History

By John B. Manbeck
Special to the Brooklyn Eagle

Last year I wrote a column about the two presidents whose birthdays we celebrate annually in this month. But the holiday seems to be restrictive, particularly since the appellation — Presidents Day — lacks an apostrophe. Does that apply to all Presidents or just the two whose birthdays are in this month, since the word “birthday” has been dropped as well?

By David Weiss

Neither of the two most famous Roosevelts — Presidents Theodore and Franklin — are buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, but 60 other people with the name of Roosevelt are.

If anyone asks you how many episodes there were of Jackie Gleason’s TV series “The Honeymooners,” you can tell them the official count is 39, though this number does not include the “lost” episodes that were uncovered in the 1980s or the many “Honeymooners” sketches that were produced on various variety shows.

The statue of Abraham Lincoln in Prospect Park was paid for by thousands of Brooklynites, each of whom paid the subscription price of one dollar.

We still occasionally hear of “gangland-style” killings, but the year 1931 was a time when gangland murders were not so few and far between. For instance the following item appeared on the front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on Feb. 21, 1931:

Witness Slain For Aiding State In Cop’s Murder

Bullet-riddled Body of Franzone, Who Turned on Former Pals in Detective’s Death, Found in Bronx Road —
Two Others Die in Gang Shootings

New York’s underworld struck back today, with the weapons that gangsters know, at one of their own number who had violated the first law of the gangster’s code — the law of silence.

Poet Wystan Hugh (W.H.) Auden was born in York, England, on Feb. 21, 1907.

Auden’s first book, Poems, was accepted by no less than T.S. Eliot for Faber & Faber, and published in 1930. Auden traveled extensively, living in Berlin, Spain and China before moving to New York in 1939.

 Auden moved to the Yorkville district of Manhattan in April of 1939 and was living there on the day the Germans invaded Poland, when he penned one of his most famous poems, “September 1, 1939.”

Soon after, Auden moved to Brooklyn, renting the top floor of One Montague Terrace. He wrote his childhood friend, Mrs. A.E. Dodd, on Oct. 27, 1939. “This house has the most beautiful view in New York: looking out over water at the towers of Manhattan...”

Sportscaster Walter Lanier “Red” Barber was born on Feb. 17, 1908, in Columbus, Mississippi.

Barber’s first professional play-by-play experience was announcing the Cincinnati Reds’ opening day on the radio in 1934. That game was also the first major league game he had ever seen.

In the winter of 1938-’39, Larry MacPhail, who had been hired as president of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1937, lured Barber from Cincinnati to New York to give the city its first radio coverage of big-league baseball from Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field.

Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born in Brooklyn on Feb. 17, 1963. Many people consider him to be the greatest basketball player of all time. Playing with the Chicago Bulls, he won six NBA championships during the 1990s. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009.