Johnson Defeats Jeffries 4 July 1910

I saw this interesting CNN article today about efforts to get a pardon for Jack Johnson, the first African-American world heavyweight boxing champion and did a quick search to learn a little more about Johnson.

He sounds like such a larger than life character.

Among many other things, the wikipedia article for Johnson talks about "the fight of the century" between Johnson and former undefeated heavyweight champion James J. Jeffries, who came out of retirement for the fight. This was one of those amazing moments when the whole country tuned in to one event.

Here's the Chicago Tribune recap of the fight:

And here it is in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Apparently the whole thing was filmed and made into a documentary. Here are a couple of YouTube clips of the documentary:

Unique Captured German Aircraft

This morning I was looking at some World War II photos of German installations and equipment that were captured in France. Here are a few that might be categorized as interesting aircraft:

An early helicopter

A German Dornier 335, shown with American markings, that has propellers in the front and rear.

An intact German "Robot Bomb"

NARA's description calls this a "Rocket-Propelled Messerschmitt 162," but Chris found a little more information about it. He also found this odd little video with animated diagrams and all sorts of details and the one below of the plane in action.

You can see more of the "Captured Materiel" by clicking through to one of the images above and using the filmstrip at the bottom of the viewer.

The Cover-Up Continues?

In this story from the LA Times, Annie Jacobsen shares details from interviews with 5 men who worked at Area 51 in the 1960s. These guys can talk now because in 2007, the CIA started declassifying information related to the OXCART aircraft program.

As you might expect, the article doesn't include any revelation of aliens or their spaceships, but it's still fun and does include a couple of great stories, like this one:

On May 24, 1963, Collins flew out of Area 51's restricted airspace in a top-secret spy plane code-named OXCART, built by Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. He was flying over Utah when the aircraft pitched, flipped and headed toward a crash. He ejected into a field of weeds.

Almost 46 years later, in late fall of 2008, sitting in a coffee shop in the San Fernando Valley, Collins remembers that day with the kind of clarity the threat of a national security breach evokes: "Three guys came driving toward me in a pickup. I saw they had the aircraft canopy in the back. They offered to take me to my plane." Until that moment, no civilian without a top-secret security clearance had ever laid eyes on the airplane Collins was flying. "I told them not to go near the aircraft. I said it had a nuclear weapon on-board." The story fit right into the Cold War backdrop of the day, as many atomic tests took place in Nevada. Spooked, the men drove Collins to the local highway patrol. The CIA disguised the accident as involving a generic Air Force plane, the F-105, which is how the event is still listed in official records.

As for the guys who picked him up, they were tracked down and told to sign national security nondisclosures. As part of Collins' own debriefing, the CIA asked the decorated pilot to take truth serum. "They wanted to see if there was anything I'd for-gotten about the events leading up to the crash." The Sodium Pento-thal experience went without a hitch—except for the reaction of his wife, Jane.

"Late Sunday, three CIA agents brought me home. One drove my car; the other two carried me inside and laid me down on the couch. I was loopy from the drugs. They handed Jane the car keys and left without saying a word." The only conclusion she could draw was that her husband had gone out and gotten drunk. "Boy, was she mad," says Collins with a chuckle.

Oskar Schindler's List Found in Sydney Australia

Here's a document it would be nice to see on Footnote.

There are 13 pages of fragile, yellowing paper, upon which are typed the names and nationalities of 801 Jewish people.

They are being described as some of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century.

The NASA Workspace

Today we've been poking around on the NASA Images site, looking at some of the great photos and playing with their "workspace." The workspace allows you to select some pictures, resize them and move them around in relation to each other and then share what you've created.

I haven't found any evidence that the moon landings were a hoax (yet :), but here are a few pictures I put together and you can play with on a workspace:

Library of Congress Launches YouTube Channel

The Library of Congress has created a YouTube channel to display some of the 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings they have in their collection.

Here are a couple of classics from Thomas Edison's lab.

A Bucking Bronco. Note the guy on the fence rail shooting the gun to keep the horse excited.


A Sneeze:


And of course the always popular Boxing Cats:

King George V attends a Baseball Game 4 July 1918

Found this interesting picture of King George V of England from July 4, 1918 in Gorrell's History of the American Expeditionary Forces Air Service. He's shaking hands with the captain of the US Army baseball team at a game between the US Army and Navy that was part of a 4th of July celebration.

Here's a story about it from The Times 4 July 1918.

Death in 1926 Bexar County, Texas: An Un-Scientific Poll

The other day I was poking around in the Texas Death Certificates, and sort of got sucked into a straw poll of causes of death.

I had randomly browsed to Bexar County in 1926 and from there down to an individual record. Once I was at a record I used the filmstrip to randomly select images and see the kinds of things that were included. It wasn't long before I noticed some interesting things and some simple trends in the cause of death field.

My random sample painted a pretty clear picture of the progress that has been made in medicine since 1926. Some of the more common causes of death have been so effectively treated in the US that I didn't even recognize them. For example, Pellagra, which showed up frequently in my straw poll, is a disease related to a vitamin deficiency which was at epidemic levels in the South in 1926, but doesn't get much press today.

The most common causes of death I saw in Bexar County in 1926 were:

• Various types of Tuberculosis
• Pneumonia
• Premature birth
• Colitis
• Kidney problems

I was surprised to find several people in my small sample who were killed by trains and even a few who were killed in automobile accidents.

The oldest person I came across? Justa Baron who died of "Unknown Natural Causes" at the age of 108.

FrankOlynyk has been working with the Missing Air Crew Reports and sending us some great corrections.

One of the reports he contacted us about was for a B-25 that went down in the Mediterranean on 10 Aug 1943.

The report includes a couple of eye witness accounts of the crash including one from Sergeant Alan J. MacDougall, who was flying in another plane in the formation, and described it this way:

"About fifteen minutes out over the Mediterranean, the ship ... went into a steep bank apparently starting back, he was banked well over 60° and very low. His left wing tip dipped into water and he went in very quickly. As the ship's nose hit, something flew from the ship. I thought it was the tail. Shortly after the ship disappeared, water boiled over the spot he went down. Nothing was seen to float to the surface."

Initially the entire crew was listed as "Killed in Action," but later it was discovered that Sergeant Ellsworth E Meinke, the Radio Waist Gunner, "survived but was seriously wounded."

Sergeant MacDougall gives a dramatic account of the accident, but I would love to hear the story from Sergeant Meinke's perspective.

I did a search of Footnote for Ellsworth E Meinke and found this Footnote Page for him that was created from his WWII Army Enlistment Record. It includes information about him at the time he enlisted. We have another Footnote Page for an Ellsworth Meinke with the same birth year that was created from the Social Security Index. If this is the same guy, he died in 1962.

The Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906

The other day, I noticed that we had added some editions of the The San Francisco Chronicle to the site that were pretty close to the time of the 1906 earthquake. I wondered how the local papers reported the quake, or if they were even still able to publish.

Here's the headline from Thursday April 19,1906.

It's not clear where they were publishing from since, as the paper says, "Newspaper Row Is Gutted" (page 2) and the fire threatened to leave the city "Without a Newspaper" (page 3), but this appears to be a special, combined edition of three San Francisco Papers, The Call, The Chronicle and The Examiner. It's just 4 pages long, down from a normal of about 16 for The Chronicle.

The Chronicle skipped April 20th, but by the 21st they were back:

And they published every day for the rest of the month, though it did take them a week or so to get back to the full length.

Of course, other major papers around the nation covered the story. Here's The Atlanta Constitution from April 19, 1906:

And The Chicago Tribune for the same day: