My father's side.

Lex Anteinternet: I had always thought my grandfather on my mother's...: but it turns out, he died in 1958. He was, therefore, about 67 years of age. Still not ancient by current standards, but not 58 years of age...

Carrying this forward, or over, or whatever it would be just a bit, my father's father died on October 9, 1949.  He was 47.  I'd been told by one of my aunts that it was on her birthday, but it was the day after her birthday when he died.  Close enough to burn in an indelible mark, I'm sure.

That aunt was born in 1931, which would have made her 17 or 18 at the time of his death.

His youngest son, my father's brother, was born in 1936, which would have made him 12 or 13, which is a bit older than I recalled.  It's still pretty young, however.  My father was born in 1929, which would have made him 19 or 20, older than I recalled, but it makes sense in context.  In both these instances, I think it's the younger age, 12 and 19, that would be correct.  My father would have just completed junior college, as they called it at the time.  His oldest sister, born in 1926 (the same year my mother was born) had been married three years and was living in Nebraska.  She was the only married sibling, naturally enough, at the time.

My married aunt would come back to Casper when her husband graduated from dental school.  He'd grown up at least partially in Nebraska, but had strong Casper family connections, but I'm not sure how that had come about.

My other aunt would go on to the University of Wyoming, something unusual for the time.  She didn't graduate.  I never thought much of that, but as the family story developed following her death the rest of us ultimately learned of a trauma that would have been about the time of her senior year there, so her failure to graduate, surprising for an extremely intelligent women, make sense.

My father's mother died in 1973, she was 71 at the time. That'd definitely older than I recalled (I had thought it was 65).  Somewhat unusually, both she and my father's father were born in the same year, 1901, making them about a decade younger than my mother's parents.  They married in 1923, when then both would have been 21 or 22.  It's interesting that the oldest of their children wasn't born until 1926, which at that time was a little bit of a delay.

I would have been ten when she died.  I can definitely recall it, and having been up at the hospital while she was ill.

Related thread:

I had always thought my grandfather on my mother's side died at age 58. . .

Tuesday January 15, 1924. New Parliament, First Radio Play, The Frac, and the German Navy takes a tour.

King George V and Queen Mary opened a new session of Parliament.

The first radio play, ever, was broadcast by the BBC. The play was entitled Danger.  The play, which as endured and been rebroadcast over the years, involves a plot featuring a young couple and an older man trapped in a pitch-black flooding mine.

The French Cabinet drafted a plan to stabilize the cascading franc.  It called for tax hikes and a reduction in the size of the civil service.

The SMS Berlin of the republican German navy, the Reichsmarine left for a two-month tour of the North Atlantic, the first German warship to do so since World War One.

Ensign of the Reichsmarine.

The current German Navy is called the Deutsch Marine.  Its ensign is as follows:

The Berlin was a prewar ship that had been retained under the Versailles Treaty.  She would not be in service much longer, being decommissioned in 1929, even though she had been modernized and recommissioned in 1922.  She became a barracks ship in Kiel that year, and survived World War Two.  in 1947 she was loaded with chemical weapons and towed out and sank thereby becoming a lasting problem to later generations.

Thursday, May 10, 1923. The bizarre actions of Maurice Conradi.

Soviet delegate to the Conference of Lausanne was shot dead by former Russian White officer and émigré Maurice Conradi in the Cecil Hotel.  Two other members of the Soviet mission were wounded when they attempted to resist.  Conradi then handed his gun to a waiter and asked him to call the police, which they did.

Conradi.

Conradi was born to Swiss parents in 1896.  They were living in St. Petersburg at the time, where they ran a candy factory.  Most of Conradi's family were killed during the Russian Revolution, with several being executed by the Bolsheviks.  During this period he married his wife,  Vladislava Lvovna Svartsevich, and he immigrated to Switzerland following the defeat of Wrangel's army.

Conradi and his confederate Arkady Polunin were tried that following November and defended themselves on moral grounds, introducing evidence of Communist horrors. The prosecution fell into this, oddly enough, and introduced evidence of the happiness of Soviet citizens, something that would have had to have involved an element of delusion.  The jury found that all the elements of murder were present, but failed to convict him 5 to 4 anyhow, leading to a rupture in diplomatic relations between Switzerland and the Soviet Union.

