One example is the Bush presidential voting fiasco in 2000, I received several phone calls from reporters wanting to know if anything like this had happened before. As a matter of fact, it has happened SIX times before. Many Americans know about the Dewey Defeats Truman episode for the presidential election of 1948. However, that error was only printed in one newspaper, the Chicago Daily News. For the presidential election of 1876, the two candidates were Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes. After the votes were counted, Tilden had 250,000 more votes than Hayes. However, the votes were still uncounted for Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Both parties demanded a recount. Despite the uncertainty of who was the winner, most newspapers declared Tilden the winner in their November 7 editions. Newspapers were filled with editorials of controversy and both sides accused the other side of fraud. The presidential inauguration took place on March 5, 1877. The final winner, Rutherford B. Hayes, was not announced until only three days prior to the inauguration.

The day after the Columbine High School shootings, April 21, 1999, I received phone calls from several reporters wanting to know if this was the worst mass-killing of children that ever took place at a school. It wasn’t. On May 18, 1927, 45 people, mostly children, were killed and 58 were injured when disgruntled and demented school board member Andrew Kehoe dynamited the new school building in Bath, Michigan. He did this out of revenge over his foreclosed farm due in part to the taxes required to pay for the new school. The school had students from kindergarten to twelfth-grade. As the school’s janitor, Kehoe spent almost an entire year wiring dynamite throughout the basement of the school. In total, about one-thousand pounds of dynamite was planted. The evening of May 17, Kehoe, hooked a clock mechanism to the dynamite and set it to go off at 8:45 the next morning. He also rigged his home with dynamite. Early morning May 18, he got up and shot his wife. He then loaded his pickup truck bed with more dynamite as well as scraps of metal, nails, broken glass and other items to be used as shrapnel. Next he set off the dynamite at his home and then drove to the school arriving at about 9 AM, just after the school had blown up. When he arrived, dozens of men and women were searching through the rubble in an effort to save children. An entire wing of the school was turned into rubble. Children could be heard screaming and crying under the debris. Kehoe parked his truck in front of what was left of the school, turned around in the driver’s seat and fired a shot into the truck bed to set off the dynamite there. With this, even more people were killed; even the few children that had made it out of the school on their own and were wandering around trying to figure out what had just happened. The rescue attempts were stopped when more dynamite was found in the school wing that had not been blown up.

Being a town of only a few hundred people, almost every household suffered the death of one or more of their children. Almost an entire generation was wiped out in their town. Except for the Lansing, Michigan newspaper, all other newspapers covered the event on inside pages, if at all. The main news coverage was on Charles Lindbergh who was making aviation history with his flight to Paris.

To read about last year's muster, check out the September 2008 issue of this newsletter.

You could make a family vacation out of this trip as there are several other great sites to visit and all within less than a morning's drive. For more information, contact me, Rick Brown.

Mrs. Robinson Crusoe

Douglas Fairbanks

Make Room for Daddy

Classic 1960s TV Series

Danny Thomas