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We thought it would be pretty cool to go to Wash­ing­ton, D.C. for the Fourth of July, 1999. As you know it was the turn of the mil­len­nium (yes, I know that Jan. 1, 2001, was the actual turn of the mil­len­nium, so don’t write me about that) and they were going to have an amaz­ing fire­works dis­play. We’d also hit var­i­ous Smith­son­ian build­ings and try to get to the Cap­i­tal Build­ing too. Fun for all.

Kim’s cousin Karen lived a cou­ple hours south of D.C. in north­ern Vir­ginia, so in late June we flew up there to visit for a cou­ple of days. We would rent a car and drive into D.C. on the Fourth and too­dle around. I thought we was pre­pared, but noth­ing pre­pared us for the heat and humidity.

I used to watch David Let­ter­man and hear him com­plain that the ther­mo­stat got up to 92 degrees that day in New York City and I’d just shake my head. “How can these peo­ple not sur­vive 92 freak­ing degree heat? I’m a Texan! We deal with 192 degree heat every sum­mer!” My father told me that the heat there was dif­fer­ent; I scoffed. Texas heat is ter­ri­ble. I scoffed too soon, I think.

We drove to the Pen­ta­gon City mall (right across from the Pen­ta­gon, no less) and took the Metro blue line from there. The D.C. Metro is amaz­ing — clean, com­fort­able and quiet, it’s the com­plete antithe­sis to the New York City sub­way as I would find out a cou­ple years later. Nobody has­sling you, peo­ple not feign­ing sleep so peo­ple wouldn’t bother them, none of that, only quiet and clean. The Metro is the way all sub­way trains should be.

We stopped at the Smith­son­ian stop and climbed out of the under­ground and got hit by a hot blast of wind. Very hot wind, and it felt like you were swim­ming there was so much humid­ity. Instantly our clothes started stick­ing to us and the back­pack we’d brought with us caused my back to ooze sweat. It was not a good sign.

Kim had never been to the Lin­coln Memo­r­ial so we trekked down past the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment (which was closed) and walked past the reflect­ing pool. As we walked past, Tito Puente was play­ing at a band shell near the Mon­u­ment, a crowd gath­ered around. I’d for­got­ten how big the reflect­ing pool actu­ally was and it seemed like we walked for­ever. We finally got there, out of breath and red in the face and saw Lin­coln. Took some pic­tures, went past the Viet­nam wall and saw the Korean War memo­r­ial and then grabbed a tram to Arling­ton National Ceme­tery. Yes, there are Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War vet­er­ans and pres­i­dents buried there, but I was there to see the grave of Lee Mar­vin, who had served in the Marine Corps dur­ing World War II. We went and asked at the visitor’s cen­ter where he was located and after a lit­tle search­ing found him. He has a very sim­ple white mar­ble head­stone, very much unlike his neigh­bor, pro­fes­sional boxer Joe “The Brown Bomber” Louis, who had vol­un­teered for the Army, even after an amaz­ing career he’d already had. We went to the Tombs of the Unknowns and then headed back to the tram.

We hit the Air and Space Museum at that point and then started to stake out our turf. The Mall was crowded already with thou­sands of peo­ple and it was prob­a­bly 6 hours before the fire­works would begin. We’d been hot and mis­er­able most of the time we were there, but it was begin­ning to get to me. I was start­ing to say things like, “Let’s just go back to the car, I can’t take it any­more,” and other whinyisms, but Kim, the trooper she is, said that we hadn’t come all that way to give up. So we found an office build­ing that had an open lobby and camped out in the air con­di­tion­ing for sev­eral hours. It was heavenly.

When the fire­works started many hours later, we were just east of 14th Street. Right across the street was a huge line of port-a-potties, with a line of peo­ple wait­ing to go them stretch­ing sev­eral hun­dred feet. With the amount of sweat­ing Kim and I had been doing we couldn’t see how any­body would even need to pee in this heat.

The fire­works were amaz­ing, like noth­ing I’d ever seen before or since. I would think that that much ord­nance was not even expelled on D-Day. The sky was full of rock­ets, light and sound. We were so close to the actual launch site that the boom­ing of each rocket was almost simul­ta­ne­ous with its explo­sion. It was pretty incredible.

After­wards, we headed back to the Metro stop, along with about 10,000 peo­ple. The heat had been bad, but cram 10,000 peo­ple together try­ing to go down a flight of stairs and you learn a new def­i­n­i­tion of hideous. It was claus­tro­pho­bia inducing.

Despite the dis­com­fort, we’d had a great time. Lots of fun. Every­one should go to D.C. for at least one Fourth of July.

It was 1814, and the United States and Great Britain had been at war for two years. The city of Bal­ti­more had been prepar­ing for an even­tual attack, but sit­ting in the way of the British was Major George Armis­tead, com­man­der of Fort McHenry¹ and his bunkered forces in Chesa­peake Bay. Know­ing that an attack would come from the sea, Major Armis­tead com­mis­sioned Mary Young Pick­ers­gill, a local Bal­ti­more flag maker, to sew a flag for the fort “so large that the British will have no dif­fi­culty see­ing it from a distance.”

Pick­ers­gill had learned flag mak­ing from her mother, Rebecca Young, who made ensigns² and con­ti­nen­tal stan­dards dur­ing and after Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. After mar­ry­ing and mov­ing to Philadel­phia, Mary returned to Bal­ti­more, wid­owed and with a small child. She estab­lished a flag-making busi­ness out of her home. Through her trade she sup­ported her fam­ily by design­ing, sewing, and sell­ing “silk stan­dards, cav­alry and divi­sion colours of every descrip­tion.” She cre­ated sig­nal and house flags for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and mer­chant ships that vis­ited Baltimore’s harbor.

When asked by Major Armis­tead to sew the flag, she cre­ated in just 6 weeks an Amer­i­can flag mea­sur­ing 30x42 feet with the help of her daugh­ter, two nieces, and two ser­vants. Each stripe was two feet wide and each star was two feet from tip to tip. As a result the flag could be seen from sev­eral miles away from the fort.

When the British attacked Bal­ti­more, Fran­cis Scott Key, a lawyer aboard the British ship HMS Ton­nant, saw Pickersgill’s flag while he was held cap­tive and was inspired to com­pose the poem that became the national anthem of the United States. Pickersgill’s flag, being restored, is the cen­ter­piece of the redesigned National Museum of Amer­i­can His­tory at the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion.³

1. Named after James McHenry, a Scotch-Irish immi­grant and surgeon-soldier who became Sec­re­tary of War under Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton, Fort McHenry was built to defend the port of Bal­ti­more from future enemy attacks after Amer­ica had won its inde­pen­dence. It was posi­tioned on the Locust Point penin­sula which juts into the open­ing of Bal­ti­more Har­bor, and was con­structed in the form of a five-pointed star sur­rounded by a dry moat. [↩]
2. An ensign is a dis­tin­guish­ing flag of a ship or a mil­i­tary unit, or a dis­tin­guish­ing token, emblem, or badge, such as a sym­bol of office. [↩]
3. The mate­r­ial for this piece came from the Mary­land Women’s Hall of Fame and Wikipedia. [↩]

Bwana Devil, a 1952 film writ­ten, directed, and pro­duced by Arch Oboler, is con­sid­ered to be the first color, Amer­i­can 3-D fea­ture film. It starred Robert Stack (of “Unsolved Mys­ter­ies” fame), Bar­bara Brit­ton, and Nigel Bruce. And on top of all that it started the 3-D film boom!

Some legacy, huh?

Screen writer Mil­ton Gun­zburg and his brother Julian thought they had a solu­tion for the declin­ing atten­dance with their Nat­ural Vision 3-D¹ film process. They tried to shop it around Hol­ly­wood, but no one really had any inter­est. Colum­bia and Para­mount passed on Gunzberg’s pitch. 20th Cen­tury Fox intro­duc­ing Cin­e­maS­cope and weren’t inter­ested in throw­ing another view­ing expe­ri­ence into the mix . Only one man, John Arnold, who headed the MGM cam­era depart­ment, liked it enough to con­vince his bosses to pur­chase an option on the tech­nol­ogy, but they let their option lapse.

To the Gun­zbergs, it appeared that the Nat­ural Vision tech­nique of film­ing was doomed and they were back to square one until a man named Arch Oboler wanted a meet­ing with the them. Oboler, pro­ducer and writer of the pop­u­lar radio show, Lights Out², was impressed enough to option it for his next film, The Lions of Gulu.

