Scores On This Historic Day

March 1, 1914: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  publishes "Chicago," a poem about the city of the same name, by Carl Sandburg, the magazine's founder. Born in 1878 in Galesburg, Illinois, about 200 miles southwest of Chicago, Sandburg moved to Chicago in 1912, and founded the magazine. The city already had a reputation for crime and corruption, and Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle , about the meatpacking industry, didn't help. Sandburg wants to elevate the city's image, as if to say, "Yes, we've got our problems. So does every other city. And, like every other city, we've got our virtues, too." Chicago, photo taken from an airplane, March 24, 1914, right after the poem's publication The text, in its entirety: Hog Butcher for the World,    Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,    Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;    Stormy, husky, brawling,    City of the Big Shoulders: They tell me you are wicked and I bel...

At the time, the winners of Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress -- regardless of race -- got a smaller trophy, on a plaque. Note: I would have written an entry for this event, regardless of the date on it. But I wanted to have an entry that happened on a February 29, and this was the best of the rather small bunch. February 29, 1940: The 12th Academy Awards are held, at the Coconut Grove ballroom of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. For the 1st time, the host is actor Bob Hope. He will go on to host "the Oscars" 19 times. Through 2022, this remains a record. Surprising no one, Gone with the Wind , having been nominated for 13 Oscars, wins 8 of them, including Best Picture for producer David O. Selznick, Best Director for Victor Fleming, Best Actress for Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, and Best Screenplay, divided between Margaret Mitchell for the original 1936 novel, and Sidney Howard for his film adaptation. It was the 1st posthumous Oscar: Howard had ...

February 28, 1984: "Weird Al" Yankovic releases his album "Weird Al" Yankovic in 3-D . It contains his best-known song, "Eat It." Alfred Matthew Yankovic was born on October 23, 1959 in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, California, and grows up in neighboring Lynwood. Known as "Weird Al" Yankovic (always billed with the nickname in quotation marks) rose to fame copying Michael Jackson, turning Jacko's songs "Beat It" into "Eat It" (which actually hit Number 12 in the Billboard Hot 100, an extraordinary feat for a parody) and "Bad" into "Fat." Early on, he seemed to specialize in food, turning The Knack's "My Sharona" into "My Bologna," Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" into "I Love Rocky Road," and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," from the film Rocky III , into "The Rye or the Kaiser." Years later, he became a vegan, and people aske...

February 28, 1983: The final episode of M*A*S*H airs on CBS, after 11 seasons, even though the Korean War, which it depicted, lasted 3 years. In its 1st season, 1972-73, M*A*S*H aired on Sundays at 8:00; 2nd season, Saturdays at 8:30; 3rd, Tuesdays at 8:30; 4th, 5th and 6th, Tuesday at 9:00; and then, late in the 6th season, 1978, to the end, Mondays at 9:00. The finale aired a little earlier, at 8:30 PM on a Monday night, and ran for two and a half hours. The episode is titled "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen." It was directed by Alan Alda, who played Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, M.D., U.S. Army Reserve, a.k.a. Hawkeye. He also wrote it, with several other writers for the series: Longtime producer Burt Metcalfe, John Rappaport, Dan Wilcox, Thad Mumford, Elias Davis, David Pollock and Karen Hall. The episode got 106 million viewers, making it the most-watched TV show in American history, breaking the record set a little over 2 years earlier, when Dallas revealed "Who ...

February 28, 1973:   A group of 200 Oglala Sioux  members of the American Indian Movement  (AIM) seized the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota,  located within the borders of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The town had been the site of the last major conflict between the U.S. government and Native Americans, in 1890, when the U.S. Army shot and killed 250 Natives in one of the worst massacres, committed by any side, in American history. The occupation was launched after the Oglala Sioux were  unable to remove the Oglala Reservation Chairman, Dick Wilson, whom they accused of corruption since his election the year before.  Frank Fools Crow,  the senior elder of the Oglala, and AIM leader Russell Means  led the occupation. Fools Crow later said, " We called our brothers and AIM to help us because we were being oppressed and terrorized. They answered our call." Frank Fools Crow The occupation  lasted for 71 days,  until an agreement was...

