November 5, 1937: The Piedrafita Massacre

November 5, 1937: In the Spanish Civil War, 35,000 Republican supporters are massacred by Francisco Franco's fascist Nationalists in Piedrafita de Babia, near León in northwestern Spain. It was part of what became known as La Terror Blanco: The White Terror.

For the most part, as they had in regard to the war thus far, the world's democracies do nothing. The America media, controlled then as now by conservatives, openly root for Franco, because he is Catholic and thus anti-Communist.

This, of course, did not stop the Fascists of Nazi Germany and Italy from aiding Franco. Result: A year and a half later, he had won the war, and Spain lived under tyranny until his death in 1975.

*

November 5, 1937 was a Friday. Actor Harris Yulin was born.

Baseball season was over. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There were no games scheduled in the NHL. There were 3 college football games, each of them with 1 team, but none of them with 2, that are now in the NCAA's Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS, formerly Division I-A):

* The University of Mississippi, a.k.a. "Ole Miss," beat George Washington University, 27-6 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. GWU dropped its football program in 1966, and has never resumed it.

* The University of Miami beat Stetson University, 25-13 at Burdine Stadium, which will later be renamed the Orange Bowl. Stetson, in DeLand, Florida, dropped its football program in 1956, restoring it in 2013, in the NCAA's Football Championship Subdivision (FCS, formerly Division I-AA).

* And Texas Tech beat Loyola, 25-6 at Loyola University Stadium in New Orleans. Loyola dropped its football program in 1939, and has never resumed it. There are also Loyola Universities in Baltimore and Chicago, and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

October 21, 1940: Ernest Hemingway Publishes "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

October 21, 1940: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway is published. It is a tale of the International Brigades, aiding the leftist Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. The novel was far more successful than those to whom it paid tribute.

The title is taken from a 1624 poem by Englishman John Donne, which has put 3 famous sayings into our lexicon. Hemingway left the original spelling in his epigraph, but I'll render it in modern English:

No man is an island, entire of itself.

Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.

If a Cloud be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less

as well as if a Promontory were,

as well as if a Manor of thy friends or thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me

because I am involved in Mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls.

It tolls for thee.

The International Brigades -- Brigadas Internacionales in Spanish -- were soldiers recruited and organized by the Communist International to assist the Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic. It is estimated that, during the entire war, there were some 32,000 Brigaders, yet at no single moment were there more than 18,000 actually deployed. among them were Americans who named their group the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

The novel tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerilla unit. As a demolitions expert, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.

The novel was made into a film in 1943, directed by Sam Wood, starring Gary Cooper as Jordan, and Ingrid Bergman as María, a guerilla he falls in love with. The film was nominated for 9 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Cooper, and Best Actress for Bergman. But the only winner was Greek actress Katina Paxinou, for Best Supporting Actress.

Both Cooper and Bergman tended to have affairs with their co-stars, and this film was no exception. Hemingway, who had recently made journalist Martha Gellhorn the 3rd of his 4 wives, would have approved.

*

October 21, 1940 was a Monday. Jimmy Beaumont, the lead singer of the Pittsburgh-based doo-wop group The Skyliners, was born.

The baseball season ended 13 days earlier, when the Cincinnati Reds won Game 7 of the World Series over the Detroit Tigers. The NFL was 30 years away from Monday Night Football. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the NHL season was 30 days away from starting. So there were no scores on this historic day.

August 19, 1936: The Assassination of Federico García Lorca

August 19, 1936: Federico García Lorca, the Spanish poet, playwright and theater director, is assassinated near Alfacar, Granada, in the southern region of Spain, known as Andalusia. He was 38 years old.

Born on on June 5, 1898 in Fuente Vaqueros, outside Granada, García Lorca gained fame as a member of "The Generation of '27," a group of Spanish poets that tapped into the European literary movements of symbolism, futurism and surrealism. In 1928, he published Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads). He published the plays Blood Wedding in 1932, Yerma in 1934, and The House of Bernarda Alba in 1936.

But success did not fulfill him. He was gay, and suffered from depression after the end of a relationship with a sculptor. The coming of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 weighed heavily on him. He was a Socialist, like the prevailing government, the Second Republic that first won election in 1931. But the Nationalists, fascists, led by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, were unfavorable to socialism due to its criticism of religion, and, with its strong Catholic base, unfavorable to homosexuals.

