| Bondage Love
by John J. Brugaletta Houdini's audiences loved him. They were poor people, illiterates:
hod carriers, icemen, washerwomen,
undernourished kids. They understood what it meant
to have your hands manacled,
your feet tied,
to be put in a straitjacket
then in a box
and sunk.
They knew what it was like to have no way out. It was the way the world made love to them. So he showed them, without a word,
that one could have no way out,
not a single, possible way out, and get out.
“Bondage Love” by John J. Brugaletta from Selected Poems. © FutureCycle Press, 2019. Reprinted with permission. (buy now) On this day in 1917, the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded. The Pulitzer is administered by Columbia University in New York, at the bequest of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, who also founded Columbia's journalism school. When Pulitzer made out his will in 1904, he specified four awards in journalism, four in literature and drama, one in education, and four travel fellowships. The board has since attempted to stick to Pulitzer's original intent, although they've added awards in poetry, photography, and music. On this day in 1919, Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the vote. On this day in 1973, Don Wetzel registered a patent for the automated teller machine, or ATM. He's not the undisputed father of the ATM, however; there were several different people working on the idea at the same time, in Japan, Sweden, and Great Britain as well as the United States. Working for the automated baggage-handling company Docutel, Wetzel and his colleagues Tom Barnes and George Chastain developed the ATM card as we know it today: a plastic card with a magnetic strip and an imbedded PIN code. It's the 30th anniversary of the June 4th Incident, otherwise known as the Tiananmen Square Incident, in Beijing (1989). In the late 1980s, Chinese students and intellectuals began calling for economic and political reform in the wake of a period of great economic growth in China. The former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, was also in favor of a more democratic China, but he was forced out of office in 1987. He died in April 1989, and on the day of his funeral, 100,000 students gathered in Tiananmen Square to demand reform; similar protests also arose in cities across China, but the Western media was already in Beijing to cover a visit by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, so the Tiananmen Square protests drew the most international attention. By May, about a million people were demonstrating. The government responded by issuing warnings to disperse, but to no avail. Martial law was declared in mid-May, but crowds of protestors blocked all avenues to the square and the army was unable to get through. Desperate to prevent anarchy, the government massed tanks and heavily armed troops overnight on June 3, and the next morning they rolled into Tiananmen Square, crushing or shooting anyone who stood in their way. Most of the protestors in the square fled and the military had complete control by June 5. The official Chinese government death toll was 241, with 7,000 wounded; other estimates place the number much higher. On this date in 1896, a young electrical engineer named Henry Ford completed, and successfully tested, his first experimental automobile. He called it the "Quadricycle," because it rolled around on four bicycle tires. He'd been working on it for two years, out in the shed behind his house on Bagley Avenue in Detroit. It was finally ready to test when he hit an unexpected snag: It was too wide to fit through the workshop's door. Ford took an ax to the doorframe and the surrounding bricks, and was soon rolling down Grand River Avenue. The Quadricycle had a two-cylinder, four-horsepower engine and could achieve speeds up to 20 miles per hour. It had two gears and no brakes. It ran on pure ethanol, and it was steered by the means of a tiller, like a boat. It wasn't much to look at, just a 500-pound skeleton with a steel frame and no body. But the first test drive was a success. | 