Christmas Every Day

1879, The Tay Bridge Disaster

On the evening of December 28, 1879 an unexpectedly strong wind struck the bridge over the Firth of Tay in Scotland at the same moment that a passenger train heading north to Dundee was on the structure. The bridge collapsed, sending the train hurtling into the water, killed all of its passengers and crew. Only 46 bodies were recovered but it was feared as there may have been as many as 70 to 75 dead. Subsequent investigations revealed a number of design flaws, particularly regarding wind loading, poor maintenance, and excessive train speed.

Today the disaster is known best for the commemorative piece written in 1880 by William McGonnagal, possibly the world’s worst poet. A section of this masterpiece is included.

Beautiful railway bridge of the silv’ry Tay

Alas! I am very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last sabbath day of 1879

Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv’ry Tay,

I now must conclude my lay

By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,

That your central girders would not have given way,

At least many sensible men do say,

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses

At least many sensible men confesses,

For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.

The passing of four notorious characters

1948 Hideki Tojo

Tojo was the unacceptable face of Japanese militarism. A veteran of the campaigns in China, Tojo urged war on the USA when America imposed an embargo on Japan because of its expansion on the Asian mainland. He was Army Minister during the decision to attack Pearl Harbor and eventually rose to the position of Prime Minister and Chief of the General Staff. After Japan’s defeat Tojo was arrested for war crimes but failed in a suicide attempt. He was found guilty and executed on this day in 1948.

1953 Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria

Beria (1899-1953) was a brilliant and much-feared apparatchik in the Stalin regime. At the age of 20 Beria, born a Georgian, joined the Soviet secret police, the Cheka, and participated in the crushing of Georgian independence. He rose through the Party ranks and by 1934 was one of Stalin’s most trusted advisors. As deputy head of the NKVD he helped carry out the purges of the late 1930s and was rewarded with the top NKVD post and a place on the Politburo. He was responsible for the Katyn massacre of the Polish officer class, and aided the success of the anti-Nazi partisan effort, and the development of the Soviet atomic bomb program. When Stalin died, Beria tried to gain popularity by carrying out liberalization but was arrested by his fellows at the top of the Communist Party and shot. He is a central character in the very black comedy The Death of Stalin.

1961 Kurt Meyer

Kurt Meyer (1910-1961) was 20 when he joined the SS, the Nazi elite paramilitary. Attached to its Waffen SS units he served in many major campaigns, steadily winning a series of victories and decorations. An enthusiastic Nazi, he seems to have committed war crimes in the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union, killing Jews and other innocent civilians. In 1944 his regiment was stationed in Normandy during the Allied landings where they massacred Canadian prisoners of war. Meyer was taken prisoner and after the war tried for the murder of those prisoners. He was found guilty and served time in Dorchester prisoner in New Brunswick. On his release he helped perpetrate the myth that the Waffen SS were not murderous fanatics but plain old soldiers with scarcely a blot on their character.

2012 Jean Harris

Jean Harris (1923-2012) was the headmistress of an exclusive private school while she was carrying on an affair with celebrity diet doctor Herman Tarnower. Though she knew that he had often had relations with other women, Harris grew particularly jealous of Tarnower’s latest flame, his much-younger receptionist. On March 10, 1980 she drove to his home and shot him dead. At her trial she claimed that she had intended to commit suicide but in a struggle the gun had accidentally discharged into Tarnower’s body four times. Harris was found guilty of second-degree murder but only served 11 years before being released.

1095 Birth of Roger II of Sicily

The Normans were a scurvy crew. Essentially Vikings with a haircut, they spread from the territory they had extorted from the King of France in 911 all across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. They were banditti, mercenaries, and crusaders, eventually setting up kingdoms in England, Ireland, southern Italy and the Levant. The most glorious of these was the Kingdom of Sicily, wrested from the Muslims who had invaded the island in the 9th century. For a couple of glorious centuries the Normans ran a nation blending the best of Catholic, Byzantine, Jewish, Lombard and Muslim art, law, architecture and statecraft. Its capital at Palermo was the largest city in Europe and visitors today still marvel at churches such as the Cappella Palatina featured above.

The Capella was commissioned by the first king of Sicily, Roger II, whose birthday is today. His state was multi-relgious and tolerant and to his court came scholars, scientists and artists from around the Mediterranean. His armies and fleets warred against the Byzantine empire and against Arab powers, from whom he successfully conquered a section of the North African coastline. He died in 1154.

69 AD Vespasian becomes Roman Emperor

The Julio-Claudian family had ruled Rome since 31 BC and in that century only the dynastic founder Caesar Augustus was a success. His heir Tiberius started off well but became a corrupt and murderous tyrant. He was followed by Caligula, a corrupt and murderous madman. Next came Claudius, a well-meaning idiot poisoned by his wife to pave the succession of her son Nero. Nero’s crimes include the murder of his step-brother, mother, two wives and a host of Christians. In the year 68 the armies of Rome rebelled. Nero committed suicide, lamenting that Rome was losing a great poet in him, but no clear successor emerged. This brought about The Year of Four Emperors, as general after general claimed the imperial crown and was defeated by the next army leader. So hail and farewell to Vitellius, Otho, and Galba in short order. Surviving this round of civil wars was Titus Flāvius Caesar Vespasiānus Augustus, the founder of the Flavian dynasty.

Vespasian came from a new-money family with few influential connections. He rose slowly through political office but did better as a general, winning fame in the invasion of Britain and later in putting down the Jewish revolt in 68. The coin above reads “Judea Conquered”. Watching the civil war back in Rome, Vespasian believed that he should try his luck and he moved his army to seize the Egyptian grain supply which fed Rome while other armies of his supporters moved on the capital. On this date in 69 the Senate declared him Emperor.

Vespasian is known as a sane man and careful with money. His tax on urine (used in the tanning business) prompted the charge that an emperor should be above making money out of piss. His reply was pecunia non olet — money has no smell — and to this day urinals in France are called vespasiennes. Loot from Israel and the Jerusalem Temple helped him build the Colosseum, with the help of thousands of Jewish slaves who were killed in celebration of the arena’s opening.

When he was dying, aware that defunct Roman emperors were routinely deified, he cried, “Oh dear. I think I’m becoming a god.”

2011 Self-immolation  of Mohamed Bouazizi

What makes man want to die by setting himself on fire? In the case of  a particular Tunisian street vendor, it was a life of grinding poverty made worse by police harassment and extortion.

Mohamed Bouazizi was born in 1984 to a poor family in Sidi Bouzid in rural Tunisia. Unable to finish high school, he supported himself and his family by buying vegetables on credit and then selling him on the street from his wheel-barrow. On a number of occasions he had run-ins with the police who would confiscate his goods or demand bribe money, actions that threatened his very precarious livelihood. On the morning of December 17, 2010, Bouazizi was allegedly harassed by police who slapped him around and confiscated his produce and electronic scale. He attempted to protest to local officials who refused to hear him out. At this point he threatened to set fire to himself if his scale were not returned and when it was not, he purchased some gasoline. He returned to the square outside the governor’s offices, poured the gas over himself and set it alight. Onlookers tried to save him but the burns were so intense that he remained in a coma 18 days before he died of his injuries.

His actions prompted widespread protests in Tunisia, where disgust with corruption and autocracy had reached a boiling point. The ruler Ben Ali was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia and a wave of  popular discontent known as the Arab Spring broke over the Middle East and North Africa. Governments fell or were forced to make concessions to the people. Bouazizi was treated as a hero in the West; streets were named after him; human rights prizes were awarded posthumously and films celebrated his actions. Alas, the Arab Spring flourished only briefly and, before too long, tyranny and corruption were the norm again.

1961

Adolf Eichmann verdict delivered

Otto Adolf Eichmann was born in Germany in 1906 but grew up in Austria where he attended the same high school that Adolf Hitler had attended 17 years before. He never graduated and worked in a series of undistinguished jobs until in 1932 he joined the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party and was assigned to the paramilitary Schützstaffel or SS. He returned to Germany in 1933 and was transferred to the SD, the Security Service; here he was sent to Berlin and worked for the Jewish Department, studying Zionist organizations and learning Yiddish and Hebrew.

By this time, the Nazis had achieved power and were using strong-arm methods to encourage the country’s Jewish population to emigrate; over half of Germany’s Jews would do so before 1939. As part of his duties Eichmann travelled to British-mandated Palestine (much of which is now Israel) to see if that territory would be suitable for the reception of those leaving Europe. He spoke with local Jewish authorities and expressed the fear that sending too many German Jews to Palestine would result in them forming an independent state.

When war began in 1939, Nazi policy shifted to the mass deportation of Jews to the east into territory Germany had conquered. Eichmann was placed in charge of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, transporting of Czech, Austrian and German Jews into what had been Poland, a task which brought him into conflict with other Nazi officials who thought that the rail system could be put to better use or who wished to relocate ethnic Germans into that area. Some Jews were being forced into overcrowded and unsanitary ghettos while farther east tens of thousands of others were being murdered out of hand. After the 1942 Wannsee Conference in which Eichmann took part, it was decided to exterminate the Jewish population of Nazi-dominated Europe. This required massive construction of a constellation of death camps and coordination of the transport system. Eichmann seems to have had little influence on policy but played a key administrative role in facilitating the destruction of European Jewry.

With the defeat of Germany in 1945, things became dangerous for former SS officers but Eichmann remained safe under a series of false identities. In 1950, with the help of Catholic priests with Nazi sympathies, he obtained papers and transportation that allowed him to emigrate to Argentina under the name of Ricardo Klement. There his family joined him and he prospered in Buenos Aires as an employee of the local Mercedes-Benz firm. By 1957 the Israeli government began to be aware that Eichmann might be in Argentina, whose government was reluctant to extradite German war criminals. In 1960 a team of Israeli agents kidnapped Eichmann on his way home from work and flew him to Israel for trial.

Despite Eichmann’s argument that he was not morally responsible for the death of those in his charge and that he was merely following orders, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes and membership in illegal organizations. He was hanged in 1942.

