Welcome to January 21. It’s a date that seems to sit slightly off to the side, just a little bit out of the spotlight. Some dates are like that; they don’t feature the main events, but the supporting cast. For instance, January 21 is the birthday of a central figure in the epic tales of Middle-earth, the elves, hobbits, and all the rest. But we’re not talking about J.R.R. Tolkien. It was his wife Edith who was born today in 1889. She was born in Gloucester, England, and showed a remarkable talent for the piano. In fact the general expectation was that she would grow up to be a concert pianist. But when she was 19, she met Ronald. That would be Ronald Tolkien, who at the time was only 16. They gradually became inseparable, and Ronald proposed to her in a letter, written on his twenty-first birthday. He had waited until that point because his guardian had forbidden any contact with Edith until he turned 21.
Ronald very nearly missed his chance; Edith had believed that Ronald (she didn’t know he was forbidden to contact her) had forgotten about her, and she had just gotten engaged to someone else. Nevertheless, she broke off her other engagement and accepted Ronald’s proposal. They were married in 1916, and Ronald promptly went off to fight in the trenches of World War I. They weren’t allowed to say too much to each other in their letters, which were read and edited by government censors, but they devised a code, enabling Edith to track Ronald’s movements around the fronts. Ronald made it back from the war safely, and Edith became the inspiration for some of the characters in Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings was a highly successful “high fantasy” novel. Speaking of success, for that matter it was one of the best-selling books ever written. But it wasn’t really the first of anything. There had been other high-fantasy novels, other English novels, and so on. There can only be one first in any category. Now, if you think of American novels, titles like Tom Sawyer, Moby-Dick, and The Sun Also Rises come to mind. You don’t tend to remember The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature by William Brown. It was Brown’s first novel, published in 1789, and the story serves as a warning against being seduced and giving in to your passions. It’s remembered as…well, okay, to be honest it’s really not remembered much at all. It wasn’t a great book; it stands somewhat off to the side, out of the spotlight. Except for one thing: it was the first American novel, written and published in North America. It’s apparently quite the soap opera, featuring revelations about unknown family ties that unveil the shocking secret that two of the characters, who are courting, are actually related and can’t marry. The woman, Harriot, is stricken by “consumption” and dies. Her suitor, Thomas, is so depressed that he takes his own life.
A book like that can be enough to make you think that young people need stricter supervision…that is, people ought to be restricted in…well at the very least, there ought to be a law that women, at least, shouldn’t be allowed to…and let’s just hold that thought and jump to New York City in 1908. That was the year that, on January 21, the Sullivan Ordinance was passed by the board of aldermen, prohibiting women from smoking in public places. See? If there ought to be a law, well, sooner or later, somewhere or other, a law probably turns up. And this is the sort of law that you’d think would be widely known, in order to be ridiculed if for no other reason. But the Sullivan Ordinance has never gotten that kind of attention. Why? Because it never took effect; the mayor of New York vetoed it.
It might have been a good idea to veto some of the products, back in the 1980s, that turned out to be a bit less exciting and iconic than they at first appeared to be. Remember Back to the Future, and the very cool, stainless-steel-bodied DeLorean car that Doc Brown turned into a time machine? It was January 21, 1981 that the DeLorean went into production. It was supposed to be a sports car, but it wasn’t really very fast. It was supposed to be a glance into the future, with its gull-wing doors and shiny steel body work, but it wasn’t built very well, wasn’t very reliable (evidently it had difficulty starting if it was raining), and they only ever sold about 9,000 of them. If you really want a sports car from 1981, the Ferrari Mondial, the Renault 5 Turbo, and the Maserati Biturbo all occupy the spotlight. The DeLorean is just a bit off to the side.
Something else introduced in 1981 was the IBM PC. By today’s standards it was ridiculously slow and feeble, and yet with its MS-DOS operating system, it pretty quickly dominated the market. As did Microsoft, the publisher of MS-DOS. When you think of Microsoft, of course, your mind turns inexorably to Bill Gates, who led the company for many years. Or Steve Ballmer, who succeeded Gates as the Microsoft CEO. But you probably don’t think of Paul Allen, who was a co-founder of Microsoft along with Gates, and whose birthday is January 21. He left Microsoft in 1983 after a bad medical diagnosis, but went on to found several other companies and research institutes, own two professional sports teams, and donate over $2 billion to charities. And yet he’s still a bit outside the spotlight occupied by Gates and Ballmer.
That can be the sort of thing that happens to you even when you’re an Olympic athlete and medalist, and rise to the top of your respective sport. It was certainly the case for Mathias Hynes. You’ve never heard of him, have you? But he was a silver medalist in the Olympics. Not for one of the spotlight, well-known sports, though. Hynes won a silver medal in the 1912 Olympics for tug-of-war. And he was born on January 21. He earned his medal along with the rest of the British tug-of-war team City of London Police. But one other out-of-the-spotlight detail about him? He wasn’t even British. He was from Ireland.
There are plenty of other January 21 events that are almost, but not quite, headliners. January 21, 1960 is when a space capsule in the Mercury program lifted off — but it’s not much remembered, because it carried Miss Sam, a monkey, instead of one of the Mercury 7 Astronauts. January 21 just seems to have been like that; it’s never really the main event. Seems like it’s always been more about monkey business.
