a month of Sundays:

my October 17: a sampling

I suppose like any given day, there are a lot of interesting, intriguing, beguiling people and events with ties to October 17. If I continued to explore those that “link” and “serendip” into my life, I might be posting this on October 17, 2022. 😉

1907 Guglielmo Marconi’s company begins the first commercial transatlantic wireless service between Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada and Clifden, Ireland

I haven’t had an occasion to include a Canadian heritage minute in a post for a while. Beginning in 1991, this series of shorts encapsulated a range of people and events in Canadian history.

1956 Mae Jemison is born in Decatur, Alabama. In 1993, she becomes the first African-American woman in space as a Mission Specialist aboard the Endeavour (STS-47).

With NASA since 1987, she left after her mission to form her own technology company. She is an advocate for STEM, and a professor at Cornell University.

She is the first real life astronaut to appear on a Star Trek episode, “Second Chances” on May 24, 1993.

And, of course this week, the original Star Trek captain Kirk, went boldly were no 90-year-old had gone before – into weightless space above the Texas desert as the guest of Jeff Bezos and his Blue Origins space tourism company.

To me, the original Star Trek is still the best.

1957 French author, Albert Camus, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Camus espoused the philosophy of absurdism. His writings were also considered existentialist though he rejected that label. Born in Algeria in 1913, he died in a car crash in France in 1960, aged 44.

I was assigned his novel, The Plague, in a high school English class.

1963 Beetles record “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” at EMI Studios in London. This clip from the Fab Four’s appearance on the Ed Sullivan show takes me back. My parents just bought our first tv set, and Ed Sullivan was one of the few shows I was allowed to watch.