Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

How do you find the old articles? Is there a site you use?

I assume you mean the old newspaper articles. In that case I use the Library of Congress and Archive.org. I sometimes borrow a friend's account and use Newspapers site. Note newspapers archived at Library of Congress only go to 12/31/1963. Beyond that it's old blog sites, bibliographies on Wiki and I follow a few people that spend their life digging up old obscure stuff.

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December 8, 1915: John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields" appears anonymously in "Punch" London magazine.



'In Flanders Field' read by Anthony Davies (Video)


"This is astounding." - J. Edgar Hoover reacting to Otto Kuehn's extradition to Germany following World War II. Kuehn was a Nazi spy who was the only person tried and convicted for the bombing of Pearl Harbor.


Bernard Julius Otto Kuehn Part 04 (pg 2)

FBI file on Bernard Julius Otto Kuehn Part 02 (pg 77-79)

Shocker: In 1994 Christine Kuehn received a letter that revealed a family history from which her father had tried to shield her: Christine's grandfather, Otto, was a Nazi spy who was the only person tried and convicted for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. David Martin talks with Kuehn about her German family conducting World War II-era espionage, a tale she recounts in her new book, "Family of Spies."

CBS Sunday Morning news clip that aired yesterday, "Family of Spies": Christine Kuehn discovers her grandfather's Nazi past...




In 1935, Goebbels offered Kuehn a job working for Japanese intelligence in Hawaii; he accepted and moved his family to Honolulu on August 15, 1935. The family included Dr. Kühn, 41 years old; his wife, Friedel; a daughter, Susie Ruth (at 17, she was the former mistress of Goebbels); and her half-brother, Hans Joachim. Goebbels sent the family to Hawaii because he discovered Ruth was half Jewish. Since all four members of the family were involved in the espionage they were dubbed the "8 eyed spy".

The family lived the good life on Japanese pay, but Bernard Kuehn soon came to the attention of the FBI as a possible suspect because of his Nazi connections and lack of any source of income. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was arrested on Dec 8th and on February 21, 1942, he was sentenced by a military commission to be executed by firing squad as a spy. After volunteering valuable information about the Japanese and German spy networks, his sentence was commuted to 50 years in prison with hard labor at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. On June 6, 1946, Kuehn's sentence was further commuted so he could be deported. He was confined at Ellis Island until July 29, 1948. On December 3, 1948, Kuehn was voluntarily deported to Buenos Aires, Argentina. He returned to Germany in 1955, where he died from cancer in 1956, at the age of 61. Friedel Kuehn and Susie Kuehn were both interned for the remainder of the war, and deported to Germany in 1945.

Kuehn family of Spies (Wiki, sourced from the FBI files)


The unincorporated township of Paradise City, NV was formed on Dec 8, 1950 mostly to prevent annexation of the Las Vegas Strip by the City of Las Vegas. As most know, the Las Vegas Strip is not technically in Las Vegas. However, the Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT) removed SR 589 from its maintenance logs in 2019 and had begun the process of turning ownership of the strip over to the City of Las Vegas and Clark County.




Dec 8, 1957: The A Day Called X (IMDB) is a dramatized CBS documentary film set in Portland, Oregon, in which the entire city is evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear attack after Soviet bombers had been detected by radar stations to the north; it details the activation of the city’s civil defense protocols and leads up to the moment before the attack (the ending is left intentionally unknown). It was filmed in September 1957 and aired December 8th of that year, narrated by Glenn Ford.


The operations were run from the Kelly Butte Bunker, which was the Civil Defense emergency operations center at that time. Apart from presenter/narrator, none of the people shown are actors. They are locals of Portland shown in their real jobs, including Mayor Terry Schrunk.

A Day Called X (1957 film)

The $670,000 Kelly Butte Civil Defense Shelter was authorized by Portland voters in 1952 and opened to great fanfare in 1956. Doomsday planning was hot after the Soviet Union acquired the hydrogen bomb and Portland’s civil defense director, Jack Lowe, was determined to “go first class or not at all.” The resulting bunker had stations set up for every branch of local government, heads of utilities, hospitals, and a military liaison. Thirty feet beneath the butte, the cave dwellers were protected by reinforced concrete laid on a shock absorbing base. Lowe estimated it could withstand a 20-kiloton explosion.

Kelly Butte Civil Defense Center

Then we have the Clyde Lewis version...


He is (or was) quite the interesting conspiracy podcast character on his Ground Zero Plus Radio out of Portland, OR.


Dec 8, 1962: President John F. Kennedy became the only sitting US President to visit the Nevada Test Site northwest of Las Vegas. JFK rested tonight at Bing Crosby's desert hideout after a strenuous two-day tour of defense & atomic rocket centers at the Nevada Test Site & Los Alamos.




Dec 8, 1962: "... And America Is Plagued by Foot-IN-Mouth Disease!"

Dean Acheson said that Great Britain "has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. Adding that the British "attempt" to play a separate power role "is just about played out."

Meanwhile, "With monumental tastelessness, the witless "movie," "romance" and "confession" magazines have gone all-out in making a "cover girl" of Mrs. John F. Kennedy."




Spreading a little holiday cheer in 1976 at Caesars Las Vegas is Ruth Eppenger D'Hondt. One of the first African American cocktail waitresses on the Strip, she worked at Caesars for over 26 years. Imagine the secrets she must have learned! Assume she was one tough woman to have survived that long on that strip.




December 8, 1978: "The Deer Hunter", directed by Michael Cimino and starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep, premieres in Los Angeles (Academy Awards Best Picture 1979).


The wedding was filmed at St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox Church - 733 Starkweather Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio and it's still there.


Dec 8, 1982: nuclear freeze activist Norman Mayer held the Washington Monument hostage by falsely claiming that he had a 1,000 pounds of dynamite. Mayer was shot dead by U.S. Park Police when he attempted to drive off in his van. His ashes interred in Arlington National Cemetery.



The Norman Mayer story thou shall not copy:

"An Edge in My Voice, Installment 55" copyright 1982, 1985 by The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

This work appears online via special arrangement with the the author, Harlan Ellison. You can thank him by visiting the HERC Store. Copying or distributing any part of this piece for personal use, commercial use, or any other use you can come up with is strictly forbidden. Breaking this rule will result in the author coming down on you like the proverbial Hand of God or, barring the author finding out, your being forced to spend 15,000 years in Purgatory watching the same three episodes of "Perfect Strangers".

An Edge in My Voice

Harlan Ellison, a Jewish atheist died back in 2018, but I'm not taking any chances. His literary estate is currently executed by Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski.

As a side note, I read a few of sources that stated this was the longest recorded police sniper killing in U.S. history at about 480 yards. And also, it is the earliest recorded use of night vision scopes by police snipers.

Ghosts of DC - Three Things That Happened at the Washington Monument

Norman Mayer trivia: He was responsible for a turning point in the life and career of political strategist/journalist George Stephanopoulos. Then 21-year-old intern at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Stephanopoulos writes about the experience in his memoir "All Too Human" (1999).