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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, OCT 9–15  
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_ A Long Time Coming, and How! (1949), A Work of Towering Imagination
(1959), August Wilson Takes Broadway (1984), The Truth Hurts (1999),
If Only There Had Been More Advertising (1929), ‘We Are
Everywhere’ (1979), Was Nixon Listening? (1969) _

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_A LONG TIME COMING, AND HOW!_

75 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 9, 1949, Harvard Law School announced that it
would soon begin to admit women students for the first time.
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_A WORK OF TOWERING IMAGINATION_

65 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 10, 1959, the future of the beautiful Watts
Towers in central Los Angeles was at risk. The 17 cement-and-steel
structures were the work of construction worker and folk artist Simon
Rodia, who single-handedly had taken 33 years to build them in his
backyard without any construction permits. Some of the towers were far
taller than anything for miles around. One of them was nearly one
hundred feet tall, and the L.A. buildings department wanted to tear
them down because their structural soundness was unknown. 

But the towers, which are one of the world’s most famous outsider
art installations, had many admirers who were confident that the
towers were safe. 

The Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts persuaded the
buildings department to allow for a test of the towers’ strength. If
they passed the test, the buildings’ department would leave them
alone. On this day a steel cable was attached to each of the three
tallest towers and put under a measured strain. When none of the
towers was affected, the buildings’ department was satisfied they
were not a hazard. 

As architect Edward Farrell, one of the towers’ advocates who helped
to design the testing procedure, said: “We knew that the towers were
very strong, but they had never been tested like that before, so it
was a relief to watch them pass it so easily.”

In the years since, the towers, which are visited by some 40,000
people each year, have been designated a National Historical Landmark.
Follow the link to a large collection of images of the towers; click
on each image to see it full-size [link removed]
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_AUGUST WILSON TAKES BROADWAY_

40 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 11, 1984, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” by
August Wilson, opened in Manhattan and changed Broadway theater
forever. The work, which is part of the masterful 10-play Pittsburgh
Cycle, was Wilson’s first Broadway production. It marked the
beginning of a 2-decade string of Wilson’s theatrical explorations
of the African-American experience, including “Fences,” “Joe
Turner's Come and Gone,” and “The Piano Lesson.”
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_TRUTHFULNESS COMES HARD AT PHILIP MORRIS_

25 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 12, 1999, the Philip Morris Co., the largest
U.S. cigarette maker, gave up its decades-long stonewalling campaign
and admitted that there is an ''overwhelming medical and scientific
consensus that cigarette smoking causes'' diseases including lung
cancer, emphysema and heart disease. The announcement came after
Philip Morris and other tobacco companies had agreed to pay more than
$200 million in damages to reimburse state governments for the expense
of providing medical treatment to Medicaid recipients for
smoking-related diseases.
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_IF ONLY THERE HAD BEEN MORE ADVERTISING_

95 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 13, 1929, the head of the U.S. Bureau of Foreign
and Domestic Commerce delivered a major speech over the CBS radio
network, in which he asserted that “advertising is the key to world
prosperity.” Given that the U.S. had practically invented
advertising, the country’s prosperity was in the bag.

Eleven days later, on Black Thursday, prices on the New York Stock
Exchange lost 11 percent of their value. The largest-ever 1-day
decline in U.S. stock prices helped to usher in the Great Depression.
What went wrong?
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_‘WE ARE EVERYWHERE’_

45 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 14, 1979, the first National March on Washington
for Lesbian and Gay Rights drew some 125,000 supporters who marched
through the capital to demand the passage and enforcement of
protective civil rights legislation.

One of the march’s organizers had been San Francisco gay rights
advocate Harvey Milk, who was assassinated less than a year before the
march took place.

As the day’s official program for the march put it: “Lesbians and
gay men are making history here today. . . . We celebrate the 10th
anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. We reaffirm our commitment to
the struggle for full human rights. . . . The planet Earth is in
crisis; and the crisis worsens each day, while greedy men insist on
continuing age-old patterns of dominance, control, and
exploitation”. Click here for a 10–minute video history of the
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_WAS NIXON LISTENING?_

55 YEARS AGO, Oct. 15, 1969, was a day of the most massive
demonstrations ever in opposition to the U.S. war against the people
of Vietnam. Some 250,000 supporters of the Moratorium to End the War
in Vietnam marched in Washington, D.C., plus an estimated 100,000 in
Boston, tens of thousands in San Francisco and Manhattan, with
hundreds of smaller demonstrations throughout the country. Life
magazine described the Moratorium as “a display without historic
parallel, the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this
country.” 
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For more People's History, go to
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* Outsider art
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* Vietnam moratorium
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