A Brief History On February 13, 1954, Franklin Delano Selvy, shooting guard/small forward for the Furman University (South Carolina) basketball team scored an NCAA Division I record 100 points in a game against Newberry College (South Carolina), a feat never matched in Division I play. Digging Deeper The 6’ 3” Selvy, known as Frank, hailed from Corbin, Kentucky and was born in 1932, presumably the reason he was so named.  (Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the 1932 US Presidential election the same month Selvy was born.) In a story right out of a book of Fairy Tales, Selvy was being honored…

A Brief History On February 12, 1909, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by a coalition of White Americans and African Americans.   The idea of this organization was conceived originally by 3 White civil rights activists, Mary White Ovington (Unitarian), William English Walling (wealthy, married Jewish woman), and Henry Moskowitz (Romanian Jewish immigrant to US) while meeting in New York.  The Race Riot of 1908 in Springfield, Illinois was the impetus for forming the NAACP. Digging Deeper (Note: February is Black History Month.) These Caucasian activists were convinced that White people would have to…

A Brief History On February 11, 1939, a prototype Lockheed P-38 Lighting twin engine fighter plane flew from California to New York in a then record 7 hours and 2 minutes.  This new US fighter plane was the fastest fighter in the world at this time, the first fighter to exceed 400 mph in level flight.  So what was wrong with it? Digging Deeper Normally our articles about military aircraft extol the virtues of the subject plane, but here we digress to look at the shortcomings and criticisms of this venerable aircraft, one of the creations of Clarence “Kelly” Johnson,…

A Brief History On February 10, 1962, the United States and the Soviet Union exchanged spies that had been captured by each country at the Glienicke bridge over the Havel River in Berlin, later known by a more romantic sounding name, “The Bridge of Spies.” Digging Deeper Perhaps the most famous American spy captured by the enemy since the Revolutionary War, Francis Gary Powers was a pilot for the CIA flying the top secret U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union when he was shot down and arrested for espionage.  The U-2 spy plane is a jet powered extremely high…

A Brief History On February 9, 1825, the United States of America had the only incident (so far) of no presidential candidate winning a majority of the Electoral votes in a presidential election, forcing the House of Representatives to elect our next president. Digging Deeper The presidential election of 1824 had been contentious, which is how these things usually are!  In this election there were four major candidates instead of the usual two.  Presidential elections often have numerous obscure candidates, but only rarely does a third or fourth party candidate garner enough votes to actually win an electoral vote.  Senator…