February 13: ON THIS DAY in 1950, miners defy order to work

February 13, 2019 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

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ON THIS DAY IN 1886, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “The Eagle Almanac for the current year, the first and the only Brooklyn almanac published, is now for sale and can be obtained in the Eagle’s counting room, as well as at a great many places announced in our advertising columns. It is the completest publication of the kind issued from any newspaper office in the United States, while as to Brooklyn and Long Island it supplies information furnished nowhere else … It is in the truest sense a handbook of Brooklyn. There is hardly a question concerning our city that an intelligent visitor is likely to propound or an intelligent citizen ought to be prepared to answer that is not covered in it. It is a book of 232 pages, printed on an excellent quality of paper from new plates, and the price is only 25 cents per copy.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1916, the Eagle reported, “Staten Island, before the end of the year, will be physically linked up with the Borough of Brooklyn, across the Narrows. Not by a subway connection, but by another sort of a river tunnel, which will be used to introduce the new Catskill water system into the Borough of Richmond. The subway tunnel, which is intended to give the Borough of Richmond a share in the rapid transit system of the city, may come in later years, as an extension to the present Fourth Avenue subway at Sixty-Seventh street. But for the present, Staten Island will have to be satisfied with its physical connection with the Catskills watershed, which should not be scorned when the fact is considered that just now, the Borough of Richmond is completely dominated by private water companies and this would not be possible were it not for the geographical position of Brooklyn and Queens.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1917, the Eagle reported, “Not in many years — in fact, veteran waterfront men could not recall in what year conditions were similar — has there been such an ice jam as there is today along the Brooklyn shore. Coal barges, tugs and vessels of substantial size are caught fast in the ice pack at Erie Basin and at the Bush terminals. The harbor might be the harbor of Vladivostok or Archangel, so pronounced is its Arctic atmosphere. The pack ice around the South Brooklyn piers is from eight inches to a foot and a half in thickness. It does not break up with the rising tide, but simply rises and falls on the current, grinding against the piers. The jam is causing serious inconvenience to shippers.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1927, the Eagle reported, “Yale University today conferred a distinct honor upon Robert Maynard Hutchins by electing him acting dean of the School of Law at the age of 27. He is the son of President William J. Hutchins of Berea College, Berea, Ky. — pastor of the Bedford Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn, from 1900 to 1907. Hutchins, secretary of Yale University for four years, was named for the new post as the result of the resignation of Thomas W. Swan to become a judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals. The new acting dean, one of the youngest ever named for that position, was born in Brooklyn in 1899. He lived [on Prospect Place] until his father had relinquished his Brooklyn church to become a professor at Oberlin College, at Oberlin, Ohio. His grandfather had been well known in Brooklyn and was at one time pastor of the Greenpoint Dutch Reformed Church.”

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ON THIS DAY IN 1950, the Eagle reported, “Pittsburgh, Feb. 13 (U.P.) — John L. Lewis’ United Mine Workers defied President [Harry] Truman’s court injunction outlawing the coal strike today and refused to work. The imbittered miners stayed home awaiting the government’s next move. A check disclosed no major mines operating in the East, Midwest and South. ‘I haven’t seen a single miner around here,’ a lonely watchman at the 500-man Harwick, Pa., mine of Duquesne Light Co. said. ‘I don’t expect to.’”