April 12

Henri Désiré Landru was born on the 12th in 1869. He was a man on a mission, a mission that he pursued with remarkable vigor. It is unfortunate that the mission consisted of defrauding young women, stealing their money, and then indiscriminately killing them. While his body count does not really hold up when compared to other serial killers, he had his routine down pat. He used a number of aliases when approaching young ladies so that his identity would be shielded. When someone is engaged in a project such as the one that Henri was in, it pays to be as consistent in your behavior as possible. In order to keep track of just who he was on a given day Henri began to keep a rather large ledger of the aliases he had and was using. The final body count was 10 women and a son of one of the victims. However, I think the size of the ledger that he maintained might indicate a rather higher body count. Compared to fellow resident of France, Hélène Jegado, Landru was a rank amateur. Between 1833 and 1851, she murdered 23 people and is suspected in the deaths of at least 13 others.

April 10

Photography as a means of preserving images for future generations was born in the 19th Century. This new tool in the historian’s toolbox captured President Abraham Lincoln’s image so that today we are all familiar with his rather stern look of melancholy and undeniable sadness. The last photograph taken of Lincoln while he was still alive was the one taken on the 10th in 1865; Lincoln died on the 16th.

Following the President’s death, his widow, Mary Ann Todd Lincoln, received from the United States Congress a pension of $3000 per year for the term of her life. In 1875 the President and Mrs. Lincoln’s son Robert would have his mother confined by court order to an insane asylum in Peoria, Illinois.

April 11

Booker T. Washington (pictured), an African-American teacher, politician and author was honored on the 7th in 1940 when the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp bearing his image, the first black American to be so honored. However, Washington received his greatest honor when the song ‘Uptight’ went top ten with his band the MG’s.

April 9

On the 9th in 1959, the American space agency NASA introduced Malcolm Scott Carpenter[i]. Leroy Gordon Cooper[ii], John H. Glenn Jr.[iii], Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom[iv], Walter M. "Wally" Schirra[v], Alan B. Shepard[vi], and Donald K. "Deke" Slayton[vii] to a waiting world. They were the first people selected to participate in the United States’ Mercury program and would be the first Americans to go into outer space, though not the first Americans to be spaced. Carpenter and Glenn are now the last survivors of this historic group.
[i] Carpenter was the second American to orbit the earth. Shame on you if you don’t know who the first was.
[ii] Cooper always insisted that he had seen extraterrestrial crafts (UFOs), the first encounter when he was flying over Germany in 1951. His Book Out of The Blue describes that incident and many other encounters, though he denied seeing any in his time with the Mercury Program. In a stunning bit of irony, Cooper died on October 4, 2004, the same day that SpaceShipOne made its second flight and won the Ansari X-prize.
[iii] In 1957, Glenn appeared on the television show Name That Tune and won $12,500.
[iv] After the successful Gemini 3 flight, Grissom said that he hoped “If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
[v] Schirra is the only astronaut to have flown in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs. He logged close to 300 hours in space.
[vi] Reflecting on his time with the Space program, Shepard reluctantly said that "I must admit, maybe I am a piece of history after all."
[vii] Despite having serious heart problems, Slayton received medical clearance and went back into space as the docking module pilot for the Apollo-Soyuz Project in July 1975.

April 8

If you are unfortunate and are arrested and brought to trial for a heinous crime, there are a number of things that your attorney will do on your behalf. The first is to try to get the terms and conditions of your bail straightened out so that you may await trial in your home rather than a prison. In the event that effort fails, your counsel will then move the court to allow you to make your appearances in the courtroom without handcuffs, shackles or clothed in a bright orange jumpsuit that has Department of Corrections emblazoned on the back. You attorney will do this because the jury’s verdict should not be prejudiced by your appearance. How do you think the jury looked at Martha M. Place? Newspapers of her time described Martha as being “rather tall and spare, with a pale, sharp face. Her nose is long and pointed, her chin sharp and prominent, her lips thin and her forehead retreating. There is something about her face that reminds one of a rat’s, and the bright but changeless eyes somehow strengthen the impression.” Martha was a very troubled woman. Unfortunately, Ida, Martha’s stepdaughter,[i] bore the brunt of those troubles. Martha, all the while proclaiming her innocence, was convicted on March 20, 1899 of her stepdaughter’s murder. On the 8th in 1899, in New York’s Sing Sing prison[ii], Miss Place became the first woman executed by the use of an electric chair[iii].

[i] On February 7 1899, when Martha’s husband William arrived home Martha met him at the door wielding an ax and tried to kill him. His daughter was already dead.
[ii] Albert Fish, whose culinary tastes were widely frowned upon (He was in the habit of kidnapping, cooking and eating children) was executed using Sing Sing’s electric chair on January 16, 1936. He had told his executioner that the execution would be “the supreme thrill of my life.”
[iii] Miss Place’s executioner was Edwin F. Davis, the State of New York’s first state electrician. He apparently enjoyed his work and had been awarded patent number 587,649, for his "Electrocution-Chair", on August 3, 1897. Davis was also William Kemmler’s executioner. Kemmler was toasted on August 6, 1890 and was the first person to be executed with an electric chair.

April 7

Booker T. Washington (pictured) an African-American teacher, politician and author was honored on the 7th in 1940 when the United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp bearing his image, the first black American to be so honored. However, Washington received his greatest honor in 1969 when the song ‘Uptight’ went top ten with his band the MG’s.
In 1901, as a guest of President Theodore Roosevelt, Booker was the first black man honored as a guest in the ironically named White House.
In his autobiography Up From Slavery, published in 1901, Washington wrote "I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."

April 6

There are few events on par with the perfection of the polio vaccine by Louis Pasteur. The same may be said of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s landing on the surface of the moon. Among those events of similar significance, one occurred on the 6th in 1938 when Roy J. Plunkett, a DuPont chemist charged with developing a new refrigerant serendipitously discovered polytetrafluoroethylene (heh?). It was immediately re-named Teflon, so that it would fit properly onto the label for a cooking utensil. In recognition of Plunkett’s contributions to Western Civilization and life as we know it generally, in 1973 Plunkett was inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame. In addition (will the joy would never end?) in 1985, Roy made it into the Inventors Hall of Fame. On the downside, Plunkett also perfected the gasoline additive tetra-ethyl lead, bequeathing to us an entirely new set of problems.