Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday in town will be cloudy and warm, with a high of seventy-eight. Sunrise is 7:12 AM and sunset 6:07 PM, for 10h 55m 24s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 97.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1777, British General Burgoyne surrenders his entire army following the Battles of Saratoga:

The Battles of Saratoga (September 19 and October 7, 1777) marked the climax of the Saratoga campaign giving a decisive victory to the Americans over the British in the American Revolutionary War. British General John Burgoyne led a large invasion army up the Champlain Valley from Canada, hoping to meet a similar force marching northward from New York City; the southern force never arrived, and Burgoyne was surrounded by American forces in upstate New York. Burgoyne fought two small battles to break out. They took place eighteen days apart on the same ground, 9 miles (14 km) south of Saratoga, New York. They both failed. Trapped by superior American forces, with no relief in sight, Burgoyne surrendered his entire army on October 17. His surrender, says historian Edmund Morgan, “was a great turning point of the war, because it won for Americans the foreign assistance which was the last element needed for victory.[8]

….Once news of Burgoyne’s surrender reached France, King Louis XVI decided to enter into negotiations with the Americans that resulted in a formal Franco-American alliance and French entry into the war. This moved the conflict onto a global stage.[89] As a consequence, Britain was forced to divert resources used to fight the war in North America to theaters in the West Indies and Europe, and rely on what turned out to be the chimera of Loyalist support in its North American operations.[90] Being defeated by the British in the French and Indian War more than a decade earlier, France found an opportunity of revenge by aiding the colonists throughout the Revolutionary War. Prior to the Battle of Saratoga, France didn’t fully aid the colonists. However, after the Battles of Saratoga were conclusively won by the colonists, France realized that the Americans had hope of winning the war, and began fully aiding the colonists by sending soldiers, donations, loans, military arms, and supplies.[91]

On this day in 1970, Pres. Nixon visits Green Bay:

On this date President Richard Nixon traveled to Green Bay to speak at a testimonial dinner in honor of Green Bay Packers quarterback Bart Starr. [Source: The American Presidency Project]

JigZone‘s daily puzzle for Monday is of a boat:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Sunday in town will be cloudy with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 6:09 PM, for 10h 58m 12s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Jessica McClure Morales (born March 26, 1986) became famous at the age of 18 months after falling into a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland, Texas, on October 14, 1987. Between that day and October 16, rescuers worked nonstop for 58 hours to free her from the eight-inch (20 cm) well casing 22 feet (6.7 m) below the ground. The story gained worldwide attention (leading to some criticism as a media circus), and later became the subject of a 1989 television movie Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure on ABC. As presented in it, a vital part of the rescue was the use of the then relatively new technology of waterjet cutting….

Rescuing McClure proved to be a much more difficult ordeal than initially anticipated. Within hours of discovering the situation, the Midland Fire and Police Departments devised a plan that involved drilling an additional shaft parallel to the well and then drilling a perpendicular tunnel from the shaft toward where McClure was stuck in the well. Enlisting the help of a variety of local (often out-of-work) oil-drillers, the Midland officials had hoped to free McClure in a matter of minutes.

However, the first drillers to arrive on the scene found their tools barely adequate in penetrating the thick rock that surrounded the well. It would take approximately six hours to complete the parallel shaft and a substantially longer period of time to drill the tunnel, attributable to the fact that the jackhammers used were developed primarily for drilling downward, as opposed to sideways. A mining engineer was eventually brought in to help supervise and coordinate the rescue effort. 45 hours after McClure had fallen into the well, the shaft and tunnel were finally complete.

Ron Short, a muscular roofing contractor who was born without collar bones because of cleidocranial dysostosis and so could collapse his shoulders to work in cramped corners, arrived at the site and offered to go down the shaft. They accepted his offer, but did not use it.[1][2] One report[3] said that he helped to clear tunneling debris away.

Ultimately, Midland Fire Department paramedic Robert O’Donnell was able to inch his way down into the tunnel and wrestle McClure free from the confines of the well, handing her to fellow paramedic Steve Forbes, who carried her up to safety.

CNN, then a fledgling cable news outlet, was on the scene with around-the-clock coverage of the rescue effort. This massive media saturation of the ordeal prompted then-President Ronald Reagan to state that “everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on.”

