is that it is the birthday of two important figures in Russian history. Vladimir Ulyanov, aka Nikolai Lenin, was born in the town of Simbirsk, on the Volga River, 1500 miles from Moscow, on this date in 1870. That is, on our calendar, it was April 22. Russia was style on the unreformed Julian calendar, so the date on his birth certificate would have been April 10.
Exactly 11 years later, IN THE SAME TOWN, was born Alexander Kerensky, who in 1917 was the Prime Minister who declared Russia a republic, but was forced to flee by the Bolsheviks.
In a further connection, Kerensky's father was the head of the gymnasium (high school) from which Lenin graduated.
Kerensky actually died in New York City in 1970. In one of my few brushes with early 20th Century history, I actually met him once in the late 1960s.
I am always intrigued by historical coincidences. In American history, Stephen A. Douglas had also courted Mary Todd before she married Abraham Lincoln, before they competed for the Senate with their famous debates, before they both ran for President in 1860.
Both Martin Luther, father of the Reformation, and Desiderius Erasmus, the great Catholic humanist of the same period (albeit 20 years older than Luther), were Augustinian Canons, although they never met.
Today is of course Earth Day. I remember the first Earth Day, and how some on the political right tried to smear the event as a communist plot because it coincided with the birthday of Lenin. Besides being the birthday of Kerensky, it is the birthday as well of the following:
1707 Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones
1724 Immanuel Kant
1777 Henry Clay, "The Great Compromiser"
1876 O E Rölvaag, author of novel of immigrant experience Giants in the Earth
1891 Sergei Prokofiev
1904 J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb
1916 Yehudi Menunin, superb violinist
1950 Peter Frampton
Among the deaths on this day were
1950 Charles Houston, father of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's efforts at desegration
1984 Ansel Adams, superb photographer, especially of natural world
1989 Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party, shot to death
1993 Cesar Chavez
1994 Richard Milhous Nixon
and on that first Earth Day, Tom Seaver struck out 19 San Diego Padres, including 10 in a row, helping his catcher Jerry Grote record a record 20 putouts by a catcher.
Happy Earth Day.