Frank Beacham's Journal

On this day in 1835 — 187 years ago — the first in a series of six articles announcing the discovery of life on the moon appeared in the New York Sun newspaper

On this day in 1835 — 187 years ago — the first in a series of six articles announcing the discovery of life on the moon appeared in the New York Sun newspaper.

Known collectively as "The Great Moon Hoax," the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day.

Herschel had in fact traveled to Capetown, South Africa, in January, 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats.

The articles also offered vivid description of the moon's geography, complete with massive craters, enormous amethyst crystals, rushing rivers and lush vegetation.

The New York Sun, founded in 1833, was one of the new "penny press" papers that appealed to a wider audience with a cheaper price and a more narrative style of journalism. From the day the first moon hoax article was released, sales of the paper shot up considerably. It was exciting stuff and readers lapped it up.

The only problem was that none of it was true. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publication years earlier, and Grant was a fictional character. The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University.

Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.

Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to recognize it as satire. The craze over Herschel's supposed discoveries even fooled a committee of Yale University scientists, who traveled to New York in search of the Edinburgh Journal articles.

After Sun employees sent them back and forth between the printing and editorial offices, hoping to discourage them, the scientists returned to New Haven without realizing they had been tricked. On September 16, 1835, the Sun admitted the articles had been a hoax. People were generally amused by the whole thing, and sales of the paper didn’t suffer.

The Sun continued operation until 1950, when it merged with the New York World-Telegram. The merger folded in 1967. A new New York Sun newspaper was founded in 2002, but it has no relation to the original.

The tradition still continues today. It’s now called “Fox News.”

Thanks History.com

This week in 1944 — 78 years ago — Smokey Bear became the symbol for the U.S. Forest Service

This week in 1944 — 78 years ago — Smokey Bear became the symbol for the U.S. Forest Service.

It was during World War II and wildfires were a major concern. Some feared attacks on the West Coast after a submarine shelled a refinery in California and a Japanese plane dropped incendiary bombs on Oregon.

The Smokey campaign was created by artist Albert Staehel in collaboration with writer and art critic, Harold Rosenberg. In 1952, the songwriters Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins had a successful song — "Smokey the Bear." The writers said "the" was added to Smokey's name to keep the song's rhythm.

During the 1950s, the name became widespread both in popular speech and in print. At first, the Forest Service first turned to the Disney movie character, Bambi, for a fire safety campaign.

Then, a living Smokey Bear emerged. In 1950, a cub was found clinging to a burned tree in the Capitan Gap fire, a wildfire that burned 17,000 acres in the Lincoln National Forest, in the Capitan Mountains of New Mexico.

The bear cub was rescued by firefighters, named Smokey and turned into a national phenomenon by the press. The cub was taken to the National Zoo in Washington, where he lived until his death in 1976.

Smokey's remains were returned by the government to Capitan, New Mexico, and buried at what is now the Smokey Bear Historical Park. The plaque at his grave reads, "This is the resting place of the first living Smokey Bear ... the living symbol of wildfire prevention and wildlife conservation."

Throughout the years, many actors have served as the voice of Smokey the Bear. In June, 2008, the Forest Service launched a new series of public service announcements voiced by actor Sam Elliott, simultaneously giving Smokey a new visual design intended to appeal to young adults.

For decades, there has been disagreement about whether humans try to put out too many forest fires that start naturally. The political and scientific debate continues today, and even Smokey acknowledges the benefits of some natural fires.

Thanks New York Times!

Robert Shelton was born 96 years ago today

Robert Shelton and Bob Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival

Photo by Ed Grazda

Robert Shelton was born 96 years ago today.

Born in Chicago, Shelton was a music and film critic. He helped launch the career of an unknown 20-year-old folk singer named Bob Dylan.

In 1961, Dylan was performing at Gerdes Folk City in the West Village, one of the best-known folk venues in New York. He was opening for a bluegrass act called the Greenbriar Boys. Shelton's positive review, in the The New York Times, brought crucial publicity to Dylan and led to a Columbia recording contract.

Shelton attended the School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He moved to New York in the 1950s, and soon joined the staff of The New York Times.

In 1955, he was one of 30 New York Times staffers subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, who were informed by Times counsel, Louis M. Loeb, that they would be fired if they took the Fifth Amendment.

Shelton refused to answer questions from the committee about any affiliation with the Communist Party or about fellow Times staffer, Matilda Landsman. He was indicted by a grand jury for contempt.

Because he did not plead the Fifth, he was allowed to continue working at the Times, but was transferred away from the news department onto the less sensitive entertainment desk, where he became a music critic.

Convicted and sentenced to six months in prison, he appealed his conviction and had it reversed on a technicality, only to be indicted, retried, convicted and have the conviction overturned on a technicality again. After several years of appeals in which he was represented by noted civil liberties lawyer, Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., the case was finally dropped in the mid-1960s.

For a decade (1958–1968), Shelton reviewed music, in particular folk music, but also pop and country music, becoming a friend of many of the artists and extending his influence beyond the pages of the Times.

His other work included writing the programs at the Newport Folk Festival, and writing album notes for several artists. On Bob Dylan's first album, Shelton's notes are credited to “Stacey Williams.”

During the early 1960s, Shelton co-edited a magazine, Hootenanny, at the same time as his friend, Linda Solomon, edited a different magazine titled ABC-TV Hootenanny.

