Babe Ruth of the Boston Braves announced his retirement from baseball on this date in 1935.

By the end of the 1934 season everyone, Ruth included, knew that he was just about finished as a ballplayer, but he had ambitions to be a manager. Teams regularly mentioned him as a possible future coaching or managerial candidate, but they seemed to do so more to make their future prospects sound interesting rather than spend what it might take to hire him or the time to educate him about team operations.
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Forty-two years ago today, Dr. Henry Heimlich published his first article about what came to be known as the “Heimlich Maneuver.” Many lives (including mine) have been saved by this method since he published his insights.

Dr. Heimlich, now 96 years of age, lives in an assisted-living facility in Cincinnati. Last week, he saved the life of one of his fellow residents, an 87-year-old woman who was seated beside him at dinner, by employing the Heimlich method. He claims that it is the first time he has had the chance to use the procedure in real life in his entire life, but he has said similar things in the past about other incidents. With a physician’s specificity over words, the incident may have been the first time that the doctor employed the method himself in a restaurant on a fellow diner with whom he was seated. Regardless, she was saved from choking by the doctor most associated with saving people from choking.
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By the end of his life in 1892, Walt Whitman had published eight revised editions (eight or so; there is some scholarly debate whether some editions constitute a full edition) of his major volume of poems, Leaves of Grass, culminating in a ninth edition, what he himself called with dark humor his “deathbed edition.” Walt Whitman was born on this date in 1819.

“L. of G. at last complete—after 33 y’rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life, fair weather & foul, all parts of the land, and peace & war, young & old,” he wrote a friend. He was only 72 when he died, but with his white beard and self-presentation as a man who seemed to have existed for the entire country’s history, he seemed older.
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