On this day in 1968, the Bucks play their first game:

On this date the Milwaukee Bucks opened their first season with an 89-84 loss to the Chicago Bulls. The loss was witnessed by 8,467 fans in the Milwaukee Arena. The starting lineup featured Wayne Embry at center, Fred Hetzel and Len Chappell at forward, and Jon McGlocklin and Guy Rodgers in the backcourt. Larry Costello was the head coach. The Bucks had its first win in their sixth game of the season with a 134-118 victory over the Detroit Pistons. [Source: Milwaukee Bucks]

Good morning, Whitewater.

Saturday in town will be cloudy with a high of sixty-seven, and a likelihood of thunderstorms tonight. Sunrise is 7:09 and sunset 6:10, for 11h 01m 00s of daytime.  The moon is full, with 99.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

Every so often, while people are swimming, a whale shows up.  This would be one of those every-so-oftens —

On this day in 1780, the British retreat, thankfully relenting too soon:

A combined force of 1,000 British regulars, Hessians, Loyalists and Indians, led by Loyalist Sir John Johnson and Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant, attempts an unsuccessful attack upon Middleburgh (or Middle Fort), New York, on this day in 1780.

Only 200 Continental soldiers under Major Melanchthon Woolsey were defending the fort, and unknown to the British, the Continentals were low on ammunition. In their ignorance of the Patriots’ weakness, the Loyalist forces retreated in the direction of the Schoharie Valley, contenting themselves with destroying everything in their path and continuing the civil war raging in upstate New York.

Johnson was the son of Sir William Johnson, Britain’s superintendent of Indian Affairs, who lived in the Mohawk Valley. The younger Johnson inherited his father’s sizable estate in 1774 only to relinquish it when he led a group of his tenants and native allies in flight to Montreal, Canada, after the outbreak of war between the colonies and Great Britain in 1775. Johnson’s cohort created the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, which fought throughout the war. For his efforts, Johnson became a British brigadier general in 1782.

Joseph Brant ranked among Britain’s best commanders during the American War for Independence. He was an educated Christian and Freemason who studied directly with Eleazer Wheelock at Moor’s Indian Charity School, the parent institution of Dartmouth College. His older sister Mary was Sir William Johnson’s common-law wife and also played a significant role in colonial and revolutionary Indian affairs. At the close of the war, the Brants and their Iroquois followers left the United States for Canada, where they found land and safety with their British allies.

Good morning, Whitewater.

Friday in the Whippet City will be mostly sunny with a high of sixty-four. Sunrise is 7:08 AM and sunset is 6:12 PM, for 11h 03m 47s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 95.7% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1964, Dr. King wins the Nobel Peace Prize. He delivered his acceptance speech on December 10, 1964 in Oslo:

On the night of October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in Milwaukee. Roosevelt was in Wisconsin stumping as the presidential candidate of the new, independent Progressive Party, which had split from the Republican Party earlier that year. Roosevelt already had served two terms as chief executive (1901-1909), but was seeking the office again as the champion of progressive reform. Unbeknownst to Roosevelt, a New York bartender named John Schrank had been stalking him for three weeks through eight states. As Roosevelt left Milwaukee’s Hotel Gilpatrick for a speaking engagement at the Milwaukee Auditorium and stood waving to the gathered crowd, Schrank fired a .38-caliber revolver that he had hidden in his coat.

Roosevelt was hit in the right side of the chest and the bullet lodged in his chest wall. Seeing the blood on his shirt, vest, and coat, his aides pleaded with him to seek medical help, but Roosevelt trivialized the wound and insisted on keeping his commitment. His life was probably saved by the speech, since the contents of his coat pocket — his metal spectacle case and the thick, folded manuscript of his talk — had absorbed much of the force of the bullet. Throughout the evening he made light of the wound, declaring at one point, “It takes more than one bullet to kill a Bull Moose,” but the candidate spend the next week in the hospital and carried the bullet inside him the rest of his life.

Schrank, the would-be assassin, was examined by psychiatrists, who recommended that he be committed to an asylum. A judge concurred and Schrank spent the remainder of his life incarcerated, first at the Northern Hospital for the Insane in Oshkosh, then at Central State Hospital for the criminally insane at the state prison at Waupun. The glass Roosevelt drank from on stage that night was acquired by the Wisconsin Historical Museum. You can read more about the assassination attempt on their Museum Object of Week pages.

JigZone‘s daily puzzle for Friday is of a gramophone: