March 29

Warner Leroy Baxter was born on the 29th in 1889, in Columbus, Ohio. He moved with his widowed mother to San Francisco, California in 1889, allowing him plenty of time to adjust to his new surroundings before the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake would force the family to live in a tent for a couple of weeks. Once firmly and safely ensconced on the left coast, Baxter was drawn to Hollywood and managed to have some success as an actor. In 1921, he got his first starring role in the movie Sheltered Daughters. It was as the Cisco Kid in the movie In Old Arizona, the first all-talking movie, that he finally achieved true star status. The movie was an adaptation of O. Henry’s story The Caballero’s Way. (O. Henry’s real name was William Sydney Porter. He was sentenced to five years in prison after being convicted of embezzlement in 1896, which goes a long way in understanding why he felt it necessary to use a pen name.)

March 28

Henry Fabre was a French aviator from Marseilles, France. On the 28th in 1910 at the controls of Le Canard, a plane he had designed and built, Fabre lifted off the surface the Etang de Berre, a body of water adjacent to the Mediterranean Sea, and successfully completed the first flight by a seaplane.

March 27

Elizabeth Muriel Gregory "Elsie" MacGill was born on the 27th in 1905 in Vancouver, British Colombia, Canada. She was the first woman elected to the Engineering Institute of Canada. She was hired as Chief Aeronautical Engineer at Canada Car & Foundry, the first woman in the world to hold that position[i]. During World War II, she was selected to design and build the Hawker Hurricane[ii], a plane thought by many to be responsible for England’s success in the Battle of Britain. Her work earned her the nickname Queen of the Hurricanes. She was well aware of the unique position she held in the world of engineering and remarked, “My presence in the University of Toronto's engineering classes in 1923 certainly turned a few heads. Although I never learned to fly myself, I accompanied the pilots on all test flights – even the dangerous first flight – of any aircraft I worked on.”

[i] Her mother, Helen Emma Gregory MacGill, born on January 7, 1864, was British Columbia’s first female judge. At her death in 1947, she had served as a judge in Vancouver’s Juvenile Court for 23 years.
[ii] Several modifications were made to the Hurricane after it entered service. The modifications were not related to the overall performance of the plane but to the unique circumstances of battle. The fuel tanks were modified to enable them to resist leakage caused by bullet holes. A bulletproof plate was installed behind the pilot’s seat. The third modification was to the machine guns, which would freeze at altitudes above 15,000 feet. Heaters were added.

March 26

On the 26th in 1484, William Caxton published his translation of Aesop’s Fables, in London, England. Aside from this date, little else is known with any certainty about Caxton. What is known is that he was the first English person to become a printer in England; his contemporaries in London were Dutch, French or German. Caxton was exposed to the printer’s trade during a tour of the continent. While in Germany, Caxton was bitten by the publishing bug and when he returned home, he immediately set about establishing himself as a printer and bookseller. Not surprisingly, he met with a great deal of resistance and outright hostility from the Merchant class in England, who felt that “if the printed page were to become widely available to the population, then it might filter through to the poor. The poor might then become aware and enlightened of their circumstances and, ultimately become dissatisfied and aggrieved.” You have to admit that his critics had made a damn good point. I have to admit that I am highly aggrieved.

March 25

On the 25th in 1655, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch part-time astronomer, discovered Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. I really don’t see what the big deal is. Titan is huge; it has a diameter of over 5000 kilometers. It would be really impressive if he had found the moon Mimas, which has a diameter of about 400 kilometers.

His father was Constantijn Huygens, a poet for whom the prestigious Constantijn Huygens Award is named.

March 24

George Francis Train was born on the 24th in 1824 in Boston, Massachusetts. When he was four years old, both his mother and his father died from yellow fever and his rather strict Methodist grandparents raised George thereafter. I am undecided if this personal tragedy had a ruling impact on George’s life. While it must have had a great affect on him, I can only wonder if it was the reason that he became both a successful businessman and a certifiable crackpot. While not necessarily the inspiration for Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in 80 Days, he did travel around the World three times, on one of the trips convincing the Queen of Spain to build a railroad through the backwoods of Pennsylvania. For the first trip, he left Tacoma, Washington and completed the journey in 67 days. Because of his interest in public affairs, he conducted a national campaign for his election to the position of Dictator. At his campaign rallies, he would charge a fee for admission and made a great deal more money doing so. He financed Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s newspaper The Revolution. He ended his days sitting on a park bench in New York’s Central Park, handing out dimes, feeding the pigeons and speaking to no one other than children and animals. He died on January 5, 1904 and was buried in Brooklyn, New York’s beautiful Green-Wood Cemetery.

Train was a member of the Thirteen Club, whose members had a thing about the superstition surrounding the number thirteen. Robert Green Ingersoll, a member in 1886, ended a toast by saying “We have had enough mediocrity, enough policy, enough superstition, enough prejudice, enough provincialism, and the time has come for the American citizen to say: Hereafter I will be represented by men who are worthy, not only of the great Republic, but of the Nineteenth Century.”
Despite their involvement in the suffragist movement, both Anthony and Stanton would actively lobby against both the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution and extending the vote to black men, on the theory that doing so would simply result in more men voting against extending the vote to women..

March 23

Some rather annoying people are born with silver spoons in their mouths. Horatio William Bottomley was not one of those however. He was born on the 23rd in 1860 in London, England. He spent the first 14 years of his life in an orphanage. Nevertheless, the experiences of his youth had imbued him with a strong desire to improve his situation in life and he pursued it with an unyielding sense of purpose. He founded a journal, John Bull, which became a platform for his rather self-serving patriotism. In the course of time, he ended up as a Member of Parliament, an Independent representing Hachney South. He succumbed however, as many politicians do, to the many temptations for unjust enrichment that he encountered. In 1921, he was convicted of fraud, perjury and false accounting, sentenced to seven years in jail and expelled from Parliament. One of the nicer comments made about his character was one made by Matthew Engel, writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, who pointed out that Bottomley was “irredeemably, utterly, psychotically corrupt. He built a string of other businesses on nothing more than fresh air: but there were always useful and distinguished idiots on the board, so he could tell the shareholders' meeting: "I would love to pay you a dividend, but my directors won't let me."