His hometown of Granada had gone without a Mayor for several months, because all possible candidates feared for their lives. García Lorca's brother-in-law, Manuel Fernández-Montesinos, agreed to accept the position, but he was assassinated within a week. On the same day he was shot, August 18, García Lorca was arrested.

The circumstances of his death are in dispute, partly because his remains have never been found. In his book The Assassination of García Lorca, author Ian Gibson wrote that he was shot -- with 3 others, Joaquín Arcollas Cabezas, Francisco Galadí Melgar and Dióscoro Galindo González -- by Nationalist militia at the Fuente Grande (the Great Spring), on the road between Viznar and Alfacar. Police reports released by radio station Cadena SER in April 2015, concluded that he was executed by fascist forces. A Franco-era report, dated 9 July 1965, describes the writer as a "socialist" and "freemason belonging to the Alhambra lodge," who engaged in "homosexual and abnormal practices."

Most biographers seem to agree that his death had political overtones. But Leslie Stainton, who wrote the 1999 biography Lorca: A Dream of Life, suggested that he was killed because he was gay -- a murder, and a hate crime, but not an assassination.

He has been honored with statues in his hometown of Granada, and the national capital of Madrid; with a garden on the River Seine in Paris; in a hotel room where he once stayed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, kept as a museum; and on the Rainbow Honor Walk, in the gay-friendly Castro District of San Francisco.

He once said, "I will always be on the side of those who have nothing, and who are not even allowed to enjoy the nothing they have in peace." Sounds like my kind of guy.

*

August 19, 1936 was a Wednesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Washington Senators, 7-4 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Red Ruffing went the distance for the win. Lou Gehrig went 2-for-4 with 2 RBIs, and rookie Joe DiMaggio went 3-for-5 with a solo home run.

* The New York Giants beat their arch-rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, 3-2 at the Polo Grounds. Carl Hubbell went the distance for the win. Mel Ott hit a home run.

* The Boston Bees beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-1 at National League Park in Boston. This was the 1st of 5 seasons under the Bees name for the former Boston Braves, who had previously called their ballpark Braves Field. The name never caught on, and in 1941, the team and the ballpark reverted to their previous names.

* The Philadelphia Athletics swept a doubleheader from the Boston Red Sox at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, 5-4 and 7-2. Frankie Hayes hit a home run to win the opener in the bottom of the 13th inning. Jimmie Foxx went 2-for-9 over the 2 games.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Chicago Cubs, 5-4 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh.

* The St. Louis Browns beat the Detroit Tigers, 13-8 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. Tiger slugger Hank Greenberg got hurt on April 29, and missed the rest of the season.

* And the Chicago White Sox and the Cleveland Indians were rained out at Comiskey Park in Chicago. The game was made up as part of a doubleheader on September 6. The White Sox swept, 15-1 and 6-3.

June 4, 1937: Pablo Picasso's "Guernica" Is Completed

This is not an illusion: Picasso purposely painted it without color.

June 4, 1937: Pablo Picasso completes his painting Guernica. It becomes a symbol of the Spanish Civil War.

On April 14, 1931, the Spanish monarchy was overthrown by the Second Spanish Republic, a left-of-center government. On February 16, 1936, Spain's national election was won by the Popular Front, a coalition that included Socialists and Communists -- which, as non-ignorant people know, are not the same thing, and usually don't work together. This time, they did.

And that infuriated a lot of people in Spain, which had traditionally been a very culturally conservative country, dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. On July 17, 1936, the Army of Africa launched a coup d'état in the Spanish-controlled part of Morocco. This coup was soon supported by units all over Spain, but not in the major cities such as the capital, Madrid, or in Barcelona or Valencia.

The coup supporters, the traitors, called themselves the Nationalists, and received support from the fascist governments of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. António Salazar, the fascist dictator of neighboring Portugal, stayed out of it.

The Republicans got aid from the Soviet Union, a Communist nation, and Mexico, which then had a leftward government, if not an outright Communist one. The fact that the Soviets were aiding the Republicans caused the United States, Britain and France to continue to recognize the Republican government of Spain, but also to refuse to intervene in the war.

