Selma Leeman: A Finnish-American Immigrant Girl’s Success Story From guest contributor Bruce Matson Selma Liimatainen started life in the small Village of Kivijärvi, Finland in 1889. As an 11-year-old, she arrived in America in 1902. Selma Sofia (she later changed her last name to Leeman) came to Quincy, Massachusetts to join her father and her…
Category: The Arts
The Year was 1986
What do you do when you can’t sleep? You read novels. And what do you do when you want to encourage authors to write more novels? You buy a 13th century castle in Scotland and set up a writers’ retreat – all expenses paid. Doreen Mary English did just this. Born in England in 1915…
The Year was 1971
A Muppet Chemist singing “Time in a Bottle”… If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing that I’d like to do is to save every day ‘til eternity passes away, just to spend them with you. These magical words were not written for lovers. They were written for Jim Croce’s unborn child….
The year was 1890
When he died in 1890, his mother threw away a lot of his weird paintings. And no wonder – he had never sold a single painting in his entire life. Well, that’s not exactly true. His younger brother did buy one. He had been was a problem child. The son of a Dutch minister, he…
The year 1938
When 23-year-old Sister Rosetta Tharpe took the stage at Carnegie Hall just before Christmas, 1938, she took the audience’s breath away. First, she was playing a guitar; that was for men, not women. Second, she was playing it in a way no one had ever heard before. No one, that is, except the small…
The Year was 1953
Five days after her father died, Antha Belle was born on Jan. 6, 1953. Her mother had signed away her parental rights to the dad. And he had arranged to have his own mother be legal guardian for the unborn baby. Which she did, then she adopted Antha Belle, giving her a new name: Catherine…
The year was 1989
It appeared out of the blue. Or out of the black, actually, on Friday night, December 15. The NYSE was furious – get that bull out of here! By the time a New York Post photographer appeared on Saturday, the 7,000 lb., 16-foot long bronze bull was already being lifted by a crane and on…
The Year was 2017
Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, is a cinematic success. But there have been real life wonder women throughout our history. Some were samurai. Tomoe Gozen (c.1157-1247) became an excellent archer and sword handler. In one battle, she threw herself upon an enemy leader and decapitated him. “Whenever a battle was imminent, Yoshinaka [Minamoto] sent…
The year was 1844
Alexandre Dumas had so many ideas! But he didn’t have time to do all that bothersome research, all that cumbersome writing. So he set up a kind of factory system to get it all done in one lifetime. His grandmother had been a slave in Haiti. That meant her children with the French nobleman who…
The year was 1722
In the middle of the south Pacific, two thousand miles from anywhere, a Dutch explorer named Jacob Roggeveen came upon a strange sight – a small island ringed with huge, weird moai – gray stone statues which looked like primitive heads. Some were more than 30 feet tall, many with red topknots. One moai, never…