NW Okie's Journey
Sixty-six years ago, Gene and Vada (Paris) McGill added a third daughter to their growing family. It was in the dead of Winter and a supposedly snow storm was brewing in Northwest Oklahoma (as the story goes) when Vada went into labor at their ranch North of Waynoka. Walking With Sadie
We were looking back to February, 1948, and found a news article that stated: Why 1948 babies are the luckiest: Their generation saw free schooling, free healthcare . . . and an end to National Service in 1960. I think it was concerning the United Kingdom 1948ers, though. 25 February 1922 Frontpage News Headlines
Twenty-six years before this NW Okie was born (1948), 25 February 1922, we find the following frontage headlines from an Albuquerque, New Mexico newspaper, The Evening Herald, which reads: Street Car Company Asks for Seven Cent Fare, among other smaller headlines on that day, 92 years ago. Another headline read: First Pictures of Wreck of the Roma. 1922 News - Shoe Cobbler Shot
It was on that same day, 25 February 1922, in Cedar Raids, Iowa, that we find the headlines: Shoe Cobbler Shot; Shop Is Burned. No clues as to the attempted assassins had been known. 25 February 1948 News
Sixty-six years ago today, Wednesday, 25 February 1948, the day in early morning that NW Okie was born in Northwest Oklahoma. It was also when the Communists were taking power in Czechoslovakia. The Velvet Revolution of 1989
The Velvet Revolution was a non-violent transition of power in what was then Czechoslovakia. The period of upheaval and transition took place from November 27 to December 29, 1989. Popular demonstrations against the one-party government of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia combined students and older dissidents. Wild Bill Kickok
Wild Bill Kickok was born in Homer, Illinois (now Troy Grove, Illinois), as James Butler Hickok, born May 27, 1837, died August 2, 1876, son of William and Polly (Butler) Hickok. In 1855, at age 18, Hickok moved to Leavenworth in the Kansas Territory following a fight with Charles Hudson during which both fell into a canal. Each mistakenly thought that they had killed the other. Hickok fled the area, joining General Jim Lane's "Free State Army" (known as the Jayhawkers), a vigilante group then active in the Kansas Territory. Where Jayhawker, Hickok, met 12-year-old William "Buffalo Bill" Cody who was a scout for the U.S. Army during the Utah War. St. Valentines Day Massacre (1929)
It was Valentines Day, 14 February 1929, 10:30am, the streets of Chicago ran with blood as the gangs of Al Capone and George "Bugs" Moran battled to the death. It was against the backdrop of Prohibition, with its tommy-guns, speakeasies and bathtub gin. Billy The Kid
William H. Bonney (born William Henry McCarty, Jr., the son of Irish immigrants, born November 23, 1859, died July 14, 1881). He was better known as Billy the Kid but also known as Henry Antrim, and was a 19th-century American gunman who participated in the Lincoln County War and became a frontier outlaw in the American Old West. According to legend, he killed 21 men, but it is generally believed that he only killed between four and nine. He killed his first man at 15. German POW Camp In Jerome, Arkansas (1945)
During WWII over 425,000 captured Axis soldiers were transported to the United States and interned for the duration in stockades and compounds scattered across the country. Arkansas eventually received about 23,000 of these enemy troops, most of them members of Germany's most famous military unit: Erwin Romnel's Afrika Korps.
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