The film was based on a well-known event at the time, the killing of more than 120 work­ers build­ing the Uganda Rail­way for the British at the turn of the cen­tury. The inci­dent was also the basis for “The Man-eaters of Tsavo”, a story writ­ten in 1907 by J.H. Pat­ter­son, the hunter who tracked and killed the animals.

Bwana Devil pre­miered on Novem­ber 26, 1952 at the Para­mount The­atres in Hol­ly­wood and Los Ange­les, CA. The crit­ics hated it but it was a smash with audi­ences. Local pre­mieres fol­lowed in San Fran­cisco on Decem­ber 13, Philadel­phia, Dal­las, Hous­ton and San Anto­nio open­ings on Decem­ber 25 and New York on Feb­ru­ary 18, 1953.

United Artists bought the rights to Bwana Devil from Oboler for $500,000 and a share of the prof­its put the film into wide release in March. After other stu­dios saw the big prof­its that UA was bring­ing in with Bwana Devil, other stu­dios raced to release their own 3-D films and a cool, albeit short lived, trend was begun.³

1. Nat­ural Vision 3-D is shot with a spe­cial cam­era rig com­prised of two cam­eras, pro­duc­ing a “left eye view” and a “right eye view.” The two result­ing film strips are put together to form one film strip. [↩]
2. Lights Out was a radio pro­gram fea­tur­ing “tales of the super­nat­ural and the super­nor­mal.” At the time it was immensely pop­u­lar, and was one of the first hor­ror pro­grams. [↩]
3. An expla­na­tion of the Nat­ural Vision 3-D process came from Dimen­sion 3 and the rest of the infor­ma­tion for this piece came from Wikipedia. [↩]

School­house Rock, the series of 41 car­toon shorts that used catchy tunes and rep­e­ti­tion to teach kids watch­ing Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons about math, Amer­i­can his­tory, gram­mar and sci­ence, began as a brain­storm of David McCall when, in 1971, he noticed that his son could sing pop­u­lar song lyrics but couldn’t han­dle sim­ple mul­ti­pli­ca­tion tables. His solu­tion was sim­ple: Cre­ate a catchy way to learn math by fus­ing it with con­tem­po­rary music and, he reck­oned, the kids would be able to mem­o­rize their math through songs.

McCall was chair­man of the New York ad agency McCaf­frey & McCall, and he put the prob­lem to his under­lings. They sug­gested he hire Bob Dor­ough, a Texas jazz musi­cian known for cre­at­ing catchy music to cre­ate the songs. Dor­ough was will­ing to give the idea a shot, and he plowed through his daughter’s math books, mak­ing up tunes on his piano until he’d cre­ated the trippy bal­lad “Three Is a Magic Number.”

McCall loved Dorough’s song, and the tune was even­tu­ally released as a record by Capi­tol Records under the title Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion Rock. A work­book deal fell through, but Tom Yohe, McCaf­frey & McCall’s cre­ative direc­tor, thought that the songs would go well with ani­ma­tion, so, after doo­dling some pic­tures, which McCall once again loved, they put together a 3 minute film to accom­pany “Three Is a Magic Num­ber”, which they showed to ABC’s head of children’s pro­gram­ming, Michael Eis­ner. Eis­ner was recep­tive to the idea and gave McCaf­frey & McCall the go ahead to cre­ate films for the rest of the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion tables. Gen­eral Mills was brought on as the sole spon­sor of School­house Rock.

Eis­ner also demanded that the big ani­ma­tion stu­dios of Hol­ly­wood that made their Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons cut 3 min­utes from each show so that the ani­mated shorts could be run. The stu­dios were not too eager to com­ply, but after prod­ding by Eis­ner that it made good busi­ness sense, the relented.

School­house Rock pre­miered on the week­end of Jan­u­ary 6–7, 1973, with the play list being “My Hero Zero,” “Ele­men­tary, My Dear,” “Three Is a Magic Num­ber” and “The Four-Legged Zoo.” The shorts were aired for 12 years, end­ing in 1985.¹

1. The infor­ma­tion for this piece came from the omnipresent Wikipedia and the totally great School House Rock Site. [↩]