I’m Fixin’ To Do Some Reminiscing

I’m fixing to do some reminiscing.

It was on this day, September 3, 1783, when the Revolutionary War ended and a treaty was signed by Great Britain and the United States in Paris, France. The treaty bears the signatures of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and John Jay.

On this day in 1833, the first successful one-cent newspaper was published when Benjamin H. Day issued the first copy of The New York Sun. I’ll wager Mr. Day would be surprised to see the paper sells for a hundred times that today.

On this day in 1838, Frederick Douglas boarded a train in the slave state of Maryland, dressed as a sailor with borrowed ID papers. The train took him to Wilmington, Delaware, where he caught a steamboat to Philadelphia, and then a train to New York City and freedom.

He went on to be a great orator and published the weekly North Star, and became one of the nation’s strongest abolitionists fighting for the struggle against slavery. His autobiography, Life And Times, has become a narrative classic of escape to freedom.

On September 3, 1895, the first professional football game was played in Latrobe, Pa., when the YMCA defeated the Jeannette Athletic Club 12-0.

On this day in 1929, The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 381.17, at the peak of the bull market in the 1920s. These days it goes up or down that much in a single day.

On September 3, 1939, British Prime Minister Chamberlain’s war announcement interrupts a Disney Cartoon, “Mickey’s Gala Premiere,” showing on the fledgling BBC, shutting it down for the duration of WW II.

On September 3, 1946, the BBC service resumes broadcasting with an announcer saying, “Well now, where were we?” After which they continued the Mickey Mouse cartoon from where it was interrupted in 1939. Those British, they are precise.
In 1954, “The Lone Ranger” was heard on radio for the final time after 2,956 episodes spanning 21 years. Many of the original ABC radio shows later became available though syndication and can still be heard on stations brave enough to air dramas in today’s radio world of talk and music. I must have listened to hundreds of them with my ear pressed to the radio speaker to hear through the static, praying all the time the battery wouldn’t go dead.

As far as I’m concerned, not much has happened since then. Or it could just be my memory. Like the late and great Lewis Grizzard said, “I don’t remember much of anything since 1961.”

I wonder if anything will happen today that will be fixing to be remembered in the annals of history?