Death Valley Truck’s Grisly History

Sitting out in the middle of Death Valley is a grim reminder of one of the most horrific and notable murder stories in American history.
Recently journalist Amy Beddows rolled through Death Valley in search of that grisly reminder.
Arriving in Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America and one of the most desolate places in the world, Beddows headed down the Trona 178 highway to the dirt road which leads to the isolated town of Ballarat.
Beddows drove past the sign at the entrance to the now-dead mining town which reads, “You learn nothing by sitting in the car.” Her and her fellow traveler got out to explore Ballarat to find the macabre object they were looking for.
The only other person in town? The owner/operator of the “Outpost” camping store which sits quietly in the middle of this long forgotten dot in the middle of nowhere.
He happily pointed out what Beddows was looking for…
A truck…but not just any truck…
Bobby Beausoleil’s truck that the Manson family used both in Los Angeles and to drive out to the Barker Ranch where Manson was caught by the Inyo County Sheriff Department and the California Highway Patrol for vandalism within the Death Valley National Park before they realized who they’d caught.
And there it sat in the fading sunset with the word ‘WAR’ vaguely remaining hand-painted on the door and the interior covered in spray-painted silver stars, a recurring image in the Manson family’s disturbing legacy.
Beddows and her companion left town before the notorious sandstorms began blowing into the basin later that evening leaving behind an old rusted truck.
A truck that sits alone on a small hill in the middle of nowhere where it’s held its ground for almost half a century.
A truck that holds a darkly grim history should the curious care to explore the speck of a town in the middle of nowhere.

Today In History

09MARCH2014

A chronological timetable of historical events that occurred on this day in history. Historical facts of the day in the areas of military, politics, science, music, sports, arts, entertainment and more.

March 9

1617		The Treaty of Stolbovo ends the occupation of Northern Russia by Swedish troops.
1734		The Russians take Danzig (Gdansk) in Poland.
1788		Connecticut becomes the 5th state.
1796		Napoleon Bonaparte marries Josephine de Beauharnais in Paris, France.
1812		Swedish Pomerania is seized by Napoleon.
1820		Congress passes the Land Act, paving the way for westward expansion.
1839		The French Academy of Science announces the Daguerreotype photo process.
1841		The rebel slaves who seized a Spanish slave ship, the Amistad, in 1839 are freed by the Supreme Court despite Spanish demands for extradition.
1862		The first and last battle between the ironclads U.S.S. Monitor and C.S.S. Virginia ends in a draw.
1864		General Ulysses Grant is appointed commander-in-chief of the Union forces.
1911		The funding for five new battleships is added to the British military defense budget.
1915		The Germans take Grondno on the Eastern Front.
1916		Mexican bandit Pancho Villa leads 1,500 horsemen on a raid of Columbus, N.M. killing 17 U.S. soldiers and citizens.
1932		Eamon De Valera is elected president of the Irish Free State and pledges to abolish all loyalty to the British Crown.
1936		The German press warns that all Jews who vote in the upcoming elections will be arrested.
1939		Czech President Emil Hacha ousts pro-German Joseph Tiso as the Premier of Slovakia in order to preserve Czech unity.
1940		Britain frees captured Italian coal ships on the eve of German Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop's visit to Rome.
1956		British authorities arrest and deport Archbishop Makarios from Cyprus. He is accused of supporting terrorists.
1957		Egyptian leader Nasser bars U.N. plans to share the tolls for the use of the Suez Canal.
1959		The Barbie doll is unveiled at a toy fair in New York City.
1964		The first Ford Mustang rolls off the Ford assembly line.
1967		Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef Stalin's daughter defects to the United States.
1968		General William Westmoreland asks for 206,000 more troops in Vietnam.
1975		Iraq launches an offensive against the rebellious Kurds.
1986		Navy divers find the crew compartment of the space shuttle Challenger along with the remains of the astronauts.
Born on March 9
1451		Amerigo Vespucci, Italian navigator.
1824		Leland Stanford, railroad builder, founder of Stanford University.
1890		Vyacheslav Molotov, former Soviet Prime Minister.
1892		Vita Sackville-West, writer.
1905		Peter Quennell, biographer.
1910		Samuel Barber, American composer ("Adagio for Strings," Vanessa).
1918		Frank Morrison Spillane [Mickey Spillane], crime writer (Kiss Me, Deadly, The Erection Set).
1930		Ornette Coleman, jazz saxophonist.
1934		Yuri Gagarin, Russian cosmonaut, the first man to orbit the Earth.
1943		Bobby Fischer, first American world chess champion.
1947		Keri Hulme, New Zealand novelist (The Bone People).

        ShareThis  

Related Articles Unknown Soldier: General Charles Lallemand World War II: March 2001 Almanac Collector's Heir Declared Rightful Owner of Posters Seized by the Gestapo WWII Dispatches, February 2010 World War II: February 2001 Almanac Daily Quiz Answers #1 Ask MHQ: Why Wasn't Davout at Waterloo?

Talk to me....

Don't every think that's there not someone there that's willing to listen to you.

www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/‎

www.afsp.org

twloha.com

HELPLINES

National Hopeline Network  ::  1.800.SUICIDE (784-2433)

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline  ::  1.800.273.TALK (273-8255)

For hearing and speech impaired with TTY equipment  ::  1.800.799.4TTY (779-4889)
Español  ::  1.888.628.9454

National Child Abuse Hotline  ::  1.800.4.A.CHILD (422-4453)

National Domestic Violence Hotline  ::  1.800.799.SAFE (799-7233)

Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN)  ::  1.800.656.HOPE (656-4673)

The Trevor Project  ::  1.866.4.U.TREVOR (488-7386)

Or send me an email. I'm always around, and willing to listen.. 

mathiasszenko@gmail.com 

Today In History

07MARCH2014 

On this day in 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention--the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse's invention of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible between two distant points. The drawback of the telegraph, however, was that it still required hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients, and only one message could be transmitted at a time. Bell wanted to improve on this by creating a "harmonic telegraph," a device that combined aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to each other from a distance.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype. In this first telephone, sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate--called the diaphragm--to vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message--the famous "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you"--from Bell to his assistant.

Bell's patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market, Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Bell's patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern telecommunications industry.

322 BC		The Greek philosopher Aristotle dies.
161		On the death of Antoninus at Lorium, Marcus Aurelius becomes emperor.
1774		The British close the port of Boston to all commerce.
1799		In Palestine, Napoleon captures Jaffa and his men massacre more than 2,000 Albanian prisoners.
1809		Aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard — the first person to make the an aerial voyage in the New World — died on March 7, 1809, at the age of 56.
1838		Soprano Jenny Lind ("the Swedish Nightingale") makes her debut in Weber's opera Der Freischultz.
1847		U.S. General Winfield Scott occupies Vera Cruz, Mexico.
1849		The Austrian Reichstag is dissolved.
1862		Confederate forces surprise the Union army at the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas, but the Union is victorious.
1876		Alexander Graham Bell is granted a patent for the telephone.
1904		The Japanese bomb the Russian town of Vladivostok.
1906		Finland becomes the third country to give women the right to vote, decreeing universal suffrage for all citizens over 24, however, barring those persons who are supported by the state.
1912		French aviator, Heri Seimet flies non-stop from London to Paris in three hours.
1918		Finland signs an alliance treaty with Germany.
1925		The Soviet Red Army occupies Outer Mongolia.
1927		A Texas law that bans Negroes from voting is ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
1933		The board game Monopoly is invented.
1933		The film King Kong premieres in New York City.
1935		Malcolm Campbell sets an auto speed record of 276.8 mph in Florida.
1936		Hitler sends German troops into the Rhineland, violating the Locarno Pact.
1942		Japanese troops land on New Guinea.
1951		U.N. forces in Korea under General Matthew Ridgeway launch Operation Ripper, an offensive to straighten out the U.N. front lines against the Chinese.
1968		The Battle of Saigon, begun on the day of the Tet Offensive, ends.
1971		A thousand U.S. planes bomb Cambodia and Laos.
1979		Voyager 1 reaches Jupiter.
Born on March 7
1707		Stephen Hopkins, signer of the Declaration of Independence.
1872		Piet Mondrian, Dutch abstract painter, leader of the movement known as "de Stijl."
1875		Maurice Ravel, composer ("Bolero").
1887		Helen Parkhurst, educator, developed a technique later known as the Dalton Plan.
1904		Reinhard Heydrich, German SS leader and architect of the "Final Solution."
1907		Rolf Jacobsen, Norwegian poet.
1908		Anna Magnani, Italian actress.

