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Today is April Fools’ Day, a holiday celebrating practical jokes of all kinds. The British collection of folk wisdom known as Poor Robin’s Almanac (1662) says: “The first of April, some do say, Is set apart for All Fools’ Day.”

…Looking foolish does the spirit good…

One theory about the origin of April Fools’ Day is that it started in France in 1582. Up until then, New Year’s Day was celebrated on April 1st, but when Europe adopted the Gregorian calendar, New Year’s Day was moved to January 1st. At the time, news of such things traveled slowly, and it took many years for everyone to get up to speed. People who continued to celebrate New Years on April 1st came to be known as April Fools.

John Updike said, “Looking foolish does the spirit good.”

Poem: “The Art of Disappearing” by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. © The Eighth Mountain Press.

The Art of Disappearing

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

It was on this day in 1918 that the first cases of what would become the influenza pandemic were reported in the U.S. when 107 soldiers got sick at Fort Riley, Kansas.

…the worst pandemic in world history…

It was the worst pandemic in world history. The flu that year killed only 2.5 percent of its victims, but more than a fifth of the world’s entire population caught it, and so it’s estimated that between 50 million and 100 million people died in just a few months.

Historians believe at least 500,000 people died in the United States alone. That’s more than the number of Americans killed in combat in all the wars of the 20th century combined. Usually, the flu would have been most likely to kill babies and the elderly, but the flu of 1918 somehow targeted healthy people in their 20s and 30s. And it was an extremely virulent strain. In the worst cases, victims’ skin would turn dark red, and their feet would turn black.

No one is sure exactly how many people died, because it wasn’t even clear at the time what the disease was. World War I was currently under way, and there were rumors that German soldiers had snuck into Boston Harbor and released some new kind of germ weapon. One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic in this country was that it was barely reported in the media. President Woodrow Wilson had passed laws to censor all kinds of news stories about the war, and newspaper editors were terrified of printing anything that might cause a scandal.

So as the flu epidemic spread across the country. In large cities, people were dying of the flu so rapidly that undertakers ran out of coffins, streetcars had to be used as hearses, and mass graves were dug. The newspapers barely commented on it. In the fall of 1918, doctors tried to get newspapers to warn people in Philadelphia against attending a parade. The newspapers refused. In the week after the parade, almost 5,000 Philadelphians died of the flu.

Among the writers affected by the flu pandemic was Katherine Anne Porter, who grew so sick with the disease that her family had already arranged her funeral before she managed to recover. The novelist and critic Mary McCarthy got on a train with her parents on October 30, 1918. Her father died of the flu before their train reached Minneapolis. Her mother died a day later. The novelist William Maxwell lost his mother to the flu that year. Maxwell later said that all the novels he went on to write were inspired by that loss.

It was on this day in 1933 that newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt called a special session of Congress and began the first hundred days of enacting his New Deal legislation.

…A quarter of the American workforce was unemployed…

It was the Great Depression. A quarter of the American workforce was unemployed. The prices for industrial goods and agricultural products were falling. There were breadlines in every major city for all the unemployed and hungry. Thousands of people roamed the country on freight trains looking for odd jobs and handouts. Banks were failing at an unprecedented rate, and millions of Americans had lost all or part of their savings.

So people were shocked by Roosevelt’s cheerful demeanor when they saw him just before his inauguration. He was facing one of the most difficult domestic situations in the country’s history, but he seemed excited about it. At his first press conference, on March 8, 1933, the reporters were surprised that the new president actually talked to them. Almost all previous presidents had refused to talk off the cuff with reporters, but Franklin Roosevelt didn’t mind answering all kinds of questions about what he planned to do for the country’s problems.

And then on this day in 1933 he called Congress into session. He had Democratic majorities in both houses. The first piece of legislation the President proposed was the Emergency Banking Act. Even though no one had a chance to examine it in detail, the bill passed after forty minutes of debate. For the next few months, bills were passed almost daily. Among the new federal programs created were the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which distributed half a billion dollars to the poor; the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed people to work on forestry projects; the Public Works Administration, which employed people to build bridges, dams and roads all across the country; the Tennessee Valley Authority, which built and maintained dams on the Tennessee River, controlling flooding and providing cheap energy; and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which provided for the first insurance of banking deposits.

It was on this day in 1951 that the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began. They were a middle-aged, married Jewish couple, charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. Julius Rosenberg was the leader of a Communist spy ring, and he persuaded his brother-in-law to steal secrets from Los Alamos National Laboratory having to do with nuclear weapons. Those secrets were relatively minor and had little effect on the Russians’ acquiring nuclear weapons, but it was strongly suggested by the government that the Rosenbergs were personally responsible for helping Communist Russia acquire the atomic bomb.

…he later said that this was a lie…

The FBI arrested Rosenberg’s wife, Ethel, in hopes of forcing Julius to talk, even though was no evidence to suggest that she had any direct role in the spy ring. The main evidence in the trial came from Ethel’s younger brother David Greenglass, who had worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory as a mechanical engineer. He testified that Ethel typed up the documents he provided, but he later said that this was a lie.

The trial was over in less than a month, and both Ethel and Julius were found guilty. The government offered to spare Ethel’s life if Julius would make a last-minute deal to name names, but he refused to do so, and so they were both executed, one after the other, in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1953.

It’s the birthday of crime novelist Ruth Rendell, born in London (1930). One of the most celebrated mystery novelists of all time, she’s best known for her mystery novels featuring Chief Inspector Reginald Wexford. But she also writes novels under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, and some critics consider these books to be her best work. Her parents had a difficult marriage, and Rendell spent a lot of time alone when she was a kid. She started writing in her teens, and she was remarkably ambitious. She managed to write an entire novel in verse about a first-century British queen when she was just 15 years old. As a young woman, she began writing dark, literary short stories, but she couldn’t get anything published.

Then, just for fun, she decided to write a detective novel. She had no intention of publishing it, but when a publisher turned down another novel and asked her if she had anything else, she decided to see what he thought of the detective story. He loved it. And that was From Doon with Death (1964), the novel that introduced Inspector Wexford. But while most of her Wexford novels are relatively straightforward mysteries, Rendell has also written books that examine how ordinary people could become murderers.

Rendell has averaged about two novels every year for most of her career. Her routine is to write every morning for five hours, and then she always eats the exact same lunch: bread, cheese, salad, and fruit. She also likes to move a lot. Since her writing career began, she’s lived in 18 different houses, entirely by choice. She said, “It’s a kind of hobby, I suppose. … I like the whole business of [moving]. And I love the first night in the new place.” Her most recent book is End in Tears (2006).

From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
Available by e-mail daily.
Further mysterious reading available at Amazon.com

…I never Saw a Purple Cow…

It’s the birthday of humorist and novelist (Frank) Gelett Burgess, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1866). He wrote more than 35 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as several plays, including the satirical book Are You a Bromide? (1897). But he is best known for a short poem he published in the first issue of a humor magazine called Lark. It reads, “I never Saw a Purple Cow; / I never Hope to See One; / But I can Tell you, Anyhow, / I’d rather See than Be One.” The fame of the poem followed him for a long time, and years later he wrote, “Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow; / I’m sorry now I wrote it; / But I can tell you, Anyhow, / I’ll Kill you if you Quote it.”

Gelett Burgess said, “If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead”.

It’s the birthday of Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). Today, he is Scotland’s national poet, although he started writing poetry to impress women. He later said, “My heart was completely tinder, and eternally lighted up by some Goddess or other.”

…writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people…

As he got older, he watched how hard his father struggled to make a living as a farmer, suffering through bad weather and bad seed. Some years, his father had almost nothing to show for an entire year of backbreaking effort, and he died when Burns was 25 years old.

So Burns began to branch out from love poems to writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people. He was inspired by the traditional Scottish folk ballades his mother had sung him as a child, and he wrote in Scottish dialect rather than formal English.

And those poems made his name when he published them in his collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which came out on the last day in July 1786. Word spread that he had written in the language of common people about common people, and farmers and maids began to save up their money to buy copies.

Burns spent much of the rest of his life traveling around the countryside collecting and rewriting the lyrics of folk songs for an anthology called The Scots Musical Museum. Because he considered the songs to be the property of all people, he refused to be paid for his work, and even for some of the most famous songs attributed to him, such as “Auld Lang Syne,” he claimed only to have made corrections and additions.