Shelton spent 20 years writing and rewriting his Dylan biography, No Direction Home, The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. It was finally published in 1986 after years of arguments with publishers about the style and length of the work. Shelton's intention from the outset was to write a serious cultural study, not a showbiz biography.

As a result, he later said his life's work had been "abridged over troubled waters." The title is taken from the lyric of Dylan's hit single, "Like a Rolling Stone."The same title, No Direction Home, was used by Martin Scorsese for his 2005 documentary film about Dylan's career from the beginning to his motorcycle crash in 1966.

Other books by Shelton include Electric Muse: The Story Of Folk Into Rock and The Face of Folk Music.

In 1982, Shelton moved to Brighton, England, where he wrote mostly about films for a number of publications up to the time of his death. In 1996, Shelton's papers, and his collection of books, records and research material were donated to the Institute of Popular Music at the University of Liverpool.

Shelton died on Dec. 11, 1995 in Brighton, England.

Pete Hamill was born 87 years ago today

Pete Hamill, New York Post, 1993

Photo by Fred R. Conrad

Pete Hamill was born 87 years ago today.

Born to Irish immigrants in Brooklyn, Hamill grew up playing stickball in a blue-collar neighborhood. However, even at an early age, he was fascinated with comic books and novels. With the neighborhood tavern the center of his community's social life, he started drinking at an early age.

Although his love for books had won him admittance to an elite high school in Manhattan, he felt out of place and dropped out.

Motivated by his love of comic books and art, Hamill went to art school and became a graphic artist after a period of drifting and living in Mexico. He eventually landed a job at the New York Post, which turned into a writing job and a regular, widely read column.

A heavy drinker, Hamill finally quit on New Year's Eve in 1972. His memoir, A Drinking Life (1995), describes his lifelong relationship with alcohol and draws a colorful picture of life in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s.

In addition to non-fiction works and journalism collections, Hamill has penned ten novels, two books of short stories and over 100 short stories for newspapers. Hamill won a Grammy Award in 1975 for the liner notes to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks album.

Of his many and diverse works, one of my favorites is a small volume written in 1999 called “Why Sinatra Matters.” It is a masterpiece of great nonfiction writing.

A friend of Robert F. Kennedy, Hamill helped persuade the senator to run for the presidency, then worked for the campaign and covered it as a journalist. He was one of four men who disarmed Sirhan Sirhan of his gun in the aftermath of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination in Los Angeles.

Hamill died on August 5, 2020, at NewYork–Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. He was 85, and suffered from heart and kidney failure at the time of his death, in addition to having fractured his right hip in a fall.

Here, Hamill speaks at St. Francis College in 2011

A national TV audience watched O. J. Simpson's white Bronco move along Los Angeles' freeways 28 years ago today

Twenty-eight years ago today, TV audiences were transfixed by a white Bronco moving along the freeways of Los Angeles.

Since that pursuit of O.J. Simpson, car chases have been a fixture of the L.A. zeitgeist. Many viewers are unable to look away from the near-daily helicopter footage on local news and, more recently, on social media feeds.

The O.J. chase is often cited as the beginning of the obsession. But Los Angeles Magazine traced the first live police pursuit to 1992, when the police chased a red Volkswagen driven by a murder suspect, pre-empting “Matlock” on TV in the process.

Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor who wrote a book on police pursuits, likened the public fascination to watching Nascar: “thousands of people in a stadium waiting for a crash.” (Tragically, hundreds of bystanders die as a result of police chases each year.)

But Alpert held the O.J. chase slightly apart from the broader public obsession. “The O.J. chase was a slow-speed chase,” he said. “It was a celebrity issue.”

Image of the O.J. Simpson chase on June 17, 1994.

Thanks New York Times!

Above photo by Joseph R. Villarin

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 105 years ago today

Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post in 1973

Katharine Graham — A Personal Remembrance

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 105 years ago today.

Publishers are normally not the creative people that I celebrate on these pages, but Graham was special and unique. In early 1974, I went to work as an investigative reporter for Post-Newsweek Television, which was owned by the Washington Post.

This was the period during the Watergate scandal, in which Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had an integral role in bringing about the resignation of President Richard Nixon that summer. Unlike newspapers and other news outlets today, Graham supported real, hard hitting reporting.

When Woodward and Bernstein brought the Watergate story to Post editor, Ben Bradlee, Graham supported their investigative reporting and Bradlee ran stories about Watergate when few other news outlets would touch the story. As a result, Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalistic history.

It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published." As an act of intimidation, the Nixon administration also set its Federal Communications Commission onto the Post’s broadcast properties. Graham was under severe pressure in those years and she rose to that pressure.

On my first day at work at the Post’s WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, I was surprised to get a personal phone call from Katherine Graham. She welcomed me and acknowledged the pressure we were under at the time.

But her real message was clear. “If you receive pressure from anyone — anyone at all — not to do your job, I want you to call me directly,” she said. “That’s very important.” She made me promise to call and gave me her direct number.

I never did call, though the next year at Post-Newsweek I was threatened, sued and publicly called every name in the book. The station defended every lawsuit and we won them all. We worked hard and got it right. It was the era of good, tough journalism — long gone today.

It was always comforting to know in those days that I was backed by the real iron lady, Katherine Graham.