"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there." Indira Gandhi (1917 ~ 1984)

Oh baybee, what a bittersweet & poignant day of anniversaries this is.... Of course it was on this day in 1863 – what? seven score & seven years ago? – when exhausted President Lincoln strode to the battleground/graveyard pulpit to read out the lines of his Gettysburg Address. But I didn't know until I checked a little bit ago that Bonnie Parker & Clyde Barrow committed their first robbery 80 years ago today on the anniversary of the day that Franz Schubert died (1828) and that Joe Hill was lawfully shot to death in 1915, having been railroaded, convicted, & sentenced to be executed as a murderer. It's likely that his real crime was his being a "Wobblie," an active member of the International Workers of the World (IWW.. some said the initials stood for I Won't Work),"One Big Union." What a fierce time that was - violent uprisings, put-downs, labor v. capital head-knocking/strike-breaking, women's last hard push to the Vote, suffragists jailed & tortured... the Great War broken out in the trenches of western Europe.... the period looks rather quaint from afar...

And explorer Wm.'s brother, Geo.Rogers Clark was born on this day in 1752. I had the chance to learn more about him when I was writing my Dan'l Boone book: "He and less than 200 half-starved frontier soldiers survived a 180-mile winter march, [in 1779] sometimes in chest-deep icy water. Out in what is now Illinois and Indiana, they captured one British outpost after another." Gen. Clark shares a birthday w/ Tommy Dorsey, the bandleader (1905), Indira Gandhi, once the Prime Minister of India, Billy Sunday, the old evangelist (1862), baseball player Roy Campanella (1921), and actors Clifton Webb (1889) & beautiful Gene Tierney (1920), who were so sly & silky together in Laura....

Now work waits the doing. I could leave it to the elves, but they are about worthless.