March 11, 1996: The Montreal Forum Closes

Five Montreal Canadiens legends. Left to right:

Guy Carbonneau, Guy Lafleur, Jean Béliveau,

Maurice Richard and Pierre Turgeon.

March 11, 1996, 30 years ago: The last hockey game is played at the Montreal Forum, the greatest of all hockey arenas.

It had opened on November 29, 1924. The Montreal Canadiens defeated the Toronto St. Patricks, the team that would become the Toronto Maple Leafs, 7-1. Billy Boucher scored the arena's 1st goal. He was 1 of 4 brothers in the NHL. Frank was the original star of the New York Rangers. Georges "Buck" Boucher starred for the Ottawa Senators. Frank and Buck both made the Hockey Hall of Fame. Billy was known for his rough play with the Canadiens, and Bobby Boucher (not to be confused with Adam Sandler's character in The Waterboy) barely played in the NHL, also for the Canadiens.

Originally, the Forum wasn't meant to be the Canadiens' home. It was meant to be the home of the Montreal Maroons, a newly-founded team, while the Canadiens continued to play home games at the Mount-Royal Arena. The Maroons' 1st game at the Forum came on December 3, but they lost to the Hamilton Tigers, 2-0.

The Maroons won the Stanley Cup in 1926. For the next season, the Canadiens moved in, and the Forum was busier than ever: Its 9,300 seats played host to the Canadiens or the Maroons every Thursday and Saturday, the Quebec Senior Hockey League on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the Quebec Junior Hockey League on Mondays, the Bank League on Tuesdays, and the Railways and Telephone League on Fridays.

The Canadiens' famed "CH" logo has confused people for over a century. It is short for the team's official name, le Club de hockey Canadien. Madison Square Garden president George "Tex" Rickard, boxing promoter and founder of the Rangers, probably without knowing the truth, told a reporter that the "H" stood for "Habitant," a term used to describe farmers in early Quebec. Ever since, the Canadiens have been known as Les Habitants, or the Habs for short. The chant became, "Go, Habs, go!"

The Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in 1916 and 1924, before the Forum opened. They won it in 1930 and 1931, led by Howie Morenz, the man eventually known as "the Babe Ruth of Hockey." In 1937, Morenz broke his leg during a game, was hospitalized, and died of a heart attack in the hospital. A benefit game was played at the Forum, between a combined team of Canadiens and Maroons against a team made up of players from the rest of the League. A few months later, at the end of the 1937-38 season, the Maroons went out of business, due to the Great Depression.

In 1942, Maurice Richard arrived on the Canadiens' roster. "The Rocket" led them to 8 Stanley Cups. In 1953, along came Jean Béliveau, and he led them to 10. Richard's last 5 and Béliveau's 1st 5, from 1956 to 1960, were the only instance ever of 5 straight Cup wins.

They followed the 1955 season, in which an incident in Boston led to Richard's suspension for the Playoffs, which led to a riot inside the Forum that spilled out into the streets. French-Canadians, for whom the Canadiens, and Richard in particular, were a point of pride were angry at Clarence Campbell, the NHL's Anglophone President, suspending him, thinking he was trying to fix the Cup for an Anglophone team. Richard went on radio and told the fans to stop, that he would take his punishment, support the team to win the Cup this time, and play to win it in the future.

They lost the Finals to the Detroit Red Wings, but with Richard joined by his brother Henri, Béliveau, defenseman Doug Harvey and goalie Jacques Plante, won those next 5 Cups. Henri actually topped his brother, and Béliveau, by being a member of 11 Cup-winning teams. In all of North American sports, only Bill Russell of the NBA's Boston Celtics matched Henri Richard's 11 World Championships.

In 1968, the Forum was seriously renovated, and expanded, to a seating capacity of 16,259, plus 1,700 in standing room, for a total of 17,959. The support poles were removed. One thing that was retained: Whereas most arenas used a horn to signal the end of a period, the Forum used a high-pitched siren, which was kept after the move to the Bell Centre.

In 1972, the Forum hosted the 1st game of the 8-game "Summit Series" between Canada and the Soviet Union, which the Soviets won in a 7-3 shocker. Canada would win the series with dramatic wins in Moscow in Games 6, 7 and 8.

From 1976 to 1979, the Canadiens had a run of 4 straight Cups, led by a slew of Hall-of-Famers: Forwards Guy Lafleur, Yvan Cournoyer, Steve Shutt and Jacques Lemaire; defensemen Larry Robinson, Serge Savard and Guy Lapointe; and goaltender Ken Dryden.