In 1925 the Conradi's moved to Paris. They divorced in 1929.  Conradi then joined the French Foreign Legion, returning to Switzerland and remarrying in 1942.  He died in 1947.  Polunin went to Paris as well and died under mysterious circumstances in 1933.

Of the Soviet survivors, one, was executed in Stalin's purges in 1938.  The other was killed in 1942 while serving in the Red Army.

About as much as can be said of this entire episode is that it was downright bizarre.

Monday, March 15, 1943 A Wyoming Federal Reservation, Germans retake Kharkiv

Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  Franklin Roosevelt used executive authority to proclaim 221,000 acres as the Jackson Hole National Monument, the predecessor to today's Grand Teton National Park.  Governor Hunt threatened to use the Highway Patrol to prevent Federal authority on its grounds.  Congress, for its part, refused to appropriate money for the monument. 

Demonstrating how Wyoming really hasn't changed much, the move was hugely unpopular in Wyoming, or at least was politically unpopular.  

The history of the reservation dated back to 1924 when John D. Rockefeller, Jr. purchased a collection of ranches and amassed 37, 117 acres in the valley. The area was always spectacularly beautiful, but ranching conditions were generally poor.  Rockefeller's intended purpose from the onset was to donate the land to the Federal Government, something which of course appealed to him but much less to locals who were scraping by in industries derived from the region's natural resources.  In 1929 Rockefeller's initial donation of land went forward on a reduced basis, with only the Grand Teton National Park coming into existence.  The donation was smaller as Wyoming's Congressional representation opposed the larger donation, leaving Rockefeller with 32,000 acres and an annual tax bill of $13,000.

In 1942 Rockefeller informed Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes that if the project did not go forwad, he would sell the land.  This resulted in President Roosevelt's Federal reservation.

On March 19, Wyoming's Congressman Frank A. Barret introduced a bill to return the land to National Forest status.  In Congress, he based his argument on preserving the grazing permits in the former Federal domain that was part of the reservation.  Teton County Commissioner Clifford Hansen, who would later become Governor, and whose Mead family contributed a later Governor and other significant state politicians, also spoke against, although he was directly impacted, holding grazing permits in the area.

The bill passed both houses of Congress, but Roosevelt issued a pocket veto that contained a memorandum stating:

The effect of this bill would be to deprive the people of the United States of the benefits of an area of national significance from the standpoint of naturalistic, historic, scientific, and recreational values,

Campaigning by conservationist deterred any further legal effort to abolish the reservation, and its being opened to grazing in 1945 due to wartime conditions somewhat allayed local fears.  In 1950 the controversy was resolved through S. 3409 which merged the monument and neighboring national park, but also provided: no further extension or establishment of national parks or monuments in Wyoming may be undertaken except by express authorization of the Congress."  This did not prevent later wilderness designations, which have continued to be opposed in ways that can be argued to be short-sighted.

The Third Battle of Kharkiv resulted in a German victory.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J22454 / Zschäckel, Friedrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5434453

The heavily photographed German victory saw German troops reenter and take the city, including a spearhead featuring the SS.

By JonCatalán(Talk) - Own work (Original text: I created this work entirely by myself.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6646109

The Red Army lost 45,219 men as killed, or missing, in action and another 41,250 were wounded.  The Germans lost 4,500 killed or missing from the SS Panzer Corps, and 7,000 wounded.  The Soviets could afford to lose more, of course, but the battle demonstrated that even at this mid-point in the war, the Germans could afflict outsized casualties upon the Soviets and still make significant advances.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 101III-Zschaeckel-189-13 / Zschäckel, Friedrich / CC-BY-SA

The German victory set the stage for the Battle of Kursk, which exhaustion precluded them from advancing on at this time.

The 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment, which was sometimes attached to the 82nd Airborne and the 11th Airborne, but which was often an independent combat team, was formed.  The unit fought in Italy, southern France, and Belgium during the war, and was slated to be deployed against Japan when the war ended.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 15: 1943  The French Line ship Wyoming sunk by the U-524.

