Milestones: Monday, October 2, 2023

October 2, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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REBELLION ENDS IN DISASTER — THE WARSAW UPRISING ENDED ON OCT. 2, 1944, but not well for Polish resistance forces who were both rebelling against Nazi occupation and trying to control their city before the Soviets arrived to “liberate it.” Two months before, the Polish resistance, anticipating the arrival of the Red Army in Warsaw launched an anti-Nazi rebellion. The rebels were supporting a pro-democracy government that was exiled in London. Fearing (correctly, as it turned out) that the Soviets were actually conquerors rather than liberators, the rebels had a deadline of taking the city before a communist regime could be set up. However, a combination of the Germans beating back the Poles, whose weaponry and supplies were inferior, and the Soviets refusing to come to the aid of the Poles, led to their being deported. The Red Army encountered minimal resistance in establishing its own regime.

In 1947, in what historians call election fraud, a Marxist-Lenin government was established and stayed in place until 1989 when the Solidarity party had huge gains.

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STROKE ENDED HOPES FOR LEAGUE — PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON, KNOWN FOR HIS EFFORTS TO ESTABLISH A LEAGUE OF NATIONS following the Great War (World War I) fell ill during a physically demanding tour, and, on Oct. 2, 1919, suffered a debilitating stroke. He had to cut short the tour, which took him 8,000 miles and 22 straight days of talks and events when he collapsed from exhaustion. Although he did survive the stroke and recovered to some degree, he never regained full strength; furthermore, the stroke left him with lasting paralysis on one side of his body. He was no longer able to move forward on the League of Nations, and the United States never ratified it.

Meanwhile, his wife, (Edith Bolling Galt Wilson), reportedly blamed Wilson’s opponents on the League of Nation issues. Legend has it (although she denied doing so without his knowledge and approval) that Edith Wilson essentially functioned by proxy as President, signing documents, making some decisions on his behalf, and, mostly, keeping his true condition secret.

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SUPREME COURT’S FIRST BLACK JUSTICE — THURGOOD MARSHALL, THE FIRST BLACK JUSTICE OF THE U.S. SUPREME COURT, took the oath of office from Chief Justice Earl Warren on Oct. 2, 1967. Marshall, who was the great-grandson of an enslaved person attended and graduated top of his class at the all-Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., after the University of Maryland Law School rejected him because of his race. Serving as the NAACP’s chief counsel from 1938 to 1961, Marshall argued more than a dozen cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, successfully challenging racial segregation, most notably in public education, and winning nearly all his cases, foremost among them Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954. President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 nominated Thurgood Marshall to succeed of retiring Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark. The Senate debated his nomination vigorously but voted to confirm it by 69-11.

When President Johnson nominated Marshall to the Supreme Court, he said it was “the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man, and the right place.”

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CHANGED PUBLIC’S VIEW OF AIDS — HANDSOME ACTOR ROCK HUDSON BECAME THE FIRST AMERICAN CELEBRITY TO DIE OF COMPLICATIONS FROM AIDS, on Oct. 2, 1985. Only 59 at the time, he was a heartthrob and star of many dramas and films, among them “Giant” and “Pillow Talk;” on TV he starred in “McMillan and Wife” and “Dynasty.” It was while working on the “Dynasty” series that he was diagnosed with AIDS. Having co-starred with many actresses, Hudson had kept his life as a gay man secret. But just over two months before his death, Hudson had publicly acknowledged that he had contracted AIDS.

The news from Hudson, an acclaimed international icon actually helped mitigate the stigma of AIDS and brought worldwide attention to the need to treat the disease.

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NOW A POPULAR SPORTS BOOST — THE SPORTS DRINK GATORADE was invented on Oct. 2, 1965, at the University of Florida when a team of scientists investigated why student-athletes were languishing in the heat. The research scientists, Dr. James Robert Cade and his team of researchers: doctors H. James Free, Dana Shires and Alex de Quesada developed a power beverage — containing both salts and sugars — that would replace bodily fluids that were depleted during physical exertion, particularly in Florida’s subtropical climate. The drink was named Gatorade, a nod to the moniker for the school’s athletic teams.

However, Gatorade was not initially popular. Some of the athletes reported the flavor to be so nasty that they threw up after drinking it.

See previous milestones, here.