Between them, Morenz, Maurice Richard, Béliveau and Lafleur were, effectively, the Mount Rushmore of hockey. They were a foursome that could only be matched in North American sports by the Yankees' Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle. (The Celtics? Bill Russell and Larry Bird, but who are the other two? Bob Cousy and John Havlicek? Not the same. No football team can match it, either.)

From 1956 to 1979, the Canadiens won 15 of the 24 available Stanley Cups. Their 1979 Cup was their 22nd, matching the Yankees for the most World Championships in North American sports. They won a 23rd in 1986 and a 24th in 1993. The Yankees didn't win their 24th World Series until 1998, surpassing them with a 25th in 1999.

In the 1976 Olympics, the Forum hosted basketball, boxing, volleyball, handball, and gymnastics, including Nadia Comaneci registering the 1st perfect 10 in Olympic history -- 7 of them.

The Beatles played the Forum on September 8, 1964. Other notable concerts there included Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, Bob Marley in 1978, and, all in separate shows in 1981, Rush, Queen, and the Jacksons.

But there was only so much that could be done with a 1924-built arena. So construction began on a new arena. And on March 11, 1996, the Forum's final game was played, against the Dallas Stars. They were chosen as the opponent because their Captain was a former Canadiens' Captain, Guy Carbonneau. Maurice Richard, Béliveau and Lafleur participated in a ceremonial puck-drop with Carbonneau and Canadiens Captain Pierre Turgeon.

Turgeon opened the scoring, Mark Recchi made it 2-0, Derian Hatcher got the Stars on the board, Saku Koivu scored, and the last goal at the shrine of hockey was scored by... Andrei Kovalenko, a Russian right wing of Ukrainian descent, at the 13:56 mark of the 3rd period. Final score: Canadiens 4, Stars 1.

In the Canadiens' locker room, replicated at the new arena, the lockers were topped by the faces of the team's members of the Hockey Hall of Fame. On each side, one in English and one in French, are words from Canadian Army doctor John McCrae's World War I poem In Flanders Fields: "To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high." (En Francais: Nos bras meurtris vous tendent le flambeau; a vous toujours de la porter bien haut.)

After the last game at the Forum, a symbolic torch was passed from the earliest living Canadiens Captain, Butch Bouchard, to each succeeding Captain: Bouchard, Maurice Richard, Jean Béliveau, Henri Richard, Yvan Cournoyer, Serge Savard, Bob Gainey, Carbonneau, up to Turgeon. (Kirk Muller and Mike Keane, each serving as Captain between Carbonneau and Turgeon, were playing with other teams, and thus unavailable.)

When Rocket Richard, the most popular player in Canadien history, was introduced, he got a standing ovation that brought him to tears. Given the uniform number he made famous, it was appropriate that it lasted for 9 minutes.

The Canadiens played an away game on March 13, a 1-1 draw with the New Jersey Devils at the Meadowlands, before going back to Montreal to play the 1st game at the Molson Centre, since renamed the Bell Centre, about a mile to the east, in Centre-Ville (downtown). In a special pregame ceremony, Turgeon took the torch from the last game, and lit a new one inside the arena. With Vincent Damphousse scoring the 1st and 3rd goals in the new arena, the Canadiens beat the New York Rangers, 4-2.

Over the next 4 years, a construction company owned by 1950s Canadien Hall-of-Famer Dickie Moore converted the Forum into retail space, including a shopping mall and a movie theater. A small bleacher section, and a bench with a statue of Maurice Richard, are roughly where center ice was. 

The repurposing of the Forum helped to inspire a similar construction job at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, after it closed in 1999. Those arenas still stand, unlike the other "Original Six" arenas: The old Madison Square Garden was torn down in 1968, the Olympia Stadium in Detroit in 1986, the Chicago Stadium in 1995, and the Boston Garden in 1998.

March 10, 1936: Dorothea Lange's Photo of Florence Owens

March 10, 1936, 90 years ago: The San Francisco News publishes Migrant Mother, a photograph by Dorothea Lange. It becomes one of the foremost images of the Great Depression.

Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn was born on May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, Hudson County, New Jersey, and grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When she was 7 years old, she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp on her right leg. When she was 12, her father left the family, and she took her mother's maiden name, Lange.

