Archive for February, 2007

On Feb­ru­ary 18, 1930, a Guernsey cow from Bis­marck, Mis­souri named Elm Farm Ollie¹ became the first cow in his­tory to fly in an air­plane as part of the Inter­na­tional Air Expo­si­tion in St. Louis, Mis­souri. The trip cov­ered 72 miles, with Ollie tak­ing off from Bis­marck, Mis­souri, and land­ing in St. Louis, Mis­souri. Dur­ing the flight she was milked, also mak­ing her the first cow ever milked in the air.

She pro­duced 24 quarts of milk dur­ing the flight, which was sealed into paper car­tons and para­chuted to spec­ta­tors below. Charles Lind­bergh report­edly received a glass of Ollie’s milk.

1. The info for this post came from the super-duper Wikipedia. [↩]

The First Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress did a few things, like draft the Arti­cles of Asso­ci­a­tion¹ and to pro­vide for a Sec­ond Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress to meet on May 10, 1775, but the big news from the Sec­ond Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress was that they began debat­ing a res­o­lu­tion in favor of inde­pen­dence, which was approved on July 2, 1776 and signed 2 days later. Big news indeed.

And yeah, you know some of these men, but what about the other men? Here they are, the mem­bers of the Sec­ond Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress -²

From New Cas­tle, Kent, and Sus­sex, on Delaware
George Read
Cae­sar Rod­ney
Thomas McKean

From the Province of Penn­syl­va­nia
George Cly­mer
Ben­jamin Franklin
Robert Mor­ris
John Mor­ton
Ben­jamin Rush
George Ross
James Smith
James Wil­son
George Taylor

From the Province of Mass­a­chu­setts Bay
John Adams
Samuel Adams
John Han­cock
Robert Treat Paine
Elbridge Gerry

From the Province of New Hamp­shire
Josiah Bartlett
William Whip­ple
Matthew Thornton

From the Colony of Rhode Island and Prov­i­dence Plan­ta­tions
Stephen Hop­kins
William Ellery

From the Province of New York
Lewis Mor­ris
Philip Liv­ingston
Fran­cis Lewis
William Floyd

From the Province of Geor­gia
But­ton Gwin­nett
Lyman Hall
George Walton

From the Colony and Domin­ion of Vir­ginia
Richard Henry Lee
Fran­cis Light­foot Lee
Carter Brax­ton
Ben­jamin Har­ri­son
Thomas Jef­fer­son
George Wythe
Thomas Nel­son, Jr.

From the Province of North Car­olina
William Hooper
John Penn
Joseph Hewes

From the Province of South Car­olina
Edward Rut­ledge
Arthur Mid­dle­ton
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Thomas Hey­ward, Jr.

From the Province of New Jer­sey
Abra­ham Clark
John Hart
Fran­cis Hop­kin­son
Richard Stock­ton
John Witherspoon

From the Con­necti­cut Colony
Samuel Hunt­ing­ton
Roger Sher­man
William Williams
Oliver Wol­cott
From Mary­land
Charles Car­roll
Samuel Chase
Thomas Stone
William Paca

1. The Arti­cles of Asso­ci­a­tion were peti­tions of griev­ances against Great Britain by the Thir­teen Colonies and a com­pact among them to col­lec­tively impose eco­nomic sanc­tions to pres­sure a res­o­lu­tion. The Arti­cles were drafted by the First Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress in 1774 and were an impor­tant for­ma­tive doc­u­ment in the his­tory of the United States that per­haps has­tened the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, though they were intended instead to alter Britain’s poli­cies towards the colonies with­out sev­er­ing alle­giance. [↩]
2. The list of these men can be found pretty much any­where on the Inter­net, but my list came from ushistory.org. [↩]

The Wil­helm Gust­loff, a KdF¹ cruise ship pressed into ser­vice to aide the Ger­man war effort, was prepar­ing to leave the port of Gdy­nia². Loaded with upwards of 10,000 peo­ple aboard, it was tor­pe­doed by the Soviet sub­ma­rine S-13 on Jan­u­ary 30th, 1945.Germany and the Soviet Union were the bit­ter­est of ene­mies. Do any amount of research into Ger­man POWs in the hands of Sovi­ets and the Ger­mans will gladly say that they would have done almost any­thing to be a pris­oner of the Amer­i­cans or British. The Sovi­ets took a par­tic­u­lar plea­sure in their hatred of Ger­mans, dol­ing out vengeance with lit­tle thought. Stalin felt that because of the hor­rors that Ger­many had brought upon the Soviet peo­ple, it was not sur­pris­ing, and accept­able, for the Red Army to behave as they did toward the Ger­man people.

