On This Day in History

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September 30th In Music

1978 - Exile's "Kiss You All Over" hits No. 1 on the Hot 100, where it stays for four weeks. The group doesn't place another song higher than No. 40.

2008 - Disney releases Nightmare Revisited, a cover album of songs from The Nightmare Before Christmas. The new album commemorates the fifteenth anniversary of the film's original 1993 release.

Birthdays:

1943 - Marilyn McCoo. Singer, 1977 US No. 1 single 'You Don't Have To Be A Star'. Also a member of The 5th Dimension. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey.

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On October 1, 1946, 12 high-ranking Nazis are sentenced to death by the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg. Among those condemned to death by hanging were Joachim von Ribbentrop, Nazi minister of foreign affairs; Hermann Goering, founder of the Gestapo and chief of the German air force; and Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior. Seven others, including Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler’s former deputy, were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life. Three others were acquitted.
The trial, which had lasted nearly 10 months, was conducted by an international tribunal made up of representatives from the United States, the USSR, France, and Great Britain. It was the first trial of its kind in history, and the defendants faced charges ranging from crimes against peace to crimes of war and crimes against humanity. On October 16, 10 of the architects of Nazi policy were hanged one by one. Hermann Goering, who at sentencing was called the “leading war aggressor and creator of the oppressive program against the Jews,” committed suicide by poison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Nazi Party leader Martin Bormann was condemned to death in absentia; he is now known to have died in Berlin at the end of the war.

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On October 1, 1908, the first production Model T Ford is completed at the company’s Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit. Between 1908 and 1927, Ford would build some 15 million Model T cars. It was the longest production run of any automobile model in history until the Volkswagen Beetle surpassed it in 1972.
Before the Model T, cars were a luxury item: At the beginning of 1908, there were fewer than 200,000 on the road. Though the Model T was fairly expensive at first (the cheapest one initially cost $825, or about $18,000 in today’s dollars), it was built for ordinary people to drive every day. It had a 22-horsepower, four-cylinder engine and was made of a new kind of heat-treated steel, pioneered by French race car makers, that made it lighter (it weighed just 1,200 pounds) and stronger than its predecessors had been. It could go as fast as 40 miles per hour and could run on gasoline or hemp-based fuel. (When oil prices dropped in the early 20th century, making gasoline more affordable, Ford phased out the hemp option.)  “No car under $2,000 offers more,” ads crowed, “and no car over $2,000 offers more except the trimmings.”
Ford kept prices low by sticking to a single product. By building just one model, for example, the company’s engineers could develop a system of interchangeable parts that reduced waste, saved time and made it easy for unskilled workers to assemble the cars. By 1914, the moving assembly line made it possible to produce thousands of cars every week and by 1924, workers at the River Rouge Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan could cast more than 10,000 Model T cylinder blocks in a day.
But by the 1920s, many Americans wanted more than just a sturdy, affordable car. They wanted style (for many years, the Model T famously came in just one color: black), speed and luxury too. As tastes changed, the era of the Model T came to an end and the last one rolled off the assembly line on May 26, 1927.

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On October 1, 1890, an act of Congress creates Yosemite National Park, home of such natural wonders as Half Dome and the giant sequoia trees. Environmental trailblazer John Muir (1838-1914) and his colleagues campaigned for the congressional action, which was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison and paved the way for generations of hikers, campers and nature lovers, along with countless “Don’t Feed the Bears” signs.
Native Americans were the main residents of the Yosemite Valley, located in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, until the 1849 gold rush brought thousands of non-Indian miners and settlers to the region. Tourists and damage to Yosemite Valley’s ecosystem followed. In 1864, to ward off further commercial exploitation, conservationists convinced President Abraham Lincoln to declare Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias a public trust of California. This marked the first time the U.S. government protected land for public enjoyment and it laid the foundation for the establishment of the national and state park systems. Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872.
In 1889, John Muir discovered that the vast meadows surrounding Yosemite Valley, which lacked government protection, were being overrun and destroyed by domestic sheep grazing. Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson, a fellow environmentalist and influential magazine editor, lobbied for national park status for the large wilderness area around Yosemite Valley. On October 1 of the following year, Congress set aside over 1,500 square miles of land (about the size of Rhode Island) for what would become Yosemite National Park, America’s third national park. In 1906, the state-controlled Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove came under federal jurisdiction with the rest of the park.
Yosemite’s natural beauty is immortalized in the black-and-white landscape photographs of Ansel Adams (1902-1984), who at one point lived in the park and spent years photographing it. Today, over 3 million people get back to nature annually at Yosemite and check out such stunning landmarks as the 2,425-foot-high Yosemite Falls, one of the world’s tallest waterfalls; rock formations Half Dome and El Capitan, the largest granite monolith in the U.S.; and the three groves of giant sequoias, the world’s biggest trees.

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On October 1, 1988, having forced the resignation of Soviet leader Andrei Gromyko, Mikhail Gorbachev names himself head of the Supreme Soviet. Within two years, he was named “Man of the Decade” by Time magazine for his role in bringing the Cold War to a close. Beginning in 1985, when he became general secretary of the Communist Party in the USSR, Gorbachev moved forward to both liberalize the Soviet economy (perestroika) and political life (glasnost), as well as decrease tensions with the United States. By late 1991, the Soviet Union was moving toward dissolution, and Gorbachev retired from office in December 1991.

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On October 1, 1918, a combined Arab and British force captures Damascus from the Turks during World War I, completing the liberation of Arabia. An instrumental commander in the Allied campaign was T.E. Lawrence, a legendary British soldier known as Lawrence of Arabia.
Lawrence, an Oxford-educated Arabist born in Tremadoc, Wales, began working for the British army as an intelligence officer in Egypt in 1914. He spent more than a year in Cairo, processing intelligence information. In 1916, he accompanied a British diplomat to Arabia, where Hussein ibn Ali, the emir of Mecca, had proclaimed a revolt against Turkish rule. Lawrence convinced his superiors to aid Hussein’s rebellion, and he was sent to join the Arabian army of Hussein’s son Faisal as a liaison officer.
Under Lawrence’s guidance, the Arabians launched an effective guerrilla war against the Turkish lines. He proved a gifted military strategist and was greatly admired by the Bedouin people of Arabia. In July 1917, Arabian forces captured Aqaba near the Sinai and joined the British march on Jerusalem. Lawrence was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. In November, he was captured by the Turks while reconnoitering behind enemy lines in Arab dress and was tortured and sexually abused before escaping. He rejoined his army, which slowly worked its way north to Damascus. The Syrian capital fell on October 1, 1918.
Arabia was liberated, but Lawrence’s hope that the peninsula would be united as a single nation was dashed when Arabian factionalism came to the fore after Damascus. Lawrence, exhausted and disillusioned, left for England. Feeling that Britain had exacerbated the rivalries between the Arabian groups, he appeared before King George V and politely refused the medals offered to him.
After the war, he lobbied hard for independence for Arab countries and appeared at the Paris peace conference in Arab robes. He later wrote a monumental war memoir, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF) under an assumed name to escape his fame and acquire material for a new book. Discharged from the RAF in 1935, he was fatally injured in a motorcycle accident a few months later.

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On October 1, 1949, naming himself head of state, communist revolutionary Mao Zedong officially proclaims the existence of the People’s Republic of China; Zhou Enlai is named premier. The proclamation was the climax of years of battle between Mao’s communist forces and the regime of Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek, who had been supported with money and arms from the American government. The loss of China, the largest nation in Asia, to communism was a severe blow to the United States, which was still reeling from the Soviet Union’s detonation of a nuclear device one month earlier.
State Department officials in President Harry S. Truman’s administration tried to prepare the American public for the worst when they released a “white paper” in August 1949. The report argued that Chiang’s regime was so corrupt, inefficient, and unpopular that no amount of U.S. aid could save it. Nevertheless, the communist victory in China brought forth a wave of criticism from Republicans who charged that the Truman administration lost China through gross mishandling of the situation. Other Republicans, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, went further, claiming that the State Department had gone “soft” on communism; more recklessly, McCarthy suggested that there were procommunist sympathizers in the department.
The United States withheld recognition from the new communist government in China. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, during which communist Chinese and U.S. forces did battle, drove an even deeper wedge between the two nations. In the ensuing years, continued U.S. support of Chiang’s Republic of China, which had been established on the island of Taiwan, and the refusal to seat the People’s Republic of China at the United Nations made diplomatic relations impossible. President Richard Nixon broke the impasse with his stunning visit to communist China in February 1972. The United States extended formal diplomatic recognition in 1979.

