Novelist, playwright, essayist and public intellectual Gore Vidal was born on October 3, 1925, at West Point, NY, where his father was an aeronautics instructor. As a youth he read aloud to his grandfather, Sen. Thomas Gore (D-Oklahoma), who was blind. His early novel The City and the Pillar (1948) dealt explicitly with homosexuality, a term he considered false or misleading since he believed all people are potentially pansexual. Of his 24 novels, one of the best known – and most notorious – is Myra Breckinridge (1968), set in Hollywood and written as a diary, which satirizes 1960s subversion of norms of gender and sexuality. It was a major best-seller despite its quasi-pornographic treatment of themes that included transsexuality and feminism. He wrote the successful play “The Best Man” (1960) and a range of historical and sociopolitical novels, including Julian (1964), about the apostate Roman emperor; Washington, D.C. (1967); Burr (1973); 1876 (1976); and Lincoln (1984). He was also a script-doctor at MGM for the movie “Ben Hur” (1959).
On October 2, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke at the White House that left him partly paralyzed on his left side and blind in one eye. He had collapsed in late September while on a U.S. speaking tour to raise support for the Treaty of Versailles and U.S. participation in the League of Nations in the aftermath of World War I. The American public was left largely uninformed, and at times misled, about the nature and extent of Wilson’s incapacity. The White House said he was suffering from "nervous exhaustion." For the remainder of his second term, through 1921, Wilson’s strong-willed second wife, Edith, screened and selected issues that reached her husband. She opposed allowing Vice President Thomas Marshall to assume the presidential powers. She later wrote that her goal was to protect Wilson’s physical and mental health. Before the stroke, Wilson was an avid golfer. He holds the presidential record for the most rounds of golf played – more than 1,000, almost one every two days. He even played in the snow with golf balls painted black.
105 years ago: On October 1, 1908, Ford Motor Company began making the first Model T automobiles at its production line in Detroit. The car came to be known as a “Tin Lizzie” and a “flivver” (a slang term) because of its ungainly appearance, rough ride and constant rattling at reasonable speeds. It was the first automobile to be mass-produced on Henry Ford’s revolutionary moving assembly lines (perfected by 1913), entirely with interchangeable parts. The process, based on the division of labor, allowed the car to be marketed to the middle class, not just the rich, at an initial price of $825 for the runabout (two-seats). By 1925 the price had dropped to $260. A durable, easily maintained machine, the Model T was also available as a touring car (five seats) and town car (seven seats). In a largely agrarian nation, owners often pulled the car apart and made it into a tractor. Gasoline was fed to the engine by gravity from a 10-gallon tank (under the front seat), and reverse gear provided the greatest power. As a result, the Model T had to be driven backward to climb steep hills.
Persian poet Rumi was born Jalal ad Din Muhammad Rumi on September 30, 1207, in Tajikistan. As a young boy in what is now Iran, while fleeing the advance of Mongol hordes, his spiritual nature was recognized, and by age 25 he had become an Islamic teacher. In 1244, after meeting a dervish (ascetic), Rumi became a mystical ascetic and began writing lyric poetry. In what is now Turkey he spent 12 years writing the Masnavi, his masterwork that combines tales of everyday life with spirituality. It strongly focuses on music as a means of union with the divine, whereby the soul is both destroyed and reborn. The ritual practice of “whirling dervishes” was developed from Rumi’s concepts. The core of Rumi’s beliefs is that the soul, separated and devolved from the divine, undergoes an evolutionary journey to be reunited with the divine. All things in the universe are governed by this law, and the process is driven by an inner urge Rumi calls “love.” This cosmic evolution and search for union with God are Rumi’s version of the Fall of Adam and the banishment from Paradise.
Composer and pianist George Gershwin was born Jacob Gershowitz on September 26, 1898, in Brooklyn, NY. At age 11 he began playing a second-hand piano acquired for his older brother, Ira, with whom he would many write hit songs. He dropped out of school at age 15, played piano in New York nightclubs, and worked as a “song-plugger” (promoter) in Tin Pan Alley (at $15 a week) and a rehearsal pianist for Broadway performers. He sold his first song for $5 in 1916 at age 17. He was commissioned by bandleader Paul Whiteman to compose his first classical work, “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924), for orchestra and piano. In 1928 he asked French composer Maurice Ravel to be his teacher, but Ravel told him he would be better as a first-rate Gershwin than a second-rate Ravel, instead recommending he study in Paris with renowned teacher, Nadia Boulanger. She, in turn, promptly refused to compromise his jazz-influenced style through the study of classical music. As a result, Gershwin wrote the innovative symphonic tone poem, “An American in Paris.”
Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg. A child prodigy on the piano, he composed his First Symphony at age 19. It was praised by major musical figures, including conductor Leopold Stokowski. But in 1936 he ran afoul of the Communist bureaucracy when Joseph Stalin and the Politburo publicly derided an opera he had composed, and he was denounced by the newspaper Pravda. That year, Stalin began his “Great Purge.” Shostakovich put away his Western-style Fourth Symphony and, in 1937, composed a pivotal work in his career, his heroic Fifth Symphony, which Soviet officials viewed as a personal perestroyka (political "rehabilitation"). Ironically, however, the monumental work was a huge success among the Russian public for its subtle condemnation of Stalin’s brutal repression. Listeners openly wept during the graceful yet mournful Largo movement, which reflected the terrible period in which Stalin sent more than seven million Russians to the Gulag (labor camps).
Novelist and journalist Herbert George "H. G." Wells was born on September 21, 1866, in a suburb of London. His parents were shopkeepers of little means, and his education was haphazard. In the 1880s he studied under biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who advocated Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 1895 Wells published his hugely successful novella, The Time Machine, the story of a Time Traveler’s journey to a dystopian, dying Earth in the distant future. His second major “scientific romance” – a genre now known as science fiction – was The War of the Worlds (1898), in which Earth is invaded by Martians whose superior force strikes into the heart of Britain at the height of its own imperialism. The novel is a brutal vision of millennial apocalypse at the close of the 19th century, in the tradition of “invasion literature,” addressing many disturbing themes: the rise of total war stripped of moral constraints, the industrialization of weaponry, the grim path of human evolution, race and class issues via Social Darwinism, and the separation of science from faith.
Television producer J Troplong "Jay" Ward was born on September 20, 1920, in Berkeley, California. Following business school, he became involved in producing animated TV programs initially with cartoonist Alex Anderson, a childhood friend who created the characters of Crusader Rabbit, Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Bullwinkle the Moose and Dudley Do-Right the Canadian Mountie. In 1949 he founded Jay Ward Productions, which later produced the animated TV series “Rocky & His Friends” and “The Bullwinkle Show,” which together became “The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show,” airing from November 1959 to June 1964 on the ABC TV network, later on NBC. The show’s undercurrent of savvy, intelligent wit made the show popular with viewers of all ages. Ward also produced the characters of Mr. Peabody and his sidekick Sherman, Boris Badenov, Natasha Fatale, George of the Jungle and Super Chicken. His company designed the characters for three cereals, Cap'n Crunch, Quisp and Quake. Ward came close to death in accidents twice in his life.
English illustrator Arthur Rackham was born on September 19, 1867, in London. One of 12 children, he began studying art in his teens and by the 1890s had settled into a career of book illustration. Beginning with Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle (1905), he produced a series of lavishly illustrated books, most published in signed, limited editions and cloth-bound trade editions, often bound in vellum and signed by Rackham. Other major books included J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), Lewis Carroll’s Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1907), four volumes of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” (1910-11), English Fairy Tales (1918) and many others. He became the most well-known artist of the period called the “Golden Age” of illustration, spanning the years prior to 1900 through the onset of World War I in 1914. Post-war changes in taste affected the market for Rackham’s fanciful, often dark depictions of fairies and mythic, folkloric figures. His edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (pictured) was published posthumously in 1940.
On September 17, 1683, Dutch merchant and early scientist Anton van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society of England describing and illustrating five different kinds of objects, which he called “animalcules,” he had found in his own saliva and plaque. The father of microscopy had discovered bacteria. As a tradesman in Delft, he had used magnifying glasses to count threads in cloth, which led to his interest in lensmaking, accomplished in secret by processing thin rods of glass into very small spheres offering high magnification (more than 200x). His “microscopes” consisted of a brass plate a few inches long, with the lens in a tiny hole (pictured). Though he had first observed microscopic life in 1674, his letter of 1683 reported with “great wonder … many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving.” He also described “enormous numbers” of animalcules from the mouths of two old men who had never cleaned their teeth in their lives. In hundreds of other letters, Van Leeuwenhoek also described the life in a drop of water and blood corpuscles circulating in capillaries.