Some people from those countries went to Spain, and enlisted in what became known as the International Brigades. An American group named themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Many liberals defied their own governments to support the Republicans, including American authors Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Hellman, British writer George Orwell, and French writer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Hemingway would write a novel about the war, For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Hitler and Mussolini really, really wanted to win this war, to send a message to Communists all over the world. Hitler sent his air force, the Luftwaffe, to bomb Republican strongholds. And Mussolini sent troops to aid the Nationalist commander, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. This became known as "Franco's Italian Army."

The Basque Country, in northernmost Spain, suffered tremendously. The Luftwaffe bombed the town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, inspiring the most famous work of Málaga native Pablo Picasso. As Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson wrote, as part of an article that tried to sum up the 20th Century, "We bombed Guernica, and we painted the bombing of Guernica."

Madrid and Barcelona, the country's 2 largest cities, suffered the most. Once Barcelona fell on January 26, 1939, and was cut off from the capital, the Republican cause was doomed. Franco entered Madrid on April 1, and proclaimed victory.

Franco was not magnanimous in victory: He acted like a genuine fascist, coming down especially hard on Barcelona, and its region, Catalonia, the region that had opposed him the hardest. The governments of Britain and France recognized Franco's government.

Picasso died on April 8, 1973, at the age of 91. This man, as much of an egotist as Franco, delivered these last words to those gathered at his deathbed: "Drink to me!" I once saw someone online remark that Picasso seemed like a character from an earlier age, and yet he lived on Earth, for nearly 6 months, at the same time as Marshall Mathers, a.k.a. Eminem.

Franco followed Picasso into death on November 20, 1975. Fascism died in Spain soon after.

The original painting of Guernica is now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Queen Sofia National Central Art Museum) in Madrid.

*

June 4, 1937 was a Friday. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, longtime owner of the New York Daily News and publisher of the magazine U.S. News & World Report, was born.

These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Cleveland Indians, 5-3 at League Park in Cleveland. Former Yankee Johnny Allen outpitched Spurgeon "Spud" Chandler. Lou Gehrig went 3-for-3 with a walk, and Joe DiMaggio went 2-for-4.

* The New York Giants split a doubleheader with the Chicago Cubs at the Polo Grounds. The Cubs won the 1st game, 6-5. Billy Herman singled home the winning run in the top of the 11th inning. Carl Hubbell started the game, but was betrayed by the bullpen. The Giants won the 2nd game, 4-2. Mel Ott went 3-for-9 with 2 RBIs over the 2 games.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the St. Louis Cardinals, 14-4 at Ebbets Field.

* The Boston Bees beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 9-1 at National League Park in Boston. This was during the 1936-40 period when they had cast aside the names "Boston Braves" and "Braves Field," before resuming them.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-8 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators, 10-3 at Navin Field in Detroit. (The ballpark was renamed Briggs Stadium the next season, and Tiger Stadium in 1961.) Hank Greenberg went 2-for-4 with a solo home run.

* A doubleheader was split at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, with both games going 10 innings. The St. Louis Browns won the opener, 7-6. Ben Huffman singled home the winning run. The Philadelphia Athletics won the nightcap, 4-3. Bob Johnson won it by drawing a bases-loaded walk.

* And the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago White Sox got rained out at Comiskey Park in Chicago. It was rained up as part of a doubleheader on September 2. The White Sox swept, 4-2 and 10-8.

April 14, 1931: The Spanish Republic Is Proclaimed

April 14, 1931: The Second Spanish Republic is proclaimed, after King Alfonso XIII is deposed. It was hoped that Spain would be a democratic nation like America, Britain and France.

The Republic lasted just 8 years.

The First Spanish Republic did not last long, only from the abdication of King Amadeo I on February 11, 1873, following the Third Carlist War, to December 29, 1874, when a military coup deposed it, and put King Alfonso XII, son of Amadeo's predecessor, Queen Isabella II, on the throne.

Alfonso died on November 25, 1885, leaving a pregnant widow, Maria Christina, who had been a Princess of Austria. On May 17, 1886, she gave birth to a son, who was proclaimed King Alfonso XIII. He was just 11 years old when the Spanish-American War began, and his mother was his Regent, so it was impossible for the American newspapers and their "yellow journalism" to make either of them a figure of hate, so the government as a whole became the enemy.