2012

The Sandy Hook massacre

On the morning of December 14, 2012 in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, Adam Lanza killed his mother, shooting her to death with a .22 rifle, one of the many guns she owned. He then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School where he shot his way through the glass doors. In the next five minutes he fired 156 shots, killing 20 small children, none older than 7, six school staff and, finally, himself. Police were on the scene almost immediately but by the time they entered the building, the shooting had stopped. Two teachers survived their wounds.

Lanza was a mentally ill young man, probably schizophrenic as well as suffering from other disorders including a serious case of anorexia that may have affected his cognition. There were neither drugs nor alcohol in his system, and his brain was free of physical abnormality. He had briefly attended the school years before but no other link to the killings was found. He was obsessed with mass murder, downloading videos about the killings in Columbine, Norway and the Amish school in Pennsylvania. Lanza seems to have spent years compiling a spreadsheet listing around 500 mass murderers and the weapons they used.

The Sandy Hook School was demolished and a new one built; his house was deemed unsaleable because of the notoriety and was acquired by the city. Calls for gun control intensified after the shooting and unsuccessful lawsuits were launched against the gun’s manufacturer and merchandiser.

1972 The last men on the moon

In 1957 the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I, and in 1961 sent the first man, Yuri Gagarin, into space. These developments spurred the United States into plans to further develop its missile capabilities and, in the words of President John Kennedy: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

The Space Race was on.

The American’s Vanguard, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs honed the American drive toward the moon while the Soviets pursued their Vostok, Voshkod and Soyuz plans. The Russians again were first to put a woman in space and to conduct activities outside of a space craft. Both sides suffered casualties in launch and voyage accidents; at least 14 astronauts and cosmonauts died in the race to the moon.

On July 21, 1969, after a three-day voyage, Apollo XI sent down its Lunar Excursion Module piloted by Neil Armstrong who became the first man on the moon. Five more successful flights were made before the attention of the Americans and Russians turned to orbiting platforms — space stations. The last men on the surface of the moon to date were Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 in 1972.

2000 Bush v. Gore is settled

What appears to outsiders to be a single election for the presidency of the United States is in a fact of a collection of over 50 state and district votes, each conducted with different rules and different forms of balloting. Nowhere was this more evident, or more controversial, than in the state of Florida during the 2000 election that pitted Republican George W. Bush against Democratic Albert Gore.

On election night, November 8, it appeared that Bush had prevailed and Gore made the customary telephone call of concession. Furious discussions among Democratic partisans reversed directions and Gore phoned a befuddled Bush to withdraw his concession. Gore had appeared to win the popular vote and some states, particularly Florida, might produce recounts in the balloting. A mandatory recount in that state confirmed a Bush victory but Gore’s people appealed in court.

The recount in Florida would be the subject of intense litigation with much of the uncertainty due to the nature of the voting machines Florida used, devices in which voters were to punch holes beside the candidates of their choice. But such machines often produced debatable results with the ‘chads’ often hanging from the holes. Scrutineers had to somehow divine the intention of the voter in such cases as

• Hanging chads — attached to the ballot at only one corner.
• Swinging chads — attached to the ballot at two corners.
• Tri-chads — attached to the ballot at three corners.
• Pregnant or dimpled chads — attached to the ballot at all four corners, but bearing an indentation indicating the voter may have intended to mark the ballot. (Sometimes “pregnant” is used to indicate a greater mark than “dimpled”.)

On this date in 2000 the Supreme Court 5-4 (the usual suspects in their respective places) ruled that no recount was necessary and that Bush had won Florida’s electoral votes, making him the President.

1956 Trans-Canada Airlines flight 810 crashes

Before there was Air Canada there was TCA, Trans-Canada Airlines. On this date in 1956 a TCA Canadair North Star (a four-engine propeller-driven craft) from Vancouver to Calgary ploughed into “the Fang”, a peak of Mount Slesse near Chilliwack, B.C. Shortly after takeoff the crew reported a fire in one engine and turned back toward Vancouver but the flight path they chose drove them into the mountain where all 62 people aboard died. Investigators blamed a faulty engine and ice on the wings.

The flight is still remembered as the one that took the lives of a number of CFL football stars returning from the East-West All-Star Game. Lost were Saskatchewan Roughrider stalwarts Mel Becket, Mario DeMarco, Ray Syrnyk and Gordon Sturtridge, and Winnipeg Blue Bomber Calvin Jones, the first black player to win the Outland Trophy as the top lineman in U.S. college football and who was the first African American on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

Scheduled to be on that flight, but missing it for various reasons, were defensive back and later Winnipeg (and even later Minnesota Viking) coach Bud Grant, and Edmonton Eskimo stars Jackie “Spaghetti Legs” Parker and Normie “the China Clipper” Kwong, later the lieutenant-governor of Alberta.

Today the Roughriders honour their lost with flags bearing their numbers above their Regina stadium. The families of Mel Becket and Mario DeMarco donated a commemorative trophy to recognize the Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman in the West.