In spite of her poor background, she was admitted to Columbia University, and became a photographer. In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had 2 sons. Her photography studio in San Francisco supported her family for the next 15 years. But at the onset of the Great Depression, she turned her lens from the studio to the street, including this one, in San Francisco in 1933, titled White Angel Breadline. (The White Angel wasn't the name of the soup kitchen, it was the nickname of the woman who ran it.)

She was hired to take pictures for the Farm Security Administration, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. In 1935, she divorced Dixon, and a few weeks later, married Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California.

For the next 5 years, they traveled through the California coast and the Midwest, documenting rural poverty, in particular the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers. Taylor interviewed subjects and gathered economic data, while Lange produced photographs and accompanying data.

Her work was distributed to newspapers across the country, and the poignant images became icons of the era. None more so than Migrant Mother.

Florence Leona Christie was born on September 1, 1903, somewhere in Oklahoma, while it was still a Territory. Both her parents were of Cherokee descent. As with Lange, her father left the family. At 17, she married Cleo Owens, a Missouri farmer. Like many farmers in the South and Midwest, as depicted on John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath and the film based on it, they moved to the Sacramento Valley in California, where they became migrant farmers. In 1931, Cleo died of tuberculosis. At the time, Florence was pregnant with their 6th child.

In 1933, she had a 7th child (the father is not publicly known), returned to Oklahoma for a time, and then was joined by her parents as they migrated to Shafter, California, near Bakersfield. There, she met Jim Hill, with whom she eventually had an 8th, a 9th and a 10th child. She said: "I worked in hospitals. I tended bar. I cooked. I worked in the fields. I done a little bit of everything to make a living for my kids."

On March 6, 1936 -- the 100th Anniversary of the Battle of the Alamo, not that Florence and her kids cared enough to "Remember the Alamo" -- they were on U.S. Route 101, heading for Watsonville, "where they had hoped to find work in the lettuce fields of the Pajaro Valley." The car's timing chain snapped, and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-pickers' camp in Nipomo. They were shocked to find as many as 3,500 people camping there. The crops had been destroyed by freezing rain, leaving them without work or pay.

While Jim Hill, her partner, and 2 of her sons went into town to get parts to repair the car, she and some of the children set up a temporary camp. As she waited, Dorothea Lange drove up, and started taking photos of Florence and her family, 7 pictures in 10 minutes. Two of the photos, which were not published, showed Florence breast-feeding a child. Her note on the best-known picture read, getting the month wrong: "Destitute peapickers in California; a 32 year old mother of seven children. February 1936."

Dorothea said, "I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food."

Troy Owens, one of Thompson's sons, disputed this: "There's no way we sold our tires, because we didn't have any to sell. The only ones we had were on the Hudson, and we drove off in them. I don't believe Dorothea Lange was lying. I just think she had one story mixed up with another. Or she was borrowing to fill in what she didn't have."

Four days later, The San Francisco News published the picture, labeling it Migrant Mother. Dorothea sent the photos there before even sending them to the Resettlement Administration. Within days, the pea-picker camp received 20,000 pounds of food from the federal government. Just their luck, Florence and her family had moved on by the time the food arrived.

The family settled in Modesto, California in 1945. After World War II, Florence met and married hospital administrator George Thompson. This brought her far greater financial security than she had previously enjoyed.

As Lange was funded by the government when she took the picture, the image was public domain, and she was not entitled to royalties. However, the picture did help make her a celebrity, and earned her "respect from her colleagues." She continued to work for the federal government through World War II, then taught photography in the San Francisco Bay Area. She died of cancer on October 11, 1965, at age 70.

Roy Stryker, Dorothea's boss at the Farm Security Administration in 1936, called Migrant Mother the "ultimate" photo of the Depression Era. But the Mother's identity was lost until 1978, when Emmett Corrigan of the Modesto Bee tracked her down. He quoted her as saying, "I wish she hadn't taken my picture. I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures. She said she'd send me a copy. She never did."

Florence Owens Thompson, 1978

Florence Owens Thompson, as she was known by then, died on September 16, 1983, of heart trouble, in Scotts Valley, California, across the State from San Francisco, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world. She was 80.

March 10, 1876: Alexander Graham Bell Invents the Telephone

March 10, 1876, 150 years ago: Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone. Or, some would say, "invents" it.

A Scotsman who had lived much of his life in Canada, he had established a laboratory in Boston, and his assistant, an electrical designer named Thomas A. Watson, had accidentally discovered that sound could be conducted through telegraph wires.

Bell began working on a device for sending listenable voices over long distances, a "tele-phone." But he was in a race. Another scientist named Elisha Gray was working on it. Bell's patent was approved by the U.S. Patent Office on March 7, before Gray's could be, and that's why Bell gets the credit.

Another contender for the title of "inventor of the telephone" was Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant living in Staten Island. He submitted a patent caveat for his device in 1871, but there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound, so he doesn't get the credit any more than Gray does.

(I remember a news reporter covering a story of Italian-Americans on Staten Island trying to get official recognition for Meucci. The reporter said, instead of "Ma Bell," we should use the name "Papa Meucci.")

On March 10, Bell was on the ground floor of his lab, with one side of the experimental device. Watson was upstairs, with the other side. Bell accidentally spilled a beaker, and got acid on his leg. He screamed in pain, and yelled, "Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!" (An AT&T commercial from the 1980s showed an actor playing Bell spilling it on his sleeve, and yelling a shorter, "Watson! Come here! I want you!")

When Watson got downstairs, he told Bell he'd heard him. Bell said he'd yelled loud enough for Watson to hear. Watson had to explain that he had heard Bell through the device. The telephone worked.

Thomas A. Watson

Bell's device was put on display at the Centennial Exposition, a World's Fair in Philadelphia celebrating the 100th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. On October 9, Bell was in Boston, and Watson 2 miles away, across the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that device worked. 

A model of the device

The following year, the Bell Telephone Company was founded. In 1879, Bell bought some patents from Thomas Edison, who was in the process of inventing, though not the electric light bulb, the 1st practical one. In 1885, the company's name was changed to American Telephone & Telegraph, or "AT&T." Until the U.S. Supreme Court broke it up in 1982, it was still called "The Bell System," it was nicknamed "Ma Bell," and a bell was its symbol.

Antonio Meucci died in 1889, and Elisha Gray died in 1901, hampering their efforts, and those of their supporters, to get them recognition. Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, having lived long enough not only better make his case, but to be in New York and make the 1st transcontinental phone call, to San Francisco, in 1915.

Thomas A. Watson died in 1934, having lived long enough to participate in a sound film in which he told of the process of inventing the telephone, thus helping to solidify his role and Bell's in the public mind. He was not related to the Thomas J. Watsons, Sr. and Jr., who built IBM into another of the world's business superpowers, one that wouldn't have been possible without Thomas A. Watson and Alexander Graham Bell.

March 9, 1946: The Burnden Park Disaster

Burnden Park, Bolton, circa 1946

March 9, 1946, 80 years ago: A 2nd-leg tie of the Football Association Cup Quarterfinal is played at Burnden Park, a soccer stadium in Bolton, in what is now Greater Manchester, in the North-West of England. It ends in disaster -- and not because of the game itself.

This was the 1st FA Cup tournament held after World War II, and every round from the First Round Proper to the Sixth Round (the Quarterfinal) was held over 2 legs, 1 at each team's ground. (At the time, "stadium" seemed too grand a word for many of the venues in question). In the 1st leg of this round, at the Victoria Ground in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, Bolton Wanderers beat Stoke City 2-0.

For the return fixture, a crowd estimated at 85,000 people crammed into Burnden Park, a ramshackle structure built in 1895. Unlike in American baseball, there was no building boom in English football when concrete and steel stadiums became viable early in the 20th Century. Many of the old wooden structures were still in place as the Century neared its end.

And the crowds were bigger than ever, following the suspension of Football League and FA Cup competition at the dawn of the 1939-40 season, as the British Empire entered World War II. Buildings like Burnden Park were simply not designed with that many people in mind. Indeed, the gates were closed at 2:40 PM, 20 minutes ahead of the traditional English football kickoff time, because the stadium stewards didn't think any more people could fit in.

Shortly after the 3:00 kickoff, fans started spilling out of the Railway End, the stadium's north end, onto the pitch (the field). The referee, George Dutton, stopped the game, and had the pitch cleared. But two of the standing-room barriers on the End collapsed, and the crowd fell forward, crushing those underneath.

Unaware of this occurrence, Dutton restarted the game. But a police officer came onto the pitch to tell him that a fan had died. Dutton called over the Captains, Harry Hubbick of Bolton and Neil Franklin of Stoke, told them, and the players left the pitch.

After half an hour, in which the dead and injured were carried out, the game was restarted. Stanley Matthews, the Stoke superstar known as "The Wizard of Dribble," said that he was sickened by the decision. Not surprisingly, the game had little urgency, and ended 0-0. Thus, Bolton won 2-0 on aggregate, and advanced to the Semifinals.

It was later determined that 33 people had died, with over 400 injuries. It was the worst stadium-related disaster in British history, and it remained so until the Ibrox Park disaster in Glasgow, Scotland in 1971. It has also been surpassed by the Hillsborough Disaster in Sheffield, Yorkshire in 1989.

The FA Cup Semifinals were played on March 23. Bolton went to Villa Park in Birmingham, home of Aston Villa, and were beaten 2-0 by Charlton Athletic of South-East London. At Hillsborough Stadium, where the aforementioned 1989 disaster would occur, Birmingham City and East Midlands team Derby County played to a 1-1 draw. A replay was held on March 27 at Maine Road, home of Manchester City, and Derby won that game 4-0. The Final was played on April 27, at the original Wembley Stadium in West London, and Derby beat Charlton, 4-1 in extra time. There were no security or safety incidents at any of these games.

A benefit match for the Burnden Park victims was held on August 24, 1946, at Maine Road. The national teams of England and Scotland played to a 2-2 draw.

Following the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989, it was ruled that all British stadiums would be converted to all-seater. This doomed most of the old stadiums that hadn't already been modernized, as it became cheaper to build an entirely new stadium than to fix up and maintain the old one. Conversion to all-seater left Burnden Park with a capacity of around 25,000.

Burnden Park, near the end

In 1997, Bolton Wanderers moved to what's now known as the Toughsheet Community Stadium, with a seating capacity of 28,723. Burnden Park was demolished in 1999, and an Asda supermarket is now on the site.

March 9, 1776: "The Wealth of Nations" Is Published

March 9, 1776, 250 years ago: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith, is published in London by Strahan and Cadell. Just 3 weeks earlier, they had published Volume I of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon. The Wealth of Nations, as this book's title is usually shortened to, becomes the biggest-selling work of economics in history.

Adam Smith's date of birth is unknown, but he was recorded as having been baptized on June 5, 1723, in Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland, so it is generally accepted that he was born in Kirkcaldy a few days earlier, perhaps only one day.

His father, also named Adam Smith, was a Scottish Writer to the Signet (a senior solicitor), advocate and prosecutor (judge advocate), and also served as comptroller of the customs in Kirkcaldy. Smith's mother was born Margaret Douglas. Two months before Smith was born, his father died, leaving his mother a widow.

The father must have left the mother a good deal of money, because the son was able to attend the Burgh School of Kirkclady, described by a Smith biographer as "one of the best secondary schools of Scotland at that period." He entered the University of Glasgow at the age of 14, and graduated at 17. He moved on to Oxford University, and, based on his later writings, found it unsatisfying, learning more from the books in the Bodleian Library than from the professors.

In 1748, he began lecturing at the University of Edinburgh. Two years later, he met a literary and philosophical hero of his, David Hume. Smith would join Hume as a leading figure of what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment, and both are now featured in statues on the front of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

In 1759, Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, with writings that would shock people who only know him as "the father of capitalism":

The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

The success of this book allowed him to assume a tutoring position that facilitated travel throughout Europe, where he encountered intellectual figures of his era. In response to the prevailing policy of safeguarding national markets and merchants through the reduction of imports and the augmentation of exports, a practice that came to be known as mercantilism, Smith laid the foundational principles of classical free-market economic theory.

In 1776, he published The Wealth of Nations. In it, he developed the concept of division of labor, and expounded upon how "rational self-interest" and competition can lead to economic prosperity.

He laid out a system of political economy with the famous metaphor of the "invisible hand" regulating the marketplace through individual self-interest. He provided a comprehensive analysis of different economic aspects: The accumulation of stock, price determination, and the flow of labor, capital and rent. The book contained Smith's critique of mercantilism, and of high taxes on luxury goods. For these reasons, he and his book upheld as exemplars by economic conservatives.

But the book also contained things to which liberals could point. He criticized the slave trade, with which Britain and its colonies, including the soon-to-be United States, were then heavily involved. He also denounced monopolies, advocating for free competition and open markets.

He made the point that transportation of goods makes economies possible, and points out that the strongest nations had the strongest economies, because they had the best transportation: Access to the sea, including through wide harbors and wide rivers.

