50th anniversary of statehood in 1957, the city of Tulsa commemorated the occasion by sealing a gold and white 1957 Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe in a watertight concrete vault under the lawn of the Tulsa County Courthouse. The car would be unearthed 5o years later, in 2007.
Among the items included with the car were 10 gallons of gas, motor oil, a case of beer. A metal time capsule contained an American flag, savings account passbook, a bumper sticker, and other documents. Also, the Belvedere’s glove compartment was stocked with the contents of a typical woman’s handbag including, a bottle of tranquilizers, 14 bobby pins, a compact, a package of cigarettes, matches, two combs, and unpaid parking ticket, a tube of lipstick, a package of gum, a plastic rain hat, facial tissues and $2.73.
Townspeople were asked to submit guesses as to what the population of Tulsa would be in 2007. The winner would receive the mint condition 1957 Plymouth Belvedere!
Well, the day of the unearthing arrived on June 15th, 2007. The crowd anxiously gathered in anticipation. As workers removed the huge concrete cover of the vault (it was built to withstand a nuclear attack), they found about 2 feet of standing water and indications that, at times, it may have been filled to the rim. The Belvedere remained encased in its supposedly water-tight material. But the material was no longer sealed well, and what showed of the car was a hint of what was to come. It was lifted out of the vault with a crane, loaded on a trailer and driven to the Tulsa Convention Center to be unveiled that evening.
Instead of a pristine car, what the townspeople saw was a lot of rust. After 50 years of sitting in various levels of water, some of the tires were flat, the upholstery disintegrated and the engine a very large doorstop. Unfortunately, many of the artifacts were unrecoverable except for two glass jugs of gasoline, a cigarette lighter and some thickly encrusted cans of Schlitz beer.
But, the story didn’t end there. The winner of the guessing contest, Raymond Humbertson, passed away in 1979, and his wife in 1988. The couple had no children. After some debate, the car was awarded to his sister. And what about the Belvedere? It’s headed for New Jersey, to a rust remover company. The company says it can remove the corrosion while leaving the metal unharmed. It also leaves rubber, plastic, seals, and most paints untouched. So, stay tuned for further updates!
Flickr user milesj has a large gallery that chronicles the unearthing of the Belvedere.
I am a direct descendant of William Bradford, a leader of the Pilgrim settlers, who crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620. He was Plymouth Colony’s longest serving governor. In learning more about him and his fellow settlers, I’ve come across many “facts” and stories about the Pilgrims that aren’t as accurate as we may have thought. As we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States, I hope you find some of them interesting.
Myth - Pilgrims Dressed in Black and Wore Big Buckles
Not only did they not dress in black, they did not wear those funny buckles, weird shoes, or black steeple hats. Inventories of Pilgrim’s estates show items such as red waistcoats, green gowns, violet cloaks, red caps, and a violet coats. Black and white clothing was usually worn on Sundays and formal occasions. Buckles came into fashion in the late 1600’s, and the blunderbuss gun, which is often depicted, was mainly used to control crowds. It wasn’t a hunting rifle.
Myth – The Pilgrims Landed on Plymouth Rock
According to the Pilgrim Hall Museum:
“There are no contemporary references to the Pilgrims’ landing on a rock at Plymouth. There are two primary sources written by the Pilgrims themselves describing the landing in Plymouth in 1620, William Bradford’s journal Of Plymouth Plantation and the 1622 book popularly known as Mourt’s Relation. Both simply say that the Pilgrims landed. Neither mentions any rocks in their account of the landing. The first references to Plymouth Rock are found over 100 years after the actual landing.”
There is very little factual data that supports the story that Plymouth Rock was the spot on which the Mayflower passengers set foot in Plymouth. There is one slender thread which, cannot entirely be dismissed. In 1741, a ninety-five year old man asked to be taken for what he thought might be his last look at a specific granite boulder on the beach in Plymouth. Before a small gathering of people, he identified a rock, directly below Cole’s Hill, as that which was the very spot “which had received the footsteps of our fathers on their first arrival.” He had been told this by his father.
In actuality, Plymouth was not the first spot the Pilgrims went ashore. They first stepped foot on land at the tip of Cape Cod. In 1620, they signed the Mayflower Compact in Provincetown harbor, agreeing to settle and build a self-governing community, and then came ashore on the west end. Although the Pilgrims did not start their colony at Provincetown, they remained in its harbor and explored its shore for a month before moving on to Plymouth.
Myth - The Mayflower Passengers Were Mostly Old Men
The oldest Mayflower passenger was 57. Only five of the 104 passengers were over 50, and only fourteen were over 40. About 60 passengers were between 20 and 40 years old, with an average age of about 32. At least 30 were under the age of 17. As for a gender breakdown, there were 51 men, 22 boys, 20 women, and 11 girls. The oldest Mayflower passenger still alive to partake in the first thanksgiving was William Brewster, at the age of 54. William Bradford was only 31.
Myth - The Mayflower Passengers were Puritans
Puritans wanted to purify the Church of England, while Separatists wanted to separate entirely from it. Mayflower passengers (those belonging to the Pilgrim’s church) are properly classified as Separatists. Some Pilgrims (”strangers”) came to America in search of riches, others (”saints”) came for religious reasons.
Puritans came to America starting in about 1629, and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony under the leadership of Governor John Winthrop. They came strictly in search of religious freedom. After the English civil war, Puritan and Pilgrim-Separatist movements became indistinguishable, though they and their descendants tended to keep to separate Colonies even into the 1690s, primarily because of differing Church-State views rather than differing religious views.
