February 3 is the Day the Music Died

On February 3, 1959, musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were killed when their plane crashed in an Iowa cornfield. The tragic accident became known as “The Day the Music Died,” after a lyric in singer-songwriter Don McLean‘s 1971 anthem American Pie.

the day the music died

Richardson, Holly and Valens

At the time, they were on their way to a gig in Moorland, MN, a stop on their “Winter Dance Party” tour of the Midwest. Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Dion DiMucci were on the way there on a school bus.

The tour began in Milwaukee, WI, on January 23, 1959. The first tour bus they rented was unequipped for the freezing winter weather. Due to the long distances between venues, everyone was stuck on the bus for many hours at a time.

The heater on the bus broke down. Drummer Carl Bunch suffered frostbite on his feet and was hospitalized in Ironwood, MI. The tour bus was replaced with a school bus and Bunch was left behind. Holly, Valens, and DiMucci took turns playing drums for each other at the performances in Green Bay, WI, and Clear Lake, IA.

By the time they reached Clear Lake on the evening of February 2, Holly was frustrated and decided to charter a plane to take him to Fargo, ND, after the show. The bus could then pick him up for the performance in nearby Moorhead, MN, sparing him hours of misery and allowing him to get some rest.

The four-seat Beechcraft 35 Bonanza Holly chartered was not named American Pie as many surmised from McLean’s song. It was known only by its registration number, N3794N. Except for a change in DiMuccio’s recollection timed to his book release more than 50 years later, the other survivors have always agreed on how the two remaining passengers ended up on that fateful flight.

The seats were meant for Holly’s bandmates Jennings and Allsup.  Along with Carl Bunch, they had formed a group after Holly left his band The Crickets. Holly felt responsible for convincing them to come on this miserable trip. Valens asked Allsup for his seat on the plane. He initially refused before agreeing to a coin toss to determine who would fly and who would take the dreaded bus. Valens won. Richardson had the flu so Jennings gave up his seat.

In Waylon: An Autobiography, Jennings related the conversation that would haunt him for the rest of his life. When Holly learned he wouldn’t be coming along on the flight,  he jokingly said, “Well, I hope your ol’ bus freezes up.” Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.”

day the music died

The cause of the crash has been under investigation on and off ever since. It was initially blamed on the poor judgment of the 21-year-old pilot, who was not yet qualified to fly using instrumentation in conditions of poor visibility. But it was also found that warnings about worsening weather weren’t relayed to the pilot before he took off in light snow.

In early 2015, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) was petitioned to reopen the case and look for evidence of mechanical failure as well as proof that the pilot had made a heroic attempt to land. (The latter is unlikely as the plane hit nose down at 170 miles per hour.) In May 2015, the NTSB announced it will not reopen the case.

It’s a somber occasion to remember the death of these rock and roll legends but also an opportunity to celebrate the music they brought into the world. Listen to some of their hits today. It’s one way to keep the music alive.

Copyright © 2017 Worldwide Weird Holidays

February 2 is Sled Dog Day

Today is Sled Dog Day which recognizes the heroism of 20 men and 150 dogs who raced to save the town of Nome, Alaska from an epidemic. In January of 1925, children began to fall ill, gasping for breath. At least four died. Diphtheria is a highly contagious respiratory disease, often lethal without treatment. It’s curable, but the nearest supply of antitoxin serum was in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away.

On January 25th the town’s only doctor, Dr. Welch, arranged for the serum to be transported by train to Nenana, the end of the line, still almost 700 miles away. Experienced dogsledders, called mushers, decided to run their teams in relays to deliver the 20-pound batch of serum, wrapped in fur, to Nome.sled dog day

The serum arrived in Nenana on the evening of January 27th. Musher “Wild Bill” Shannon tied the package to his sled and set off on the first 52-mile leg of a 674-mile journey that became known as the “Great Race of Mercy.” Wind chill reached -60° Fahrenheit.

The teams averaged six miles per hour and covered about 30 miles of ground apiece, but when Leonhard Seppala, a famous musher at the time, received the serum on January 31st in Shaktoolik, he covered 91 miles with lead dog Togo. He then handed it off to Charlie Olson, who traveled 25 miles before giving it to Gunnar Kaasen for what was supposed to be the second-to-last leg of the relay.

sled dog day

Kaasen and Balto

Kaasen ran straight into a blizzard, the snow sometimes so intense it caused a white-out in which he couldn’t see any of his 13-dog team. He trusted his lead dog, Balto, who relied on scent to guide them. At one point the sled flipped, pitching the serum into a snowbank and sending Kaasen scrambling to find it.

