Category: Quick hits

This is an important anniversary date for Americans who revere old baseball parks — the Green Cathedrals of nostalgia. April 20 saw the first recognized games played at Boston’s Fenway Park, Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, Chicago’s previously used Wrigley Field, and Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. The years were 1912 for Boston and Detroit, 1916 for Chicago, and 1950 in Baltimore. Fenway Park and Wrigley Field remain cherished outposts of the national pastime. The Detroit and Baltimore parks were closed in the 1990s …

This date in 1961 saw the launch of the ill-fated invasion of Cuba by some 1,400 U.S. trained exiles. The attempt to overthrow the Fidel Castro dictatorship was crushed at the Bay of Pigs. A reverse amphibious operation began this month in 1980, when what’s known as the Mariel boatlift began. Castro had announced that any citizens wishing to leave the island could do so. Voluntary exiles embarked in the port town of Mariel, just west of Havana. Some 125,000 …

Yesterday marked the 60th anniversary of the opening of a small hamburger restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois — the first of what would become one of the world’s best-recognized brand names — McDonald’s. The franchise shop belonged Ray Kroc, whose main interest at the time was selling the machines that mixed milkshakes. The name came from two McDonald brothers who ran a hamburger shop in California. The first day’s revenue at the Illinois outlet was $366 and 12 cents. That …

To borrow from some recent advertising slogans, although many Americans couldn’t imagine leaving home without them, and they’re everywhere they want to be, there was a time when credit cards were rare — issued only by individual merchants. But that proprietary limitation ended on this date in 1952, when the Franklin National Bank in New York launched a credit card for use by the customers of varied merchants. In this, the bank was following the lead of the Diners Club …

The distribution of political representation under the Constitution was authorized on this date in 1792. Based on the results of the 1790 Census, the House of Representatives was to be apportioned according to population, coming as near to equal populations in the districts as could be determined. That first census counted a resident population of over 3.9 million people in the soon to be 15 states. There were then 105 seats in the House of Representatives, and the Apportionment Act …

April is a significant month for the American printed word. In 1800, the Library of Congress was founded, and earlier this week, in 1828, Noah Webster published the first dictionary of American English. This is also the second day of National Library Week, celebrating libraries, those who staff them and the billions of materials they circulate. While computers and electronic media are of increasing importance in the services libraries offer, books remain at the core of their collections, with the …

The need to pay a $15 debt sparked one of the most useful of inventions, patented on this date in 1849. Walter Hunt, a mechanic in New York, owed the debt. While he thought about how to raise the money, he fiddled with a small piece of wire. Finally, he bent the wire with a twist in the middle, creating a spring, and formed a clasp at the other end, to guard the point of the wire. He had invented …

For much of history, a cooked meal was followed by the drudgery of scrubbing the pans used to prepare it. But something was discovered this week in 1938 that changed all that, a solidified refrigerant gas that we now know as Teflon. Developed by Roy Plunkett of the DuPont Company, slippery Teflon revolutionized cooking utensils in the 1960s. By the time he died in the early 1990s, most new cooking pans in the nation where coated with his invention. Today, …

On this date 102 years ago, the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified establishing direct popular election of senators. Previously, members of the Senate were elected by each state’s legislature. As the voting franchise expanded after the Civil War and into the Progressive Era, growing sentiment held that senators ought to be popularly elected in the same manner as representatives. In fact, because of such developments, at least 29 states by 1913 were nominating senators on a popular …

The years of Prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, were considered a noble experiment that failed, as the subsequent crime associated with bootlegging caused problems worse than the lone problem of drunkenness. The crumbling of the unpopular Volstead Act accelerated on this date in 1933 when Congress amended the act to permit beer of 3.2 percent alcohol to be brewed and sold. The beer permitted earlier under Prohibition contained only .05 percent. Called “near beer,” and much disdained, one humorist declared …

On this date in 1859, Massachusetts established the first state milk inspection program. An inspector of milk was appointed in August that year, operating from Boston, and whose primary efforts were to suppress so-called “swill milk,” the poor, thin output of cows kept in unsanitary conditions and fed on distillery refuse. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration assists state and local dairy inspections. Every year, Americans consume an average of over 600 pounds of all manner of dairy products, including …

America’s coffee-loving public has no grounds for complaint about today’s anniversary. On this date in 1829, a patent was issued to James Carrington of Connecticut for a coffee mill. Milling is an ancient process for grinding grains and beans, and the basis of the 1829 patent was largely for its more robust, all-cast iron construction. But Carrington’s coffee mill came out to benefit from the country’s increasing taste for coffee, which supplanted tea as a favorite beverage around the time …

Critics of federal spending initiatives often allude with some disdain to the government’s ability to create money. It’s pure coincidence, though, that the first federal building commissioned under the country’s new constitution was intended to do just that. On this date in 1792, President George Washington and Congress established the National Mint in the then capital city of Philadelphia. The mint issued the gold, silver and copper coinage as the legal tender of the young republic. Since building the mint …

Broadcast advertising saw a major change on this date in 1970 as President Nixon signed a bill into law prohibiting cigarette advertising on the nation’s airwaves. The ban went into effect on January 1 of the following year — the first major step in the ongoing debate over the public health risk of smoking. Until then, names such as Lucky Strike, Chesterfield and Philip Morris had sponsored some of the most famous shows since the earliest days of broadcasting. In …