Happy Friday the 13th, the first one of 2012. The year 2012 is one of the rare years in which there are three Friday the 13ths – January, April and July. That combination of a year where Friday the 13th happens three times in January, April and July only happens on leap years, and has only happened seven times since 1860, and not at all since 1984. The other three-month combination in which Friday the 13th can happen in three different months is February, March and November of a given year (non-leap years). Friday the 13th cannot happen more than three times in a Gregorian calendar year. In a 400 year Gregorian calendar cycle, the odds of the 13th falling on a Friday is slightly more likely than any other day of the week (it will happen 688 times in those 400 years, slightly more frequent than Sundays or Wednesdays).
Friday the 13th of any month, of course, is considered to be unlucky but it is just another ordinary day. Some years, not much happens on a month that has a Friday the 13th. Other years, history is made, for better or worse.
Other internet lists that focus on events of Friday the 13th describe the most noteworthy events that have occurred – the crash of the rugby team’s plane in the Andes mountains in 1972, the 1970 Bangladesh flood, the 1989 [amazon asin=0486447952&template=*lrc ad (left)]stock market crash, the death of Tupac Shakur in 1996. This list will focus on ten of the lesser-known events that occurred on Friday the 13th.
10 Illegal Evolution Friday May 13, 1925
Event: Tennessee Makes it Unlawful to Teach Evolution.
On Friday, May 13, 1925, by a vote of 24-6, the Tennessee Senate voted to ratify the new state law called The Butler Act. The new law prevented Tennessee public school teachers from denying the biblical account of God creating man and prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution in the classroom. Specifically, the new law stated “it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the Story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Teachers who failed to comply could be charged with a misdemeanor offense and fined up to $500, a considerable amount of money in 1925.[amazon asin=0809083884&template=*lrc ad (right)]
The law was made famous by the Scopes Monkey trial when a teacher, John Scopes, agreed to be arrested on the charges of teaching evolution in the classroom. The law was then challenged by the ACLU after Scopes was indicted and convicted. In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court found the law to be constitutional under the Tennessee State Constitution, but threw out the charges against Scopes on a technicality. During the trial, Butler told reporters: “I never had any idea my bill would make a fuss. I just thought it would become a law, and that everybody would abide by it and that we wouldn’t hear any more of evolution in Tennessee.” The law remained on the books until 1967.
9 MIG Fighter Friday June 13, 1952
Event: Soviet MIG Shoots Down Swedish Plane.
[amazon asin=B007LUV2N6&template=*lrc ad (left)]On Friday, June 13, 1952, a Swedish C-47 airplane was performing secret Cold War electronic intelligence gathering operations for the US (Sweden being, supposedly, a neutral country). The plane was called “Hugin” after the mythological ravens used by the god Odin to gather information from all over the world. The planes were supposed to be normal transport planes but were, in fact, outfitted with five radio operator stations, each one listening in on Soviet electronic intelligence. The Hugin would become just one more of the many incidents of shooting down in the long Cold War air battle over gathering intelligence. A Soviet MIG fighter jet shot it down over the East Sea. All eight people on board were killed. Only a raft was found, no bodies or the plane were located until 2004, when they were recovered. Today the plane is on display at the Swedish Air Force museum. You can see the plane above.
8 Big Discovery Friday July 13, 1832
Event: Henry Rowe Schoolcraft Makes a Big Discovery.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was an early American geologist, geographer and explorer, who studied Native American cultures and is best remembered for what he found – the source of the mighty Mississippi River, on Friday, [amazon asin=B005S28ZES&template=*lrc ad (right)]July 13th, 1832.
Born in 1793, Schoolcraft had an early interest in geology. He would do one of the early explorations of the American Midwest, producing the first written account of the exploration of the Ozark Mountain region. In 1820, he did some of the earliest explorations of the Lake Superior region as part of the Lewis Cass Expedition. The expedition mistakenly named the source of the Mississippi Rover as Cass Lake, in Minnesota.
As a member of the Michigan Territory legislator, in 1832, he traveled to the upper reaches of the Mississippi and spoke with many members of the Ojibwa and Dakota (Sioux) nations. Among other things, he discovered that there was no evidence of smallpox among the native people until 1750, when a group of warriors went east to battle with the French against the British. The warriors returned with smallpox and infected the native peoples who had no natural immunity from this Old World disease. While he was there, he took the opportunity to try to find the true source of the Mississippi River, and was successful.
On Friday the 13th of July, 1832, Schoolcraft discovered the true headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, which he named from the Latin words “verities” meaning ‘truth’ and “kaput” meaning ‘head.’ The nearby Schoolcraft River, the first major tributary of the Mississippi, was later named in his honor.
Schoolcraft would marry Jane Johnston, whose parents were Native American (Ojibwe) and Scots-Irish. Her knowledge of the Ojibwe language and of Ojibwe legends, which she shared with Schoolcraft, formed in part the source material for Longfellow’s epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha. Schoolcraft died in 1864.