Myth - The Pilgrims Were Celebrating a Great Harvest
Actually, the harvest of 1621, wasn’t great at all. The barley, wheat, and peas the Pilgrims brought with them from England had failed. Fortunately, the corn did well enough that they were able to double their weekly food rations. The Pilgrims were very happy to be alive. 47 of them died the previous winter - almost half of their colony.
Myth - The Pilgrims Ate Turkey
So how close was the Pilgrims’ thanksgiving feast to ours? They didn’t have corn on the cob, apples, pears, potatoes or even cranberries. No one knows if they had turkey, although they were used to eating turkey. The only food we know they had for sure was deer, but they also probably ate beans, squash, corn and fish. (And they didn’t eat with a fork - they didn’t have forks back then.)
Myth - The Pilgrims Watched Football
Even though they were in a celebratory mood, do you think they could handle watching the Lions? 
The first official Thanksgiving Proclamation made in America was issued by the Continental Congress in 1777. Six national Proclamations of Thanksgiving were issued in the first 30 years. President George Washington issued two, President John Adams issued two and President James Madison issued two. After 1815, no more Thanksgiving Proclamations were issued until the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.
President Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a Federal holiday as a “prayerful day of Thanksgiving” on the last Thursday in November. President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the date for Thanksgiving to the fourth Thursday of November in 1939.
The Pilgrims, incidentally, didn’t become part of the holiday until late in the nineteenth century. Until then, Thanksgiving was simply a day of thanks, not a day to remember the Pilgrims.
Happy Thanksgiving!
For those of you who haven’t seen Oscar in a while, here he is. I bought him last year around Labor Day. He was only about an inch long at the time, but now he’s close to 9″. I feed him mostly commercial pellet food, but he also nibbles on raw fish, lettuce, earthworms, beefheart and brine shrimp. He always seems to be hungry.
He also has quite a personality. If I’m rearranging things in his tank, he’ll lay on his side on the bottom. I think he’s sulking! He recognizes us when we come near, but cowers when strangers come close. At feeding time, if he’s really hungry, he jumps up to my hand above the water. His head comes about 3″ out of the water. Of course, when he comes down, he splashes on the couch, the wall, the window…
Oscar’s latin name is Astronotus ocellatus. He is a South American Cichlid and is native to Peru, Colombia, Brazil and French Guiana, living in the Amazon river basin. In the wild they can grow up to 18″! They are often found for sale as a food fish in the local markets.
A North Carolina mother gave birth to twins early Sunday morning on November 6th. Sounds pretty normal. But it happened right around the time Daylight Savings Time was ending. The first twin, Peter, was born at 1:32 a.m. Thirty four minutes later, Allison was born. But, because the clocks moved back an hour, Allison’s time of birth was officially 1:06 a.m. So, she is 26 minutes older than Peter, even though he was born first!
Here’s the link to the full story.
On November 10, 1975, the bulk lake freighter S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a violent storm on Lake Superior. With a length of 729 feet, she was the largest boat on the Great Lakes when built in 1958.
The Fitzgerald left Superior, WI on November 9th with a cargo of 26,116 tons of taconite pellets. She headed for a steel mill on Zug Island located at the mouth of the Rouge River just south of Detroit, MI. About 17 miles north of Whitefish Point, the captain radioed that they were taking on water. She was listing to port and had two of three ballast pumps working. She had also lost her radar. All 29 officers and crew went down with the ship, which lies broken in two sections in 530 feet of water. There is still controversy as to how the Fitzgerald actually sank.
I’ve seen the Fitzgerald’s two lifeboats and other artifacts aboard the Museum Ship Valley Camp in Sault Ste. Marie, MI.
In 1976, Canadian Gordon Lightfoot recorded the song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald“, commemorating the events surrounding the sinking of the ship.
Joseph Fulton put together this video tribute to those who died:
A 90 ft. church tower in the Northern Germany village of Suurhusen, has been officially recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most lopsided building. It bumped the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of the top spot. The church was built in the middle 13th century and the tower was added in 1450. The tower was build on a wooden foundation and that, in combination with wet soil, causes it to lean 5.19 degrees. In comparison, the Tower of Pisa leans 3.97 degrees.
The tower was stabilized in 1996 to keep it from leaning more. The church is still in use, but because of the perceived danger of the tower falling over, church services are held only on occasions such as Christmas or Easter.
FamilySearch, the family history arm of the LDS Church is undertaking an ambitious project of digitizing their entire microfilmed collection of family history records. They have more than 2.3 million rolls of microfilm, which is equivalent to about 6 million 300-page books.
These records are held in their Granite Mountain Record Vault, located twenty miles southeast of downtown Salt Lake City, Utah. It was constructed between 1958 and 1963 and reaches 600 feet into the north side of Little Cottonwood Canyon. Specially constructed fourteen ton doors at the main entrance are designed to withstand a nuclear blast. In the storage chambers, nature maintains constant humidity and temperatures optimum for microfilm storage.
The first part of this project is called Scanstone. It’s a system to rapidly create digital images of the microfilm records. They will be able to convert 370,000 rolls of film per year and could have the digitizing project completed by 2012. You can read more about the technicalities of the scanning process here.
The second part of this project is to index these scans so that anyone can search them online at FamilySearch.org. The LDS Church is recruiting thousands of volunteers to complete the indexing project. If you would like to volunteer, go to www.familysearchindexing.org. Once you register, you download their special software and then choose from a group of projects to work on. The project images are then downloaded to your computer. You transcribe the information and then upload it back to their site. The types of images include censuses and birth and death records from various states.
I’ve been helping to index for the past year. It takes about twenty minutes to complete a project. If you have some free time and want to contribute to making these important documents public, give it a try!