You’ve probably heard the term “going postal.” When it’s used as dark humor, it means being driven nuts by events and people around you. When it’s used seriously, it means shooting your coworkers.
“Going postal” comes from this very day in 1986. Patrick Sherrill, a “relief carrier” in the Edmond, Oklahoma post office, brought a pistol to work, killed 14 people and injured 6 more. Nobody knows his real motives — he killed himself too — but it could have been anger. He’d been disciplined by two supervisors the previous day. Or it could have been fear — relief carriers have the lowest seniority and act as “fill in” workers, and their jobs are not very secure.
Sherrill’s first victim was one of the supervisors. But the other one, Bill Bland, overslept that morning and didn’t arrive until everything was over. Punctuality doesn’t always pay off. But it did in 1858, when Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel published their papers in the “Journal of the Linnean Society” on August 20. Ideas about speciation were circulating in the scientific community at the time, and both men had been urged to publish to establish the precedence of their discoveries and theories.
Darwin had returned from his voyage on the Beagle several years earlier, and for a while had been living with his brother Erasmus. Erasmus was a “free thinker,” which nowadays is usually associated with religious thought, but in the 1800s in England was a broader movement that encompassed politics, authority, and, most important in this case, conventional scientific thought.
George Tucker was born on August 20, 1775, and he also enjoyed a lot of support from his family, in this case his cousin St. George Tucker. The cousins were both born in Bermuda in the same English colonial family. St. George moved to Virginia in 1772 to study law.
Even in the 1770s, being a lawyer mostly had to do with paperwork, but the Stamp Act of 1774 decreed that most official papers had to have a “stamp” issued by the English government. You had to pay for the stamp, of course — the Stamp Act was really a kind of tax. But the tax was so high that most of the courts in Virginia just closed, because most people couldn’t afford the tax.
Without any courts available (they didn’t reopen for several years), St. George Tucker needed a new job. So he returned to Bermuda and became a smuggler. As you do. He served in the Virginia militia during the Revolution, then in quick succession reopened his law practice, married into a very wealthy family (remember this part), and went on to become a law professor and judge.
But this is really about his cousin George (the one without the “St.”). The younger George Tucker really wasn’t a saint. By the time he was born, in 1775, his cousin (the saint version) was 23. And by the time the non-saint George left Bermuda for Philadelphia, in 1795, his cousin was well-established and, even better, rich. The younger George loved a good party, and developed a pattern where he’d have a good time with the young upper-crust of society, run out of money, then visit his cousin for help.
The non-saint George eventually became a lawyer too, and a politician, and eventually even also married into a rich family, but he spent most of the fortune on his extravagant social life. He also became a prolific writer, often writing in support of ending slavery. He also wrote fiction, and in 1827 published “Voyage to the Moon,” one of the first science fiction novels. It was possibly the very first one written in North America, which has been the home of countless authors of science fiction and related genres since.
One of those authors is H.P. Lovecraft, who was born on August 20, 1890. He wrote about the moon too, but in a slightly darker way. You wouldn’t want to go outside if you found yourself in an H.P. Lovecraft story. In fact, be careful going outside today anyway; it’s “World Mosquito Day.” It seems like an injustice that mosquitos have their own day, doesn’t it? Maybe even unfair enough to make somebody go postal.
