January 30
I’m not sure how to put this delicately, but if you schedule something to start or end on January 30, you might be surprised, and it might not be pleasant. To start with, let’s have a look at the year 1661 in England. It was a couple years after Oliver Cromwell had passed away, apparently from some at-the-time unknown illness. Cromwell had caused — or at least been centrally involved in — all sorts of mayhem and violence, and by 1661 England seemed like it was settling down a bit. Getting calmer, more rational.
Don’t believe it for a minute. What happened on January 30, 1661 was that they executed Cromwell. At the time he had, of course, been dead for a couple years. That minor detail notwithstanding, his body was exhumed and he — or it, I suppose — was hanged. This seems to have been part of restoring a king to the throne or something like that. It seems to me that ushering in a change by executing somebody a second time is not the sort of thing that inspires confidence, but hey, what do I know. I just think there’s something strange about January 30 that makes endings turn out differently than what anyone expects.
The January 30 that came along in 1959 is another example. A new steamship had entered service earlier that month, intended to sail year-round between Denmark and Greenland. The ship was the Hans Hedtoft. It was well known that sailing between Denmark and Greenland in the winter months meant that you might encounter ice, so the Hans Hedtoft was designed for it. Her bow and stern were reinforced and armored for extra strength against any ice, and her hull was made up of seven watertight compartments. That way if an iceberg damaged one part of the hull and caused a leak, the leak could be contained and repaired. The ship was called “the safest ship afloat.” Some people said she was “unsinkable.” Piece of advice: never say that about a ship. Particularly a steamship that carries passengers in the North Atlantic.
The Hans Hedtoft was on the return leg of her maiden voyage, heading home to Denmark from Greenland with 55 passengers on board. She made it about 35 miles south of Greenland when she ran into an iceberg. It was 1959, so naturally they had radios, and they sent SOS messages requesting help. But the weather conditions were so bad airplanes couldn’t be used to get to the ship. A US Coast Guard ship was the first to arrive, the next day, but it was too late. There wasn’t even any wreckage — the only thing ever found was a life float that washed ashore nine months later. A ship carefully designed to withstand the conditions in the North Atlantic had been sunk by conditions in the North Atlantic. Although, for what it’s worth, the Hans Hedtoft was the last ship to suffer casualties when being sunk by ice. I would say something about ships now being completely safe from accidents like that, but if anybody’s going to tempt fate like that, it’s not going to be me.
Nope, I’m going to stick to reporting things that started or ended (or both) unexpectedly on January 30. Like that time in 1969 when the Beatles were in their Apple Corps building in London and went up to the roof to play some music. The band was planning a tour to support (and possibly record) their upcoming album, Let It Be, and they played for 42 minutes. Up to just a couple minutes before they started, they still hadn’t made up their minds to actually play. But reportedly John Lennon finally said “Fuck it — let’s go do it,” and they did.
The concert was unplanned and unannounced, but people could hear it, and started listening from the street and from the roofs of nearby buildings if they could get there. It was 1969, and it was The Beatles, at the time the most popular band in the world. So naturally the police arrived and broke up the concert. Since it happened at Apple Corps headquarters, they had the equipment on hand to film and record the whole thing. This was good, because as it turned out, that was the last time the Beatles performed in public. The audio from the conference just hit streaming services, too. I mean, it just did —decades later.
In 1920, January 20 gave us the founding of Mazda, the auto manufacturer. There wasn’t anything tragic or ironic about it, really. It didn’t originally have the name “Mazda,” but there’s nothing unusual about companies changing their brand names. What is a bit more unusual is a company completely changing the business it’s in. That’s what Mazda did — the company originally made…wait for it…corks. I’d be willing to bet a good sum that there aren’t any corks built into the new RX-9 sports car.
Douglas McCurdy — his full name was John Alexander Douglas McCurdy — was a mover and shaker in the early days of aviation in Canada. He was born in 1886 (no, not on January 30) and soon after the turn of the 20th Century got involved in those new-fangled flying machines. He was the first to fly an aircraft in the British Empire in 1909, set up the first flying school in Canada, and was the first manager of Canada’s first airport. But none of those things happened on January 30. McCurdy’s run-in with January 30 happened in 1911, when he attempted a flight between Havana, Cuba and Florida. His flight ended unexpectedly when he crashed in the ocean about ten miles out — and then the USS Terry, a Navy destroyer in the area, made history by rescuing McCurdy. That was the first time a ship had ever rescued an aviator at sea. McCurdy was unhurt, and in fact went on to eventually become the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia (although not the first one).
That’s probably enough of the unexpected for one date. I mean, you set things in motion or establish something, and naturally you expect it to continue. You expect there to be some continuity, some stability. And then along comes a January 30, and there goes any normalcy you might have hoped for. Let’s say, for example, you were a Spanish officer in one of the 18th century’s exploration and colonizing missions to the Pacific coast of North America. You’re assigned the task of building a mission and a fort, and you carry that out very well indeed, thank you. You name your site Yerba Buena after the native herb that’s so plentiful there. You think everything is fine, and then…along comes January 30, 1847, and they change the name to San Francisco. Can you rely on nothing? Maybe you can’t. At least not on January 30.
