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February 19th
1913 - Cracker Jacks
prizes. There wasn't always a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. In 1910,
coupons were included in the boxes which could be redeemed for prizes. It
wasn't until 1913 that children's prizes (miniature books, magnifying glasses,
tiny pitchers, beans, metal trains, etc.) were place in the boxes. The company
slogan was "a prize-in-every-package."
February 20th
1943 - A volcano is
born. On the afternoon of February 20, 1943, Dionisio Pulido, a farmer in
the Mexican state of Michoacán, was readying his fields for spring sowing when
the ground nearby opened in a fissure about 150 fee long. "I then felt a
thunder," he recalled later, "the trees trembled, and is was then I
saw how, in the hole, the ground swelled and raised it self 2 or 21/2 meters
high, and a kind of smoke or fine dust-gray, like ashes-began to rise, with a
hiss or whistle, loud and continuous; and there was a smell of sulphur. I then
became greatly frightened and tried to help unyoke one of the ox teams."
Virtually
under the farmer's feet, a volcano was being born. Pulido and the handful of
other witnesses fled. By the next morning, when he returned, the cone had grown
to a height of 30 feet and was "hurling out rocks with great
violence." During the day, the come grew another 120 feet. That night,
incandescent bombs blew more than 1,000 feet up into the darkness, and a slag
like mass of lava rolled over Pulido's cornfields.
The scientific world was almost as stunned as the hapless
farmer himself by the volcano's sudden appearance. Around the world, volcanic
eruptions are commonplace, but the birth of an entirely new volcano, marked by
the arrival at the earth's surface of a distinct vent from the magma chamber,
is genuinely rare. In North America, only two
new volcanoes have appeared in historic times. One of them was western Mexico's
Jorullo, born in 1759 some 50 miles southeast of Dionisio Pulido's property.
The second, born about 183 years later in Pulido's field, was named Paricutín
for a nearby village that it eventually destroyed.
Paricutín and Jorullo both rose in an area known for its
volcanoes. Called the Mexican Volcanic Belt, the region stretches about 700
miles from east to west across southern Mexico. Geologists say that
eruptive activity deposited a layer of volcanic rock some 6,000 feet thick,
creating a high and fertile plateau. During summer months, the heights snag
moisture-laden breezes from the Pacific Ocean; rich farmland, in turn, has made
this belt the most populous region in Mexico.
Though the region already boasted three of the country's
four largest cities-Mexico City, Puebla, and Guadalajara-the area around
Paricutín, some 200 miles west of the capital, was still a peaceful backwater
inhabited by Tarascan Indians in the early 1940s. Its gently rolling landscape,
in a zone that had experienced almost no volcanic activity during historic
times, was one of Mexico's
loveliest. Although hundreds of extinct cinder cones rose around the small
valleys, the only eruption in human memory had been that of distant Jorullo.
The Tarascan had no folk legends concerning volcanic
eruptions in the area. But when Paricutín came into their lives, they saw
events, in retrospect that foretold the cataclysm. The first event was a
sacrilege: the 1941 destruction of a large wooden cross on a hillside. The
second one hinted at biblical retribution: a plague of locusts in 1942. When
1943 began, so did the third sign: a series of earthquakes; these were
preceded, said one man, by "many noises in the center of the earth."
On February 19, the day before the volcano began to erupt,
some 300 earthquakes shook the ground. On February 22, with the new cone rising
and fiery skyrockets descending, the first of many geologists who would monitor
and map Paricutin's behavior over the next
nine years arrived. From then on, Paricutín was under constant observation: It
yielded a trove of information, including unique, fleeting glimpses of
ephemeral features.
New volcanic phenomena and processes were sometimes
obliterated almost as soon as they were recorded, especially during Paricutín's
first year of violent, explosive growth and change. In that year, the cone
topped 1,100 feet, four-fifths of its final height; explosions echoed all over
the state of Michoacan; ash snowed on faraway Mexico City; and almost all of
the vegetation for miles around the crater was destroyed.
During the summer of 1943, probably the volcano's most
violent period. Lava rose to about 50 feet below the crater's rim. That fall, a
new vent opened explosively at the cone's base, fountaining lava high into the
sky. Lava finally destroyed the nearby villages the following year, but most
villagers had seen their livelihoods disappear long before that.
Over the next years, lava flows continued with little
interruption. But in February of 1952, almost exactly nine years after
Paricutín was born, the volcano experienced its last major spasm of activity.
By then, villages and farms had been relocated with government assistance. The
new Bracero Program drew many of the displaced farmers to California for seasonal agricultural work.
February 21st
1937 - Initial flight
of the first successful flying car, Waldo Waterman's Arrowbile.
The first flying car to actually fly was built by Waldo
Waterman. Waterman was associated with Curtiss while Curtiss was pioneering
naval aviator on North Island on San
Diego Bay
in the 1910s. On February 21, 1937, Waterman's Arrowbile first took to the air.
The Arrowbile was a development of Waterman's tailless aircraft, the Whatsit. It
had a wingspan of 38 feet and a length of 20 feet 6 inches. On the ground and
in the air it was powered by a Studebaker engine. It could fly at 112 mph and
drive at 56 mph
February 22nd
1903 - Niagara Falls freezes.
As a result of an ice jam at the eastern end of Goat Island the American Falls froze completely. The flow started to
freeze in late January. The American Falls remained
frozen for a period of days before the
ice dam upriver broke apart and returned the flow of water of the Falls to
normal.
February 23rd
1958 - 5-time world
driving champion Juan Fangio kidnapped by Cuban rebels
On 23rd February 1958, the Argentinean racing car driver
Juan Fangio, was approached by a man brandishing a revolver in the lobby of the
Hotel Lincoln in Havana, Cuba. The man was Manuel Uziel, a
member of Fidel Castro's 26th of July Movement then struggling to overthrow the
regime of President Batista. Uziel asked Fangio to identify him-self, but the
five time Formula One Champion thought it was some sort of joke, until Uziel
was joined by several other rebels carrying submachine guns. They explained
that they intended to keep him captive until after the Cuban Grand Prix, in
which Fangio was going to defend his title the following day.
They took him to an apartment where he received a visit from
Faustino Pérez, one of the leaders of the 26th of July Movement, who apologized
for the inconvenience. The rebels treated Fangio well, feeding him and giving
him a radio so that he could listen to the race, but he chose not to. The race
itself ended in disaster after only six laps when the Cuban driver, Armando
Garcia, ran into the crowd killing several people and injuring many more.
Good to their word, the rebels released Fangio the following
day. He told police that he had been "treated very well - as though I was
a friend of the rebels." When asked about the kidnapping he said, "If
what the rebels did was in a good cause, then I, as an Argentine, accept
it" He declined to identify his captors, with whom he remained good friends.
February 24th
1942 UFO sightings on
this day in Los Angeles
Photo captions: This
image of the UFO sightings was on the front of the Los Angeles Times in February 1942. The
searchlights are targeting the object with the artillery shell.
On the evening of 24th February and the early hours of 25th
February 1942, several UFO sightings were made over Los Angeles.
Known as the West coast air raid, Los
Angeles air raid and sometimes as The battle of Los Angeles a total blackout was ordered. Air
raid sirens sounded out across the County at 2.25 a.m. as a warning of an
impending raid.
At 3.16 a.m. the 37th Coast Artillery Brigade started firing
12.8 pound antiaircraft shells at the UFOs, which were sometimes illuminated by
bright searchlights.
After the air raid warning sounded, pilots from the 4th
Interceptor Command prepared their aircraft to intercept the UFOs, but no order
to intercept was given. The aircraft remained on the ground.
Artillery fire continued occasionally for nearly an hour,
and stopped at 4.14 a.m. The objects took about 20 minutes to move between Santa Monica and Long
Beach. The all-clear was sounded and the blackout
order lifted at 7.21 a.m.
Several buildings were damaged by friendly fire and three
civilians killed by the antiaircraft fire. Another three died of heart attacks
attributed to the stress of the hour-long bombardment.
The UFO sightings made front-page news along the U.S.
Pacific coast, and earned some mass media coverage throughout the United States.
One Herald Express writer who observed some of the incident insisted that
several antiaircraft shells had struck one of the objects, and he was stunned
that the object had not been brought down.
Secretary of the Navy Knox announced that the entire
incident was a false alarm due to anxiety and "war nerves". The press
was outraged, some suspected a cover up: the Long Beach Independent wrote,
"There is a mysterious reticence about the whole affair and it appears
that some form of censorship is trying to halt discussion on the matter."
Others speculated that the incident was a ruse designed to give coastal defense
industries an excuse to move further inland. And if there truly was nothing to
the incident, the possibility that Navy personnel had fired heavy artillery
shells for nearly an hour at nothing at all, killing three civilians in the
process seemed to suggest that the men of the U.S. Navy were dangerously
incompetent.
A Freedom of Information Act request was made in 1974 to
gain access to a memorandum regarding the incident, access was granted and
documentation released. Written by General George C. Marshall for President
Franklin Roosevelt, and dated February 26, 1942, the memo contradicts Knox's
assertion that the incident was due only to "war nerves," and proves
that officials took the event seriously.
February 25th
1908 - 1st railway tunnel
under Hudson River opensThe first trains ran in 1907 and revenue service started
between Hoboken and 19th Street at midnight on February 25, 1908, after
President Theodore Roosevelt pressed a button at the White House that turned on
the electric lines in the uptown tubes. On July 19, 1909, service began between
the Hudson Terminal in Lower Manhattan and Jersey City, through the downtown tubes
located about 1¼ miles south of the
first pair. After the completion of the uptown Manhattan extension to 33rd
Street and the westward extension to the now-defunct Manhattan Transfer and
Park Place Newark terminus in 1911, the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad was
considered to be complete. The cost of the entire project was estimated at
between $55 and $60 million, equal to more than $1 billion in present-day
dollars.
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Farewell
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