He arrived in Port Safety in the early morning hours of February 2nd, but when the next team was not ready to leave, he pressed on to Nome himself. At 5:30 AM, Balto led the way into Nome to deliver the serum, frozen solid, to Dr. Welch. The doctor thawed the antitoxin, then injected the townspeople. Three weeks later, he lifted the quarantine.

sled dog day

Balto and team in Nome after delivering vaccine

The relay had taken five-and-a-half days, cutting the previous record by almost half. Many mushers had suffered frostbite and four of the dogs died from exposure.

The story got international attention and Balto became a superstar. Within weeks, he was contracted to star in a short Hollywood film entitled Balto’s Race to Nome. After traveling to Seattle, Washington and shooting on Mt. Rainier, Kaasen, his wife, Balto and the rest of the team embarked on a nine-month vaudeville tour of the country. They arrived in December of 1925 to witness the unveiling of a bronze likeness of Balto in New York City’s Central Park.

Statue of Balto in New York's Central Park (Credit: Getty Images)

The statue is located on the main path leading north from the Tisch Children’s Zoo. In front of it, a slate plaque depicts Balto’s sled team, and bears the following inscription:

Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxin six hundred miles
over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through Arctic blizzards from Nenana
to the relief of stricken Nome in the Winter of 1925.

Endurance · Fidelity · Intelligence

Although Seppala also toured the country and appeared with Togo in an advertising campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes, he felt cheated by the attention lavished on Kaasen and Balto. He had raised Balto and considered him genetically inferior, with a boxy build; he’d neutered him as a puppy to ensure his line would not continue.

sled dog day

Seppala and Togo

A quote from biography Seppala: Alaskan Dog Driver reads, “The chief thing which disturbed me was that Togo’s records were given to Balto, a scrub dog who was pushed into the limelight and made immortal. It was almost more than I could bear when the ‘newspaper’ dog Balto received a statue for his ‘glorious achievements.'”

The timing and circumstances surrounding what happened next is unclear. Both men worked for Pioneer Mining and Ditch Company near Nome. Kaasen was recalled by the company, most likely at his superior Seppala’s behest. Some accounts say Seppala’s friend, mountaineer Roald Amundsen confronted Kaasen in Chicago, Illinois, a stop on the vaudeville tour he’d been forced to resume due to financial difficulties, and told him to return home immediately. With Kaasen in Alaska, there would be nothing to divert attention from a ceremony Seppala had planned in which Amundsen would award a gold medal to Togo.

No matter how it came to pass, Kaasen found himself financially unable to secure passage for the dogs and with no time to raise funds. He had no choice but to leave them with the tour’s promoter, who had no use for 13 dogs and sold them at a stop in Los Angeles, California to a “museum” where they were tied up in a small dark room, neglected and sometimes abused. For a dime, people could peek in the room’s one small window and see the hero dogs that had saved a town.

This went on for several months until businessman George Kimble, visiting from Cleveland, Ohio, saw an advertisement for the attraction and went to have a look. Incensed at their deplorable condition, fearing that they would soon pine away and die, he approached the owner who offered to sell them to him for $2,000.

Mr. Kimble worked together with a Cleveland newspaper, The Plain Dealer, to get the word out. Children and adults all over the country donated and in only ten days, Kimble was able to rescue the dogs and bring them to Cleveland. (At this point, only seven dogs remained. It’s unknown what happened to the other six.) On March 19, 1927, Balto and his teammates received a hero’s welcome in a triumphant parade. The dogs were then taken to the Brookside Zoo and lived the rest of their lives in comfort.

After Balto died in 1933, his remains were mounted by a taxidermist and donated to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. In 1998, the Alaska legislature passed HJR 62- the ‘Bring Back Balto’ resolution. The museum refused to return Balto but in October of that year, they loaned him for five months to the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, which drew record crowds.

sled dog day

Sunlight has faded Balto’s coat from black to brown.

After Togo’s death in 1929, Seppala had him custom mounted and displayed at Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. (His skeleton is still there.) In 1964, the stuffed dog was transferred to a museum in Vermont.

