December 8 makes us pine for what we’ve lost to history. Back in the good old days, this whole modern practice of surnames wasn’t nearly as established, so people were able to identify their leaders the ways they wanted. That’s why we know that in the year 877, when the new king of Aquitaine was crowned on December 8th, his name was Charles the Stammerer. He was the oldest son of Charles the Bald. And his younger brother? Charles the Child. The very next year, he gave several counties to his ally, Wilfred the Hairy. And one of his sons would grow up to be the King of West Francia, Charles the Simple.
If only we’d had the collective sense to maintain that naming convention, we’d remember that in London in 1660, the first woman to ever appear on an English stage played a role in Shakespeare the Eloquent’s production of Othello on December 8. And in 1953, the US President Dwight the Mild Mannered delivered a December 8 speech on Atoms for Peace, which introduced a program delivering the equipment to schools, hospitals, and labs that led to the creation of nuclear medicine, the nuclear isotope power cells built into space probes, modern medical systems like MRI scanners, and more. Hmmm, maybe we should call him Dwight the Nuclear instead.
Many people remember that December 8 is the anniversary of the 1980 death of Lennon the Minstrel outside his New York apartment building. He was murdered by Chapman the Lunatic, who evidently believed he was Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye — after he shot Lennon he didn’t run away, just read the book until he was arrested.
Other than people with descriptive sobriquets entering the history books, the series of December eighths for about the last six decades has seen an unusual number of airplane disasters. In 1963, a Boeing 707 was struck by lightning over Maryland and crashed. It’s pretty common for airplanes to receive lightning hits, and it’s usually not a problem at all. As far as could be reconstructed, this lightning strike ignited some vapor in the fuel tanks. After the crash, airliners were modified and the formulation of jet fuel was changed to eliminate all the problems that could be found. Lightning has downed planes since, but only very rarely.
One lighting-caused crash was in South America in 1971, when a Lockheed Electra flying from Lima to Pucallpa, Peru, was struck. It crashed, killing nearly everyone aboard. There was one survivor, a 17-year-old woman who somehow survived the fall from 9,800 feet strapped to her seat, then survived walking through the Amazon rain forest for 11 days until she was rescued. She’s Juliane Diller, but she probably ought to be known as Juliane the Fortunate.
In 1969, December 8 saw an Olympic Airways flight crash into a mountain in Greece. It’s still the worst accident that type of plane — a Douglas DC-6 — ever suffered. Then in 1972, United Airlines flight 553 crashed trying to land at Midway Airport in Chicago. It was the first crash of a Boeing 737, which has more recently acquired a certain reputation that might be conveyed as 737 the Dangerous. Then on December 8, 1988, a US Air Force jet crashed into an apartment building in Germany with deadly results.
The lesson of December 8th might well be “it’s not a good day to fly.” But it could also be “eat your spinach,” because it’s the birthday of E.C. Segar, who took a correspondence course in 1912 to learn cartooning. He said later that he “lit up the oil lamps about midnight and worked on the course until 3am” every night. It was a worthwhile investment, because he was able to start selling cartoons just a couple of years later. In 1919 he moved to New York City and created the comic strip Thimble Theatre, which ran in the New York Journal newspaper. The strip ran for years, and featured characters like Harold Hamgravy, Castor Oyl, and Olive Oyl. In 1929 Castor Oyl needed a sailor to help him sail his ship, and found an old salt hanging around the cartoon docks. It was Popeye, who not only signed on to sail the ship but took over the whole strip.
One of the other Thimble Theatre characters — who arrived after Popeye — was Eugene the Jeep. A “Jeep”, as explained to Popeye by Professor Brainstine, is “an animal living in a three dimensional world—in this case our world—but really belonging to a fourth dimensional world. Here’s what happened. A number of Jeep life cells were somehow forced through the dimensional barrier into our world. They combined at a favorable time with free life cells of the African Hooey Hound.” Eugene could teleport and walk on walls and ceilings, which meant he could pretty much go anywhere. He was such a popular character that in WWII a light utility vehicle that turned out to be very maneuverable was nicknamed a “Jeep.” The name seems to have stuck.
Wartime manufacturing in the US involved sharing designs between factories, even if they were under different ownership. So some wartime Jeeps, designed by Willys, were manufactured in General Motors plants — that’s the company founded by William Durant, who might have appreciated that his factories were building a truck named after a character in a comic strip drawn by E.C. Segar — with whom he shared a birthday.
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