Crime Dog Actor Sentenced For Pot, Weapons.. HAHA!

McGruff the Crime Dog has been barking up the wrong tree.

John Russell Morales, 41, an actor who once played the crime-fighting cartoon bloodhound, has been sentenced to nearly two decades behind bars after pleading guilty to possessing 1,000 marijuana plants and a cache of nearly 30 weapons — including a grenade launcher and thousands of ammunition rounds.

Morales was arrested in 2011 after Galveston, Texas, police and drug-sniffing dogs — real dogs, that is — stopped him for speeding, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Kusin, who later prosecuted the case.

Authorities discovered diagrams of two indoor pot-growing operations and an abundance of marijuana seeds in Morales' Infinity, according to the Houston Chronicle newspaper.

Police who raided Morales' residence seized 1,000 marijuana plants and 9,000 rounds of ammunition for 27 weapons — including a shotgun, pistols, rifles, and a military grenade launcher, according to court documents obtained by NBC News.

STEPHEN DUNN / GETTY IMAGES FILE

An actor dressed as McGruff the Crime Dog at The Ballpark in Arlington on August 4, 1998 in Arlington, Texas.

Morales was sentenced to 16 years in jail on Monday, Kusin said.

McGruff was created by the global advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi through the Ad Council for the National Crime Prevention Council as a tool for American police in developing crime awareness among kids.

Houdini's Legend Still Living In NYC

Houdini in his crate escape trick, first performed in New York's East River (via New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theatre Collection)

Harry Houdini arrived in New York City in 1886, an anonymous Budapest-born newcomer in the frenetic cityscape. By the time he died in 1926, however, he was the city's most thrilling performer, and the shadow of the great escape artist still remains.

It was while performing in Coney Island that he met his future wife Bess, in Flatbush where he recorded his voice on wax cylinders with Thomas Edison, and in 1917 he performed his straightjacket escape above a Times Square crowd while hanging upside down from a crane being employed to work on the subway. In the East River he survived his first crate escape, tossed in the currents between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and in 1926 he escaped from a coffin at the bottom of a pool in the Shelton Hotel on Lexington (now a Marriott Hotel). In 1918, he even made an elephant vanish at the New York Hippodrome. 

Yet more than a stage, New York was Houdini's home. Here are four places in New York City where you can still find the great magician manifested:

Home in Harlem
278 West 113th Street, Manhattan

Houdini's home in Harlem (in the center with the small balcony) (via Google Maps)

When Houdini hit it big in 1904, he bought a stately brownstone up in Harlem on 113th Street, where he would live until his 1926 death. The neighborhood at the time was mostly Jewish and German, and Houdini settled in by making his house into a place of respite and practice. An oversized bathtub was installed so that he could perfect his underwater escape tricks, and he kept a vast library of books on magic. 

While with the little balcony and unchanged façade you can still almost imagine Houdini stepping out from its doorway (on which a historic red plaque rests in honor of his residency), it is still a private home and its current owner reportedly isn't fond of the flood of visiting fans who arrive on Halloween, the anniversary of Houdini's death. However, you can appreciate the home from the street and imagine the escape artist within developing some new impossible escape. 

Houdini Museum
421 Seventh Avenue, Manhattan

Houdini Museum (via Houdini Museum & Fantasma Magic)

One place that is happy to welcome fans is the small Houdini Museum inside Roger Dreyer’s Fantasma magic shop across from Penn Station on Seventh Avenue. The museum opened in 2012 and is formed from Dreyer's private collection of Houdini memorabilia, with hundreds of items from vintage posters to straightjackets to handcuffs, and even the trunk in which he performed his "Metamorphosis" trick. The collection continues to expand, with recent acquisitions including Houdini's Escape Coffin from 1907, which he managed to free himself from in 66 minutes after it was banged shut with six inch nails. 

