OCTOBER 25 — 1962 CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS Pt. 4: Bucharest crosses the line; 1764 Happy anniversary John and Abigail Adams; 1780 Happy birthday journalist Phillip Hone
OCTOBER 25
1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis part 4: day 10.
…Bucharest crosses the line. President Kennedy ordered a quarantine to encircle Cuba to prevent Moscow from sending ships there. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev told Kennedy that he considered the quarantine an act of aggression and his ships would continue to Cuba. However Khrushchev would order 15 of his ships carrying weapons to turn around. Kennedy learned that some of the nuclear missiles were ready to be launched in Cuba and more were nearing completion. He issued a memorandum that authorized the loading of nuclear weapons onto aircraft.
In China, 650 million people sided with Cuba. Western Europe sided with the US. At the United Nations, during a debate at the Security Council, US Ambassador Adler Stevens, normally cool under pressure, blew his top and angrily confronted his Soviet counterpart Valerian Zorin with photographic evidence of missiles in Cuba. In the seas, the Bucharest continued its way. American destroyers USS Essex and USDS Gearing engaged an interception. The world held its breath. The American ships however did not seize the Soviet ship, hoping and assuming it wasn’t carrying weapons. The gamble paid off. The Bucharest was only an oil supply ship. The crisis was over…for the moment.
To be continued!
1764 – Happy anniversary John and Abigail Adams!
When we thing of first couples in the White House, we often think John and Jack Kennedy or Ron and Nancy Reagan, FDR and Eleanor, but the timeless love between John and Abby is forever as detailed through over 1,100 letters of correspondences, probably makes this relationship the most romantic that ever hit the White House. John may have gone down in American history as a signer of the Declaration of Independence more predominantly than his “failed” presidency, which is often spouted by those who just don’t understand that by keeping a young America out of another war with Great Britain while trying to please the French at the same time was not easy task. Abby’s contribution to history as intellectually brilliant, not only the perfect housewife but also a very well versed in theology and philosophy, John could not have picked a better friend or advisor. “You who have always softened and warmed my heart, shall restore my benevolence as well as my health and tranquility of mind,” he told her right before they married.
John Adams met Abigale Smith when he was a young lawyer at 23 and she was 14. He would often stay at her father’s house in Weymouth Mass when he was away on business. By the time Abby turned 19, she was so in love with John that there was no doubt their “heats were cast from the same stone.” Women weren’t even allowed to think for themselves in the 18th century, and she probably knew about politics just as much as any of her male contemporaries, and John loved her all the more for it. While her husband was away in Philadelphia trying to get this new young nation of America in gear, 30-year old Abby stayed at home Braintree Mass rearing four children. “the little folks are very sick and puke every morning, but after that they are comfortable,” she wrote John when they were little. “
“Every exp0ression of tenderness is a cordial to my heart. Unimportant as they are to the rest of the world, to me they are everything.” But John was deeply in evolved with the Continental Congress, and Abby helped him untangle the complex personalities of all these men. After going from Philadelphia to New York to Europe, the ten year distance that took its toll on John and Abby was too much, and in the mid-1780s John sent for her to join him in France. Abby was 40 now and had barely been outside Massachusetts.
”She wasn’t ready. “Can we draw a veil over the guilty cause or refrain from comparing a country grown old in debauchery and lewdness with the wise laws and institutions of one wherein marriage is considered as holy and honorable…half blah”, yeah Abby didn’t like France. Abby changed her mind about France once she was there and saw a ballet. All thi8s singing and dancing in skin tights and short skirts was considered morally appalling to pretty much any New Englander, but Abby went in with an open mind and loved it. When they returned home to America, John Adams had been elected the second President of the United States. And his wife’s health, which was never that robust, became worse. “What will become of you, I know not. How you will be able to live is past my comprehension,” John wrote to her. The kids, all four of them including John Jr, had seen better days.
Abigail Jr, or Abbie as she was nicknamed, was born 1765, followed by younger bratty little brother John Quincy Adams, born in 1767, finally Susanna and Charles 1768 and1770, respectively. Two other children were stillborn. Abigail Adams, who was genuinely close with Martha Washington, turned out to be as fine of a first lady as Martha was. Though she didn’t verbally engage with the male diplomats who came in the White House, since opposite sex communication was very much looked down upon unless it was in written text, she did great; making them feel comfortable. She couldn’t show up for her husband’s presidential inauguration because she was busy trying to nurse the president’s mom back to health, which would eventually prove futile.
