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Party Like It's 1955: Freedom from Fear for Parents the Day a Successful Polio Vaccine was Announced April 12, 11955

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  It is April 12, 1955--a Tuesday, exactly ten years to the day after the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who had served for over twelve years in the White House, but who also had spent most of his life crippled by polio. On this day, in 1955, Dr. Thomas Francis Jr.--a fifty-four year old virologist and epidemiologist from the University of Michigan who had been the first person in the United States to isolate a strain of the influenza virus back in 1940 which led to the development of the yearly flu vaccine--stands at a podium in a large auditorium before an assembled crowd of upwards of five-hundred reporters and scientists from around the world. One of Dr. Francis’ former students--Jonas Salk who is originally from New York City and the New York University School of Medicine--but who has been working at the University of Pittsburgh on research and development has made a major breakthrough in the development of a vaccine against the dreaded childhood disease of p...
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Humans in America Two Million Years Ago or Geology's Greatest Practical Joke? The Debate behind the Calaveras Skull Discovered in 1866

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  February 25, 1866--two men, James Mattson a gold miner and John Scribner a commissary store owner, Wells Fargo employee and part time miner himself, at a place called Angel’s Mining Camp in Calaveras County, California, are looking-- just like thousands of others among them who have recently headed west over the past decade and a half--to strike it rich by finding gold. As the men dig their mine down deeper and deeper beneath a layer of hardened lava from an extinct volcano and reach a depth of approximately 130 feet below the surface of the earth, Mattson’s pick hits something hard in a side wall of the mine.  At first, he thinks it’s simply a fossilized tree root, but the two men consider the item oddly shaped enough, and interesting enough, to bring it up to the surface anyway. At the end of the day, this hard and oddly shaped object is brought to the commissary store that is owned by John Scribner.  For days it sits in the store on a shelf and is largely ignored...
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America's Last Living Emancipated Slave, Civil War Veteran and Oldest Man: The Remarkable Story of 130 Year Old Sylvester Magee

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“A.P. Andrews of the Civil War Roundtable of Jackson, Mississippi and Dr. Laurin C. Post of San Diego State College, and other historians, say they have confirmed that Sylvester Magee was born in Carpet, N.C in 1841, that later he became a slave to Hugh Magee of the Dry Creek area of Covington County, Mississippi and that he fought in the Civil War for the Northern Army.”  ftrom the Monday May 2, 1966 edition of The Hattiesburg American . In 1966, on his supposed 125th birthday, Governor Paul B. Johnson, Mississippi’s first Governor who wasn’t a staunch segregationist or overt racist, declared May 29, 1966 to be Sylvester Magee day in honor of the Hattiesburg man who claimed to be America’s last living enslaved person, last surviving Civil War Veteran and the oldest living person in the history of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson the then President of the United States, a man known as a Civil Rights reformer in the 1960’s, personally wrote Mr. Magee a note of congratulations ...
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