Happy Birthday, Babe!

One of the crappy old books I picked up at the Palmer House last week was Anniversaries and Holidays: A Calendar of Days and How to Observe Them by Mary Emogene Hazeltine published by American Library Association (Chicago) in 1944. What a fun book! In addition to the calendar, Part II provides, among many other things, "Origin and History of Holidays and Holiday Customs," and "Time and the Calendar." Fun stuff.

I've taken to skimming today's entries-- not so much to learn who was born when, but to recall who is worth remembering to today.

Today,

February 7,

let's recall

Charles Dickens 1812-June 9, 1870. Great English novelist and social critic.

Sir James Augustus Henry Murray 1837-July 26, 1915. Distinguished editor of the scholarly Oxford English dictionary, completed in 1933 after 50 years of work.

Sinclair Lewis 1885- . American novelist, satirist of contemporary life. [He declined the Pulitzer.]

George Herman (Babe) Ruth 1894- . Baseball's greatest batsman; home-run king of the New York Yankees.

Thanks to Miss M., we've had a great deal of Dickens lately and are expecting more.

O.E.D. Can't live without it here at the Farm.

Lewis. One of those names I know. Pretty sure I have Babbitt somewhere on a shelf. But that's all I got. (Hey! What did you expect? I'm a vegetable farmer, not an English major.)

Happy Birthday, Babe!