Where Were You In 1981?

What you see here is the official NWS severe probabalistic map for Saturday midday to Sunday midday. A pokey storm system is losing much of its energy as it gets stretched out. A couple of days ago it touched off 63 tornadoes on the front range of the Rockies. Saturday night into Sunday morning will be our best chance for rain and t’storms but the best dynamics, or wind action, will be to our west and the late night/early morning timing will not provide energy from the sun and the heat that is available is also limited. Bottom line, at this point, on early Friday morning, it doesn’t look to fearsome but we’ll keep our nose to the grindstone. Now, last weekend I was talking about highs in the low 50′s for this weekend….well…back that up a few days. We will remain well above seasonal norms this weekend but by the latter half of next week, our tempertures tank and I bet we stay there for several days. Hopefully this nice weather will be back in time for Derby Festival activities.

This Date In History On this date in 1962, my friend Andrew Knox was born…and on this date several years before that, my sister was enjoying her first full day on the planet and my dad began the first day of seeing his hair fall out. However, on this date in 1981, John Hinkley, Jr. became a household name when he took potshots and President Reagan. Other assassins have had other reasons. The guy who shot McKinley was an anarchist, the guy who shot Garfield was a disgruntled…not sure if they used that term in the 19th century… office seeker and Boothe shot Lincoln in some “south’s gonna rise again” scheme. I’m not sure why Lynettte Squeaky Fromme or later her fellow Charles Manson follower took a shot a good guy President Gerald Ford. I think he may have talked to the bullits about his WIN buttons as each approached and they lost interest, like the rest of the nation did…as well as the history books. But whatever the reasons, they could not have been as goofy as that of Hinkley, who shot the President of the United States to try an win the affections of a teenage actress named Jodie Foster, who was either in her first or second year at Yale University. I’ve always wondered how he thought that would work. “Hey, Jodie, I shot the President…you wanna go on a date?”…”gee…wow…sure!” Thankfully for the nation, President Reagan survived and was back on the job in less than two weeks. One of the bullits lodged right near the President’s heart. It was a small caliber bullitt. But this particular type of .22 bullitt was designed to fragment so as to cause maximum damage, but this one by the heart remained in tact. Thus, one might say that Divine Providence had a hand in the Gipper beating Tecumseh’s curse. If you don’t know what that is, go back in the archives…I think it was probably March 4. I’m not explaining it again.

I will conclude with something to give you hope in these days of such pessimism. See, on this date in 1867, many Americans were chiding the Johnson Administration for being stupid. In particular, the Secretary of State William Seward who in the wee hours of the morning of March 30, 1867 signed a treaty with czarist Russia for the purchase of Alaska. Czar Alexander II had been trying to unload it on the US since the Buchannon administration but the US got sidetracked by the Civil War. After the war, Seward really went after it and he ended up increasing the size of the country by about 20% for around two cents and acre. But the people of the time ridiculed the deal. They called it most famously “Seward’s Folly” and also “Seward’s Ice Box” and “Johnsons’s Polar Bear Garden.” The treaty passed in Congress by one vote a few weeks later but funding wasn’t provided by Congress for another year. Seems a bunch of really wise men with great vision of possibility in the future decided the pursestrings were the way they could reign in such a imbecilic President. Fortunately, their foolishness did not prevail, for if it did, the US would have had the Soviet Union as a neighbor and we would have been without all of the resources and beauty of our 49th state. Quite often, what is thought of as truth and fact by a majority of people and politicians later is proven to be false. Thankfully, sometimes history does repeat itself and dire predictions do not always come true. If you read the Memoirs of US Grant, you will find that he felt his biggest failure was not in annexing Santo Domingo. I think today we would call that the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Had he been allowe to do that, its plausible that the US might have also acquired Cuba….and think how history later might have been different. BTW…Grant’s memoirs are considered the greatest Presidential memoir ever. It was published by Mark Twain.

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