Tuesday, February 5, 1924. Joseph M. Carey passes away. Burying Wilson, Enjoining Tepot Dome.

Today In Wyoming's History: February 5: 1924  Joseph M. Carey, Governor from 1911 to 1915, and member of the Republican and Progressive parties, died.in Cheyenne.

Carey was born in Delaware in 1845 and came to Wyoming after being appointed United States Attorney for the Territory of Wyoming in 1869.  He was still in his twenties at the time.  In 1871 he became an Associated Justice for the Territorial Wyoming Supreme Court, still at an absurdly young age.  He became mayor of Cheyenne in 1880.  Following statehood, he became a Senator in 1890. In 1895 he was not reelected by the legislature, which elected Senators at the time, due to his opposition to free silver, an opposition which was economically correct.  He was elected Governor in 1910 and served until 1915, joining the Progressive Party with Progressives bolted from the Republican Party.

Staying true to his Progressive views, he endorsed Woodrow Wilson during the 1916 election.  He was a supporter of Prohibition.

In addition to being a lawyer and politicians, he was a rancher, with large ranching interest in Central Wyoming.  In many ways, he's is representative of an era in Wyoming when people could come from out of state and become central in many aspects of the state's economic and political life.

In 1959, he was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

The Winter Olympics concluded.    France, Norway and Finland tied for gold medals.

Mexican rebels retreated from Vera Cruz as Federals won a victory at  Córdoba.

Nosotras queremos libertad!

So, they cried, in an open demonstration in Cuba on July 11.

Cuba is not only having riots, but semi violent riots. The Communist government has promised to do whatever it takes to put them down.  Reportedly, a couple of people have been shot.

A crippled economy, and a COVID-19 fueled healthcare crisis, have brought about the immediate crisis, but 60 years of communist rule haven't helped, to say the least.  It's time for Cuba to close that chapter of its history and start a new one.

And it would be a new one, the new one that a lot of Cubans thought they were getting in 1959 when Castro deposed the Batista regime.  Castro had not campaigned against the government as a Communist, although suspicions existed.  The suspicions were uncertain enough that the United States, which had backed Batista during the war, but also quietly supplied some funds to Castro's movement, recognized his government and made some initial attempts to be friendly to it.  Only after it declared itself to be Communist did the rupture occur.

But that rupture was nearly complete.  Only funding from the Soviet Union kept Cuba going during the Cold War, in exchange for which Cuba supplied proxy troops to the Soviet backed effort in Angola during the 70s and 80s. The demise of the USSR dried up direct support of the Cuban economy, and it's limped by on what remains of its infrastructure since that time.  Only 90 miles from the United States, its economy would prosper if opened up, and that won't fully occur without the country's politics also opening up.

Cuba before Castro was corrupt.  Cuba during Castro's regime featured repression, economic stagnation, but a rooting out of the pre-revolution form of corruption.  The country is ready to step into the promise that has always existed for it.

Blog Mirror: Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959. Mystery solved?

 

Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959

Churches of the West: Old Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston Texas

Churches of the West: Old Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Hou...:

Old Catholic Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, Houston Texas

This is the old Co Cathedral of the Sacred Heart in Houston Texas.  The new Co Cathedral is located one block over and this cathedral, originally a 1912 church that was elevated to the status of Co Cathedral in 1959.  The other cathedral for the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston is located in Galveston, with that church being the Mother Cathedral for Texas.

Iphone photograph from the highway, with the new Co Cathedral also partially visible.

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.

1959 El Camino

Today's installment on recently viewed cars of the past features a 1959 Chevrolet El Camino.

The El Camino was Chevy's effort to combine the pickup truck with the coup.  The result was a light pickup truck that really wasn't very suitable for much, but which had a certain appearance that people either love or hate to this day.

The El Caminio followed a prior mid 1950s Chevrolet pickup truck that was specifically aimed at an urban market.  That model, based on its standard pickup, had some sedan features that Chevy incorporated in the hopes of breaking into the suburban market, and in fact it was called the Suburban Carrier.  The El Camino followed and was sold first in 1959, with various models lasting all the way to 1987.  By that time it had evolved from a really sporty looking car/truck to a fairly pedestrian looking late 80s sedan/truck and, by that time, the plethora of trucks in the urban market, including light duty Japanese trucks, rendered it pointless.

Which is to assume it ever had a point in the first place.

But maybe it did.

Pickup trucks entered the American market really early and in fact there were pickup truck conversions for Model T body's available as early as 1913.  Dodge introduced a factor built pickup in 1924 and Ford followed in 1925.  While early pickups were on car frames, with car suspensions, the heavy duty nature of cars at the time made them pretty suitable for such conversions.  By the 1930s, however, with improvements in roads, pickups were departing company with automobiles in significant ways.  While postwar automobiles remains more suitable for dirt roads than any car made today, the direction was very clear and by the 1960s car suspensions were low and no longer really suitable for double duty, rural and urban.

Not that the El Camino really was either, but pickups of the 1940s and 1950s were definitely rather stout vehicles.  In the rural West there were plenty of people who used a pickup as their primary daily driver, almost all of which were two wheel drives, but Chevrolet was on to the need for an urban carrier.

El Caminio's filled a notch that nothing else really did, but they were a vehicle of mixed success.  It really took the introduction of Chevrolet's sleek styled pickup in 1968 to begin the move towards urban popularity of pickup trucks.  Dodge followed suit in 1972 when it remodeled its D Series trucks along similar lines.  Ford had started towards a sleeker line of truck, which still remained a work styling, in the 1960s, but followed suit with a major restyling in 1987.

Ford in some ways ultimately won this contest. . . for the time being, with the Ford F Series trucks absolutely dominating the market for the most part.  Ironically, however, Dodge's 1994 turn from this style of truck to a more rugged appearing body style brought beefy back into the truck market and secured, at least for the time being, Chrysler as the heavy truck king, a position it had held from the end of World War Two until at least the early 70s due to its wartime Power Wagon series of truck.  Everyone else has followed since then except that Ford and Chevrolet both make light duty trucks that are more car like, but still trucks.

Sunday, June 20, 1909. Typhoid Mary.

The New York American broke the tragic and odd story of Mary Mallon, Typhoid Mary, who had been quarantined at that point for two years.

Mallon never accepted that she was responsible for passing typhoid, but remained quarantined until 1910 when she was released with a promise that she would not return to cooking. Facing economic desperation, she did, and new infections commenced that were traced to her.  She was returned to quarantine in 1915 where she remained until her death at age 69 in 1938.

In a modern context, this is interesting due to the recent debates on quarantines.  The ethnics of essentially imprisoning a person for life as a disease carrier have been debated, but its clear that in the first half of the 20th Century, it could in fact be done.

Errol Flynn was born in Hobart, Tasmania.  The Australian actor obtained a reputation as a dashing figure in Hollywood, with his reputation tarnished by being tried for two accusations of statutory rape in 1942.  His career didn't end, but it did suffer thereafter, even though he was acquitted.  He oddly had a late in life role as a journalist from Cuba, where he supported Fidel Castro.  He died in 1959 at age 50 of a heart attack while in British Columbia.  His then current girl friend, 17 years old at the time, was with him on the trip.

Last prior edition:

Friday, June 18, 1909. Medals for the Wright Brothers.

Labels: 1900s, 1909, Aircraft, Commentary, Dayton Ohio, Donald Trump, Government, Illinois, Ohio, Ohio (Dayton), Republican Party, technology