OCTOBER 15 — 1965 Draft Card burnt in protest; 1863 Cliff House, San Francisco, opens; 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmed to Supreme Court; 2002 Greenstein, helped discover quasars, dies
OCTOBER 15
1965 – David Miller becomes the first to publicly burn a draft card.
…In protests of the Vietnam War, demonstrations were being held all throughout America by several groups. Miller was part of the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which splintered off the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Members of the Coordinating Committee convinced Eugene McCarthy to run against Lyndon Johnson for President. Miller, meanwhile, was arrested and imprisoned for two years for the public draft card burning.
1863 – The Cliff House of San Francisco opens up.
…After the Gold Rush, according to their website, the first Cliff House was a modest structure built in 1863 by Senator John Buckley and C. C. Butler, even though Wikipedia states it was built by Sam Brannan in 1858. Anyway! The Cliff House was the omnipotent restaurant in Lands’ End, overlooking Seal Rocks with breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. Not to sound like a tour guide or anything! Visitors included several U.S. Presidents, along with San Francisco elites the Hearst’s, Stanfords, Crockers, and more.
In 1883, philanthropist Adolf Sutro purchased the Cliff House, but then schooner Parallel ran aground and exploded, causing damage to the restaurant, and all those guest signatures from the illustrious visitors were burned in the fire. Sutro rebuilt it, including skating rinks, museums, swimming pools, so much more, and survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, only to burn to the ground a year later. Sutro’s daughter Dr. Emma Merritt would rebuild it, then it would pass hands to George and Leo Whitteny in the 1930s, eventually became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
1991 Clarence Thomas confirmed to the Supreme Court.
…Born in 1948 in Pin Point, GA, Thomas grew up in Savannah and went to law school at Yale. He rose up the political ranks and was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. . When Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, announced his retirement in 1991, President George HW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to fill the seat. Thomas’s conservative values would replace Marshall’s super liberal policies. The confirmation hearings began on October 11, and it looked like an easy win for Thomas.
Until Anita Hill stepped forward and accused Thomas of sexual harassment. Sexual who? Up until 1990 few people didn’t know what that meant. In the workplace, men could get away with trying to hit on women. It happened all the time and there weren’t really any laws preventing it from happen. Anita Hill, who worked with Thomas at the EOOC, complained of him making passes at her, but really didn’t have any evidence. In fact, Thomas was able to find more ladies who testified on his behalf stating he had never made a pass at them. Well, maybe a little, but not enough to make it a game changer. America was divided on this one. Thomas narrowly won the nomination 52-48. He remains on America’s highest court to this day.
Sexual harassment laws, meanwhile, began passing to protect women against unwanted gestures in the workplace.
2002 – Greenstein dies. From NYC, Jesse L. Greenstein started attending Harvard at age 15 in studies in stellar chemical abundancies and white dwarfs (white dwarf is the observation of matter under heavy conditions that cannot be duplicated anywhere else, lest you think I’m being a racist), learning about interstellar dust and its relation to magnetic fields, paving the way to the discovery of quasars.
Quasars or quasi-stellar radio sources are the most energetic and distant members of a class of objects called active galactic nuclei, or AGN. In 1963, he and Maarten Schmidt observed the first cosmological shift of quasars, which is another way of saying that this spectral line was being seen 5 billion light years from earth, with a B, and time and space being relative, very very old objects. According to todayinsci.com, Greenstein designed and constructed with the help of Louis Henyey, a new spectrograph and wide-view camera to improve astronomical observations. Jesse Grenfield, from Brooklyn, NY, was one of the most important astronomers and astrophysicists in the last century.