The Ides of January?
And for that matter, what are "ides" anyway?
It’s the beginning of the year, in January, which in the Northern Hemisphere is also known as The Dead of Winter. The Christmas and New Year’s holidays are over and the normal daily routine is beginning to reassert itself. It seems like there might not be a lot to recommend January 15 as any sort of sweet deal.
But on the other hand…it was January 15 in 1886 that the Coca-Cola Company was incorporated. Their secret formula started out actually containing coca leaves and kola nuts (hence the name of the beverage), but it wasn’t too long before it became the concoction so many have loved ever since. It definitely contains an addictive substance, but instead of cocaine it’s now sugar. Or high-fructose corn syrup.
I’m sure they blame Pepsi.
Coca Cola had a pretty sweet deal in its first fifty years or so. The company was an innovator in advertising and merchandising, and by mid-century they had nearly 50% of the share of the market for soft drinks. Their market share is a lot lower today, and I’m sure they blame Pepsi. Actually they should blame Pepsi, because that brand became their main competitor and reduced Coca Cola’s market share to about 20%. If you know any Coke executives, maybe don’t remind them that the company had three chances to buy Pepsi, in the 1920s and 1930s, and passed each time.
That’s more than three Olympic-size swimming pools.
Neither Coke nor Pepsi, as far as anybody knows (secret formulas, remember), ever contained molasses. Nevertheless, molasses was a big seller on its own. Besides being an ingredient in baking, molasses is also used in distilling rum, brewing some kinds of beer, making munitions, and it’s even been used in making mortar (the stuff in between bricks, not the small cannon). For a while, quite some time ago, it was even one of the ingredients used to make the rollers that spread the ink in printing presses. I’m not sure if this adds to January 15 being considered a sweet deal of a day, but it was that day in 1919 in Boston that a huge tank of molasses burst. By “huge”, I’m talking about 2.3 million gallons. That’s more than three Olympic-size swimming pools. The tank was on a hill overlooking the docks, and a tidal wave of molasses swept down the hill toward the waterfront.
Molasses is thick, heavy stuff. A big wave of it isn’t like water, swirling around obstacles. It’s more like a bulldozer, flattening everything in its path. People in the area reported feeling the ground shake. The molasses wave was as high as 25 feet, and nearly collapsed an elevated railway it flooded. To make it worse, as the molasses flowed around the wreckage it had created, it was as deep as two and three feet, and it was January. In Boston. The molasses began to cool off and thicken, making escape and rescue more and more difficult. In the aftermath of the flood, Boston harbor was brown for months, and residents of the area claimed for decades that on a hot summer day you could still smell the molasses.
Fighting your way out of being stuck in molasses might make an interesting reality show episode, but it’s not going to make it as a professional sport. Basketball players thrive of speed and agility instead. Oh, and by the way, January 15, 1892 is the day the first official rules of the sport were published by James Naismith, its inventor. Naismith saw basketball soar in popularity and eventually became coach of the University of Kansas basketball team. They take basketball pretty seriously in Kansas, and the Kansas Jayhawks are a perennial powerhouse in college sport. But oddly enough, James Naismith, who invented the game and published the rules, is the only basketball coach the University of Kansas has ever had with a career losing record.
The first Super Bowl took place on his 12th birthday.
Maybe basketball players aren’t the best choice if we’re going to think about forming a national molasses escape league. Pro football players might be better; there are a lot of football positions that depend on raw strength and endurance. Might be just what you need to slog through yards of waist-deep molasses. And January 15 is a good day to consider these teams, too, because it was the day of the very first Super Bowl, in 1967. It was played in Los Angeles, by the way, and although there was not a drop of molasses on the field, the Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs. There might have been a boy watching the game, maybe on TV in Dallas, where he lived. The first Super Bowl took place on his 12th birthday. If he did watch (I have no idea) it would make a great story, because we’re talking about Drew Brees, who grew up to be the winning quarterback in Super Bowl 44 — er, I mean “XLIV” — when his New Orleans Saints defeated the Indianapolis Colts.
You know, one of the resources I rely on a lot in writing Happened is Wikipedia. It doesn’t always have all the details about an event or a person, but as often as not it has something, and the editors — all volunteers — are careful about citing their sources, so you can follow up and gather more, um, well I don’t want to say trivia… But never mind that. We’re here to talk about January 15, and that was the day in 2001 that Wikipedia first went online. Wikipedia was founded by Larry Sanger (who came up with the name) and Jimmy Wales, who was involved with a prior free online encylopedia, “Nupedia.” Don’t bother doing a search for Nupedia; it was shut down in 2003 and the content was absorbed into Wikipedia. Initially it was “wikipedia.com," by the way, and the idea of accepting ads to fund the operation was under consideration. But in about 2002 the decision was taken that Wikipedia would never display ads, and the domain was changed to what it is today, “wikipedia.org.” It’s pretty sweet for a volunteer operation; there are over 300,000 editors, and the service is available in 325 languages. The English edition consists of over six million articles.
One of the features of Wikipedia is a list of notable people born on any given day of the year. In the US, though, you might not need Wikipedia to know that today is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. If you know nothing else about Dr. King, you must be familiar with his “I have a dream” speech. He delivered it in 1963 during a civil rights march on Washington, D.C.
It’s not a long speech, but even so, King was reading from prepared notes he’d typed up and brought with him. But the words “I have a dream” weren’t on the sheet. They may be the most remembered words from any modern American speech, and they were ad-libbed on the spot. How do we know?
Well, aside from King saying as much at the time, there was a basketball coach (from the University of Iowa, a long time rival of Kansas) standing near the podium, and when King finished speaking the coach — George Raveling — asked if he could have the notes, which included King’s typed text and handwritten comments. King gave them to Raveling. The document sort of disappeared after that — or people just hadn’t thought about it — until 1984, when Raveling mentioned having it. Raveling still has the speech today, even though he’s been offered millions of dollars for it. Appropriately enough, George Raveling was the first African-American basketball coach ever hired at the University of Iowa. And unlike James Naismith, he has a winning record. Pretty sweet.
P.S. You may have noticed that the title questions, whether "today is the Ides of January," and "what the heck are ides anyway," were never addressed. All I can say is to refer you to the Man in Black’s words to Inigo Montoya in "The Princess Bride": “get used to disappointment.”