It explained why it could be predicted, though he did not do so, that New York would surpass London as the leading city in the world over the next 150 years. What Smith also could not have predicted was the rise of railroads, which helped both Britain and America more than the rest of the world; and the development of air travel and transport.

In other words, Smith had unwittingly predicted the rise of vast fortunes through railroad companies, but also the development of the suburbs of major cities that the railroads would develop, allowing the creation of a vast middle class, especially in the English-speaking world -- including in European and Asian countries where English is, effectively, everyone's second language, regardless of what their first language is. And he unwittingly predicted how farm products could more easily get to the cities, making even agriculture a prosperous profession for a smart farmer.

In other words, Smith showed that increasing demand was the way to make an economy grow, not increasing supply. The supply-side economists of the late 20th Century totally misread him.

The book's 1st edition sold out in 6 months, causing William Strahan, publisher of both Smith and Gibbon, to write to a friend, "What you say of Mr. Gibbon's and Dr. Smith's book is exactly just. The former is the most popular work; but the sale of the latter, though not near so rapid, has been more than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers) to peruse to any purpose."

And to university professor and Enlightenment philosopher Adam Ferguson, Gibbon wrote, "What an excellent work is that with which our common friend Mr. Adam Smith has enriched the public! An extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language."

In 1778, Smith was appointed to a post as Commissioner of Customs in Scotland. From 1787 to 1789, he occupied the honorary position of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. He died on July 17, 1790, in Edinburgh, after what is described only as "a painful illness." He was 67 years old. He never married, and is not known to have had any children.

March 5, 1946: Winston Churchill's "Iron Curtain" Speech

March 5, 1946, 80 years ago: Winston Churchill, as he had done many times before, turns a phrase that sticks in the collective consciousness of Western civilization.

Shortly after meeting with the new President of the United States, Harry Truman, at the Potsdam Conference outside Berlin in July 1945, he had to stand for election in Britain. His Conservative Party lost, and he had to resign as Prime Minister, although he was still Party Leader. He had more free time than before, and visited America the next year.

The British capital building is known as the Palace of Westminster. In Fulton, in Truman's home State of Missouri -- 111 miles west of St. Louis, 150 miles east of Kansas City, 23 miles southeast of the University of Missouri at Columbia, and 24 miles northeast of the State Capitol in Jefferson City -- there is a Westminster College. It offered Churchill an honorary degree, hoping he would come, accept, and deliver one of his rousing speeches, inspiring donations to the school. They couldn't have been more thrilled, because this is pretty much the only thing the school is known for today.

With Truman in attendance, Churchill gave a speech he had titled "Sinews of Peace." But that would not be the phrase anybody remembered.

Even by the time of the Yalta Conference in the Crimea in February 1945, when Churchill and the dying President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union's Red Army was occupying much of Eastern Europe. After pushing Nazi Germany back, there was little willingness to start a World War III with Communism before World War II with Fascism was over. Churchill came up with a plan, but he knew it would never see the light of day. He proved this by naming it "Operation Unthinkable."

The term "iron curtain" had been used to describe safety curtains, installed on theater stages to slow the spread of fire. In 1918, Vasily Rozanov, an anti-Communist writer opposing the Bolshevik Revolution, wrote a book titled The Apocalypse of Our Time. When translated into English in 1920 -- Rozanov having died in the Russian famine then still ongoing -- Churchill would have read Rozanov's words as:

With clanging, creaking, and squeaking, an iron curtain is lowering over Russian History. "The performance is over." The audience got up. "Time to put on your fur coats and go home." We looked around, but the fur coats and homes were missing.

Already having both a taste for the theatrical and a predisposition to oppose Communism, Churchill would have approved of Rozanov's metaphors.

Germany had long been fond of iron metaphors. The founder of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck, had begun the unification process with an 1862 speech titled "Blood and Iron" (Blud und Eisen), and so was known as "The Iron Chancellor." The country's top military decoration was the Iron Cross. And Adolf Hitler often invoked the legacy of Bismarck by speaking of "Blood and Iron" (or, alternatively, "Iron and Blood") So the Nazis, too, used the phrase "Iron Curtain."

A 1943 magazine named Signal discussed "the iron curtain that more than ever before separates the world from the Soviet Union." Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in Das Reich, on February 25, 1945, that, if Germany should lose the war, "An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered." In that, if in little else, he was right.

Churchill's first recorded use of the term "iron curtain" came in a May 12, 1945 telegram he sent to Truman, regarding his concern about Soviet actions, stating "[a]n iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind." In another telegram to Truman, on June 4, he wrote of "...the descent of an iron curtain between us and everything to the eastward."

Now, at Westminster College, with Truman seated on the stage behind him, Churchill spoke of this new "border": 

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia. All these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence, but to a very high, and in some cases increasing, measure of control from Moscow.

Film of this speech shows that, at the words "iron curtain," he made a downward slashing motion with his left hand -- or, if you prefer, his left wing -- providing another fitting metaphor.

Churchill was a little off, geographically: Stettin, soon to be renamed Szczecin, as it was now part of Poland, was on the new border between Poland and East Germany; and Berlin, divided into 3 Allied and 1 Soviet sector, was to the west of that; while Trieste is in northeast Italy, on the border with what was then Yugoslavia, and is now Slovenia.

And Churchill (and, to be fair, Truman as well) did not yet realize that Yugoslavia's dictator, Josip Broz Tito, while he was a true believer in Communism, had already broken with Stalin, and thus his country was on the West's side of the Iron Curtain. And in 1955, Austria broke with the Soviets, and got away with it.

Nevertheless, the term had been used. The Cold War was on. As for that term, it appears to have been first used by George Orwell, in his 1945 essay, "You and the Atomic Bomb": He described a world living in fear of nuclear destruction, which he described as a "permanent state of 'cold war.'" Bernard Baruch, an advisor to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, used the phrase in a speech on April 16, 1947, saying: "Let us not be deceived: We are today in the midst of a cold war." Later that year, journalist Walter Lippman wrote a book titled Cold War, which helped solidify the term's use in the public consciousness.

On March 5, 1953, 7 years later to the day after Churchill's speech, Stalin died. But the Iron Curtain would live on until 1989 when, one by one, the countries behind it lifted their portions of it.

The term would be adapted. The borders between North and South Korea, and North and South Vietnam, and the Sea of Japan between Japan and Red China, became known as the Bamboo Curtain. And in America, black writers suggested that there was a Cotton Curtain that separated the segregationist Southern States from the rest of the country.

Maybe a line can be drawn across New Jersey, westward from the Outerbridge Crossing in Perth Amboy, along State Route 440, to Interstate 287, to where it meets U.S. Route 22 in Bridgewater, on west to the Delaware River in Phillipsburg, and that can be the Pork Roll Curtain, as an unofficial divider between people south of it, who call the processed meat by its legal name, "pork roll"; and people north of it, who call it by its incorrect and officially (if not enforced) illegal name, "Taylor ham."

Lou Holtz, 1937-2026

Lou Holtz has died. I will be (by my standards) brief, because I didn't like him:

Louis Leo Holtz was born on January 6, 1937 in Follansbee, West Virginia, not far from Wheeling, or from Pittsburgh. He grew up in nearby East Liverpool, Ohio, and attended nearby Kent State University, where he played linebacker. He was an assistant coach at Iowa, William & Mary, Connecticut, South Carolina, and on Woody Hayes' staff when Ohio State won the National Championship in 1968.

His 1st head coaching job was at William & Mary, from 1969 to 1971. He went just 13-20 with them, but he did get them into the 1970 Tangerine Bowl. This game, which became the Citrus Bowl, was then for what would now be Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) teams, or (before that) Division I-AA. In 1972, he was named head coach at North Carolina State. He coached them for 4 seasons, winning the Atlantic Coast Conference title in 1973, and getting them into a bowl game every year, including winning the 1972 Peach Bowl and the 1973 Liberty Bowl.

In 1976, he got his 1st NFL job. It turned out to be his last. It was with the New York Jets, and Holtz tried to install the veer offense, a run-oriented offense. And the quarterback was Joe Namath. This was not the 1969 Namath with the cannon arm and the swagger, it was the 1976 Namath with 7 added years of pounding and two bad knees. He couldn't run it.

I think we should all be glad

this picture is not in color.

It was the 1970s, after all.

He wasn't the first college football coach to bomb out in the NFL, and he wouldn't be the last: The Jets went 3-10, with 2 of the wins being by 5 and 7 points. On December 9, with one game to go, and one step ahead of the law, Holtz quit, saying, "God did not put Lou Holtz on this earth to coach in the pros."

