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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. [↩]

You know sev­eral mem­bers of the First Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress from school — John Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, and George Wash­ing­ton. If you drink beer, you know another mem­ber — Samuel Adams. But there were more, 50 more.

The idea of a meet­ing such as this was floated a year ear­lier by Renais­sance man Ben­jamin Franklin, but it took the clos­ing of Boston Har­bor by the British and the fol­low­ing Boston Tea Party¹ to get the ball really rolling. The First Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress met in Philadelphia’s Car­pen­ters Hall on Sep­tem­ber 5, 1774. Of the 12 colonies, only 12 sent del­e­gates, as Geor­gia was beset by prob­lems with Indi­ans and needed help from the British mil­i­tary to put down the problems.

So…you know those few men that you had to know for school, but what about the other ones? Here they are from the First Con­ti­nen­tal Congress -

From the Province of New Hamp­shire
Nathaniel Folsom

From the Province of Mass­a­chu­setts Bay
John Adams
Samuel Adams
Thomas Cush­ing
Robert Treat Paine

From the Colony of Rhode Island and Prov­i­dence Plan­ta­tions
Stephen Hop­kins
Samuel Ward

From the Con­necti­cut Colony
Silas Deane
Eliphalet Dyer
Roger Sherman

From the Province of New York
John Alsop
James Duane
John Jay
Philip Liv­ingston
Isaac Low
County of Kings
Simon Boerum
County of Orange
John Har­ing
Henry Wis­ner
County of Suf­folk
William Floyd

From the Province of New Jer­sey
Stephen Crane
John De Hart
James Kin­sey
William Liv­ingston
Richard Smith

From the Province of Penn­syl­va­nia
Edward Bid­dle
John Dick­in­son
Joseph Gal­loway
Charles Humphreys
Thomas Mif­flin
John Mor­ton
Samuel Rhoads
George Ross

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

From Mary­land
Samuel Chase
Robert Golds­bor­ough
Thomas John­son
William Paca
Matthew Tilghman

From the Colony and Domin­ion of Vir­ginia
Richard Bland
Ben­jamin Har­ri­son V
Patrick Henry
Richard Henry Lee
Edmund Pendle­ton
Pey­ton Ran­dolph
George Washington

From the Province of North Car­olina
Richard Caswell
Joseph Hewes
William Hooper

From the Province of South Car­olina
Christo­pher Gads­den
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Henry Mid­dle­ton
Edward Rut­ledge
John Rutledge

Pos­si­bly next — the mem­bers of the Sec­ond Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress.²

1. To protest the The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Town­shend Acts of 1767, a secret group call­ing them­selves the Sons of Lib­erty, orga­nized by future Con­gress mem­ber Samuel Adams, qui­etly boarded 3 ships (The Dart­mouth, the Elenor and the Beaver) on Decem­ber 16, 1773 and threw most of the con­tents of each ship into the har­bor. It totaled around £10,000 worth of mer­chan­dise. [↩]
2. The list of these men can pretty much be found any­where, but for lit­tle tid­bits about this piece I got a few facts from U-S-History.com. [↩]

“The Gold­bergs” was a live radio pro­gram that was even­tu­ally trans­lated for tele­vi­sion and became the first sit­com broad­cast on Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion in 1949.

It fol­lowed the lives of the Molly and Jake Gold­berg and their fam­ily as they made their way through their every­day lives in Brooky­lyn, NY. Gertrude Berg, the writer-producer behind the show, por­trayed Molly and Philip Loeb por­trayed her hus­band Jake. Also on the show were Roslyn Sil­ber and Alfred Ryder Molly and Jake’s chil­dren Ros­alie and Sammy.

Dur­ing the first sea­son on CBS, the show was the third most pop­u­lar pro­gram on the air. It was such a pop­u­lar show that per­form­ers from other fields desired to be on the show, like Jan Peerce of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera.

It went on to be the 3rd high­est rated show for CBS dur­ing that time. It even­tu­ally went from CBS to NBC to a now none-existent net­work known as the Dumont net­work where it ended its run in 1955.¹

1. Parts of this piece came from infor­ma­tion from the Inter­net Movie Data­base, Wikipedia and the always enter­tain­ing TV Party site. [↩]