ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, January 1, 1996 TAG: 9601020131
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: RICK HOROWITZ/SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES
ADMIT IT: You're just tickled to send 1995 off to the scrap heap. Not enough of this, too much of this, and way too much of that other thing. The new year simply has to be better!
So why not look forward to 1996 by looking backward first? Way backward. All sorts of intriguing anniversaries are waiting to be observed - even celebrated, some of them - in the new year: centennials and bi- and tri- and sesquicentennials and such everywhere you turn.
Crusades and cannon. Gold and grapefruit. "Blue Tail Fly" and "Shoo-Fly Pie." Tootsies. Bikinis. (Or is that tootsies in bikinis?)
Plus all the news that's fit to print ...
They play for keeps
We can go all the way back to two-digit territory, in fact, to the original '96: 96 A.D. That's when Roman emperor Domitian's reign of terror - persecuting Christians, confiscating property, sending countrymen into exile - came to a sudden halt at the pointy end of a dagger. Among the plotters? The missus herself, the Empress Domitia.
But we don't have to go quite that far.
Take 996, for instance - exactly a millennium ago. From Alexandria to Venice comes cane sugar! It's all sweetness and light for Otto III, too; the 16-year-old is finally crowned Holy Roman Emperor. He was only 3 when his father died, but his succession was disputed by the Duke of Bavaria, one Henry the Troublemaker. Henry kidnapped the tyke, but Otto's mom and grandmom got him back and eventually put him on the throne.
The First Crusade hits the road in 1096. The effort to restore Christianity in the Holy Land sets off from France under Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless, among others. (Typical Crusade-era conversation: ``Hey, who's in charge of this outfit?" ``Peter the Hermit." ``Anyone else?" ``Walter the Penniless." ``Sounds good - sign me up!")
It's 1346, early in the Hundred Years War, and one of history's most significant battles is about to occur: the English against the French at Crecy. The French have Europe's best horse soldiers, plus heavy armor, the crossbow and plenty of attitude. The English invaders have foot soldiers, the longbow and "bombards," the first primitive cannon. The result? A massacre. The French lines are wiped out by the rapid-firing English longbowmen, and the heavily armored French knights can't even remount once their horses are shot - or scared - out from under them.
A thousand years of cavalry superiority is at an end, as is the unchallenged dominance of the aristocracy, the only ones who can afford the horses and the armor. The foot soldier - the common man - is on the rise.
Christopher Columbus is on the move in 1496; he returns from his second voyage to the New World. He still hasn't found India, but from the West Indies he brings back samples of a "bewitching vegetable" that the natives dry, ignite and inhale from a slingshot-shaped pipe inserted in their nostrils. The pipe is called a "tabaco." We can call it "Indians' revenge."
There are two major cultural advances in 1546. The first Welsh book is printed: "Yny Lhyvyr Mwnn" (rough translation - ``Buy A Vowel from Vanna"). And "The Proverbs of John Heywood" appear, including such cliches-in-the-making as "Rome was not built in a day," "Look before you leap" and "Haste makes waste."
Food and drink, and people who think
More words to remember in 1596, 400 years ago: Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" and "King John" have their first performances. If the crowd doesn't like them, they can always throw tomatoes, introduced into England this very year as an ornamental plant. And making its first appearance in the New World in 1596 or thereabouts: the wagon, the Western Hemisphere's first wheeled vehicle. It looks a lot like the German farm cart, and the Spanish will use it to haul supplies as they explore and settle the American southwest.
In Massachusetts in 1646, the Rev. John Eliot holds the colonies' first Protestant service for Indians, preaching to the Algonquins in their own language. In 1696, seeds from the Polynesian pomelo tree arrive in Barbados; a mutant form of the pomelo, thinner and sweeter, will become the American grapefruit. And on the other side of the world, coffee growing is brought from India to the Indonesian island of Java - a good thing, or today we'd all be asking for "a cup of India."
