A Fake Alien Invasion?

 There's been talk of an alien invasion lately, a fake alien invasion, perhaps to distract from much more important issues in the news. Just what will we, the unsuspecting masses, fall for? This fake alien scenario reminds me of Orson Welles' radio production of The War of the Worlds. If you're not familiar with that broadcast, here's the lowdown from Wikipedia:

The War of the Worlds was a Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. This production was directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898). It was performed and broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938 over the CBS Radio Network. The episode is famous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was taking place. 

The episode begins with an introductory monologue based closely on the opening of the original novel, after which the program takes on the format of an evening of typical radio programming being periodically interrupted by news bulletins. The first few bulletins interrupt a program of live music and are relatively calm reports of unusual explosions on Mars followed by a seemingly unrelated report of an unknown object falling on a farm in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. 

The crisis escalates dramatically when a correspondent reporting live from Grovers Mill describes creatures emerging from what is evidently an alien spacecraft. When local officials approach the aliens waving a flag of truce, the "monsters" respond by incinerating them and others nearby with a heat ray which the on-scene reporter describes in a panic until the audio feed abruptly goes dead. This is followed by a rapid series of news updates detailing the beginning of a devastating alien invasion and the military's futile efforts to stop it. The first portion of the episode climaxes with another live report from the rooftop of a Manhattan radio station. 

The correspondent describes crowds fleeing clouds of poison smoke released by giant Martian "war machines" and "dropping like flies" as the gas approaches his location. Eventually he coughs and falls silent, and a lone ham radio operator asks, "Is there anyone on the air? Isn't there... anyone?" with no response. The program takes its first break thirty minutes after Welles's introduction.

The second portion of the show shifts to a conventional radio drama format that follows a survivor (played by Welles) dealing with the aftermath of the invasion and the ongoing Martian occupation of Earth. The final segment lasts for about sixteen minutes, and like the original novel, concludes with the revelation that the Martians have been defeated by microbes rather than by humans. The broadcast ends with a brief "out of character" announcement by Welles in which he compares the show to "dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying 'boo!'"

If you want to hear the broadcast, here's the link. And if you're interested in a more up to date version, check out War of the Worlds on Amazon Prime, an excellent adaptation that will keep you on the edge of your seat, complete with those awful robot dogs.

Have you ever read War of the Worlds or seen the series on Amazon? Thanks for visiting and have a great week! 

William Howard Taft: He Didn't Get Stuck in a Tub!

William Howard Taft was a president from my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio and was a man of rather large proportion. A story has been around for decades that because of his girth, he got stuck in a bathtub while serving as president. I thought that might be an amusing post for Presidents Day, but I just learned that story wasn't even true! Check out an article below from History.com:  

Topping the scales at over 350 pounds, William Howard Taft was a true political heavyweight. Although “Big Bill” was the only man to serve as both U.S. president and Supreme Court chief justice, what most remember about Taft is that he supposedly became stuck in the White House bathtub. The story, however, apparently doesn’t hold water. No documentary evidence backs it up, and according to Brady Carlson, author of the book “Dead Presidents: An American Adventure into the Strange Deaths and Surprising Afterlives of Our Nation’s Leaders,” the story didn’t arise until two decades after Taft left the presidency. Carlson says the sudsy tale first surfaced along with other presidential dirt in longtime White House usher Ike Hoover’s 1934 memoir, “42 Years in the White House.”

“The funny part is that while Taft was president, the White House got a tub that was so big a president couldn’t possibly get stuck in it,” Carlson says. Indeed, just weeks after Taft’s 1908 election, the captain of a warship carrying the president-elect to inspect the Panama Canal re-quested a super-sized bathtub capable of holding the heftiest man ever to occupy the Oval Office. Since no “Taft-size” basin could be found, a Manhattan company specially crafted the largest solid porcelain tub ever made for an individual. It was more than seven feet long, 41 inches wide and weighed a ton—literally. A photograph in the February 1909 issue of the journal Engineering Review showed the pond-like presidential bathtub with four men sitting comfortably in-side.

Newspapers reported that similarly spacious tubs were installed in the White House, on Taft’s presidential yacht and inside his brother’s summer home in Texas. After leaving the White House in 1913, Taft moved into a suite in a New Haven, Connecticut, hotel with an immense bathtub that the Philadelphia Inquirer reported was “deep enough to allow an ordinary sized man to float when it is filled.” Two years later, the ex-president’s bathing habits again made news when at a Cape May, New Jersey, hotel he “failed properly to consider the size of the average seashore hotel bathtub.” The water displaced by his tremendous girth flooded the floor and trickled onto the heads of guests in the downstairs dining room. As a wistful Taft gazed out at the Atlantic Ocean the next morning, he said, “I’ll get a piece of that fenced in some day, and then when I venture in, there won’t be any overflow.”