Against the back­drop of this knowl­edge, Ger­mans were flee­ing the advanc­ing Soviet army as fast as they could. The Wil­helm Gust­loff was there in Gdy­nia to help with the evac­u­a­tion as part of Oper­a­tion Han­ni­bal.³ Com­manded by Friedrich Petersen, the Wil­helm Gust­loff began tak­ing refugees aboard on Jan­u­ary 28, 1945, with a launch time 48 hours from then. After launch they were to head to Kiel.⁴

Armed guards allowed pas­sen­gers on in an orderly fash­ion, even though panic had taken over the har­bor. The mob mainly con­sisted of women, chil­dren and old men, as the SS was comb­ing the crowd for men to fight the advanc­ing Red Army. As the 30th approaches the throng became more pan­icked, moth­ers and chil­dren became sep­a­rated, shov­ing caused some to fall over­board into the icy waters below, hys­te­ria was set­ting in as the last remain­ing avenues of escape dried up.

At around 12:30 pm, the Wil­helm Gust­loff weighed anchor and left Gdy­nia with their escort, a small tor­pedo boat, the Löwe. The sail­ing was any­thing but smooth. Rough seas, snow and hail pelted the ship, while on the bridge the crew debated the best course of action to take. Route, opti­mal speed and whether the Gust­loff should be fol­low­ing a zigzag course to avoid detec­tion were all top­ics of dis­cus­sion. Shortly after 6 pm the crew was alerted that con­voy of minesweep­ers was approach­ing them from the oppo­site direc­tion. In order to avoid a col­li­sion, shouldn’t the ships run­ning lights be turned on? The deci­sion, which would prove fatal, was that they should.

Near 8 pm that night the crew of the Soviet sub­ma­rine S-13 spot­ted the lights of the Wil­helm Gust­loff. Cap­tain Alexan­der Mari­nesko gath­ered his offi­cers together and for­mu­lated their plan off attack on the huge ship. Because of ice, the Löwe’s anti-submarine sonar was dis­abled, forc­ing look­outs on both ships to rely on sight to spot sub­marines, which allowed the S-13 to get in close to both ships. Shortly after 9 pm Cap­tain Mari­nesko orders 4 tor­pe­does to be launched at the Wil­helm Gust­loff (only 3 worked prop­erly), each hit­ting the star­board side of the cruise ship. Pas­sen­gers were caught off guard, as most believed that the worst of their jour­ney had passed.

The 3 tor­pe­does had hit the front of the ship, mid­ship where the swim­ming pool was, and the rear of the boat near the engine room, knock­ing out all power on board the ship. Because of this the radio room oper­a­tor had to use an emer­gency trans­mit­ter to trans­mit the SOS dis­tress sig­nal. Com­plete chaos ensued as the ship descended into anar­chy. An hour and 10 min­utes after the first tor­pedo hit at 9:16 pm, the Wil­helm Gust­loff slipped beneath the waves of the Baltic, tak­ing thou­sands of peo­ple with it. Some sur­vivors flailed in the icy water attempt­ing to climb into life boats, only to be beaten back by those occu­py­ing them.

