Headlines in History

March 29, 1973

US withdraws from Vietnam

1929

Herbert Hoover has telephone installed

in Oval Office

March 30, 1981

President Reagan shot

1965

Bill Bradley scores 58 points for Princeton

2009

Pres. Obama announces

auto industry shake up

March 31, 1889

Eiffel Tower opens

1973

Mississippi River reaches peak flood level

1975

Legendary UCLA basketball coach

John Wooden wins 10th national title

April 1, 1984

Marvin Gaye is shot and killed

by his own father

April 2, 1917

Woodrow Wilson asks congress

for declaration of war

1992

Mob boss John Gotti convicted of murder

April 3, 1912

Pony Express debuts

1865

Confederate capital of Richmond is captured

1982

Jesse James is murdered

April 4, 1968

Dr. King is assassinated

1841

Pres. Harrison dies of pneumonia

April Fools tradition popularized

April 1, 1700

English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other.

Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery. Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes. These included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young easily caught fish and a gullible person.

April Fools’ Day spread through Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with ‘hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol of fool) and followed by Tallie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs

Clinton County News Headlines:

Thursday, March 30, 1950 – Volume 1, #22

Sewer system bids opened Tuesday

Bids for the construction of a sanitary sewer system, lift stations, sewer treatment plant, and extension of present water works, were opened here Tuesday afternoon at a meeting of the mayor and city council, along with representatives of companies which had placed bids.

Bids were received on three separate units of the projects: A. Sanitary Sewer System; B. Sewer Treatment Plant; and C. Water works extension. The total of the three low bids were $285,690.

Approximately $28,000 indebtedness remains on the local water system, which when added to the new projects, along with construction interest and engineering cost raises the total to approximately $371,000. This amount was estimated to be about $60,000 higher than the bonding companies would consider.

Plans are being worked out to extend the water works to the city limits and the sewer system as near the limits as possible. Engineers are now checking the number of users and will establish a rate where by the bonds will be paid off in 25 to 30 years.

Assembly approves rural phone co-ops

Extension of rural telephone service through co-operative effort formally was approved by the General Assembly.

The House without debate passed by a vote of 74 to 2 the telephone bill that the Senate already had approved by unanimous vote. It enables rural telephone co-operatives to be formed under a new federal law, and get loans from the Federal Rural Electric Administration.

Series of deadly twisters hits U. S. heartland

April 3, 1974

On this day in 1974, 148 tornadoes hit the United States heartland within 16 hours. By the time the deadly storm ended, 330 people had died. This was the largest grouping of tornadoes recorded in its time, affecting 11 states and Ontario, Canada. At any one moment during the storm, there were as many as 15 separate tornadoes touching the ground.

The storm began over the Ohio River Valley. The first twister hit Lincoln, Illinois, at about 2 p.m. and within hours, others made landfall over a range of hundreds of miles across several states. The deadly storm did not end until early the next morning. In all, it caused 22 F4 tornadoes, with winds over 207 mph, and six F5 tornadoes, with winds over 261 mph.

The worst hit location was Xenia, Ohio, where, with little warning of the impending catastrophe, 38 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. It is believed that had the tornado not hit after school had ended for the day, the casualties would have been far more. In the aftermath, it took 200 trucks three months to haul away all the rubble in Xenia.

Brandenburg, Kentucky was also badly hit. The town lost 31 people and 250 were seriously hurt. The entire downtown was demolished, causing many millions of dollars in damages. In Indiana, a school bus was pushed 400 feet off a road, killing the driver. The Tennessee Valley Authority suffered the worst damage to its power operations to that date.

In all, 40,000 people were directly impacted by the tornadoes. Six states were declared federal disaster areas. In response, many towns installed tornado warning sirens in a effort to minimize future damage from deadly twisters.

The radio was invented by a Kentuckian named Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray in 1892. It was three years before Marconi made his claim to the invention.

He was the second of seven sons of a lawyer, William Jefferson Stubblefield, and Victoria Bowman Stubblefield (died 1869) and was tutored by a governess. He later attended a boarding school called the Male and Female Institute in Farmington until his father died in 1874, leaving Stubblefield an orphan at 14 years old.

He married Ada Mae Buchannan in 1881 and nine children were born, three of whom died in infancy. Six of Nathan’s and Ada’s seven children did not bear descendants except for Oliver Jack who bore seven children. From 1907 to 1911, Stubblefield operated a home school built on his 85 acre melon farmland. It is now the campus of Murray State University.

Stubblefield’s devices seem to have worked by audio frequency induction or, later, audio frequency earth conduction (creating disturbances in the near-field region) rather than by radio frequency radiation for radio transmission telecommunications. Stubblefield has been proposed as a claimant for the invention of the wireless telephony, or wireless transmission of the human voice, which would, however conflict with the four documented patents for the photophone, invented by Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter in 1880.

He made his public demonstrations of voice and music transmission to five receiving locations on the courthouse square in Murray on January 1, 1902, which was witnessed by at least 1,000 persons. He demonstrated more voice and music transmissions in Washington D. C., Philadelphia, and New York City.

He made private demonstrations of wireless telephony in 1892. Rainey T. Wells was one of the first persons to hear Stubblefield’s wireless voice transmissions in that year. Wireless telegraphy using damped high frequency radio waves was demonstrated in 1894 by Sir Oliver Lodge, but that system could not carry voice messages or music. In 1898, Stubblefield was issued US patent 600457 for an electric battery, which was an electrolytic coil of iron and insulated copper wire to be immersed in liquid or buried in the ground, where it could also serve as a ground terminal for wireless telephony. In 1908 he received another patent for wireless telephone, using the voice frequency induction system. He said in the patent it would be useful for “securing telephoic communications between moving vehicles and way stations.” However, there is no indication that he was using voice-modulated continuous high frequency waves, as used for radio today.

Stubblefield later lived in self-imposed isolation in a crude shelter near Almo, Kentucky and eventually starved to death on March 28, 1928. He was buried in the Bowman Cemetery in Murray.

Kentucky Facts and Trivia: