The Blaisdell Blog

  At 6:52 p.m. on the evening of November 1, 1955 United Airlines Flight 629 took off from Stapleton Airfield in Denver, Colorado.   Eleven minutes later the Douglas DC 6B disintegrated in the air and plunged into a sugar beet field near Longmont, CO.   All 44 people on board died.               A bomb, 17 pounds of dynamite with a timer, had exploded in passenger Daisie King’s luggage.   It had been placed there by her son, John Gilbert “Jack” Graham.   At check-in Mrs. King paid a $27 fine because the bags were overweight.    She asked her son if she really needed all that much in her luggage.   Cold as ice he had said, “Yes, mother, I’m sure you will need it.”   Jack Gilbert had then turned to his wife, gave her some money and told her to buy three life insurance policies on his mother’s flight.               There ...

  On April 12, 1861, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Ft. Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay, beginning the American Civil War.   Three months earlier, Benito Juarez had been elected President of Mexico.   Like Lincoln, Juarez inherited a country with serious, perhaps fatal, problems.   In Juarez’s case, however, the problems were primarily external. In 1861, Mexico was a country in financial ruin.   It owed money to all of the major European powers and, smelling blood in the water, they were circling the drowning nation.   When Juarez defaulted on the loans France, Britain and Spain all sent their ships into the harbor of Veracruz to wrest something, anything, of value from the destitute government.   Britain and Spain were satisfied with negotiated settlements but France’s Napoleon III saw a chance to claim some semblance of imperial grandeur by annexing Mexico.    Napoleon III (nephew of the great Bonaparte) was certain h...