It cannot be said that Alfonso XIII, who assumed full duties upon turning 16 in 1902, had "lost the empire": It had been falling apart since Britain defeated the Armada in 1588, and the process accelerated with the losses of most of the American colonies in the 1810s and 1820s. But corruption in the parliament, the dictatorial tendencies of most of Spain's Prime Ministers, and the ineffectuality of the King led to their overthrow.

King Alfonso XIII

Alfonso survived the influenza epidemic of 1918. Because Spain did not enter World War I and remained neutral, his illness was reported on, and the disease became known as the Spanish Flu. Most of the world suppressed news of the disease in their own countries as best they could, even though it killed twice as many people as the war did.

After the proclamation of the Republic, a provisional government was established, until December 9, 1931, at which time the 1931 Constitution was approved. Over the next 2 years of constitutional government, known as the Reformist Biennium, Prime Minister Manuel Azaña initiated numerous reforms. Power in Spain had long been shared by the crown and the Catholic Church. In 1932, religious orders were forbidden control of schools, while the government began a large-scale school-building project. A moderate agrarian reform was carried out. Home rule was granted to Catalonia, withe a parliament and a President of its own.

Manuel Azaña

Soon, Azaña lost parliamentary support and President Niceto Alcalá-Zamora forced his resignation on September 8, 1933. In the subsequent election, the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA) won a plurality. However, the President declined to invite its leader, Gil Robles, to form a government, fearing CEDA's monarchist sympathies. Instead, he invited Alejandro Lerroux of the Radical Republican Party to do so.

Niceto Alcalá-Zamora

The period following the CEDA's victory, called the Black Biennium, was marked by escalating clashes between the left and the right,and state-sanctioned repression against the left. The CEDA exercised indirect influence over the government, and in October 1934 was finally successful in forcing the acceptance of three ministries.

In 1935, after a series of crises and corruption scandals, Alcalá-Zamora called for new elections, instead of inviting CEDA, the party with most seats in the parliament, to form a new government. The leftist Popular Front won a narrow victory in the February 13, 1936 election. The Right accelerated its preparations for a coup, which had been months in the planning.

Amidst the wave of political violence that broke out after the triumph of the Popular Front, a group of leftist militiamen shot José Calvo Sotelo, 1st Duke of Calvo Sotelo, one of the leaders of the opposition, on July 12, 1936. He died the next day. This assassination convinced many military officers to back the planned coup. On July 17, the revolt began with an army uprising in Spanish Morocco, followed by military takeovers in many cities in Spain. Military rebels intended to seize power immediately, but they were met with serious resistance as most of the main cities remained loyal to the Republic.

An estimated total of half a million people died in the war that followed. But most of the world considered the Republic to be Communist, and the democracies of the world, especially those with large Catholic populations, such as America, refused to stop the Fascist takeover by Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

King Alfonso XIII of Spain died on February 28, 1941. The Kings of Cambodia and Thailand would also die in 1941. Shortly before his death, Alfonso abdicated his claim to the throne, in favor of his son Juan, Count of Barcelona. Juan would eventually renounce his claim in favor of his son. When dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975, the grandson of Alfonso XIII became King Juan Carlos I. He is still alive, but has abdicated in favor of his own son, King Felipe VI.

Although Manuel Azaña had been arrested, his death in 1940 was due to natural causes. Niceto Alcalá-Zamora died in 1949.

*

April 14, 1931 was a Thursday. The Stanley Cup was awarded, as the Montreal Canadiens successfully defended their title. They beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 2-0 at the Montreal Forum, to win the Finals, 3 games to 2.

Football was out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And these baseball games were played:

* The New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox, 6-3 at Yankee Stadium. Red Ruffing outpitched Wilcy Moore, each man having previously pitched for the other team. Babe Ruth went 2-for-3 with a home run. Lou Gehrig went 1-for-4.

* The New York Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 9-5 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia. Mel Ott went 2-for-4 with a home run and 2 RBIs. Bill Terry went 1-for-4 with a walk. Chuck Klein went 2-for-5 with 2 homers and 3 RBIs.

