Creative History

  On February 9, 1889 in front of a crowd of 1200 bemused bedouins, none of whom had any idea what the Hell they were watching--in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza and beneath the gaze of the sphinx--the Chicago White Stockings and a team of professional all stars called the All Americans played a baseball game amidst the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert. This was part of Albert G. Spalding’s World Tour of Baseball which had begun in October of the previous year and would stretch into April, nearly until opening day, of the 1889 professional baseball season.  The World Tour included stops in Australia, Hawaii where baseball was played before half-naked natives and their indigenous king, England where games were watched by an aging Queen Victoria, Ceylon modern day Sri Lanka in front of groups of Buddhist monks, and Italy where baseball games were played by American major leaguers before papal emissaries outside of the Vatican in the shadow of the Roman Colosseum....

  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...

  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...