Frank Broyles retired as head coach at the University of Arkansas. Since he was still their athletic director, he chose his successor, and he chose Holtz. In that 1st season, 1977, he took them to 11-1 and victory over Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl. Their only loss was 13-9 to Texas, costing them the Southwest Conference title. In 1979, they won the SWC title, but lost the Sugar Bowl to Alabama. They won the Hall of Fame Bowl in 1980, and the Bluebonnet Bowl in 1982.

In 1984, he left Arkansas to become head coach at Minnesota. In just 2 years, he got a program that had been doormats for a generation to victory in the 1985 Independence Bowl. It was the program's only bowl game win between the 1961 and 2002 seasons.

That got him hired by Notre Dame in 1986. In his 2nd season, he got them to the Cotton Bowl, but they lost. Like George Gipp, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian and Dan Devine, Lou Holtz led Notre Dame to the National Championship in just his 3rd season, going 12-0, including their Number 1 vs. Number 2 "Catholics vs. Convicts" game against the University of Miami, the defending National Champions. They capped it by beating West Virginia in the 1989 Fiesta Bowl.

They nearly did it again in 1989, losing only to revenge-minded Miami on Thanksgiving weekend. Their win in the Orange Bowl cost Colorado the National Championship, throwing it to Miami. Colorado avenged this loss in the next season's Orange Bowl, winning the National Championship.

Notre Dame won the Sugar Bowl in the 1991 season, and the Cotton Bowl in each of the next 2 seasons. But losses to Stanford in 1992 and Boston College in 1993 -- just 1 week after a Number 1 vs. Number 2 "Game of the Century" with Florida State -- cost them the National Championship both times.

His next 3 seasons were not as successful, and he retired after the 1996 season. The Minnesota Vikings offered him their head job, but he turned it down, and took a studio analyst job with CBS. In 1999, he took the job at South Carolina, going 0-11, before going 8-4 and 9-3, and winning back-to-back Outback bowls. He retired after going 8-4 in 2004, and went back to ESPN before retiring after the 2015 season.

His college coaching record was 249-132-7, including a 10-8-1 record in bowl games, for a winning percentage of .651. He won an ACC title, a SWC title, and the 1988 National Championship. He was beloved among college football fans, as both a coach and a broadcaster.

He was also a horrible person, supporting horrible people. In 1990, he supported the successful re-election campaign of race-baiting homophobic Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. In 2016, he spoke at the Republican Convention, endorsed Donald Trump, and criticized Colin Kaepernick for his kneeling in opposition to police brutality.

In the 2020 campaign, he again spoke at the Republican Convention, again endorsed Trump, made multiple appearances on Sean Hannity's Fox News Channel show, supported Amy Coney Barrett's nomination for the Supreme Court, and said -- remember, he had been the head coach at the University of Notre Dame, a towering symbol of American Catholicism -- that Joe Biden was "a Catholic in name only." This statement was so foul that Notre Dame released a statement distancing itself from it.

Trump gave Holtz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, something he absolutely would not have done if Holtz had supported Democrats. Holtz was also elected to the Upper Ohio Valley Hall of Fame, the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame, and the Indiana Sports Hall of Fame. Notre Dame does not have an intra-university Hall of Fame.

Lou Holtz died today, at age 89, in Orlando, Florida. He was predeceased by his wife, Beth Barcus, and was survived by 4 children, including 3 Notre Dame graduates.

One of those is Louis Leo Holtz Jr., a.k.a. Skip Holtz, who has been an assistant to Bobby Bowden at Florida State, offensive coordinator to his father at both Notre Dame and South Carolina, and head coach at Connecticut, East Carolina, South Florida and Louisiana Tech. For the last 4 seasons, he was the head coach of the UFL's Birmingham Stallions.

With the death of Lou Holtz, the earliest living former head coach of the Jets is now Bruce Coslet (1990-93); and the earliest living former Notre Dame head coach is Holtz's successor, Bob Davie (1997-2001).

I will close with a joke I heard while Holtz was still in South Bend. A man walks into a bar, and announces that he's the world's biggest Notre Dame fan. Nobody believes him. He tells the bar, "I've got a tattoo of Paul Hornung on one side of my ass, and Joe Montana on the other!" Both had been quarterbacks at Notre Dame. The bartender says, "Prove it!" So the guy drops his pants and moons the bartender. Talk about a "South Bend." The bartender says, "I don't see Hornung, and I don't see Montana, but that's definitely Lou Holtz in the middle!"