Had you ever heard this story?

Thanks for visiting and have a great week!

Love, Love, Love the Lovings!

 

Mildred and Richard Loving

Valentine's Day is tomorrow, and the story of Mildred and Richard Loving is one of my favorite love stories! The Loving Story was an HBO Documentary back in 2011, and a feature film, Loving, was released back in 2016. What an impact they made on love!

When I first read about the Lovings several years ago, I thought what a fitting (and ironic) name for them!

Richard Loving was white, and his wife, Mildred, black. In 1958, since they couldn’t marry in their home state of Virginia where interracial marriage was banned, they went to Washington, D.C. where they could legally wed.  However, upon returning home as a married couple, they were arrested, jailed and banished from the state for 25 years for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act.

The Lovings agreed to leave Virginia and relocated to Washington. By doing this they avoided jail time. But after living there for five years and having three children, they missed family and friends and wanted to return home to Caroline County, Virginia. 

Around this time they contacted Bernard Cohen, an attorney volunteering at the ACLU, to request that he ask the Caroline County judge to reconsider his decision.

Cohen and another lawyer challenged the Lovings' conviction, but the original judge in the case, Leon Bazile, upheld his ruling claiming: "Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. ... The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix."

The case moved all the way up to the Supreme Court where Cohen made this argument:

"The Lovings have the right to go to sleep at night knowing that if should they not wake in the morning, their children would have the right to inherit from them. They have the right to be secure in knowing that, if they go to sleep and do not wake in the morning, that one of them, a survivor of them, has the right to Social Security benefits. All of these are denied to them, and they will not be denied to them if the whole anti-miscegenistic scheme of Virginia... [is] found unconstitutional." 

After the ruling, in their favor (now known as the "Loving Decision") they returned home to Caroline County.

A happy ending to now what seems an unbelievable story—and believe it or not, they were arrested in the privacy of their bedroom during the middle of the night!

Had you ever heard of the Lovings' story? 

Thanks for visiting, and Happy Valentine's Day!

Claudette Colvin: Rebel With a Cause

Claudette Colvin in 1953

It's Black History Month, and not long ago, one of my kids told me about a young woman in Alabama in the 1950s who refused to give up her seat on the bus before Rosa Parks. That was news to me, so here's a little about her from Wikipedia:

Claudette Colvin (b. 1939) was a pioneer of the African American Civil Rights Movement. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus in segregated Montgomery, Alabama, nine months prior to Rosa Parks.

Colvin was among the five plaintiffs originally included in the federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, and she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case in the United States District Court. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court, which upheld their ruling on December 17, 1956. Colvin was the last witness to testify. Three days later, the Supreme Court issued an order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was called off.

For many years, Montgomery's black leaders did not publicize Colvin's pioneering effort because she was a teenager who was pregnant by a married man; words like "feisty", "mouthy", and "emotional" were used to describe her, while her older counterpart Rosa Parks was viewed as being calm, well-mannered, and studious. Because of the social norms of the time and her youth, the NAACP leaders worried about using her to symbolize their boycott.

Claudette Colvin said, "Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all."

On the day Colvin was ordered from her seat by the bus driver but refused to move, here's what happened:

When Colvin refused to get up, she was thinking about a school paper she had written that day about the local custom which prevented blacks from using the dressing rooms and trying on clothes in department stores. In a later interview, she said: "We couldn't try on clothes. You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot [...] and take it to the store”;and "She couldn't sit in the same row as us because that would mean we were as good as her".

"The bus was getting crowded, and I remember the bus driver looking through the rear view mirror asking her to get up for the white woman, which she didn't," said Annie Larkins Price, a classmate of Colvin's. "She had been yelling "It's my constitutional right!". She decided on that day that she wasn't going to move." Colvin was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus. She shouted that her constitutional rights were being violated. Price testified for Colvin in the juvenile court case. Colvin was convicted of disturbing the peace, violating the segregation law, and assault.

To read the complete article click here.

Feisty, mouthy and emotional; sounds like a teenager, and what a teen she was! I had never heard of Claudette Colvin. Had you?

Thanks for visiting and have a great week!