Category Archives: Forgotten History

I did a blog recently about JFK and found out that the same day JFK was assassinated , the authors CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley had died. This made me wonder how more historical event were forgotten because they were over shadowed by even bigger events. Below are a few examples.

Harriet Quimby

Although her name is nowadays remembered by a small group of people, Harriet Quimby was one of the greatest early female aviators. In 1911, Quimby became the first woman in the country to get her pilot’s license with the Aero Club of America. When she wasn’t busy flying planes recreationally, Harriet Quimby enjoyed quite a successful career in Hollywood by writing screenplays that were turned into silent shorts.

Eventually, Quimby set her sights on more ambitious projects and was soon planning a flight across the English Channel, a first for a female pilot. She completed it on April 16, 1912 by taking off from Dover and landing 59 minutes later on a beach near Calais in France. She officially became the first female pilot to fly the Channel, but her feat drew little interest from the media. It’s not that it wasn’t newsworthy, but something really big just the day before completely captured the public’s attention.

On April 15, 1912, the Titanic sank during its maiden voyage.

Quite understandably, all other events took a backseat in the press. And unfortunately for Harriet, she didn’t get to enjoy her legacy once the frenzy around the Titanic subsided, either. Just two and a half months later, Harriet Quimby died in an accident during an aviation contest in Boston.

Dr Who

The longest running Sci-Fi show nearly didn’t happen. Like the aforementioned deaths of CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley, the pilot episode of Dr Who had been scheduled on the 22nd of November 1963. The day of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

The BBC did broadcast the pilot episode again a week later.

John Fairfax

On January 20, 1969, Fairfax set off on his own from the Canary Islands in a boat. On July 19, he arrived in Florida, becoming the first person to row across an ocean solo.

Fairfax became the talk of the town, but only for a day. His bad timing didn’t allow him to bask in the adulation of the media because the very next day, something truly historic was happening. On July 20, 1969, all of humanity was watching as the Apollo 11 astronauts became the first humans to walk on the Moon.

Steamboat Sultana

The greatest maritime disaster in United States history occurred on April 27, 1865, when the steamboat Sultana had a boiler explosion, sinking the ship and killing an estimated 1,800 of her 2,427 passengers.

Unfortunately, another event happened across the Mississippi River: the death of President Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

1959: U.S. and Soviets on Brink of War; Nobody Notices

On Feb. 3, 1959, Soviet border guards stopped a convoy of four U.S. Army trucks headed from West Berlin, on a routine trip from the free section of the divided German capital, through communist territory to East Germany. After the Americans refused an inspection, the Soviets seized the trucks, along with five American personnel, and held them captive overnight. New York Times correspondent Arthur J. Olsen wrote this kidnapping “appeared to be a planned test” of the U.S. ability to support a garrison in West Berlin.

It took a high-level official protest from the U.S. embassy in Moscow to get the Soviets to finally release the prisoners and let their trucks through the checkpoint more than two days later

On a different day, the Soviet provocation might have dominated the newspapers. But a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson also took off from Mason City, Iowa, and crashed, killing the rock ‘n’ roll stars and their pilot, Roger Peterson. Feb. 3 became known as “The Day the Music Died,” not a day when Cold War tensions simmered.

Michael Chekhov

As an actor, Michael Chekhov was probably best known for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, for which he was nominated for an Oscar (Best Supporting Actor.) As an acting instructor, Chekhov wrote a book called To The Actor, which is still cited as a developmental tool by actors such as Johnny Depp today. Chekhov would count among his students such luminaries as Marilyn Monroe, Lloyd Bridges, Anthony Quinn, Clint Eastwood, Elia Kazan, and Yul Brynner. But on September 30th 1955, Michael Chekhov’s death was not even a news story compared to another person who would become associated with method acting.

When James Dean died in a car crash on September 30, 1955, the world stopped and nothing else happened for the rest of the year. Dean was only 24, and had primarily been a television actor. Dean was starting to break through in movies though, with moving performances in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. It was Rebel that catapulted Dean to icon status. He had just finished work on his final film, Giant. As a symbol of eternal youth, Dean would quickly become legend. And while even Dean himself would have probably admitted that Chekhov had the more influential career, it is his death, now Chekhov’s, that still resonates to this day.