The Löwe was able to pick up 472 pas­sen­gers from the water, while another tor­pedo boat, the T-36, was able to pick up 564. The minesweep­ers which were feared to cause a col­li­sion arrived and picked up an addi­tional 179 peo­ple from the water, even­tu­ally bring­ing the com­bined total of res­cued to approx­i­mately 1,230. All in all, 9,500 peo­ple would per­ish in the sink­ing, mak­ing the sink­ing of the Wil­helm Gust­loff the worst mar­itime dis­as­ter in his­tory.⁵

1. Kraft durch Freude (KdF, lit­er­ally “Strength Through Joy”) was a large state-controlled leisure orga­ni­za­tion in the Third Reich, a part of the Ger­man Labour Front, the national Ger­man labor orga­ni­za­tion. [↩]
2. Gdy­nia was a city located in the state of Kashu­bia in East­ern Pomera­nia, a coun­try that no longer exists. It was incor­po­rated into Poland fol­low­ing the Sec­ond World War. [↩]
3. Oper­a­tion Han­ni­bal was a Ger­man mil­i­tary oper­a­tion involv­ing the with­drawal of Ger­man troops and civil­ians from East Prus­sia in mid-January 1945 as the invad­ing Soviet Army advanced. It became the most suc­cess­ful wartime evac­u­a­tion in his­tory, respon­si­ble for trans­port­ing 2 mil­lion Ger­mans safely to the West. [↩]
4. A city in north­ern Ger­many on the Baltic Sea. [↩]
5. Most of the infor­ma­tion for this piece came from the amaz­ingly thor­ough web­site wilhelmgustloff.com. [↩]

Bessie Cole­man, one of 10 kids that were born to George and Susan Cole­man, was born on Jan­u­ary 26, 1892, in the far east Texas town of Atlanta. George and Susan made ends meet by share­crop­ping, wash­ing laun­dry and cook­ing for white fam­i­lies. Grow­ing up Bessie was an excel­lent stu­dent, where she excelled at math and read­ing. She would com­plete school all the way up to eighth grade, and all of it done in a one room schoolhouse.

George moved the fam­ily to Wax­a­hachie for work rea­sons, but he left the fam­ily there and moved back to Okla­homa, once again in a quest to find bet­ter work. The inter­est­ing thing about this is that Susan and the chil­dren did not go with him. The fam­ily con­tin­ued to pick cot­ton to feed themselves.

Dur­ing all of this Bessie believed that she was des­tined for greater things than liv­ing out a mea­ger exis­tence. Try­ing to get out of the sit­u­a­tion she was in, she saved all the money she could and attended a year at the Okla­homa Col­ored Agri­cul­tural and Nor­mal Uni­ver­sity in Langston, Okla­homa. The prob­lem was that her money ran out after that amount of time and she had to go leave school. She returned home.

At the age of 23 she moved to Chicago and lived with some of her broth­ers who were liv­ing there at the time. She worked at a super­mar­ket and as a man­i­curist, but she dreamed of fly­ing. Orville and Wilbur Wright had flown their Wright Flyer in 1903, and Bessie wanted to do the same. She heard sto­ries from men return­ing from The Great War about fly­ing over the bat­tle­fields of France and they fas­ci­nated her.

With some finan­cial back­ing, she took classes in French and then in 1920 trav­eled to Paris to attend the Fed­er­a­tion Aero­nau­tique Inter­na­tionale. She’d had to travel that far to learn to fly, because Amer­i­can flight schools would not allow blacks to enroll. By 1921, after train­ing, she was the only black pilot in the world.

She became a role model, not just for black women, but peo­ple of all races, for she had over­come great obsta­cles and ful­filled her dreams. Sadly, her dream came to an end on April 30, 1926 in Jack­sonville, Florida when she crashed in the first plane she had ever owned.

She and her mechanic had taken the new plane out for a test flight. Dur­ing the flight the mechanic, who was pilot­ing the plane, expe­ri­enced engine trou­ble and lost con­trol of the air­craft. Bessie fell out of the open cock­pit of the plane and plum­meted sev­eral hun­dred feet to her death.

More than 5,000 peo­ple attended her memo­r­ial ser­vices in Chicago and another 10,000 filed past her cof­fin to pay their last respects. She gar­nered much atten­tion even in death, but she will always be the first black woman pilot.¹

1. Infor­ma­tion for this piece came from Texas Escapes and BessieColeman.com. [↩]