Today is the international Day of the Imprisoned Writer. When it was instituted in 1981 the PEN International Writers in Prison Committee was about political writers and journalists, but any time you have the opportunity to appropriate a holiday, you should probably make the most of it. After all, there might be cake.
It’s also a holiday in Japan today, but like many things in Japan, it’s a little bit puzzling to the rest of us. It’s Shichi-Go-San, which means “Seven-Five-Three.” It’s a celebration of a rite of passage of little boys and girls, but — and here’s the puzzling part — girls are celebrated when they’re three years old and when they’re seven, but boys are celebrated just once when they’re five. It’s tied to some ancient traditions, not that those help it make more sense. For instance, in ancient Japan, children’s heads were shaved until they were three. Boys would start wearing “hakama,” a form of pants, when they were five. And girls, who wore kimonos, would tie them with string up until they were seven, when they started to use an obi, which is more like a belt. Nowadays the holiday is mostly known as a day to take extra photos of your kids and give them special chitose ame treats, which look a lot like candy canes.
In 1806, November 15th was the day Zebulon Pike first spotted Pikes Peak, although it wasn’t named after him until 84 years later. He didn’t discover it, of course — the people who already lived there called it Tava, and the Spanish explorers who had happened by a century earlier called it El Capitan. For that matter, it was named James Peak in 1820, after Edwin James, who climbed it. The story was, as usual, that he was the “first” to climb it, but also as usual, he was really just the first English-speaking white guy to climb it. The mountain is also known as one of Colorado’s “fourteeners”, which are mountains more than 14,000 feet high. That may have been a fairly unique distinction at one time, but now that we know there are 58 of those in Colorado, it’s no longer such a big deal.
On November 15, 1926, the NBC radio network was founded, and they started out with a lot fewer stations than Colorado has high mountains; at first they had just 24. They didn’t use the famous peacock logo at first; that only appeared in 1956 to showcase their new color TV broadcasts. Their distinctive three-note chime arrived in 1931, and was the first audio trademark ever registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office. When there’s an extreme emergency, though, a fourth note is added. They used it to announce the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 and D-Day in 1944. If you listen carefully to the NBC News theme music, you can hear the three-note sequence. On the musical scale it’s G – E sharp – C sharp, which oddly enough matches the initials of General Electric Company. GE was a major shareholder in RCA, which originally spun out NBC. The company has always maintained that it’s just coincidence, but the legend is still floating around.
NBC News probably reported on a cargo plane that made an emergency landing on November 15, 1979. It was on its way from Chicago to Washington, DC when smoke started coming out of a package in the hold. Inside the package was a bomb, sent by Ted Kaczynski — the Unabomber. That particular incident, in fact, is where the term Unabomber came from. There had already been a series of bombs sent through the mail to random people who worked in colleges developing technology. Postal Inspectors were investigating, looking for someone they called the “junkyard bomber.” But because blowing up an airliner is a federal crime, the FBI got involved at that point. They named their investigation “UNABOM” for “UNiversity and Airline BOMber,” and the mystery bomber instantly had a memorable name — thanks to the FBI. They didn’t catch him for another 17 years, though, and in the interim there was another November 15 incident. That was the date in 1985 that one of his bomb packages exploded at the University of Michigan. Nobody was killed, but a research assistant was injured.
November 15 is hiding a couple of other coincidences, too. It’s the birthday of Franklin Pierce and Josephine Baker. But not that Franklin Pierce, and not that Josephine Baker. It’s Sara Josephine Baker, who was a doctor and epidemiologist in the first half of the 20th century. Everybody’s heard of Typhoid Mary — she was a real person, and Sara Josephine Baker was the one who tracked her down. The Franklin Pierce born on November 15 was Franklin Pierce Adams. He was a writer and newspaper columnist whose Conning Tower column was one of the most widely read in the country from 1914 to 1941. Adams’ writing was witty, and he mentioned other satirists and humorists in it. Dorothy Parker and James Thurber credited Adams with launching their careers. And even though he was a writer — and born on November 15 — Adams was never imprisoned for his writing.
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