Archive for January, 2007

Den­nis Wil­son, brother of Brian Wil­son and drum­mer for the Beach Boys, was dri­ving through Mal­ibu in 1968 when he noticed a cou­ple of girls hitch­hik­ing on the side of the road. He picked up the girls, Ella Jo Bai­ley and Patri­cia Kren­winkel¹ and took them where they asked him. He saw them hitch­hik­ing again later on and picked them up again, this time tak­ing them to his home.

Den­nis lived on Sun­set Blvd in a house for­merly occu­pied by Will Rogers, and he left Ella Jo and Patri­cia there while he went to a record­ing ses­sion. Upon return­ing home at 3 am, a man appeared at the back door of Den­nis’ house.

Den­nis, fright­ened, asked the man, “Are you going to hurt me?”

The man replied, “Do I look like I’m going to hurt you, brother?” and he dropped to his knees and kissed Den­nis’ feet. He invited Den­nis into his own house where about a dozen unin­vited house guests, nearly all of them girls, were gathered.

The man was Charles Man­son, and he and Den­nis got along great. He and Man­son would sing and talk about impor­tant things, while the girls cleaned house, cooked, and catered to their needs. Man­son liked to write music, even though Den­nis said he was not musi­cally gifted, and Den­nis intro­duced Man­son around town to var­i­ous peo­ple in the enter­tain­ment industry.

The Beach Boys even­tu­ally went on to record one of Manson’s songs, reti­tled from its orig­i­nal name “Cease To Exist” to become “Never Learn Not To Love” from the 1969 album 20/20.²

1. From Vin­cent Bugliosi’s Hel­ter Skel­ter. [↩]
2. The rest of this piece was parsed together from the always excel­lent Answers.com web­site. [↩]

On Jan­u­ary 12, 1967, in Glen­dale, CA, Dr. James Bed­ford, a 73-year old retired psy­chol­ogy pro­fes­sor and writer, was the first per­son to undergo cry­onic sus­pen­sion¹. Bed­ford had been diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal renal can­cer and had decided that he wished to be cry­on­i­cally frozen in the hopes that he would later be able to be revived and cured of his ail­ment. At the time, Bed­ford paid out $4200 for a steel cap­sule and liq­uid nitro­gen to keep his body frozen at about 328°F. He cur­rently resides at Alcor Life Exten­sion Foundation’s facil­ity in Scotts­dale, Ari­zona.²

1. Cry­onic sus­pen­sion, most com­monly, but incor­rectly, called cryo­gen­ics, is the process where a sub­ject is flash frozen to the boil­ing point of liq­uid nitro­gen, or –320.5°F. [↩]
2. Large por­tions of this story came from Time Mag­a­zine, Feb. 3, 1967. [↩]

When the Man­hat­tan Engi­neer­ing Dis­trict, also known as the Man­hat­tan Project, was first con­ceived in 1941 out of the fear that the Allies were in a race with Ger­many to cre­ate the world’s first atomic fis­sion bomb. It went down in his­tory that the efforts of the Amer­i­can team beat out the Ger­man team and, in an effort to end the war early with­out hav­ing to enact Oper­a­tion Down­fall¹, Pres­i­dent Harry S. Tru­man autho­rized the drop­ping of two atomic bombs on the Japan­ese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By this point, of course, the Nazis had been defeated by the Allied forces in Europe, negat­ing the need for the Allies to bomb Berlin, much else any Ger­man city. But that hadn’t stopped Nazi physi­cists from pon­der­ing how a nuclear device might be deliv­ered to either New York or Lon­don. The dia­gram at right shows an idea for this.

While far away from the ideal nuclear bomb even­tu­ally deliv­ered by the Man­hat­tan Project, Nazi physi­cists believed that if they could con­struct a small low-level nuclear device and com­bine it with a rocket (prob­a­bly a V-2) that the Axis pow­ers could deliver their nuclear pay­load to Lon­don. Nat­u­rally a larger rocket would have to be con­structed if this type of sce­nario were to befall New York, but the war ended before the pos­si­bil­ity could even be envi­sioned.²

1. Oper­a­tion Down­fall con­sisted of 2 planned inva­sions ; Oper­a­tion Olympic, sched­uled for Novem­ber 1, 1945, was the planned inva­sion of Kyushu, and Oper­a­tion Coro­net, sched­uled for March 1, 1946, would have put Allied forces on the Kanto plain near Tokyo. [↩]
2. A large por­tion of info for this piece came from the BBC. [↩]