Say hello to Princeton University - or its ancestor, anyway; the College of New Jersey is founded by a group of Presbyterian ministers in 1746, 250 years ago. And there's more learning going on in 1746, as Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin starts experimenting with electricity.
In France in 1796, Napoleon marries his Josephine, while astronomer Pierre-Simon de Laplace first suggests that the solar system is created from the cooling and contracting of a giant gas cloud. Across the Channel, a major advance right here on earth as English physician Edward Jenner introduces the world's first smallpox vaccination. Jenner has noticed that milkmaids with cowpox don't catch the much more dangerous smallpox; he takes fluid from a cowpox blister and rubs it into the skin of 8-year-old James Phipps. Though Phipps is later exposed to smallpox, he doesn't contract the deadly disease.
Closer to home, George Washington declines to offer himself for a third term as President of the United States; in a close and bitter election, John Adams is elected over Thomas Jefferson, who becomes vice president.
Tennessee joins the union as its 16th state in 1796. Farther north, Gen. Moses Cleaveland lays out a town where the Cuyahoga River empties into Lake Erie. The General wants to name the town "Cuyahoga." His men overrule him and opt for the more personal touch; by the 1830s Cleaveland's first "a" has sunk into the lake somewhere.
Expansion is the order of the day in 1846, 150 years ago. The United States wants to buy land from Mexico; Mexico doesn't want to sell. The U.S. response? War. American forces move into disputed territory on the banks of the Rio Grande and bait Mexico into an attack. When the fighting stops in 1848, U.S. territory extends to the Rio Grande, and includes California and what will later become the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and part of Colorado.
The northern-border question is more peaceably settled this same year. Despite angry cries of "54-40 or Fight!" the Oregon Treaty sets the U.S.-Canadian border west of the Rockies at the 49th parallel.
Iowa, meanwhile, is admitted to the Union as the 29th state, while Brigham Young leads his fellow Mormons out of Nauvoo, Ill., on a trek that will ultimately take them to Utah's Great Salt Lake.
English poet-artist Edward Lear's "Book of Nonsense" is a sensation in 1846, and popularizes the five-line verse called the limerick.
The planet Neptune is discovered in 1846. Nancy Johnson of New Jersey invents the first portable, hand-cranked ice cream freezer. In Baltimore, the song "Jim Crack Corn, or the Blue Tail Fly" is published. The Smithsonian Institution is founded.
And Boston dentist William T.G. Morton opens the era of modern anesthesiology. Morton, 27, tests sulfuric ether on himself and on his dog, then uses it to remove one patient's tooth and another patient's facial tumor. The patients are grateful. The dog's reaction is unrecorded.
As good as:
Gold!
At Bonanza Creek off the Klondike River, on the Canadian side of the Alaskan border, prospector George Washington Carmack strikes paydirt in 1896; as soon as word gets out, the Klondike gold rush is on. They're going for the gold in Athens, too - 484 competitors from 13 nations - as the modern-day Olympics are born, some 1500 years after they were banned by the Romans.
Utah becomes the 45th state in the union in 1896, after the territory's Mormons agree to give up polygamous marriage.
In Florida, industrialist H.M. Flagler extends his Florida East Coast Railway a little farther south, to the new town of Miami, incorporated this year.
And speaking of resorts, Atlantic City completes a new boardwalk in 1896. It's 41 feet wide and it replaces four narrower boardwalks that have been on the job since 1870.
Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird. It's a plane. It's - a plane. The Smithsonian's Samuel Pierpont Langley sends his steam-powered model airplane aloft for some 3,000 feet along the Potomac River, the first-ever journey for a mechanically propelled flying machine.
Back on the ground in 1896, botanist George Washington Carver joins Alabama's Tuskegee Institute and devises new methods to make worn-out cotton land productive once again. Grow peanuts, says Carver. Grow sweet potatoes.
