ON THIS DAY IN 1846, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Everybody knows and therefore need not be informed that this is the day appointed for billing, cooing, and billet-doux-ing, generally denominated as St. Valentine’s Day. It is about the most pleasant carnival of the year, and fraught with darts and smarts and twittering hearts. Postmen are scouring the streets like locomotives, to deliver the great conglomeration of missives with which the post office is crowded. The postmaster of this city has put on eight extra hands to accomplish this momentous and pithy business.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1861, the Eagle reported, “Yesterday it was officially announced that Abraham Lincoln has been elected President of the United States for four years from the 4th of March next. This was pretty generally expected throughout the country; our own mind was pretty well satisfied of the fact by reading an ‘extra’ in the grey twilight of a cool and crispy morning about the 7th of November last. There were rumors in the party papers of all sorts of plots to prevent the counting of the electoral vote, but the event proved they were altogether groundless. The ceremony was performed in the usual way, and no improper manifestations were indulged in.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1929, the Eagle reported, “Chicago, Feb. 14 (AP) — Seven members of the North Side gang of George (‘Bugs’) Moran were lined up against a wall and summarily executed and one other was probably fatally wounded today by a band of men who invaded the North Side headquarters of the gang posing as police officers. After forcing the men to raise their hands, the gangsters shot them down in cold blood. The heaped bodies of the victims were found in the rear room of the S.M.C. Cartage Company garage, 2122 Clark St., by police, who had been summoned by a woman living nearby. She was apparently the only person to hear the sawed-off shotguns and machine guns of the slayers, who pulled up before the Moran gang headquarters in two large automobiles … Today’s killing brought the total of gang slayings here in the past few years to more than 135.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1947, the Eagle reported, “Paris, Feb. 14 (U.P.) — An estimated 5,000,000 civil service employees walked off their jobs late today, paralyzing transportation, closing government offices and virtually bringing French life to a standstill in a demonstration for higher wages to meet the inflationary cost of living. The strike was scheduled as a demonstration, and to lost only this afternoon. It deprived the city of telephone service. All lines to the provinces were dead, as was the metropolitan automatic network. The sudden walkout occurred about 4 p.m., when the workers took to the streets for massive parades along the Paris boulevards, chanting their demands for pay and carrying big banners. Paris was in confusion as hundreds of thousands milled in the streets or demonstrated. Citizens were unable to reach their homes because all public transport had halted. The French radio, a governmental enterprise, went off the air precisely at 4 p.m. France already was without newspapers due to a strike.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1954, the Eagle reported, “Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ has been recorded frequently, but never with the vibrancy and urgent excitement engendered by Victor de Sabata in the new two-disc set from Angel. We have always had the feeling that de Sabata was more at home in the opera house than on the concert stage and this, his first operatic recording, certainly bears out that contention. Brilliantly recorded at La Scala in Milan, it enlists the services of a superb Tosca, Maria Callas; an excellent Cavaradossi, Giuseppe di Stefano; and a good, if not always sufficiently evil Scarpia, Tito Gobbi. Though there is considerable competition from other albums, this is likely to be the definitive ‘Tosca’ for some years.”