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On October 1, 1944, the first of two sets of medical experiments involving castration are performed on homosexuals at the Buchenwald concentration camp, near Weimar, Germany.
Buchenwald was one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazi regime. Constructed in 1937, it was a complement to camps north (Sachsenhausen) and south (Dachau), and was built to hold enslaved laborers, who worked in local munitions factories 24 hours a day, in 12-hour shifts. Although not technically a death camp, in that it had no gas chambers, nevertheless hundreds of prisoners died monthly, from malnutrition, beatings, disease and executions.
The camp boasted a sophisticated-sounding facility on its grounds called the Division for Typhus and Virus Research of the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS. In truth, it was a chamber of horrors where medical experiments of the cruelest kind were carried out on prisoners against their will. Victims were often intentionally infused with various infections to test out vaccines. Euthanasia was also performed regularly on Jews, Romani people and mentally ill prisoners.
Among the cruelest of Buchenwald’s overseers was the infamous Ilsa Koch, wife of SS commandant Karl Koch and known as the “Witch of Buchenwald.” Among her fetishistic tendencies was her penchant for lampshades, gloves and other items made from the tattooed skin of dead inmates. She also had a reputation for forcing prisoners to participate in orgies. She was ultimately sentenced to life in prison for her sadism, but she hanged herself after 16 years behind bars.
Buchenwald was liberated by the Allies on April 11, 1945, one day before the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. It was later used by the Soviet Union as a concentration camp for the enemies of East Germany.

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October 1st In Music

1962 - Johnny Carson's Tonight Show makes its debut. The theme song ("Johnny's Theme") is written by Paul Anka, but as part of the deal, Carson writes some lyrics for the song that are published, but never used, earning him half of the royalties from the song, which are substantial, as the song runs throughout Carson's 30-year tenure on the show.

Birthdays:

1948 - Cub Koda. Guitarist, songwriter, Brownsville Station, 1973 US No. 3 single 'Smokin' In The Boys Room'. Born in Detroit, Michigan. He died on 7.5.2000.

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On October 2, 1944, the Warsaw Uprising ends on October 2, 1944, with the surrender of the surviving Polish rebels to German forces.
Two months earlier, the approach of the Red Army to Warsaw prompted Polish resistance forces to launch a rebellion against the Nazi occupation. The rebels, who supported the democratic Polish government-in-exile in London, hoped to gain control of the city before the Soviets “liberated” it. The Poles feared that if they failed to take the city the Soviet conquerors would forcibly set up a pro-Soviet communist regime in Poland.
The poorly supplied Poles made early gains against the Germans, but Nazi leader Adolf Hitler sent reinforcements. In brutal street fighting, the Poles were gradually overcome by superior German weaponry. Meanwhile, the Red Army occupied a suburb of Warsaw but made no efforts to aid the Polish rebels. The Soviets also rejected a request by the British to use Soviet air bases to airlift supplies to the beleaguered Poles.
After 63 days, the Poles, out of arms, supplies, food, and water, were forced to surrender. In the aftermath, the Nazis deported much of Warsaw’s population and destroyed the city. With protestors in Warsaw out of the way, the Soviets faced little organized opposition in establishing a communist government in Poland.

 

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On October 2, 1941, the Germans begin their surge to Moscow, led by the 1st Army Group and Gen. Fedor von Bock. Russian peasants in the path of Hitler’s army employ a “scorched-earth” policy.
Hitler’s forces had invaded the Soviet Union in June, and early on it had become one relentless push inside Russian territory. The first setback came in August, when the Red Army’s tanks drove the Germans back from the Yelnya salient. Hitler confided to General Bock at the time: “Had I known they had as many tanks as that, I’d have thought twice before invading.” But there was no turning back for Hitler, he believed he was destined to succeed where others had failed, and capture Moscow.
Although some German generals had warned Hitler against launching Operation Typhoon as the harsh Russian winter was just beginning, remembering the fate that befell Napoleon, who got bogged down in horrendous conditions, losing serious numbers of men and horses, Bock urged him on. This encouragement, coupled with the fact that the Germany army had taken the city of Kiev in late September, caused Hitler to declare, “The enemy is broken and will never be in a position to rise again.” So for 10 days, starting October 2, the 1st Army Group drove east, drawing closer to the Soviet capital each day. But the Russians also remembered Napoleon and began destroying everything as they fled their villages, fields, and farms. Harvested crops were burned, livestock were driven away, and buildings were blown up, leaving nothing of value behind to support exhausted troops. Hitler’s army inherited nothing but ruins.

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On October 2, 1965, a team of scientists invent Gatorade, a sports drink to quench thirst, in a University of Florida lab. The name "Gatorade" is derived from the nickname of the university's sports teams. Eventually, the drink becomes a phenomenon and makes its inventors wealthy.
Early in the summer of 1965, University of Florida assistant football coach Dewayne Douglas met a group of scientists on campus to determine why many of Florida's players were so negatively affected by heat. To replace bodily fluids lost during physical exertion, Dr. James Robert Cade and his team of researchers, doctors H. James Free, Dana Shires and Alex de Quesada, created the now-ubiquitous sports drink.
"They developed a drink that contained salts and sugars that could be absorbed more quickly," according to a University of Florida history of medicine, "and the basis for Gatorade was formed."
In its early days, Gatorade wasn't a hit with players. The drink reportedly tasted so awful that some athletes vomited after consuming it.
By 2015, however, royalties for the group that invented Gatorade, as well as some of their family members and friends, had eclipsed $1 billion.

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On October 2, 1835, the growing tensions between Mexico and Texas erupt into violence when Mexican soldiers attempt to disarm the people of Gonzales, sparking the Texan war for independence.
Texas, or Tejas as the Mexicans called it, had technically been a part of the Spanish empire since the 17th century. However, even as late as the 1820s, there were only about 3,000 Spanish-Mexican settlers in Texas, and Mexico City’s hold on the territory was tenuous at best. After winning its own independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico welcomed large numbers of Anglo-American immigrants into Texas in the hopes they would become loyal Mexican citizens and keep the territory from falling into the hands of the United States. During the next decade men like Stephen Austin brought more than 25,000 people to Texas, most of them Americans. But while these emigrants legally became Mexican citizens, they continued to speak English, formed their own schools, and had closer trading ties to the United States than to Mexico.
In 1835, the president of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, overthrew the constitution and appointed himself dictator. Recognizing that the “American” Texans were likely to use his rise to power as an excuse to secede, Santa Anna ordered the Mexican military to begin disarming the Texans whenever possible. This proved more difficult than expected, and on October 2, 1835, Mexican soldiers attempting to take a small cannon from the village of Gonzales encountered stiff resistance from a hastily assembled militia of Texans. After a brief fight, the Mexicans retreated and the Texans kept their cannon.
The determined Texans would continue to battle Santa Ana and his army for another year and a half before winning their independence and establishing the Republic of Texas.

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October 2nd In Music

Birthdays:

1939 - Lolly Vegas. Guitarist/vocalist for Redbone. One of the biggest acts of Native American heritage, Redbone has a huge hit in 1974 with "Come and Get Your Love." Born in Coalinga, California.
Redbone - Come And Get Your Love

1945 - Don McLean. Singer, songwriter, 1971 US No. 1 single 'American Pie’. Born in New Rochelle, New York.

