Creative History

  During the 15th or 16th century, in Dublin, Ireland, there lived a drunkard whom everyone knew by the name of “Stingy” Jack.  Now, Jack was a well known alcoholic and a conman and many people in town flat out called him a liar.  It’s believed that his state of dissipation and dishonesty is what caused Jack to earn the nickname “Stingy” because if anyone either out of pity, or trickery, chose to trust Jack he would only let them down and thereby “sting” them either out of drink or simple negligence. Well, as the story goes, none other than the Devil himself found out about Stingy Jack’s reputation throughout Ireland.  Satan couldn’t believe that there could possibly be a drunken Irish Hell-raiser who was  worse than himself.  And so, one day it is reported, the Devil himself went down to Dublin to have a conversation with “Stingy” Jack. The night that the Devil came to talk with Jack, he was drunkenly stumbling around in the fields outside the city lim...

  On the day before Halloween in 1948, a Saturday, in the early afternoon the Donora Pennsylvania High School football team was defeated on its home turf, Legion Field,  by local rival Monongahela High School.  The final score was Monongahela 27 Donora 7. Not a single pass was thrown during the entire game by either team.  But there was something far more odd, sinister and tragic than erratic play on the gridiron that both literally and figuratively overshadowed the field and the one hundred and fifty or so players and spectators who had gathered together that afternoon at Legion Field in suburban western Pennsylvania. The Smog. Speaking sixty-years later in 2008 to reporters from the Pittsburgh Gazette local resident Sam Jackson, who played in the football game for Monongahela High School remembered, “The smog was like a big cloud of yellowish mist hanging over the players.” Donora resident Paul Brown, who had left work early from the U.S. Steel Company Mill...

            Explosions shake the earth.  A fiery object falls from the sky and crashes through the roof of a farmhouse.  Flames leap skyward as a small New Jersey town burns. On the radio a newsflash interrupts a broadcast of popular dance music with an urgent bulletin.  It is 8 pm on October 30, 1938--the night before Halloween. The news bulletin reports, “Professor Farrell of Mount Jenning Observatory has detected explosions on the surface of Mars,” and then abruptly switches back to playing orchestral dance tunes.   But within moments, listeners to WCBS Radio, the northeast’s largest and most powerful station at the time, are informed that a large meteor has crashed into the small town of Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Around 9 pm the radio broadcast cuts to a reporter live on the scene in Grover’s Mill who frantically retracts his previous statement and says that it was not a meteor which crashed in town, but rather i...