February 28, 1960: The U.S. team wins the Gold Medal in hockey at the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near Lake Tahoe. In 2022, the town changed the name to Olympic Valley, to remove the insensitive Native American name. Despite being the 2nd-biggest hockey-player-producing country behind Canada, where the sport was invented, America had struggled in the sport in the Olympic Games. We had won the Silver Medal at the 1st tournament in 1920, and again in 1924, '32, '52 and '56; and the Bronze Medal in 1936; but won no medal in 1928 and '48, and had never won the Gold Medal. All hockey games at the 1960 Winter Olympics, and also the figure skating events, were held at the Blyth Arena, which was torn down in 1983. The U.S. was put into Group C, and beat Czechoslovakia 7-5 on February 19, and Australia 12-1 on February 21. (This remains the only time Australia has entered a hockey team into the Winter Olympics.) This put them int...

February 28, 1905: Jane Stanford is murdered -- on the 2nd try. Jane Elizabeth Lathrop was born on August 25, 1828 in Albany, New York. Like any other good little rich girl of her time, she was expected to have no ambitions, marry a rich man, have as many rich children as possible, and do nothing on her own. Well, she certainly married a rich man: Leland Stanford, a lawyer from nearby Watervliet. He became one of the wealthiest lawyers in Wisconsin. But in 1852, a fire in his office cost him his law library, a vital thing for a lawyer to have. He took Jane west, opened a dry goods store with his brothers, took advantage of the Gold Rush, and built a fortune. In 1861, he was among the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was elected Governor of California, serving a single 2-year term. As for the other thing, it didn't work out. For whatever reason, she didn't have a child until she was 39, and he would be the only one. On March 13, 1884, Leland Stanford Jr. died of ty...

T-Pain as the Monster (left) and host Nick Cannon February 27, 2019: The 1st season of the American version of The Masked Singer comes to a close, with the choosing of a winner. The show's concept began in South Korea in 2015. Celebrities sing while wearing costumes that completely cover them, and, when not singing, their voices are disguised as they drop clues as to their identity. The American version is broadcast on Fox, and hosted by actor and TV-show host Nick Cannon. The regular panel of celebrities who analyze the performances and make guesses as to who the singers really are have been: * Robin Thicke, singer, songwriter and producer, son of actor-singers Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring, best known for singing the controversial song "Blurred Lines." * Jenny McCarthy, actress, who became famous for hosting the game show Singled Out on MTV, wife of actor and former New Kids On the Block singer Donnie Wahlberg. * Ken Jeong, physician, comedian, actor. And... * Nicole...

February 27, 1951: The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is ratified, when the Minnesota legislature approves it, becoming the 36th State to do so. That made it 36 out of 48, the three-quarters of the States necessary. The Amendment limits the President of the United States to two terms. Congress passed the Amendment on March 21, 1947. It was a Republican-controlled Congress, the first since the 1929-30 session. They passed it as a slap at the memory of the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrat who had won 4 elections, all by landslide wins over Republican candidates: Incumbent President Herbert Hoover in 1932, Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas in 1936, corporate lawyer with no political experience Wendell Willkie in 1940, and Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York in 1944. Except... the Republicans put in a grandfather clause, allowing the President at the time the Amendment was ratified to run for, and serve out, a 3rd term, if he so chose. It was ...

February 27, 1933: The Reichstag, the German parliament building in Berlin, catches fire. Nobody dies from the fire itself. The first report of the fire came shortly after 9:00  PM,  when a Berlin fire station received an alarm call.  By the time police and firefighters arrived, the Chamber of Deputies,  the lower house, was engulfed in flames. The police conducted a thorough search inside the building and found Marinus Van der Lubbe, a Dutch "council communist," who was arrested. It had been 28 days since Adolf Hitler had been appointed Chancellor of Germany. He attributed the fire to Communist  agitators. He used it as a pretext to claim that Communists were plotting against the German government, and induced President  Paul von Hindenburg  to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree,  suspending civil liberties, and pursuing what he called a "ruthless confrontation" with the Communists. This made the fire pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany....