Good morning.

Our Saturday before election day will be mostly cloudy, with a high near 45, and calm north winds.

On this day in 1948, the Chicago Tribune makes a famous mistake:

…the Chicago Tribune jumps the gun and mistakenly declares New York Governor Thomas Dewey the winner of his presidential race with incumbent Harry S. Truman in a front-page headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Many of America’s major newspapers had predicted a Dewey victory early on in the campaign. A New York Times article editorialized that “if Truman is nominated, he will be forced to wage the loneliest campaign in recent history.” Perhaps not surprisingly then, Truman chose not to use the press as a vehicle for getting his message across. Instead, in July 1948, he embarked on an ambitious 22,000-mile “whistle stop” railroad and automobile campaign tour. At every destination, Truman asked crowds to help him keep his job as president. His eventual success in the election of 1948 has been largely attributed to this direct interaction with the public and his appeal to the common voters as the political “underdog.” At the end of one of his campaign speeches, voices in the crowd could be heard yelling “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” It didn’t take long for the phrase to catch on and become Truman’s unofficial campaign slogan.

In a now famous photograph snapped in the early morning hours after the election, a beaming and bemused Truman is shown holding aloft the Chicago Tribune issue that had wrongly predicted his political downfall. Truman defeated Dewey by 114 electoral votes.

In Wisconsin history, on this day in 1804, a treaty with the Fox and Sauk:

1804 – Treaty at St. Louis
On this date Fox and Sauk negotiators in St. Louis traded 50 million acres of land in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois for an annuity of $1,000. The treaty allowed the tribes to remain on the land until it was sold to white settlers. However, Chief Black Hawk and others believed that the 1804 negotiators had no authority to speak for their nation, so the treaty was invalid. U.S. authorities, on the other hand, considered it binding and used it justify the Black Hawk War that occurred in the spring and summer of 1832. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 32-33]

Google’s daily puzzle asks about the world’s tallest mountain, measured a certain way: “When measured from its base rather than from sea level, this mountain is the world’s tallest. Where is it located?”

Good morning.

Whitewater’s week ends with mostly sunny skies and a high of forty-five.

On this day in 1947, the Hughes Flying Boat actually flew:

The Hughes Flying Boat—the largest aircraft ever built—is piloted by designer Howard Hughes on its first and only flight. Built with laminated birch and spruce, the massive wooden aircraft had a wingspan longer than a football field and was designed to carry more than 700 men to battle.

Howard Hughes was a successful Hollywood movie producer when he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He personally tested cutting-edge aircraft of his own design and in 1937 broke the transcontinental flight-time record. In 1938, he flew around the world in a record three days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.

Following the U.S. entrance into World War II in 1941, the U.S. government commissioned the Hughes Aircraft Company to build a large flying boat capable of carrying men and materials over long distances. The concept for what would become the “Spruce Goose” was originally conceived by the industrialist Henry Kaiser, but Kaiser dropped out of the project early, leaving Hughes and his small team to make the H-4 a reality. Because of wartime restrictions on steel, Hughes decided to build his aircraft out of wood laminated with plastic and covered with fabric. Although it was constructed mainly of birch, the use of spruce (along with its white-gray color) would later earn the aircraft the nickname Spruce Goose. It had a wingspan of 320 feet and was powered by eight giant propeller engines.

Development of the Spruce Goose cost a phenomenal $23 million and took so long that the war had ended by the time of its completion in 1946. The aircraft had many detractors, and Congress demanded that Hughes prove the plane airworthy. On November 2, 1947, Hughes obliged, taking the H-4 prototype out into Long Beach Harbor, CA for an unannounced flight test. Thousands of onlookers had come to watch the aircraft taxi on the water and were surprised when Hughes lifted his wooden behemoth 70 feet above the water and flew for a mile before landing.

Despite its successful maiden flight, the Spruce Goose never went into production, primarily because critics alleged that its wooden framework was insufficient to support its weight during long flights. Nevertheless, Howard Hughes, who became increasingly eccentric and withdrawn after 1950, refused to neglect what he saw as his greatest achievement in the aviation field. From 1947 until his death in 1976, he kept the Spruce Goose prototype ready for flight in an enormous, climate-controlled hangar at a cost of $1 million per year. Today, the Spruce Goose is housed at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

Google’s daily puzzle offers a sports question: “What was the birthplace of the 1972 Olympian credited with popularizing the running craze in the U.S.? (City)”

Good morning.

November comes to Whitewater with partly sunny skies and a high of forty-seven.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets tonight at 6 PM.

On this day in 1952, America exploded the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands:

On this day in 1902, a disappointment for the Badgers, after a long string of successes:

1902 – UW Winning Streak Snapped
On this date the University of Wisconsin football team had a 17-game winning streak snapped by the University of Michigan’s infamous “Point-A-Minute Machine” who defeated the Badgers 6-0. The game drew over 20,000 fans to Marshall Field in Chicago. [Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Google’s daily puzzle asks about geography: “If you take Bus #919 from Deshengmen, travel to Donggou Village, Badaling Town, Yanqing County and purchase a ticket, to what would you gain entry?”

Good morning.

Halloween in Whitewater will offer mostly sunny skies with a high of forty-five. During trick or treating, from 4 to 7 PM in the city, temperatures are likely to begin at 45 and fall to about 40 degrees.

• The Indian town of Sadiya was overrun with spiders — venomous ones that weren’t known to be native to the area. Out of dozens of reported bites, two people died — but the deaths might have been caused by inept medical treatments. [url]
• An invasive snake killed off a significant population of forest birds in Guam, causing the spider population to grow to forty times that of nearby islands.Normally, birds compete with spiders over eating insects, so when the birds died out, the spiders had an all-you-can-eat insect buffet. [url]
• Flooding in Wagga Wagga (Australia) forced spiders to seek higher ground to avoid drowning. The standing water caused an increase in the insect population and also resulted in vast blankets of spider webs covering fields like snow. [url]

The French, by the way, think spiders as bad luck in the morning, and good luck in the evening (‘araignée du matin, chagrin, araignée du soir, espoir’). I’ll go for good luck all the time, as they eat insect pests.

Google’s daily puzzle greets the day with a geography question: “To whom is the NOLA park at 901 North Rampart Street dedicated?”

Good morning.

Whitewater’s Tuesday brings partly sunny skies, a high near 46, and north winds at 15 to 25 miles per hour.

This evening in Whitewater, at 7:30 PM in Timmerman Auditorium (Hyland Hall) on the UW-Whitewater campus, there will be a forum with Rep. Evan Wynn and Rep. Andy Jorgensen, candidates for the 43rd Assembly District. (Update: Now corrected, thanks to a kind reader’s note, to post both candidates’ names. It’s a two-person forum: one won’t be debating himself.)

On this day in 1938, Orson Welles scares America:

Orson Welles causes a nationwide panic with his broadcast of “War of the Worlds”—a realistic radio dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth.

Orson Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater company decided to update H.G. Wells’ 19th-century science fiction novel War of the Worlds for national radio. Despite his age, Welles had been in radio for several years, most notably as the voice of “The Shadow” in the hit mystery program of the same name. “War of the Worlds” was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little idea of the havoc it would cause.

The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”

Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.

Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.

Soon, an announcer was at the crash site describing a Martian emerging from a large metallic cylinder. “Good heavens,” he declared, “something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now here’s another and another one and another one. They look like tentacles to me … I can see the thing’s body now. It’s large, large as a bear. It glistens like wet leather. But that face, it… it … ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”

The Martians mounted walking war machines and fired “heat-ray” weapons at the puny humans gathered around the crash site. They annihilated a force of 7,000 National Guardsman, and after being attacked by artillery and bombers the Martians released a poisonous gas into the air. Soon “Martian cylinders” landed in Chicago and St. Louis. The radio play was extremely realistic, with Welles employing sophisticated sound effects and his actors doing an excellent job portraying terrified announcers and other characters. An announcer reported that widespread panic had broken out in the vicinity of the landing sites, with thousands desperately trying to flee. In fact, that was not far from the truth.

Here’s that full radio program:

Google’s daily puzzle asks a question of literature: “Which nobel prize winning author explored philosophy through the point of view of English literature’s earliest monster?”