* The Brooklyn Dodgers -- in their last season with Wilbert Robinson as manager, and thus with the Brooklyn Robins name -- lost to the Boston Braves, 

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Washington Senators, 5-3 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Jimmie Foxx singled home the winning run in the top of the 11th inning, making Lefty Grove the winning pitcher in relief of Rube Walberg.

* The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox, 5-4 at League Park in Cleveland.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 7-3 at Redland Field (later renamed Crosley Field) in Cincinnati.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-2 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Rogers Hornsby went 1-for-4 for the Cubs. Gabby Hartnett hit a home run. For the Pirates, Pie Traynor went 0-for-3 with a walk, Paul Waner went 0-for-4, but had an RBI on a groundout; and Lloyd Waner went 2-for-3 with a walk.

* And the St. Louis Browns beat the Detroit Tigers, 7-3 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.

April 1, 1939, The Spanish Civil War Ends

Monument to the victims of the war,

known as the Valley of the Fallen, outside Madrid.

April 1, 1939: The last of the Republican forces surrender, ending the Spanish Civil War. But the path to World War II was now clear.

On April 14, 1931, the Spanish monarchy was overthrown by the Second Spanish Republic, a left-of-center government. On February 16, 1936, Spain's national election was won by the Popular Front, a coalition that included Socialists and Communists -- which, as non-ignorant people know, are not the same thing, and usually don't work together. This time, they did.

And that infuriated a lot of people in Spain, which had traditionally been a very culturally conservative country, dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. On July 17, 1936, the Army of Africa launched a coup d'état in the Spanish-controlled part of Morocco. This coup was soon supported by units all over Spain, but not in the major cities such as the capital, Madrid, or in Barcelona or Valencia.

The coup supporters, the traitors, called themselves the Nationalists, and received support from the fascist governments of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini in Italy. António Salazar, the fascist dictator of neighboring Portugal, stayed out of it.

The Republicans got aid from the Soviet Union, a Communist nation, and Mexico, which then had a leftward government, if not an outright Communist one. (They had taken in former Bolshevik hero Leon Trotsky after Joseph Stalin expelled him.) The fact that the Soviets were aiding the Republicans caused the United States, Britain and France to continue to recognize the Republican government of Spain, but also to refuse to intervene in the war.

Some people from those countries went to Spain, and enlisted in what became known as the International Brigades. An American group named themselves the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Many liberals defied their own governments to support the Republicans, including American authors Ernest Hemingway and Lillian Hellman, British writer George Orwell, and French writer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Hemingway would write a novel about the war, For Whom the Bell Tolls. (Hemingway had met Picasso in Paris in 1922, before becoming famous, but last saw each other in 1924, before reconnecting following the liberation of Paris in 1944, and did not meet in Spain during the war.)

Hitler and Mussolini really, really wanted to win this war, to send a message to Communists all over the world. Hitler sent his air force, the Luftwaffe, to bomb Republican strongholds. And Mussolini sent troops to aid the Nationalist commander, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. This became known as "Franco's Italian Army."

Franco was quoted as saying, "I have four Nationalist columns approaching Madrid," a column meaning a formation of soldiers significantly longer than it is wide; "and a fifth column, waiting to attack from the inside." By this, he meant supporters, hidden, yet undermining the national government through various means, such as sabotage and misinformation. Thus the term "fifth columnist" was born, and was popular during the subsequent World War II to describe a Fascist sympathizer in the Allied nations. It wasn't used as much during the following Cold War.

The Basque Country, in northernmost Spain, suffered tremendously. The Luftwaffe bombed the town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, inspiring the most famous work of Málaga native Pablo Picasso. As Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson wrote, as part of an article that tried to sum up the 20th Century, "We bombed Guernica, and we painted the bombing of Guernica."

The painting is now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

(Queen Sofia National Central Art Museum) in Madrid.

This is not an illusion: Picasso purposely painted it without color.

Madrid and Barcelona, the country's 2 largest cities, suffered the most. Once Barcelona fell on January 26, 1939, and was cut off from the capital, the Republican cause was doomed. Franco entered Madrid on April 1, and proclaimed victory.

Franco was not magnanimous in victory: He acted like a genuine Fascist, coming down especially hard on Barcelona, and its region, Catalonia, the region that had opposed him the hardest. The governments of Britain and France recognized Franco's government.

