History Thread...

[Screwball]

I had a Rambler of some kind, don't remember what year. 70s probably. It had air conditioning when that was a thing, but this was old when I got it. It didn't work. There were buttons on the dash for air, maybe 5 of them. One setting said "desert only." Too funny.

Cars are a perfect example where a simple task like getting from point A to point B departs from the KISS rule (Keep It Simple Stupid) to product life cycle and making a **** load of money. You could design a car to last a lifetime and save a ton of money over the years, but they don't do that and never will. We also like all the bells and whistles.

A good buddy is a retired Mercedes mechanic. They have car seats that make my recliner feel like a park bench. The electronics in cars today is off the charts as well. All stuff that can **** up - and cost money to fix. Lots of it, and usually not a fun experience.

ON EDIT: appliances are no different.

Edited Thursday at 12:52 AM by Screwball

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, CMRivdogs said:

Didn't AMC have their offices in Southfield back in the day. We moved to the area late 2000, WWJ was and still is on American Dr, or at least last I knew

Yes- AMC was originally down on Plymouth just west of Schafer. (there is some kind of huge warehouse on the site now).  When they moved out of that they built a kind of a blackish glass tower - 15-20 story range in Southfield near 11 and Franklin just south of 696.. After they got merged out of existence and the building went to general office rental the firm my mother worked for was in the building for a while. It was the only place she worked I never had occasion to visit because they were there when I was at school.

[gehringer_2]

35 minutes ago, Screwball said:

One setting said "desert only." Too funny.

LOL - yeah  I remember 'desert only' on early car ACs. I had only had my license a few months and was driving in FLA mid summer with the air on 'desert only' (which was full blast) when the whole damn car fogged up. PANIC! We were trying to wipe the front windshield while not crashing into anything and finally realized the condensate was on the outside of the window - turn on the wipers dummy!  I think modern cars are set up so they never blow ice cold air on the windshield like some of those early ones (1968 IIRC) could.

Edited Thursday at 01:26 AM by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

Just a simple car (years ago), for the most part the make didn't matter, if you took it in for a tune up and inspection once a year they were dependable, and didn't cost a lot of money. I've dealt with some car issues recently, and it is a total mess, and not cheap. So much has changed over the years. 

[gehringer_2]

1 minute ago, Screwball said:

Just a simple car (years ago), for the most part the make didn't matter, if you took it in for a tune up and inspection once a year they were dependable, and didn't cost a lot of money. I've dealt with some car issues recently, and it is a total mess, and not cheap. So much has changed over the years. 

To this this day it never fails to make me laugh when I pop the hood on my 2.4 L *4* cylinder powered car and can't see the ground anywhere, when I had 300 horses sitting under the hood of my '66 SS and almost had room to stand inside the engine compartment with the engine. 

[Screwball]

18 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

To this this day it never fails to make me laugh when I pop the hood on my 2.4 L *4* cylinder powered car and can't see the ground anywhere, when I had 300 horses sitting under the hood of my '66 SS and almost had room to stand inside the engine compartment with the engine. 

Absolutely.

Change the oil, and filter, plugs (and wires if needed), points, condenser, clean the battery terminals (and battery), look at the belts, air filter, all the fluid containers (brakes, wipers, anti-freeze,etc) then put it up on a rack and check the suspension parts while they get greased, u-joints, rear end fluid level, tire wear level, and pull a front and back wheel to look at the brakes. This was a routine tune-up as they called it. It used to work that way.

They were simple, and they lasted as long as you did that. 

Now they are too complicated. The first thing they do is hook up a computer.

 

[CMRivdogs]

December 4

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-4

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On December 4, 1991, Islamic militants in Lebanon release kidnapped American journalist Terry Andersonafter 2,454 days in captivity.

As chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, Anderson covered the long-running civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). On March 16, 1985, he was kidnapped on a west Beirut street while leaving a tennis court. His captors took him to the southern suburbs of the city, where he was held prisoner in an underground dungeon for the next six-and-a-half years.

Anderson was one of 92 foreigners (including 17 Americans) abducted during Lebanon’s bitter civil war. The kidnappings were linked to Hezbollah, or the Party of God, a militant Shiite Muslim organization formed in 1982 in reaction to Israel’s military presence in Lebanon. They seized several Americans, including Anderson, soon after Kuwaiti courts jailed 17 Shiites found guilty of bombing the American and French embassies there in 1983. Hezbollah in Lebanon received financial and spiritual support from Iran.

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A force of Continental dragoons commanded by Colonel William Washington–General George Washington’s second cousin once removed–corners Loyalist Colonel Rowland Rugeley and his followers in Rugeley’s house and barn near Camden, South Carolina, on December 4, 1780.

After nearly a year of brutal backcountry conflict between Washington and the fierce British commander Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton (who was infamous for Tarleton’s Quarter, the murder of colonial POWs on May 29, 1780 at Waxhaws), Washington had retreated to North Carolina the previous October. Commanded to return to the South Carolina theater by Brigadier General Daniel The Old Wagoner Morgan, Colonel Washington still lacked the proper artillery to dislodge the Loyalists. He told his cavalrymen to dismount and surround the barn. While out of Rugeley’s sight, Washington’s men fabricated a pine log to resemble a cannon.

This Quaker gun trick, named so because Quakers used it to be intimidating without breaching their pacifist vow of non-violence, worked beautifully. Washington faced the cannon toward the buildings in which the Loyalists had barricaded themselves and threatened bombardment if they did not surrender. Shortly after, Rugeley surrendered his entire force without a single shot being fired.

When informed of the pacifist victory, General Charles Cornwallis, commander of the British armies in America, informed Tarleton that Rugeley’s performance ensured he would never rise to the rank of brigadier. A few weeks later, Tarleton would himself face an even worse humiliation at the hands of General Morgan during the devastating Battle of Cowpens. The harrowing civil war for the hearts and minds of the Carolina backcountry had finally begun to favor the Patriots.

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On December 4, 1783, future President George Washington, then commanding general of the Continental Army, summons his military officers to Fraunces Tavern in New York City to inform them that he will be resigning his commission and returning to civilian life.

Washington had led the army through six long years of war against the British before the American forces finally prevailed at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781. There, Washington received the formal surrender of British General Lord Charles Cornwallis, effectively ending the Revolutionary War, although it took almost two more years to conclude a peace treaty and slightly longer for all British troops to leave New York.

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1967. An impromptu jam session breaks out between Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash at Memphis' Sun Studios. The press dubs it the “Million Dollar Quartet.”

 

[CMRivdogs]

December 5

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-5

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At 2:10 p.m. on December 5, 1945, five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. After having completed their objective, Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for an additional 67 miles, then turn north for 73 miles, and back to the air station after that, totaling a distance of 120 miles. They never returned.

Two hours after the flight began, the leader of the squadron, who had been flying in the area for more than six months, reported that his compass and backup compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The other planes experienced similar instrument malfunctions. Radio facilities on land were contacted to find the location of the lost squadron, but none were successful. After two more hours of confused messages from the fliers, a distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard at 6:20 p.m., apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft simultaneously because of lack of fuel.

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1872 The Dei Gratia, a small British brig under Captain David Morehouse, spots the Mary Celeste, an American vessel, sailing erratically but at full sail near the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a soul was onboard.

On November 7, the brigantine Mary Celeste sailed from New York harbor for Genoa, Italy, carrying Captain Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife and two-year-old daughter, a crew of eight, and a cargo of some 1,700 barrels of crude alcohol. After the Dei Gratia sighted the vessel on December 4, Captain Morehouse and his men boarded the ship to find it abandoned, with its sails slightly damaged, several feet of water in the hold, and the lifeboat and navigational instruments missing. However, the ship was in good order, the cargo intact, and reserves of food and water remained on board.

The last entry in the captain’s log shows that the Mary Celeste had been nine days and 500 miles away from where the ship was found by the Dei Gratia. Apparently, the Mary Celeste had been drifting toward Genoa on her intended course for 11 days with no one at the wheel to guide her. Captain Briggs, his family, and the crew of the vessel were never found, and the reason for the abandonment of the Mary Celeste has never been determined.

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1776 

In Williamsburg, Virginia, a group of five students at the College of William and Mary gather at Raleigh’s Tavern to found a new fraternity, Phi Beta Kappa. Intended to follow strictly American principles as opposed to those of England or Germany, the new society engaged in the fervent political debate typical of student life at the college in Virginia’s capital. The fluent scholars of Greek and Latin who gathered to found the society, which was destined to count presidents and poets of the newly declared republic among its ranks, could not have differed more greatly from their Patriot fellows suffering as prisoners of the crown in British-occupied New York.

From the British stronghold, an officer writing on this day described his 5,000 American captives in Shakespearian terms: “…many of them are such ragamuffins, as you never saw in your life; I cannot give you a better idea of them than by putting you in mind of Falstaff’s recruits, or poor Tom in King Lear; and yet they had strained every nerve to cover their nakedness, by dismantling all the beds.”

While students toasted and the captured shivered, General George Washington pled the virtues of a standing army above those of an ad hoc militia. His missive to Congress came at the end of his notice that his batch of ragamuffins and their supplies were still in transit across the Delaware to Pennsylvania, protected from the rampaging redcoats by a rear guard at Princeton commanded by Lord William Stirling and General Adam Stephens.

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1933 

The 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment and bringing an end to the era of national prohibition of alcohol in America. At 5:32 p.m. EST, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, achieving the requisite three-fourths majority of states’ approval. Pennsylvania and Ohio had ratified it earlier in the day.

The movement for the prohibition of alcohol began in the early 19th century, when Americans concerned about the adverse effects of drinking began forming temperance societies. By the late 19th century, these groups had become a powerful political force, campaigning on the state level and calling for national liquor abstinence. Several states outlawed the manufacture or sale of alcohol within their own borders. In December 1917, the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. On January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment was ratified by the states. Prohibition went into effect the next year, on January 17, 1920.

 

[CMRivdogs]

The petition singles out Poor’s leadership abilities: he “behaved like an experienced officer as well as an excellent soldier.” Implicit is a contrast with the many white New England officers at Bunker Hill who emerged with accusations of incompetence or cowardice.

As the army besieging Boston is reconstituted for the New Year, Washington and the Continental Congress have ordered that black men be forbidden from enlisting, including those who have already served in it since it formed spontaneously after the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

[CMRivdogs]

December 6

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/december-6

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On December 6, 1884, in Washington, D.C., workers place a nine-inch aluminum pyramid inscribed with "Laus Deo," meaning praise (be) to God, atop a tower of white marble, completing the construction of an impressive monument to the city’s namesake and the nation’s first president, George Washington.

As early as 1783, the infant U.S. Congress decided that a statue of George Washington, the great Revolutionary Wargeneral, should be placed near the site of the new Congressional building, wherever it might be. After then-President Washington asked him to lay out a new federal capital on the Potomac River in 1791, architect Pierre L’Enfant left a place for the statue at the western end of the sweeping National Mall (near the monument’s present location).

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On December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, officially ending the institution of slavery, is ratified. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” With these words, the single greatest change wrought by the Civil War was officially noted in the Constitution.

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1917 At 9:05 a.m., in the harbor of Halifax in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the most devastating manmade explosion in the pre-atomic age occurs when the Mont Blanc, a French munitions ship, explodes 20 minutes after colliding with another vessel. More than 1,800 people died.

At approximately 8:45 a.m., the two ships collided, setting the picric acid ablaze. The Mont Blanc was propelled toward the shore by its collision with the Imo, and the crew rapidly abandoned the ship, attempting without success to alert the harbor of the peril of the burning ship. Spectators gathered along the waterfront to witness the spectacle of the blazing ship, and minutes later it brushed by a harbor pier, setting it ablaze. The Halifax Fire Department responded quickly and was positioning its engine next to the nearest hydrant when the Mont Blanc exploded at 9:05 a.m. in a blinding white flash.

The massive explosion killed more than 1,800 people, injured another 9,000—including blinding 200—and destroyed almost the entire north end of the city of Halifax, including more than 1,600 homes. The resulting shock wave shattered windows 50 miles away, and the sound of the explosion could be heard hundreds of miles away.