 

1950 - Rocker Mike Rutherford. Genesis. 1986 US No. 1 single 'Invisible Touch', 1992 UK No. 7 single 'I Can't Dance' & 6 UK No. 1 albums. With Mike And The Mechanics, 1989 US No. 1 & UK No. 2 single 'The Living Years'. Born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, England.

1955 - Philip Oakey. Frontman for The Human League. Born in Oadby, Leicestershire, England.

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On October 3, 1990, less than one year after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, East and West Germany come together on what is known as “Unity Day.”
Since 1945, when Soviet forces occupied eastern Germany, and the United States and other Allied forces occupied the western half of the nation at the close of World War II, divided Germany had come to serve as one of the most enduring symbols of the Cold War.
Some of the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War took place there. The Berlin Blockade (June 1948–May 1949), during which the Soviet Union blocked all ground travel into West Berlin, and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 were perhaps the most famous. With the gradual waning of Soviet power in the late 1980s, the Communist Party in East Germany began to lose its grip on power. Tens of thousands of East Germans began to flee the nation, and by late 1989 the Berlin Wall started to come down.
Shortly thereafter, talks between East and West German officials, joined by officials from the United States, Great Britain, France and the USSR, began to explore the possibility of reunification. Two months following reunification, all-German elections took place and Helmut Kohl became the first chancellor of the reunified Germany. Although this action came more than a year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, for many observers the reunification of Germany effectively marked the end of the Cold War.

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On October 3, 1863, expressing gratitude for a pivotal Union Army victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln announces that the nation will celebrate an official Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, 1863.
The speech, which was actually written by Secretary of State William Seward, declared that the fourth Thursday of every November thereafter would be considered an official U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving. This announcement harkened back to when George Washington was in his first term as the first president in 1789 and the young American nation had only a few years earlier emerged from the American Revolution. At that time, George Washington called for an official celebratory “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.” While Congress overwhelmingly agreed to Washington’s suggestion, the holiday did not yet become an annual event.
Thomas Jefferson, the third president, felt that public demonstrations of piety to a higher power, like that celebrated at Thanksgiving, were inappropriate in a nation based in part on the separation of church and state. Subsequent presidents agreed with him. In fact, no official Thanksgiving proclamation was issued by any president between 1815 and the day Lincoln took the opportunity to thank the Union Army and God for a shift in the country’s fortunes on this day in 1863.
The fourth Thursday of November remained the annual day of Thanksgiving from 1863 until 1939. Then, at the tail-end of the Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, hoping to boost the economy by providing shoppers and merchants a few extra days to conduct business between the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, moved Thanksgiving to November’s third Thursday. In 1941, however, Roosevelt bowed to Congress’ insistence that the fourth Thursday of November be re-set permanently, without alteration, as the official Thanksgiving holiday.

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On October 3, 1917, six months after the United States declared war on Germany and began its participation in the First World War, the U.S. Congress passes the War Revenue Act, increasing income taxes to unprecedented levels in order to raise more money for the war effort.
The 16th Amendment, which gave Congress the power to levy an income tax, became part of the Constitution in 1913; in October of that year, a new income tax law introduced a graduated tax system, with rates starting at 1 percent and rising to 7 percent for taxpayers with income above $500,000. Though less than 1 percent of the population paid income tax at the time, the amendment marked an important shift, as before most citizens had carried on their economic affairs without government knowledge. In an attempt to assuage fears of excessive government intervention into private financial affairs, Congress added a clause in 1916 requiring that all information from tax returns be kept confidential.
By then, however, preparation for and entry into World War I had greatly increased the government’s need for revenue. Congress responded to this need by passing an initial Revenue Act in 1916, raising the lowest tax rate from 1 percent to 2 percent; those with incomes above $1.5 million were taxed at 15 percent. The act also imposed new taxes on estates and excess business profits.
By 1917, largely due to the new income tax rate, the annual federal budget was almost equal to the total budget for all the years between 1791 and 1916. Still more was required, however, and in October 1917 Congress passed the War Revenue Act, lowering the number of exemptions and greatly increasing tax rates. Under the 1917 act, a taxpayer with an income of only $40,000 was subject to a 16 percent tax rate, while one who earned $1.5 million faced a rate of 67 percent. While only five percent of the U.S. population was required to pay taxes, U.S. tax revenue increased from $809 million in 1917 to a whopping $3.6 billion the following year. By the time World War I ended in 1918, income tax revenue had funded a full one-third of the cost of the war effort.

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On October 3, 1942, German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun’s brainchild, the V-2 missile, is fired successfully from Peenemunde, as island off Germany’s Baltic coast. It traveled 118 miles. It proved extraordinarily deadly in the war and was the precursor to the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) of the postwar era.
German scientists, led by von Braun, had been working on the development of these long-range missiles since the 1930s. Three trial launches had already failed; the fourth in the series, known as A-4, finally saw the V-2, a 12-ton rocket capable of carrying a one-ton warhead, successfully launched.
The V-2 was unique in several ways. First, it was virtually impossible to intercept. Upon launching, the missile rises six miles vertically; it then proceeds on an arced course, cutting off its own fuel according to the range desired. The missile then tips over and falls on its target, at a speed of almost 4,000 mph. It hits with such force that the missile burrows itself into the ground several feet before exploding. It had the potential of flying a distance of 200 miles, and the launch pads were portable, making them impossible to detect before firing.
The first launches as part of an offensive did not occur until September 6, 1944 when two missiles were fired at Paris. On September 8, two more were fired at England, which would be followed by more than 1,100 more during the next six months. More than 2,700 Brits died because of the rocket attacks.
After the war, both the United States and the Soviet Union captured samples of the rockets for reproduction, they also captured the scientists responsible for their creation.

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October 3rd In Music

1901 - The first record company, The Victor Talking Machine Company, is incorporated, later merging with the Radio Corporation of America to become RCA-Victor.

1981 - Two months after MTV's debut, Blue Öyster Cult's "Burnin' For You" reaches its peak of No. 40 in the US, their first Top 40 since "(Don't Fear) The Reaper”.

2014 - Seventeen years after its release, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album is certified Double Diamond by the RIAA for sales of over 20 million in the US. It is the ninth album to achieve the certification.

Birthdays:

1940 - Alan O'Day. American singer-songwriter, best known for 'Undercover Angel,' a million-selling American No. 1 hit in 1977. He also wrote the 1974 Helen Reddy No. 1 hit 'Angie Baby'. Born in Hollywood, California.

1941 - Chubby Checker. US singer, (Ernest Evans), 1960 US No. 1 single 'The Twist', 1962 UK No. 2 single 'Let's Twist Again'). 'The Twist' is the only song to go to number 1 on the US singles charts twice. Once in 1960 and again in 1962. Born in Spring Gulley, South Carolina.

1945 - Antonio Martinez. From Spanish beat group Los Bravos who had the 1966 UK No. 2 & US No. 4 single 'Black Is Black'. They were the first Spanish rock band to have a UK & US hit single. Born in Madrid, Spain.

1949 - Lindsey Buckingham. Fleetwood Mac, who had the 1977 US No. 1 single 'Dreams' from the world wide No. 1 album Rumours. Buckingham was one half of the duo, Buckingham Nicks and aside from his tenure with Fleetwood Mac, Buckingham has also released six solo albums and three live albums. Born in Palo Alto, California.

1950 - Ronnie Laws. Saxophonist for Earth, Wind & Fire, who had the 1975 US No. 1 single 'Shining Star', and the 1981 UK No. 3 single 'Let's Groove'. The band has received 20 Grammy nominations and were the first African-American act to sell out Madison Square Garden. Born in Houston, Texas.

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On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union inaugurates the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for “satellite,” was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic.
Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles. Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik’s orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.
Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system. However, many Americans feared more sinister uses of the Soviets’ new rocket and satellite technology, which was apparently strides ahead of the U.S. space effort. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets heralded the beginning of the “space race.”
The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late ’60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969.

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On October 4, 1927, sculpting begins on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. It would take another 12 years for the granite images of four of America’s most revered presidents, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, to be completed.
The monument was the brainchild of a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson, who was looking for a way to attract more tourists to his state. He hired a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum to carve the faces into the mountain.  
According to the National Park Service, the first face to be chiseled was George Washington’s; Borglum first sculpted the head as an egg shape, his features added later. Thomas Jefferson’s image was originally fashioned in the space to the right of Washington, but, within two years, the face was badly cracked. Workers had to blast the sculpture off the mountain using dynamite. Borglum then started over with Jefferson situated on the left side of Washington.
Washington’s face was the first to be completed in 1934. Jefferson’s was dedicated in 1936, with then-president Franklin Roosevelt in attendance, and Lincoln’s was completed a year later. In 1939, Teddy Roosevelt’s face was completed. The project, which cost $1 million, was funded primarily by the federal government.
Borglum continued to touch up his work at Mount Rushmore until he died suddenly in 1941. Borglum had originally hoped to also carve a series of inscriptions into the mountain, outlining the history of the United States.
The Lakota Sioux people, who consider the Black Hills to be sacred ground, strongly opposed the project. The mountain was previously part of the Great Sioux Reservation before being taken away from them by the U.S. government.

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On October 4, 1918, in the early hours, German Chancellor Max von Baden, appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm II just three days earlier, sends a telegraph message to the administration of President Woodrow Wilson in Washington, D.C., requesting an armistice between Germany and the Allied powers in World War I.
By the end of September 1918, the Allies had made a tremendous resurgence on the Western Front, reversing the gains of the previous spring’s massive German offensive and pushing the German army in eastern France and western Belgium back to its last line of defenses, the so-called Hindenburg Line. Stunned and despondent, German General Erich Ludendorff, chief architect of that final spring offensive, reversed his previous optimism about the German military situation and demanded at a crown council meeting on September 29, that Germany seek an immediate armistice based on the terms President Wilson had laid out in his famous Fourteen Points address in January 1918. Feeling that the army’s leadership had completely usurped the government, Chancellor Georg von Hertling immediately resigned; Kaiser Wilhelm subsequently appointed his second cousin, Prince Max von Baden, to the post.
As soon as von Baden arrived in Berlin to take office on October 1, he made it clear that he had no intention of admitting defeat until Germany had regained at least some ground on the battlefield; in this way he hoped to retain some powers of negotiation with the Allies. On October 3, however, Paul von Hindenburg, the German army’s chief of staff and head of the Third Supreme Command, as Germany’s military leadership was known, reiterated Ludendorff’s advice, stating that “The German army still stands firm and is defending itself against all attacks. The situation, however, is growing more critical daily, and may force the High Command to momentous decisions. In these circumstances it is imperative to stop the fighting in order to spare the German people and their allies unnecessary sacrifices. Every day of delay costs thousands of brave soldiers their lives.”
Von Baden disagreed with Hindenburg, telling him that too early an armistice could mean Germany would lose valuable territory in Alsace-Lorraine and East Prussia, which had been implicit under the terms of the Fourteen Points, despite Wilson’s expressed desire for a “peace without victory.” Deciding to seek his own way apart from the Supreme Command, von Baden brought two Socialist members of the German Reichstag into his cabinet; they too, appraising the growing anti-war feeling on the home front and in the government, advised the chancellor to seek an armistice. On October 4, heeding their advice, von Baden telegraphed his request to Washington.
Wilson’s response, in notes of October 14 and 23, made it clear that the Allies would only deal with a democratic Germany, not an imperial state with an effective military dictatorship presided over by the Supreme Command. Neither Wilson nor his even less conciliatory counterparts in Britain and France trusted von Baden’s declaration of October 5 that he was taking steps to move Germany towards parliamentary democracy. After Wilson’s second note arrived, Ludendorff’s resolve returned and he announced that the note should be rejected and the war resumed in full force. After peace had come so tantalizingly close, however, it proved even more difficult for Germans, on the battlefield as well as on the home front, to carry on. Within a month, Ludendorff had resigned, as the German position had deteriorated still further and it was determined that the war could not be allowed to continue. On November 7, Hindenburg contacted the Allied Supreme Commander, Ferdinand Foch, to open armistice negotiations; four days later, World War I came to an end.

[Schmidt Meister]

October 4th In Music

1966 - The Vince Guaraldi Trio records the music for the Halloween special ‘It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown’ at Desilu's Gower Street Studio in Hollywood. A digitally remastered soundtrack was released on 8.26.2022 by Craft Recordings.

1969 - Creedence Clearwater Revival started a four week run at No. 1 on the US album chart with 'Green River', the group's first US chart topper.

1975 - Pink Floyd went to No. 1 on the US album chart with ‘Wish You Were Here.’

1980 - Queen started a three week run at No. 1 on the US singles chart with 'Another One Bites The Dust.'

Birthdays:

Jim Fielder. Bassist for Buffalo Springfield, Mothers of Invention, Blood, Sweat & Tears. Born in Denton, Texas.

[Schmidt Meister]

On October 5, 1775, General George Washington writes to the president of the Continental Congress, John Hancock, to inform him that a letter from Dr. Benjamin Church, surgeon general of the Continental Army, to Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Gage, British commander in chief for North America, had been intercepted. Washington wrote, “I have now a painful tho’ a Necessary Duty to perform respecting Doctor Church, Director General of the Hospital.”
Washington described how a coded letter to a British officer, Major Crane, came into Washington’s possession by a convoluted route from “a Woman who was kept by Doctor Church.” Washington “immediately secured the Woman, but for a long time she was proof against every threat and perswasion[sic] to discover the Author, however at length she was brought to a confession and named Doctor Church. I then immediately secured him and all his papers.”
The woman Washington interrogated was the mistress of Dr. Benjamin Church, a renowned Boston physician, who was active in the Massachusetts Committee of Safety and served as a member of the Provincial Congress. In July 1775, Washington had named Church the first surgeon general of the Continental Army, only to find out three months later that he had been spying for the British since 1772. Church faced an army court martial on October 4, 1775.
Despite Church’s plea of innocence, and the inconsequential nature of the information he provided to Crane, the contents of the letter included Church’s statement of allegiance to the British crown. He was charged with treason, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. After becoming ill while incarcerated, Dr. Church was exiled to the West Indies. The ship in which he traveled is believed to have been lost at sea.
On November 7, 1775, shortly after the conviction of Dr. Church, the Continental Congress added a mandate for the death penalty as punishment for acts of espionage to the “articles of war.”

[Schmidt Meister]

October 5th In Music

1965 - Henry Mancini's soundtrack LP The Pink Panther is certified gold.

1966 - The Jimi Hendrix Experience were formed. Having moved to and living in London, England, Jimi Hendrix, Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding played together for the first time.

1970 - Led Zeppelin III was released in the UK on Atlantic records. The album peaked at No. 1 on both the UK and US charts. It has now been certified 6 times Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for US sales in excess of 6 million copies.

1979 - The Who's soundtrack album The Kids Are Alright is certified Platinum.

Birthdays:

1942 - Richard Street. American, who with The Temptations had the 1971 US No. 1 single 'Just My Imagination' and 'My Girl' which was a UK No. 2 hit in 1992. Born in Detroit, Michigan. Street died on 2.27.2013.

1943 - Steve Miller. American singer, guitarist, songwriter who had the 1974 US No. 1 single 'The Joker'. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

1945 - Brian Connolly. Singer with English group Sweet, who had the 1973 UK No. 1 single 'Blockbuster', plus 14 other UK Top 40 singles. Sweet scored four top-ten hits in the US: 'Little Willy', 'Ballroom Blitz', 'Fox On The Run', and 'Love Is Like Oxygen'. Born in Anderston, Glasgow, Scotland. Connolly died on 2.9.1997.

1947 - Brian Johnson. Lead singer for AC/DC. Born in Dunston, Gateshead, England.

1957 - Chris Hayes. Lead guitarist for Huey Lewis and the News. Born in Great Lakes, Illinois.