The submarine USS Triton was sunk by the Japanese off of Kairiru,

Thursday, September 21, 1922. Baby Ruth.

 Louis Mbarick Fall, aka Siki, became the world light heavyweight champion in boxing after champion Georges Carpentier knocked down Siki in the firth round, thereby violating a deal not to injury Siki in exchange for Siki throwing the fight.

Fall was a Senegalese veteran of the French Army from World War One.  His boxing career was impressive, and it was suggested at one time that he fight heavyweight champion, Jack Dempsey.

He ultimately lost the title to Irish fighter Mike McTigue in 1925, only to be murdered in New York City the following month.  McTigue, oddly enough, would die in poverty and ill health in Queens, New York, in 1966.

Boxing, it might be noted, has few happy endings.

Turkish nationalist seized Ezine, which was in the Allied neutral zone.

The existence of Dorothy Ruth came to light.  The one-year-old daughter of Babe Ruth had been sighted with the Babe and his wife Helen. The couple claimed she had been kept from public light, as she had been ill.

In truth, Dorothy's mother was Juanita Jennings, a paramour of Ruth's.  The couple adopted Dorothy in an age in which such infidelities were often kept secret and, most likely, that in spite of George Herman Ruth's behavior, their teenage wedding at St. Paul's Catholic Church in Ellicott City had some traction with the couple in spite of Ruth's infidelities.  That caught up, however, with Helen in 1925 when the couple separated..  She died in 1929 in a house fire in Waterford Massachusetts, by which time she was living with a Dr. Kinder, DDS, as "Mrs. Kinder".

Ruth would remarry actress and model Clair Hodgson in 1929. She was a widow and the union would last the rest of their lives, with Clair putting lacking structure into Ruth's' personal life.

Dorothy did not know that Juanita, whom she knew as Aunt Nita, was her mother until she was 59. She died in 1989.

The Cable Act was signed into law, allowing American women who married foreign nationals to keep 

Get Along Little Doggies (Whoopie Ti Yi Yo).

Whoopie Ti Yi Yo is a classic genuine Cowboy song. The song is an old one and like a lot of genuine Western music, it is a European folk ballad that was reset in a Western location.  The original song was an Irish ballad about an old man being rocked in a rocking chair.

The first reference to this song of any kind was in Owen Wister's The Virginian.  He'd no doubt heard it in Wyoming when he'd toured it prior to writing his novel which was published in 1893.  The song was referenced by musicologist John Lomax in his 1910 work Cowboy Song and Other Frontier Ballads.  It was first recorded in 1929.

In putting this up here, I had a variety of recordings I could have chosen, but I yielded to popular pressure and put up the Chris Ledoux variant as Ledoux remains very popular with Wyomingites.  I'm the odd man out on that as I find Ledoux's voice rough and I'm generally not a fan.

The First Vice President of Color. . .

 no, not Kamala Harris.

Charles Curtis.

Curtis was Vice President from 1929 to 1933 under Herbert Hoover.  He was a Kansan who was 3/8 Native American from a variety of tribes in the Kansas region.  His first words were in Kansa and French, not English.  While his mother, from whom his native ancestry derived, died when he was extremely young, he was raised in my of his early youth by his grandparents on his mother's side.  He lived on the Kaw Reservation in this period, was an excellent horseman, and was known as "Indian Charlie."

He graduated from high school in Topeka and then read law, making him an example of a successful lawyer who had never been to university.  He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1893 and served there until 1907 when he entered the Senate.  After serving as Vice President, he resumed the practice law and died at age 76 in 1936.

Somebody worth remembering.

53,000

Appalachian coal miner, 1946. He's carrying a lunch pail.

That's the number of people employed in the coal industry and miners today.

There were 694,000 in 1919.  1919 was the peak year for coal mine employment in the United States.

In 1929 it was already down, to 602,000.

454,000 in 1939.  But of course that was in the Great Depression.

170,000 in 1959.

Put that way, the 53,000, in 2019, which is up slightly over the past year, is a pretty resilient figure. After all, in just the 20 years from 1939 to 1959 the industry suffered the loss of 280,000 jobs.

Still, that trajectory is remarkable.  And it's related to what we've noted previously.