Machpelah Cemetery
Glendale, Queens

Houdini's headstone (photograph by the author)

Over in the quiet Machpelah Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, you can find the final resting place of Houdini. The Jewish cemetery is part of the broad band of burial grounds that cuts across the borough, but you can easily spot Houdini's grave out at the front of the cemetery where a bust of the illusionist rests above a crest of the Society of American Magicians. A statue of a mourning woman presses herself to the monument. The headstone of Houdini at the front left of the family plot is usually covered with trinkets from visitors, including playing cards and other magic relics.

It's here that some still gather to await a return from the grave, believing that someday the greatest escape artist will break through the chains of death and communicate with the living. This has yet to happen, but it is true that he was buried in a coffin used in his performanceswhere he did just that. 

Houdini's family plot (photograph by the author)

McSorley's Old Ale House
15 E 7th Street, Manhattan

Handcuffs in McSorley's - not Houdini's (photograph by Bee Collins)

Finally, while Houdini has yet to rise again in Queens, some believe he visits McSorley's Old Ale House in the East Village. Where this belief got started is not quite clear, although the legend long held that if you saw a cat in the window it meant Houdini was revisiting the bar in the afterlife (sadly, resident cat Minnie McSorley is no longer welcome in the bar due to the health department).

Specters aside, if you are drinking in the ale house, one of New York's oldest dating back to 1854, you may notice among the sawdust and cluttered curios some handcuffs attached to the bottom bar rail. Many sources cite these as Houdini's, although they are in fact at type made after his death. It's the older handcuffs hanging higher in the bar that are more likely to be from Houdini. Sure, it might seem a little wild for a drinking establishment to have such museum-worthy memorabilia, but this is McSorley's which has everything from a John Wilkes booth wanted poster to wishbones on a gas lamp said to have been left by young men departing for the Great War. Whether or not the ghost of Houdini has jangled his chains amid the din of drinking, you can likely find someone sitting near those bar rail handcuffs who would be happy to add some story to the legend.  

McSorley's (photograph by Jeff Rosen)

Minnie McSorley haunting the window in her glory days (photograph by Cayuga Outrigger)

 Houdini being lowered into the East River in 1912 (via Library of Congress)

What Happened This Day In History

February 28

1066		Westminster Abbey, the most famous church in England, opens its doors.
1574		On the orders of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, two Englishmen and an Irishman are burnt for heresy.
1610		Thomas West is appointed governor of Virginia.
1704		Indians attack Deerfield, Mass. killing 40 and kidnapping 100.
1847		Colonel Alexander Doniphan and his ragtag Missouri Mounted Volunteers ride to victory at the Battle of Sacramento, during the Mexican War.
1861		The territory of Colorado is established.
1900		After a 119-day siege by the Boers, the surrounded British troops in Ladysmith, South Africa, are relieved.
1863		Four Union gunboats destroy the CSS Nashville near Fort McAllister, Georgia.
1916		Haiti becomes the first U.S. protectorate.
1924		U.S. troops are sent to Honduras to protect American interests during an election conflict.
1936		The Japanese Army restores order in Tokyo and arrests officers involved in a coup.
1945		U.S. tanks break the natural defense line west of the Rhine and cross the Erft River.
1946		The U.S. Army declares that it will use V-2 rocket to test radar as an atomic rocket defense system.
1953		Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia sign a 5-year defense pact in Ankara.
1967		In Mississippi, 19 are indicted in the slayings of three civil rights workers.
1969		A Los Angeles court refuses Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan's request to be executed.
1971		The male electorate in Lichtenstein refuses to give voting rights to women.
1994		U.S. warplanes shoot down four Serb aircraft over Bosnia in the first NATO use of force in the troubled area.
Born on February 28
1533		Michel de Montaigne, French moralist who created the personal essay.
1820		John Tenniel, illustrator of various books (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).
1824		Charles Blondin, tightrope walker.
1894		Ben Hecht, writer.
1901		Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize-winning American chemist.
1909		Stephen Spender, English poet, critic.
1911		Denis Burkitt, British medical researcher.
1926		Svetlana Stalin, daughter of Josef Stalin.