April 18

Certainly, everyone has heard the poem of Paul Revere’s midnight ride “Listen my children and you shall hear of the Midnight ride of Paul Revere….” It is widely understood that the ride was to warn people that the British were coming to do battle. They were not; the British wanted to seize a munitions stockpile in Concord. That ride began when two lanterns were seen hanging in the steeple of the Old North Church in Boston, Massachusetts on the 18th in 1775. Overlooked, however, is the fact that Revere was not alone on this ride. There were three riders giving the warning and the warning had little to do with an invasion. Riding with Revere were William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. In addition to warning of the approach of British forces to Concord, the three men were also riding to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming to arrest them. While Prescott was the only one to actually reach Concord, I kind of think everything worked out all right in the end.

William Dawes’ great-great grandson, Charles Gates Dawes, was the nation’s 30th Vice-president in Calvin Coolidge’s administration. He followed that job by becoming the United States’ Ambassador to the Court of St. James, which is just a fancy way of saying the United Kingdom. Charles wrote the music for the hit song, It’s All In the Game, which has been covered by Nat ‘King’ Cole, Van Morrison, Elton John and Keith Jarret, among others.