"Henry Lee Milledge, the 16 month old son of Maj. John Milledge, Air Service, is believed to be the youngest passenger every carried in an Aeroplane. The flight was made at Bolling field in the Curtis "Eagle." The baby was carried in the arms of Maj. Milledge"
It isn't the intent of this blog to be the "100 Years Ago Today Blog", or something like that, but as we close in on the last year that's the central focus of this site, 1920, we continue to note some interesting items that occurred a century ago, as they occurred. Some are just things that are interesting, like little Henry Lee Milledge's first flight.
He's crying, and I don't blame him.
Others are more significant.
Of the significant, the United States Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Russian Jewish immigrant Jacob Abrams, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison for distributing leaflets opposed to American intervention in the Russian Civil War. The conviction was harsh and would clearly be regarded as unconstitutional today. There were two dissents, including one by Oliver Wendell Holmes which signaled the direction the Court would take on free speech in the future.
NVA soldier participating in Vietnam War prisoner exchange. The stamped receiver would indicate that this is most likely a AKM although it could be a second generation Soviet AK47.
In Revolutionary Russia itself, Mikhail Kalashnikov was born. He'd become famous as the inventor of the assault rifle archetype, the AK47.
The AK series of weapons were introduced by the Soviet Union in 1947 and went on to replace the rifles and submachineguns used by that country. Ultimately, it went on to be the standard weapon of all Communist nations everywhere and was the basic arm of every Soviet and Chinese sponsored revolutionary movement all around the globe. It's likely the most distributed weapon ever made. It's cheap, inaccurate, but functions.
It's inventor was born of a father who was ultimately sentenced to Siberia as kulak. Sentenced to Siberia, the family had to supplement its table by hunting, something that people generally don't realize was allowed in the Soviet Union but was. Mikhail accordingly became a lifelong hunter at an early age.
His early dream was to become a poet, but this was interrupted by World War Two. He entered the Red Army as a tanker and was wounded in action. He conceived of his design while convalescing. The weapon's design is simplistic, building upon a concept that had already been pioneered by the Germans during the war and in fact bearing a superficial resemblance to wartime German designs, but having no mechanical similarity to them at all. The cartridge that the rifle fired was designed for another weapon and preexisted it.
A design can't be blamed on its inventor, and at the time of the first work on the weapon the Soviet Union was engaged in the titanic struggle against Nazi Germany. It went on to be an inexcusably prolifically distributed weapon, however, and virtually defines the misery caused by the mass distribution of weapons of war by major countries. While much of that misery was shared by the United States, and still is given that the weapon remains in common use around the world, Klashnikov went on, oddly, to be admired in some quarters in the United States.
The misery of a recent war was on people's minds on this November 10 as people were getting set for the nation's first Armistice Day the next day.
The news from the Casper paper reflected hat, but it also reflected something we haven't dealt with here which was the degree to which Casper was a corrupt mess.
People always look back on earlier eras romantically, but the early history of Casper can hardly be justifiably looked upon that way. Prior to the big World War One oil boom Owen Wister had already noted it to be a real hole. The World War One petroleum boom had transformed the town overnight, but it had also brought in a flood of vice. As the nation headed towards Prohibition that wouldn't go away, and in fact it really wouldn't until after World War Two when returning veterans were so disgusted with it that they dedicated themselves to eliminating it, something that would take all the way until the 1970s to really achieve.
The byproduct of all that petroleum, automobiles, was the topic of today's Gasoline Alley a century ago.
I've been running a lot of these, linking them in from the Crittendon Automotive Library website. They're public domain due to their age.
I'm not a huge fan of the modern Gasoline Alley by any means, but these 100 year old ones do provide an interesting insight to the times, including prices of things. Some things are quite familiar today, including the topic of a wife preferring to trade in a car over the view of the husband, or at least its familiar in this household. Receiving a cigar for buying a tire, however, is almost unimaginable.
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