It’s the birthday of the physician and lexicographer, Peter Mark Roget, born in London, England (1779). He was a working doctor for most of his life, but he was also a member of various scientific, literary, and philosophical societies. In his spare time, he invented a slide rule for performing difficult mathematical calculations, and a method of water filtration that is still in use today. He wrote papers on a variety of topics, including the kaleidoscope and Dante, and he was one of the contributors to the early Encylopædia Britannica.

…one of the great lexicographical achievements in the history of the English language…

He was 61 years old when he decided to devote his retirement to publishing a system of classifying words into groups based on their meanings. Other scholars had published books of synonyms before, but Roget wanted to assemble something more comprehensive. He said, “[The book will be] a collection of the words it contains and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express.”

He organized all the words into six categories: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition, Sentient and Moral Powers, and within each category there were many subcategories. The project took him more than 10 years, but he finally published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852. He chose the word “thesaurus” because it means “treasury” in Greek.

Roget’s Thesaurus might have been considered an intellectual curiosity, except that at the last minute Roget decided to include an index. That index, which helped readers find synonyms, made the book into one of the most popular reference books of all time. It is considered one of the great lexicographical achievements in the history of the English language, and it has been helping English students pad their vocabularies for more than 150 years.

It’s the birthday of the novelist Horatio Alger Jr., born in Chelsea, Massachusetts (1832). He was one of the most influential writers in American history. He wrote more than a hundred novels, almost every single one of which tells the same story: a young boy, living in poverty, manages to find success and happiness by working hard and never giving up. But even though Alger’s books were all the same, and none was a literary masterpiece, they were read by thousands of young Americans all across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been argued that Horatio Alger, more than any other person, was responsible for creating the idea of the American Dream.

…if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come…

For more than a hundred years after his death, almost nothing was known about the life of Alger, because when he died, his sister destroyed all of his personal papers. It’s only been recently that scholars have been able to uncover the bare bones of Alger’s life. He was the son of a Unitarian minister. He studied literature at Harvard, and then went into the ministry. But 15 months after his ordination, he was expelled from his parish for apparently molesting boys in his congregation. He wrote a poem at the time that suggests he considered suicide, but instead he decided to devote the rest of his life to improving the lives of the poor.

So Alger moved to New York City, and got involved in helping the homeless street kids who worked as bootblacks and newsboys. And he wrote his first book about one of those street kids. It was called Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks (1868), and it was a huge success.

Many of the successful men of the early 20th century claimed that they had been inspired by reading Horatio Alger books when they were kids. Groucho Marx once said, “Horatio Alger’s books conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young friends - that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come. As a child I didn’t regard it as a myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of my life.”

It was on this day in 1776 that a 77-page pamphlet called “Common Sense” was published anonymously, making the case that the American colonies should declare independence from Great Britain. It had been written by a man named Thomas Paine. The pamphlet sold more than 500,000 copies, more copies than any other publication had ever sold at that time in America.

…persuaded most ordinary Americans to support independence…

Adams would always be somewhat jealous of the attention “Common Sense” received, but even he had to admit that it was “Common Sense,” more than anything else, that had persuaded most ordinary Americans to support independence. Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on this day in 1815. It was the last major battle of the War of 1812, won with the help of a pirate named Jean Laffite.

…it took place after the war was over…

The war of 1812 had started for a variety of complicated reasons, but mainly because the United States refused to put up with British control of the Atlantic Ocean while the British were fighting a war with France. When the war started, the United States had only existed for a few decades. By 1814, after just two years of fighting with the British, almost all the buildings in Washington, D.C., had been destroyed, the U.S. treasury was virtually empty, and the British Navy had blockaded every major seaport on the East Coast.

At the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson managed to fend off the British attempt to take over the mouth of the Mississippi with a ragtag band of volunteers, Indians, and pirates. It was America’s greatest triumph in the War of 1812, but it turned out that it took place after the war was over. The United States and Great Britain had signed a treaty, ending the war, on Christmas Eve, a few weeks before the battle. The news of the treaty just hadn’t reached New Orleans in time.