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Highlights for July 5
1896; Bill Doolin escapes from jail
The famous outlaw Bill Doolin escapes from an Oklahoma jail after only a few months of captivity.
Like many outlaws, William Doolin only gradually fell into a life of crime. Born in Arkansas in 1858, the tall and slim Doolin went west at the age of 23. He found work as a cowboy on several Oklahoma ranches and was widely regarded as a trustworthy and capable employee.
Doolin's life course changed forever when a beer party in southern Kansas turned violent and two deputy sheriffs ended up dead. Doolin's exact role in the murders was unclear, but evidence of his guilt was substantial enough to raise the chance of prison. Unwilling to risk a trial, Doolin became a fugitive.
Cool, intelligent, and a skilled shot, Doolin was suited to the outlaw life. Traveling throughout the West, he robbed banks and trains, sold illegal whiskey to Indians, rustled cattle and horses, and killed several men. He formed a criminal gang that occasionally joined forces with the Dalton brothers to rob banks in Oklahoma and Missouri.
As a robber, Doolin was more successful than most because of his careful planning, but success inevitably attracted the unwanted attention of the law. In January 1896, Doolin returned to Arkansas. While Doolin was taking the medicinal waters at a resort called Eureka Springs, the famous Oklahoma lawman William Tilghman arrested him without a struggle.
Tilghman transferred Doolin to a jail at Guthrie, Oklahoma, to await trial. On this day in 1896, Doolin managed to escape, but was free only for a short time. A few weeks later, on August 25, a posse caught up with Doolin at Lawson, Oklahoma. Doolin resisted arrest, and in the ensuing gun battle, lawmen shot him to death.
More Highlights from the Old West
1861 Battle of Carthage, Missouri
On this day, the first large-scale engagement of the Civil War is fought in southwestern Missouri, signaling an escalation in the hostilities between the North and South.
Missouri was the scene of some of the most bitter partisan fighting during the war. After the clash at Fort Sumter in April, the state was deeply divided. The Missouri State Guardsmen, a force of 6,000 men commanded by Confederate Governor Claiborne Jackson and Colonel Sterling Price, were poorly equipped and outfitted mostly in civilian clothing. Their Union counterpart was a force of 1,100, mostly German-Americans from St. Louis, commanded by General Franz Sigel.
Sigel's force occupied Springfield in late June, and then collided with the Confederates at nearby Carthage on July 5. Outnumbered, Sigel eventually withdrew, but was able to hold off several small attacks. By nightfall, the Union troops had retreated through Carthage and escaped a dangerous trap. Both sides declared victory, and losses were light: 13 Union men were killed and 31 were wounded, while 40 Confederates were killed and 120 were wounded. The forces remained in the area of Springfield, gathering strength over the next month. They would fight again in August at Wilson's Creek, Missouri.
More on the American Civil War
1921 The "Black Sox" are accused of throwing the World Series
After Judge Hugo Friend denies a motion to quash the indictments against the major league baseball players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, a trial begins with jury selection. The Chicago White Sox players, including stars Shoeless Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, and Eddie Cicotte, subsequently became known as the "Black Sox" after the scandal was revealed.
The White Sox, who were heavily favored at the start of the World Series, had been seriously underpaid and mistreated by owner Charles Comiskey. The conspiracy to fix the games was most likely initiated by New York gambler Arnold Rothstein, who used this discontent to his advantage: Through intermediaries, he offered relatively small sums of money for the players to lose some of the games intentionally. The scandal came to light when the gamblers did not pay the players as promised, thinking that they had no recourse. But when the players openly complained, the story became public and authorities were forced to prosecute them.The trial against the players was actually just for show. Not so surprisingly, after a tacit agreement whereby the players assented not to denigrate major league baseball or Comiskey in return for an acquittal, the signed confessions from some of the players mysteriously disappeared from police custody.
The jury acquitted all of the accused players and then celebrated with them at a nearby restaurant. But the height of the hypocrisy surrounding the entire matter came when Shoeless Joe was forced to sue Comiskey for unpaid salary. During this trial, Comiskey's lawyers suddenly produced the confessions that had disappeared during the criminal trial, with no explanation as to how they had been obtained.
Arnold Rothstein never even faced trial, and Comiskey hoped to go back to business as usual. However, all did not end well for everyone. Other baseball owners, hoping to remove any hint that the games were illegitimate, hired Judge Kennisaw Mountain Landis to be the new commissioner of baseball. Landis was a hard-liner (and also a virulent racist-he prevented blacks from playing in the major leagues during his reign into the 1940s) who then permanently barred the implicated Black Sox players from baseball.
Landis' decision has come under considerable criticism for its unfairness to a few of the players. Buck Weaver, by all accounts, had refused to take any money offered by the gamblers. He was purportedly banned from baseball for refusing to turn his teammates in. And although Shoeless Joe Jackson probably accepted some money, his statistics show that he never truly participated in throwing the games-he had the best batting average of either team in the series.
French designer Louis Reard unveils a daring two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a popular swimming pool in Paris. Parisian showgirl Micheline Bernardini modeled the new fashion, which Reard dubbed "bikini," inspired by a news-making U.S. atomic test that took place off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week.
European women first began wearing two-piece bathing suits that consisted of a halter top and shorts in the 1930s, but only a sliver of the midriff was revealed and the navel was vigilantly covered. In the United States, the modest two-piece made its appearance during World War II, when wartime rationing of fabric saw the removal of the skirt panel and other superfluous material. Meanwhile, in Europe, fortified coastlines and Allied invasions curtailed beach life during the war, and swimsuit development, like everything else non-military, came to a standstill.
In 1946, Western Europeans joyously greeted the first war-free summer in years, and French designers came up with fashions to match the liberated mood of the people. Two French designers, Jacques Heim and Louis Reard, developed competing prototypes of the bikini. Heim called his the "atom" and advertised it as "the world's smallest bathing suit." Reard's swimsuit, which was basically a bra top and two inverted triangles of cloth connected by string, was in fact significantly smaller. Made out of a scant 30 inches of fabric, Reard promoted his creation as "smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit." Reard called his creation the bikini, named after the Bikini Atoll.
In planning the debut of his new swimsuit, Reard had trouble finding a professional model who would deign to wear the scandalously skimpy two-piece. So he turned to Micheline Bernardini, an exotic dancer at the Casino de Paris, who had no qualms about appearing nearly nude in public. As an allusion to the headlines that he knew his swimsuit would generate, he printed newspaper type across the suit that Bernardini modeled on July 5 at the Piscine Molitor. The bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.
Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy passed measures prohibiting bikinis on public beaches but later capitulated to the changing times when the swimsuit grew into a mainstay of European beaches in the 1950s. Reard's business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini mystique alive by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn't a genuine bikini "unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring."
In America, the bikini was successfully resisted until the early 1960s, when a new emphasis on youthful liberation brought the swimsuit en masse to U.S. beaches. It was immortalized by the pop singer Brian Hyland, who sang "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" in 1960, by the teenage "beach blanket" movies of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, and by the California surfing culture celebrated by rock groups like the Beach Boys. Since then, the popularity of the bikini has hardly diminished; though on beaches in Brazil and the Mediterranean today, many women favor the "monokini," a swimsuit style that consists solely of a bikini bottom.
If you have other Birthdays or events to add for this day please E-Mail me.
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