In very human terms.

3.6 %. The lowest U.S. Unemployment Rate since 1969.

That rate is not only stunningly low, it's disturbingly low.

Traditionally economist have regarded 7% as "full employment".  If we keep in mind that at any one time there's a certain percentage of the available workforce that's idled by choice, that makes sense. That's not throwing stones at anyone, its just that some folks choose not to work. That's different from being unemployed.

Now, some will tell you that some of those people have given up looking for work, but anyway you look at it, the current unemployment rate is bizarrely low.

3.6% is so low, it's actually problematic, or it could be.

Usually when unemployment reaches this sort of unemployment rate, bad things begin to happen.  For one thing, it's usually a sign of a "super heated" economy, and very soon prices and wages begin to rise and inflation sets in. 

Indeed, that is what happened the last time the rate was this low. That was in 1969 and the reason it was that low is that the Vietnam War was at its height.  We had 500,000 men in Vietnam, a huge military deployment elsewhere around the globe, and a massive amount of military and social expenditure going on. At first, the government actually welcomed inflation, as it reduced the value of the loans it had to pay back to afford all of that, but by the early 1970s it was totally out of control.  It took Ronald Reagan coming into office and intentionally throwing the country into a severe recession to fix the economy, and we've lived with that fixed economy since then.

This could wreck it.

Indeed, if we look at other historical low unemployment rates its disturbing.  3.2% was the unemployment rate in 1929. . . and we know what happened to that super heated economy.  During World War Two the unemployment rate was below 2%, but that was due to our being in the largest war of the 20th Century and the government was forced to put in wage controls to handle the resulting labor shortage.  It wasn't even possible to leave some critical defense work if you occupied such a job.  The Korean War dropped the unemployment rate down that low once again.

The oddity now is that there's  no wars going on. . . or at least nothing like the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and so far inflation hasn't really gotten ramped up.  Indeed, while its debated, some claim that the American middle class remains in wage stagnation, although there's pretty good evidence that's not true.  So, so far, so good.

But also, this can't keep going in this direction. 

Assuming that it's not a statistical glitch, and that it doesn't straighten itself out on its own rapidly, this will be inflationary at some point absent external forces.

Of course, those external forces may be at work right now.  It could be automation that's keeping inflation from getting rolling. As labor shortages develop, some of those shortages might be getting filled by machines, which might in turn keep the inflationary drive of wage hikes from occurring.  That would be good in the short term but when this trend reverses, and it will, it won't be. The robots will keep their jobs. . . or just be unplugged until they're needed again.

An external force that would seem to be available would be job exportation, always a hot topic. That may still be going on as well, in the form of globalization.  If it is, what's surprising here is that there' hasn't been an effort to translate that into a similar economic regime south of the Rio Grande.

Or maybe it is.  Mexico's unemployment rate right now is 3.2%, even lower than the American one.  That's up from a nearly incredible 2.9% the prior year.  The Canadian unemployment rate, in comparison, is a more normal but still really good 5.8%.  Anyhow, the combined Mexican and American rates go a long ways towards explaining why Central Americans are hitting the road and going north.  Would that the Central American governments were more stable, perhaps this would translate into a rise for them as well.

Interesting economic times at any rate.

Particularly as current American politics have gotten so odd that a really low unemployment rate doesn't seem to translate into the normal political conversation.  From national politics, you'd think we were in a fairly severe recession, but we're not.

Monday, March 15, 1909. Walking.

Edward Payson Weston, age 71, let the New York Post Office bound for San Francisco on foot, seeking to become the first person to do so.

He would in fact succeed, taking 105 days to accomplish the task.

Weston was a major figure in the rise of pedestrianism, something that was very much in vogue at the time.  After his last major walk in 1913, he warned that automobiles were making people lazy and sedentary, something he was really correct about.  He urged people to talk up waking for exercise and competition.

Not without some irony, he was rendered unable to walk after being hit by a car in 1927, and he passed away in 1929 at age 90.

Congress was called into a special session to consider the Payne Tariff act.

Last prior:

Saturday, March 13, 1909. Sulphur Springs Florida and Augusta Georgia.

Related threads:

Walking