A Brief History On May 4, 1894, educator Charles Babcock, superintendent of Oil City, Pennsylvania schools, established “Bird Day” on May 4 in order to advance the celebration and conservation of our feathered friends. Digging Deeper Other “Bird Days” include International Bird Day (April 13) and International Migratory Bird Day (second Saturday in May, or May 13 this year). The 2017 theme is Stopover Sites: Helping Birds Along the Way. As birds are extremely important to the environment and to the welfare of mankind, we will take a moment to recognize some of their important contributions to the ecology. For…
Browsing: May 4
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A Brief History On May 4, 1970, Kent State University in Ohio became famous as the scene of a tragic anti-war protest gone wrong, with 4 students dead and 9 wounded. Do you know what Kent State sports teams are known as? Hint: it has nothing to do with this infamous incident. They are known as The Golden Flashes. Many schools have teams named for ferocious animals or some sort of warrior people, but many others have names that leave others to wonder what the heck image they are trying to project. Since the NCAA forced schools to lose derogatory…
A Brief History On May 4, 1970, the M-1 Garand rifles of the Ohio National Guard were used in combat; against college kids! Digging Deeper With the United States torn by the War in Vietnam, protests at college campuses became common. President Nixon had promised to end the War in Vietnam when running for election in 1968, and by 1970 he had sent US forces into Cambodia to eliminate sanctuary for communist Vietnamese forces and disrupt communist supply lines. Many in the US saw this broken promise as an escalation of the unpopular war. Additional fuel for the anti-war fire…
A Brief History On May 4, 1959, the first ever Grammy music awards were held, with no category for rock and roll despite the fact that this new type of music had already long taken the country by storm. Digging Deeper The big winners with 2 Grammys apiece were: Ella Fitzgerald (Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Female and Best Jazz Performance by an Individual, for compilations of the Irving Berlin songbook and the Duke Ellington songbook, respectively); Henri Mancini (Best Arrangement and Album of the Year, both for The Music from Peter Gunn); Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., better known by his stage persona…
