Stanley Kubrick’s black comic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove or:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opened in
theaters to both critical and popular acclaim.
The movie’s popularity was evidence of changing attitudes
toward atomic weapons and the concept of nuclear deterrence.
Stanley Kubrick in the directing chair.
On January 29, 1936, the U.S. Baseball Hall of Fame elected
its first members in Cooperstown, New York: Ty Cobb, Babe
Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Matthewson and Walter Johnson.
The Hall of Fame actually had its beginnings in 1935, when
plans were made to build a museum devoted to baseball
and its 100-year history.
A private organization based in Cooperstown called the Clark
Foundation thought that establishing the Baseball Hall of
Fame in their city would help to reinvigorate the area’s
Depression-ravaged economy by attracting tourists.
To help sell the idea, the foundation advanced the idea that
U.S. Civil War hero Abner Doubleday invented baseball in
Cooperstown.
The story proved to be phony, but baseball officials, eager
to capitalize on the marketing and publicity potential of a
museum to honor the game’s greats, gave their support to
the project anyway.
Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” beginning
“Once upon a midnight dreary,”was published on this day
in the New York Evening Mirror in 1845.
Poe’s dark and macabre work reflected his own tumultuous
and difficult life. Born in Boston in 1809,
Poe was orphaned at age three and went to live with the
family of a Richmond, Virginia, businessman.
Poe studied at the University of Virginia but was expelled
for gambling. He later enrolled briefly at a military
academy.