Leftists around the world wanted to know why the Western democracies did nothing. There were 2 reasons. One was the fear of provoking the Nazis, which had already manifested in the Munich Agreement the year before, essentially handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler's Third Reich. Nobody seemed to want a World War II, so they chose not to antagonize Hitler.

The other was the Catholic Church. Since the Republic was perceived as Communist, and thus atheist and indeed anti-Catholic, the Church went out of its way to convince Catholics all over the world to avoid aiding the Republic. And the Church still had a lot of influence in America and France in particular.

George Seldes, a leftist American journalist, was one of the last living people to have covered the war, and to the end of his life in 1995, he refused to call it "The Spanish Civil War." It was simply "The Spanish War." He saw the Western democracies betray their beliefs -- America: "All men are created equal"; France: "Liberty, equality, brotherhood" -- because they were afraid to have to fight for those beliefs for a 2nd time in 20 years. Seldes wrote, "Spain broke the heart of the world."

What's more, by not interfering, the Western democracies were essentially telling Hitler (who had already annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia by April 1939) and Mussolini (who had begun building a "new Roman Empire" in Africa, with Libya, Ethiopia and Somalia) that they could do whatever they wanted, and the democracies wouldn't care.

And for what? On September 1, 1939, just 5 months later, Hitler invaded Poland, and Britain and France went to war with him anyway.

The name "Franco's Italian Army" would be revived in 1972, by Al Vento, owner of an Italian restaurant in Pittsburgh, who formed a fan club in honor of Franco Harris, the half-Italian, half-African-American running back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who capped that season with a play known as "The Immaculate Reception," and eventually helped the Steelers win 4 Super Bowls on his way to a Hall of Fame career. Francisco Franco was still alive and in power when the fan club was founded, and while Vento and his members were not openly political, neither did they seem to have a problem with a name associated with Fascism, which some of its members had fought 30 years earlier.

By 1975, it had become clear that Franco was dying. And he didn't have a son to take over after his death, only a daughter. After the death in exile of King Alfonso XIII in 1941, his son, Juan, Count of Barcelona, was considered the heir to the Spanish government. But Franco believed that Juan would not be likely to continue his policies, but that his son, Juan Carlos, would. So Franco stripped Juan of his right to the throne, and proclaimed Juan Carlos the new heir.

Franco died on November 20, 1975. It was a big story on the American national news. A new TV show, Saturday Night Live, featured a "news" segment titled Weekend Update, and, for weeks, anchorman Chevy Chase would say, "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."

On November 22, Juan Carlos was proclaimed King of Spain. And while he was considerably more conservative than the Second Republic, he betrayed Franco -- who had, of course, betrayed the entire country -- and dismantled the Fascist state. In 1978, a new Constitution was ratified. Since then, Spain has had conservative governments, but never again a Fascist one. King Juan Carlos I abdicated in 2014, in favor of his son, King Felipe VI.

But the liberal/conservative divide is still seen in Spain, often in sports, especially the favorite sport, soccer: The most successful team, Real Madrid CF, was once run by allies of Franco; while the 2nd-most successful team, FC Barcelona, are considered the resistance team. The fact that both teams have achieved a significant amount of success through dishonest tactics shows that (Cliché Alert) maybe they're not so different, after all.

*

April 1, 1939 was a Saturday. Actress Ali McGraw and Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Phil Niekro were born on this day.

The baseball season had yet to begin. Football was out of season. There was no NBA yet. But the NHL season was coming to a close, with the Stanley Cup Semifinals. In Game 6 of one series, the New York Rangers beat the Boston Bruins, 3-1 at the old Madison Square Garden. However, the next day, at the Boston Garden, the Bruins won Game 7, 2-1 in triple overtime, on a goal by Mel Hill. It was the 3rd time in the series that Hill had won a game in overtime, and he became known as "Sudden Death Mel Hill."

In the other series, the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Detroit Red Wings, 5-4 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. This game also ended in overtime, and it was Gordie Drillon who scored the winner. On April 16, the Bruins beat the Leafs, 3-1 at the Boston Garden, in Game 5, to take the Cup.

And in English soccer, Arsenal lost to Yorkshire team Middlesbrough, 2-1 at the Arsenal Stadium, a.k.a. Highbury, in North London.