Friday June 26, 2015

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Follower

My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

“Follower” by Seamus Heaney from Selected Poems: 1966-1987. © Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1987. Reprinted with permission.  (buy now)

On this day in 1974, the first Universal Product Code was scanned at a supermarket cash register. The first scan was made at a Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, which had agreed to serve as a test facility for the new technology, and the first item scanned was a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit Gum. There’s no significance to gum being the first item scanned; it just happened to be the first thing pulled from the cart. That pack of gum is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.

The UPC bar code system was originally invented specifically for grocery stores, to speed checkout and help them keep better track of their inventory, but it proved so successful that it spread quickly to other retailers. The first patent for a bar code went to N. Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver in 1952. They didn’t do anything with it for 20 years, because the scanning technology didn’t exist yet. By 1972, Woodland was working for IBM, and it was there that the bar code design was perfected and the prototype scanner was built in 1973. The IBM 3660 included a digital cash register and checkout scanner, and the grocery industry, which had been collaborating with IBM on the invention, began requiring its suppliers to start putting bar codes on their packaging.

It was on this day in 1997 that the first book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published in Britain. Joanne Rowling (books by this author) was an unemployed, single mother waiting for a delayed train, when an idea suddenly came to her. “I did not have a functioning pen with me,” she said. “I simply sat and thought for four hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me ... I began to write that very evening.” The seven Harry Potter books have sold 450 million copies worldwide and spawned a successful movie franchise. The character of Harry Potter earns J.K. Rowling, as she is now known, an estimated $10,000 every hour.

It’s the birthday of Pearl Buck (books by this author), born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, in 1892 to two Presbyterian missionaries, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstriker. The family moved to China when Buck was three months old, and she lived there for most of the next 40 years. As a child, she was homeschooled by her mother in the mornings. In the afternoon, she was taught classical Chinese by a scholar named Mr. Kung.

Her first novel, East Wind, West Wind, (1930) sold well, but it was her second novel, The Good Earth (1931), about a clan of Chinese peasants struggling to survive during a drought, that became an international best-seller and won Buck the Pulitzer Prize. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938, one of only two American women to do so (the second was Toni Morrison).

Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” was published on this date in 1948. The story is about a small American town that holds a lottery every year to ensure a bountiful harvest. Names are written on slips of paper, and the winner of the lottery is stoned to death by the townspeople. Jackson said she wrote it in about two hours, one sunny June afternoon after she had run some errands with her young daughter. “[The idea] had come to me while I was pushing my daughter up the hill in her stroller,” she later recalled. “It was ... a warm morning, and the hill was steep, and beside my daughter, the stroller held the day’s groceries—and perhaps the effort of that last 50 yards up the hill put an edge to the story.”

Jackson submitted the story to The New Yorker and the editors wasted no time in accepting it; it was in print three weeks after Jackson’s agent had sent it to them. The public outcry against the story was immediate and intense. People canceled their subscriptions to The New Yorker in droves, and they wrote in with complaints and questions. The magazine forwarded all letters to Jackson, at the rate of 10 or 12 a day; Jackson’s mail carrier stopped speaking to her. Out of the roughly 300 letters Jackson received that summer, only 13 of them were positive, and those all came from friends. Even her mother was a critic. She wrote, “Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker ... [I]t does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don’t you write something to cheer people up?”

It’s the birthday of the blues musician Big Bill Broonzy, born in Scott, Mississippi (although some sources say Lake Dick, Arkansas), in 1898 (some sources say 1893), one of 17 children of parents born into slavery. When he was a young boy, his uncle made him a fiddle from a cigar box and taught him how to play. He moved to Chicago and started playing fiddle tunes, which did not appeal to sophisticated Chicago audiences. So, he learned to play the guitar and sing the blues. It took him several years to get the hang of it, but he began making recordings in 1927 and soon became one of the most popular blues singers in the country. He sang at Carnegie Hall in 1939, but by the late 1940s, the blues began to change with Muddy Waters’ electric guitar sound and style. By 1950, Broonzy was working as a janitor at Iowa State University when Studs Terkel “rediscovered” him and had him on his radio program as a frequent guest.

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