She was also taking care of Abby’s kids, making Abby a very busy grandmother. Not a lot of interesting stories surround the kids, except for John Quincy, who would become president. Abigail Adams, one of America’s first real feminists, had a personality to be reckoned with, which is the exact firepower John needed to entrust her as his soulless mate. If you don’t think the relationship between John and Abby Adams is the most romantic, show me another couple who had a more loving relationship. Hint, infidelity doesn’t count, so that throws out JFK and Jackie. John Adams wrapped it all up with his beautiful wife, saying “it is fit and proper that you and I should retire together and not one before the other.
He would sign the letter, I am with unabated Confidence and affection you’re…John Adams
1906 –Lee deforest, a.k.a. Inventor of the Talking Motion Picture, patents the Audion, which was a 3-diode amplification valve.
…He was self-described “Father of Radio”, and a pioneer in the development of sound-on-film recording used for motion pictures. DeFroest started out at Yale, trying to improve the wireless telegraph, but couldn’t get past the security issue in sending coded messages.. He might have an understanding of what we IT folks have to go through to this day! Deforest had over 180 patents, but also a rocky career — he boasted that he made, then lost, several fortunes, dealt with litigation where much of his money went, convicted but acquitted of mail fraud, but nonetheless, his vacuum tube technology would pave the way for the Grid Audion, which would be used for arc-based radiotelephonic, or a primitive wireless, transmission and receiving. According to leedeforest.org, he developed plans back in the 1950’s to transmit music wirelessly. Hope you like opera, because that’s what Deforest was serving. Another great inventor, this one originally forms Council Bluffs, Iowa. Like a boss!
His most famous invention, in 1906, was the three-element “grid Audion”, which, although he had only a limited understanding of how it worked, provided the foundation for the development of vacuum tube technology.
1929 – Cabinet member guilty in Teapot Dome scandal.
…Seven years prior to this, the wall street journal reported a secret arrangement between secretaries of Interior Albert Fall, without competitive bidding, had leased the US naval petroleum reserve at Wyoming’s Teapot Dome to a private oil company.
There was an investigation as to how Secretary Fall got rich so quickly. Not only did the investigation find a $100,000 bribe from Edward Doheny of the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company, but it also uncovered that Harry Sinclair, president of Mammoth Oil, had given him around $300,000 in government bonds and cash in exchange for use of the Teapot Dome oil reserve. Fall would become the first cabinet officer to go to prison.
As if President Warren G. Hardin’s cabinet wasn’t corrupted enough.
1780 happy birthday former New York Mayor and diary writer Philip Hone.
There’s really not much about him that’s in particular that’s interesting, he was only mayor for one year, other than he captured the mood of the Industrial Revolution and beyond and provides historians of a great reference manual.
According to the American Heritage, Davy Crockett called Hone the politest man he ever did see while Hone called Crockett a coonskin congressman. Hone made his fortune through auctions, and noted the rapid expansion and technological advances. “The world is going so fast. Railroads, steamers, packets, race against time. Oh, for the good old days of heavy post coaches and speed at the rate of six miles an hour!”
He also punted out a fight that broke out in front of his hotel between one of the editors of the Evening Post and the editor of Commercial Advertising that involved a cow skin whip, he wrote of his dislike of Andrew Jackson, yet was good friends not only with Martin Van Buren and John Quincy Adams, as well as Washington Irving, Samuel Morse and Daniel Webster.
2005 – Chicago beats Houston, 7-5 in 14 innings, the longest World Series game at 5 hours and 41 minutes.
1964 Vikings Jim Marshall runs 66 yards in the wrong direction for a safety.
1990 – Evander Holyfield KO’s Buster Douglas in three rounds to win the heavyweight title.
1987 – Minnesota wins their first World Series.
1986 –For the first time in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, the top three spots were held by female solo acts. Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” held down the #1 position, followed by Tina Turner’s “Typical Male” at #2 and Janet Jackson’s “When I Think of You” at #3.
1996 – Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottlehouse becomes historic.
Tressa Luella, born in Easton Minnesota in 1896, had bad luck with loved ones. When she was 15 she married her sister’s ex-husband, who at the time was 52 years old. Yup, 37 years o0lder than her. With him, she had 7 children, six who died during her lifetime. After her husband died, she would lose a fiancé and another husband. This may explain her bottle collection. She moved to Seattle and then to Santa Susana, now known as Simi Valley.
Looking for a place to store her 15,000 pencil collection, and having a passion for recycling, she began making a bottle village. You know what they say, I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. Yes. She visited the city dump and took home over a million bottles and got to work. It was partially destroyed in the Northridge earthquake of 1994 but from what I understand is fully restored. If you don’t believe me, and no one would fault you if you didn’t because, I mean, seriously, who does that? Then you can check it out for yourself. It became a historic landmark on this day in 1996. Just remember the rule about throwing stones if you live in glass houses. Don’t do it.
Congratulations Grandma Prisbrey!