Today in History: August 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The two men, both of them adults, wanted the boy dead. They wanted him dead. The boy was 14 years old and a visitor from out of town, a city kid from Chicago.

On a visit to see family in the country, in Money, Mississippi, the boy from Chicago went to the local grocery store one day. He bought bubblegum.

He spoke to the woman behind the counter, who was not a lot older than he was, 21. Perhaps he thanked her, perhaps he said something else. Either way, she did not like the contact. She was white and the boy was black.

Her husband later said that the boy had “whistled” at his wife, so he and his half-brother wanted the boy dead. At 2:30 in the morning, with the young woman alongside to identify the boy, they went to the boy’s uncle’s home and found the boy.

What followed was not a lecture from two men to a boy about how a young man should speak with a woman. No. On this date in 1955, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam took Emmett Till with them and the boy never returned. Days later, when the body was found in the Tallahatchie River, it was identifiable only by a ring the boy usually wore. The body was identifiable as human only in the minimal sense after what they had done before throwing Emmett Till in the water. They wanted him dead, you see.
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Make No Mitsaek

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Mistakes suck. Errors do, too.

Adverbs will never go hungry for a lack of work in many writers’ drafts, including mine, but that part of speech demands erasure whenever one encounters it. Adverbs are the empty calories of the English language: They are tasty, and they appear to be helpful when we want to bend a verb to do our verbal bidding and guide our eager reader(s) to share our thought-patterns, when context and the verb itself are capable of handling the task just fine on their own. They are potato chips and cotton candy blended into a linguistic smoothie.

All of the personal errors in my history can be described with an adverb, colorfully. Merely an adverb minus a verb or other details, so no personal stuff, no self-incriminating or embarrassing information might reveal some things: complacently, awkwardly, abruptly, vigorously, languorously, braggingly, disgustingly, violently, wrongly. Timidly. Brazenly. Toss a “very” or three in there.
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Today in History: August 27

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Beatles met Elvis Presley at his mansion on Perugia Way in Bel Air on this date in 1965.

The meeting between two of the biggest acts in show business came about after negotiations between Beatles manager Brian Epstein and Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. When the Beatles came to America in February 1964 to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show, Sullivan read a telegram to the band: “Congratulations on your appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show and your visit to America. We hope your engagement will be a successful one and your visit pleasant. Give our best to Mr. Sullivan. Sincerely, Elvis & the Colonel.”

It was decided that with Elvis as the older performer (just four years older than John Lennon and Ringo Starr but famous for a decade by 1965), the Beatles would visit him at home while they were performing in Los Angeles instead of bring him to the home that had been rented for them or bring him backstage after they had performed.

Thus, there were no photographers present at 10:00 p.m. that night when the Beatles arrived at Elvis Presley’s mansion, and no tape recorders were turned on. All present say that an informal jam session took place, but no one wrote down what was played. Elvis played bass.

A few photographs exist, taken by fans outside Presley’s mansion gates who possibly did not know what they were witnessing or could not believe it. One is above; you can make out John Lennon walking toward a limo with Elvis and his girlfriend (later wife) Priscilla in the doorway on the left. In another photo, one of Elvis’ neighbors appears to be walking past, oblivious.
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