Grow children, says philosopher John Dewey, working somewhat different terrain. Dewey founds an elementary school in 1896 to try out his progressive ideas about education.
A failing New York newspaper, its circulation down to 9,000, is purchased in 1896 by the publisher of the Chattanooga Times, Adolph Ochs, for $75,000 in borrowed funds. Ochs revamps his new paper and promises readers "All the news that's fit to print." It seems to work.
The first advice-to-the-lovelorn column appears in 1896, in the New Orleans Picayune. Ann Landers isn't even born yet; Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer writes the column under the pen name Dorothy Dix.
Mr. H.J. Heinz sees an advertisement for 21 styles of shoes; he knows a good thing when he sees it. His new advertising slogan? "57 Varieties." Adolphus Busch introduces Michelob beer in 1896. And don't forget confectioner Leo Hirschfield, who's also on a roll in 1896. His new penny candy is the first to be wrapped in paper. He names it after his 6-year-old daughter whose nickname is "Tootsie."
She's wearing a what?
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic," says Winston Churchill in Fulton, Mo., "an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." Churchill's 1946 plea for the west to resist Soviet aggression strikes some as too hostile; others see it as a vital Cold War wake-up call.
The world spends part of the first post-war year picking up the pieces. The Nuremberg tribunal sentences a dozen Nazis to death for crimes against humanity. The emperor of Japan publicly declares that, centuries of tradition notwithstanding, emperors are not truly divine. And the United Nations selects New York City as its permanent headquarters
Some of those returning soldiers are ready to start (or expand) families in 1946: The U.S. birth rate soars almost 20 percent. It's the perfect opportunity for a new book by a Dr. Benjamin Spock. "The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care" is published in 1946; retitled "Baby and Child Care," it will become an all-time best-seller.
Lots of diapers to clean? Tide detergent first appears in 1946. It won't take much Tide to wash the latest thing in swimwear, though: At a Paris fashion show just four days after that atomic-bomb test, a model wears a scandalously skimpy two-piece bathing suit. The suit - what little there is of it - creates a sensation, and designer Louis Reard reportedly finds the name of the Pacific Ocean bomb site appropriately explosive. The "bikini" is born.
It'll be years before the bikini makes it to American shores; in the meantime, there's always a good movie. The best of 1946? "The Best Years of Our Lives," which will win eight Academy Awards. But don't forget "The Big Sleep," "Notorious" and "My Darling Clementine" - and another one which still gets some attention every now and again: "It's a Wonderful Life."
On Broadway, there's no business like show business; Ethel Merman has them singing her praises in Irving Berlin's hit musical "Annie Get Your Gun," while Pearl Bailey heads an all-black cast in "St. Louis Woman"; the Johnny Mercer-Harold Arlen score includes "Come Rain or Come Shine." Other popular songs in 1946: "To Each His Own." "Ole Buttermilk Sky." "Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy." And this one, co-written in 1946 by 21-year-old Mel Torme: "The Christmas Song."
The St. Louis Cardinals dispose of the Boston Red Sox in the 1946 World Series, while the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants 24-14 for the NFL championship. And the country's top athlete, four-legged division, is the "clubfoot comet," Assault, winner of racing's Triple Crown.
In the sleepy desert town of Las Vegas, mobster Bugsy Siegel builds the Flamingo Hotel. And one more sign of things to come in 1946:
ENIAC - an "electronic numerical integrator and computer" - comes on line at the University of Pennsylvania. The world's first all-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC fills a 30-by-50-foot room. It has 18,000 vacuum tubes and a half-million soldered connections. It weighs 30 tons.
Put that in your laptop and smoke it. Happy Anniversaries!
Rick Horowitz is a syndicated columnist and television commentator based in Milwaukee, and a winner of the National Headliner Award.
LENGTH: Long : 212 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: photo collage. graphic. chart. KEYWORDS: YEAR 1996by CNB