“We have not been lucky enough to find anyone who saw him come down,” wrote H. L. Pinckney in the Charleston Mercury, “but the important fact that he was there is incontestable—and as he couldn’t have got there any other way, it was decide unanimously that he rained down.” On this date in 1843 in Charleston, South Carolina, a two-foot alligator was found on the corner of Wentworth and Anson in that city after a particularly violent thunderstorm, in which “the whole firmament growled thunder and shot lightning.”

Weather is fairly complex but it is also quite consistent. There are many stories of rainstorms bearing tadpoles and sometimes larger creatures that have been given a baffling free ride. In a world of many weather events taking place continuously, these things happen. But a two-foot-long gator, perhaps and perhaps not. As the writer in the Mercury confessed, no one saw the gator deposited with the downpour. But no one didn’t, either. By that standard, a two-foot-long alligator came down with the rain on this date in 1843 in Charleston, South Carolina.

The story was briefly popular in the national press; the clipping at the top of today’s “Today in History” is from the July 11, 1843, New Orleans Times-Picayune, but it reproduces Pinckney’s article.
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Olivia de Havilland is 100 today.

She is the oldest living Oscar winner, the last cast member of the film version of Gone with the Wind still alive, the final star from Hollywood’s Golden Age still with us. And she continues to collect awards: in February, she was named one of several winners of the “Oldie of the Year” by a British satirical magazine, The Oldie. (Photo at top, holding the award and with her two Oscars conveniently behind her.) She did not attend the ceremony, but she did record a sweet and funny acceptance speech (audio after the jump):
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Macmillan Publishers ordered a first printing of 10,000 copies of Gone with the Wind, which was published 80 years ago today. Ten thousand copies was a large number for a 1000-page novel bearing a high cover price ($3 in the Great Depression) and written by a first-time novelist, Margaret Mitchell. Within two months, Macmillan needed to order a second and a third printing, and by the end of the year 100,000 copies were in peoples’ homes.

Gone with the Wind was an instant bestseller, and it was a rarity among bestsellers: one that most of those who purchased it that year actually took the time to read.

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London’s Tower Bridge, one of that city’s iconic structures, was opened by HRH The Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), and his wife, The Princess of Wales (Alexandra of Denmark). (Pictured above.)
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