David Prashker's Book Of Days: April 4

1968

On the balcony of the Motel Lorraine

Martin Luther King Jr, civil rights leader, killed today in 1968.

There is an interesting take on this story, written at the time of its 50th anniversary, in Russia Today. Click here)

Marguerite Duras, French authoress, born today in 1914 - but I cannot write about this version of the name, without first writing about its source: Claire Lechat de Kersaint when she was born into a plantation-owning family in 1777, Claire de Durfort, Duchesse de Duras when she married, and ran the most prominent salon in France, both before and after the revolution, regularly visited by close friends like Mme de Stäel and René de Chateaubriand...remembered, if at all, as the authoress of what was actually a very significant novel, "Ourika". Worth recounting the sheer accidence of that novel:

Somewhere around 1820, no doubt over petite madeleines at her salon, she remembered a tale from her childhood, about a young Senegalese girl who had been rescued from the slave trade and brought up in the home of French nobility. Her listeners encouraged her to write it down, and so she did, and in a great hurry too, because "by noon the next day," as one of her fellow salonistes later recalled, "half of the novel was written." So sensitive was the subject matter, she had to publish it anonymously; nevertheless it is the first French novel to feature a black woman, and as the dignified heroine, not the abused kitchen-maid.

Had the young and literary-aspiring Marguerite Donnadieu read the book, and chose her nom de plume in tribute? Probably, but it was not the reason that she ever gave. Duras was the town her father had grown up in, and where they spent many a summer holidaying, in the shadows of the chateau from which the Duchesse took her name.

Amber pages:

Today, in 1896, the Yukon Gold Rush began... the northern branch of the California Gold Rush, which then grew into the Great San Francisco Grape Fraud, and is still continuing today, on blank walls in cyberspace filled up with advertising, in Silicone Enhancement Valley...

Marguerite Annie Johnson (Maya Angelou sounds so much more... authorial? authoritative? authorised?), born today in 1928 ... (click here for a surprising Ghana connection)

NATO established, today in 1949. The twelve countries that formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation were Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the United States. Since then it has grown to twenty-nine, Greece and Turkey joining in 1952, Germany in 1955, Spain in 1982, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland in 1999, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, and Montenegro in 2017.

The first artificial heart transplant was performed, today in 1969, in Houston, Texas, by Dr. Denton Cooley. You thought this was done by Christian Barnard? But that was the transplant of an authentic human heart, sixteen months earlier, in South Africa (see December 3). This one was artificial, and the recipient was one Haskell Karp, aged 47, from Skokie, Illinois. It lasted 16 hours, then failed, after which a donor was found with a real heart and that was transplanted in its place. It lasted 32 hours.

And just to add one more name to my list of Sherpa Ten-Zings (see July 24), Dr Michael E. DeBakey probably ought to get a mention too. To read about the way Sir Edmund Cooley effectively pushed Sherpa DeBakey off the summit of Mount Transplant, click here

And finally, irresistibly, this (my cartoon, much fun making it):