Today in History: June 6

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Today is the 72nd anniversary of D-Day.

Allied forces began the fight to retake Europe from Nazi Germany with an invasion that began at the beaches in Normandy along the coast of France. The numbers are stunning: in one single day, more than 160,000 troops made the beach landing, with 5000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers taking part. By the end of the day, more than 10,000 American and British troops were dead, as were more than 1000 Germans.

About a month after the invasion, General Dwight D. Eisenhower showed an aide a handwritten note he had written the night before Operation Overlord began. It was an “In case of failure” note and it is only four sentences long, but it gives a sense of the his integrity and how much was riding on the 150,000-man invasion of France. It reads (after the jump):
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Meeting Spalding Gray

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“I began to realize I was acting as though the world were going to end and this was helping lead to its destruction. The only positve act would be to leave a record. To leave a chronicle of feelings, acts, reflections, something outside of me, something that might be useful in the unexpected future.”—Spalding Gray, 1970, The Journals of Spalding Gray

Two friends and I started a theater company in the summer of 1990. Perhaps you have not heard about it; it was kind of a not-at-all-big deal in Poughkeepsie, New York, for almost two entire weeks. Call it ten days.

Our endeavor yielded one sell-out summer night’s performance in the open-air back porch of a bar, a bad review in our local daily newspaper, yet one more (mostly unattended) performance, and a bunch of t-shirts. With grad school beckoning we shut it down, and with time and many residences I lost our newspaper clippings and even eventually forgot the name of the “company” we had started.

My one t-shirt wound up in Spalding Gray’s hands. Spalding Gray was born 75 years ago today, which prompted this recollection of one of my more awkward moments with celebrity.
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Today in History: June 5

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

On this date in 1783, the Montgolfier brothers (Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne) gave a public demonstration of their invention: the hot-air balloon. It was unmanned, flew for about ten minutes, and covered about a mile. (At top, floating above these words, is a contemporary depiction of the event.)

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The Centers for Disease Control published an article with the title, “Pneumocycstis Pneumonia—Los Angeles,” 35 years ago today. It described the appearance of cases of a rare form of pneumonia in five gay men in Los Angeles. This article is acknowledged as the first reporting of cases in the AIDS epidemic.
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