During all the years he was displayed, Togo was not enclosed. His coat had begun to bald where he was petted. His significance forgotten, Togo was put into storage in 1979. A carpenter who happened to have a background in racing sled dogs discovered him in 1983 atop an old refrigerator.

The sled run of 1925 became international news again. The museum was pressured by legislators, dog clubs, and museums to do something, whether it was to try to repair the taxidermy, bury him where he had died or, as a letter-writing campaign begun by Alaskan schoolchildren urged, return him to the place of his greatest triumph. sled dog day

Today he is on display in a glass case at the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Headquarters Museum in Wasilla, Alaska.

Raise a glass to Balto and Togo and all the dogs that save lives or just make our lives better. Hear, hear and have a happy Sled Dog Day!

Copyright © 2017 Worldwide Weird Holidays

February 1 is G.I. Joe Day

Today is G.I. Joe Day. In February of 1964toymaker Hassenfeld Brothers (later shortened to Hasbro) introduced its first doll specifically intended for boys at the American International Toy Show in New York. The company hoped to duplicate the success of Mattel’s Barbie, which had been introduced in 1959 and sold a record 351,000 units in its first year.

But there was a problem. Parents wouldn’t buy dolls for their sons. Playing with dolls was considered a girl’s activity and boys generally wanted nothing to do with that. Some parents feared it might cause them to become effeminate and possibly even homosexual.

In a brilliant bit of marketing, the toymaker solved this issue by coining the term “action figure,” which has been used for countless toys since. It further masculinized the toy by making it a military man, G.I. (Government Issue) Joe. The name came from a 1945 American war film called The Story of G.I. Joe.

GI Joe Day

They also placed a scar across his right cheek. Not only did it denote manly ruggedness, combat and valor, but also enabled Hassenfeld Brothers to copyright the toy. (A generic human figure cannot be copyrighted.) The scar made it an identifiable character as did a production glitch that gave Joe an inverted thumbnail.

Four original G.I. Joes were released in 1964. An African-American soldier followed in 1965. “America’s Moveable Fighting Man” had a patented twenty-one points of articulation. Unlike standard toy soldiers, one-third the size and made of hard plastic, the Joes were fully poseable, allowing more creative play.
The Joes had been introduced while the U.S. was in the middle of an undeclared war in Vietnam. As it escalated and casualties mounted, the toys that had symbolized the brave fight against all foes, Communist and otherwise, lost their luster.
Women picketed the 1966 toy show in New York, holding umbrellas that read, “Toy Fair or Warfare?” Sears later dropped all war toys from its catalog. Fearing a boycott, Hasbro (which had shortened its name in 1968) phased out military uniforms and added flocked hair and beards. By 1970, the company had replaced the war-oriented Joe with the G.I. Joe Adventure Team.
gi joe day There were individual Land, Sea and Air Adventurer Joes, along with the more generalized Adventurer Joe and the mysterious Man of Action Joe. The kung-fu grip was born. Hasbro upped the merchandising quotient by selling props for scenes like White Tiger Hunt, Revenge of the Spy Shark, Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb, Capture of the Pygmy Gorilla and Sandstorm Survival.
We don’t know if kids became bored with every aspect of playtime being mapped out for them or if Hasbro was ahead of its time in roping parents into buying ancillary items, something that seems normal today. By 1976, the Joe brand was in trouble. Hasbro tried to cash in on the superhero craze by adding BulletMan to the lineup and throwing in a villainous caveman from outer space for good measure.
Nothing worked and production shut down in 1978. Joe was “furloughed,” according to Hasbro, never expected to return. But the stratospheric profitability of Star Wars merchandise would give Joe one more chance. Shrunken to the same size as those action figures–a little less than 4 inches tall–Joe came back on the scene in 1982.

In an inspired feat of cross-promotion, Hasbro produced a television cartoon called G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero as a vehicle to sell toys. It debuted as two five-part miniseries in 1983 and 1984 and ran as a regular series from 1985 to 1987. The show introduced new heroes, villains and storylines, spawning an ever-increasing number of action figures and turning viewers into avid collectors.

Each episode concluded with a Joe teaching kids valuable lessons like, “don’t go with strangers,” “don’t paint your bike in the garage,” and “blind kids can find lost kittens, too.” The kids would say, “Now we know!” and Joe would reply, “And knowing is half the battle!”

Now you know.

Copyright © 2017 Worldwide Weird Holidays