https://www.facebook.com/103934485968842/

Yesterday's Memories, 5054 U.S. 69, Greenville, TX (2026)

10/31/2025

Until his death in 1930, Richard Clarke rode through the streets of Deadwood as the living ghost of a legend. Each year, he donned his frontier hat, swung into the saddle, and became “Deadwood Dick”—the hero who had leapt from the pages of Edward L. Wheeler’s dime novels into the hearts of those who still longed for the wild days of the frontier. To the cheering crowds, Clarke wasn’t an actor but a relic of an age when justice was won with a six-shooter and courage was worth more than gold.
But long before Clarke’s parade rides, Deadwood Dick had already blazed across the imagination of a nation hungry for heroes. Born in 1877 from Wheeler’s pen, the character was a daring figure—a “cuss from Custer” who defended the helpless and defied villains with a smirk and a steady aim. When Wheeler died, other writers refused to let the legend fade, spinning tales of “Deadwood Dick Jr.” and keeping his name alive through pulp adventures and even a 1940 film serial. He became more than a man of fiction; he was an idea—freedom in boots and dust.
And soon, the name escaped the page entirely. Men across the West borrowed it as their own: Frank Palmer, the gambler whose cards and charm earned him the nickname; and Richard Bullock, the Cornish stagecoach guard whose quick draw made him feared and respected alike. But it was Clarke who turned myth into memory. When he took up the role in Deadwood’s annual parade, he didn’t just perform a story—he became its heartbeat. By the time he passed in 1930, no one could say where the real man ended and Deadwood Dick began.

10/31/2025

On October 18, 1970, Sergeant Sidney Allen Kurz of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, gave his life while serving with C Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Infantry Regiment, 11th Light Infantry Brigade in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam.
Drafted through the Selective Service, Sgt. Kurz entered the Army in 1970 and served as a Light Weapons Infantryman—a front-line soldier who bore the weight of combat face-to-face. His tour began on January 28, 1970, and less than nine months later, his life was taken by wounds from an enemy explosive device.
He was 22 years old.
Sgt. Kurz’s loss was not the end of his story. It lives on in the memory of his family, his brothers-in-arms, and every American who honors the quiet courage of those who served and never came home. He was one of the many who answered when his country called—and gave all that could be given.

10/31/2025

On February 20th, 2003, Joe walked into a Rhode Island nightclub with his girlfriend Karla, ready to enjoy a rock concert. He left as one of the few survivors of one of America’s deadliest fires.
A pyrotechnic malfunction ignited the venue into chaos. A hundred lives were lost. Over 200 were injured. The club was packed beyond capacity. As smoke thickened and panic surged, Joe shielded Karla with his leather vest and fought toward the exit. But the crowd collapsed. Bodies fell. Karla suffocated in his arms. Joe was buried alive—conscious, burning, listening as screams faded into silence.
Then a voice pierced the dark: “We’ve got one over here.”
Joe had suffered 3rd- and 4th-degree burns over 40% of his body. He lost his fingers, toes, left eye, and nearly his scalp. He spent a year in the hospital. 128 surgeries and counting. He calls them “tune-ups.” He will never stop healing.
But in 2007, at a burn survivors conference, Joe met Carrie—herself a burn victim from childhood. Two years later, they got engaged. And then came Hadley.
“My daughter’s so cute,” Joe says, eyes full of wonder. “I feel happy, nervous, fulfilled. Nobody knows what’s coming in an hour or two or five. I’m just determined to be the best dad I can be.”
And then—another miracle. A hand transplant. After years of pain and loss, Joe could finally feel his baby daughter’s soft hair.
From the ashes of tragedy, Joe built a new legacy: one of love, survival, and fatherhood. His story isn’t just heartwarming—it’s a testament to the human spirit’s refusal to surrender.
Facebook

10/31/2025

The Titanic's chief baker threw deck chairs into the ocean, stepped off the stern, floated for two hours in freezing water—and climbed the rescue ladder without help.April 14-15, 1912. RMS Titanic.When the "unsinkable" ship struck an iceberg at 11:40 PM, Charles Joughin—the 33-year-old chief baker—was asleep in his cabin. He was awakened by the collision and immediately understood something was terribly wrong.But Charles Joughin wasn't the panicking type. He was a baker—practical, methodical, used to working under pressure in a hot kitchen. And in the hours that followed, that calm, practical nature would save his life.While others scrambled for lifeboats, Charles went to work.He gathered his entire 13-man bakery staff and gave them orders: bring all the bread from the kitchens to the lifeboats. Passengers would need food. Women and children were being loaded into boats, sent out into the freezing Atlantic night with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They'd need provisions.So while chaos erupted on deck, Joughin and his bakers calmly ferried loaves of bread to the lifeboats, slipping extra rations in wherever they could.Then Charles began helping load women and children into the boats. When Lifeboat 10 was being loaded, someone tried to get Charles to get in. He refused. He gave his spot to someone else and kept working.As the ship continued to sink and lifeboats became scarce, Charles did something most people wouldn't think to do: he ran below decks—into a sinking ship—and started grabbing deck chairs.He threw about 50 deck chairs overboard.His reasoning was simple: if people ended up in the water, they'd need something to grab onto. A floating deck chair could be the difference between life and death. So while the Titanic was dying beneath his feet, Charles Joughin was thinking about people who weren't even in the water yet.By around 2:00 AM, it was clear the ship was doomed. The bow was underwater. The stern was rising. There were no lifeboats left.Charles went to his cabin and had a drink.Actually, according to his later testimony, he had several drinks—whiskey, to be specific. Then he returned to the deck.At approximately 2:15 AM, Charles made his way to the stern as the ship began its final plunge. He grabbed the rail and held on as the great vessel tilted more and more vertical, like a dying whale standing on its tail.At 2:20 AM, the Titanic broke apart and sank.Charles Joughin, standing at the very stern, became the last person to leave the Titanic.But he didn't jump. He didn't scream. He didn't panic.He simply stepped off—as casually as stepping off a curb.In his own words from the official inquiries: "I was up on deck, and I suddenly felt her going. I just stepped off the edge. I didn't even get my head wet."Think about that. While 1,500 people screamed and drowned and froze, Charles Joughin stepped off a sinking ship like he was getting off a bus.And then he floated.The water temperature was 28°F (-2°C)—cold enough to kill most people in 15 to 30 minutes from hypothermia. People were dying all around him, their screams filling the night until, one by one, they went silent.Charles Joughin floated for about two hours.He was wearing a life vest, which kept him afloat. He treaded water minimally, conserving energy. He stayed calm—whether from his natural temperament, the whiskey, or sheer survival instinct, he didn't panic.Some people have speculated that the alcohol helped him survive—that it dilated his blood vessels and made him feel warmer, or that it kept him calm. Medically, this is questionable—alcohol actually increases heat loss and generally decreases survival in cold water.But something worked. Charles Joughin survived where nearly everyone else in the water died.Eventually, through the darkness, he found Collapsible B—one of the ship's emergency boats that had floated off the deck upside down. About 30 men were standing or kneeling on its overturned hull, including Second Officer Charles Lightoller, the most senior officer to survive.Charles tried to climb on. There was no room. The boat was already overcrowded and barely floating. If he climbed aboard, it might capsize and kill everyone.So Charles Joughin clung to the side.For possibly another hour, he held onto the edge of that overturned boat, still in the freezing water, while the men on top tried to stay balanced. Lightoller later testified that Joughin "hung on like grim death" but never tried to pull himself up at the risk of others.Finally, around 4:00 AM or later, Lifeboat 12 came by and pulled survivors from Collapsible B—including Charles Joughin.He'd been in the water for approximately two to two-and-a-half hours—far longer than should have been survivable.When the rescue ship RMS Carpathia arrived around 4:00-8:00 AM, survivors were hauled up on rope ladders. Many were too weak or frozen to climb and had to be lifted in slings.Charles Joughin climbed the ladder on his own.Soaking wet. Freezing cold. After hours in water that killed nearly everyone else.He walked onto the Carpathia under his own power, as if he'd just had a bad swim.You'd think after surviving the Titanic, Charles Joughin would retire from sea life.He did not.Charles returned to work on the RMS Olympic—the Titanic's sister ship—where he continued as a baker. He sailed for years on the Olympic without incident.Then came World War I.Charles served as a baker on the SS Congress, a transport ship. In 1917, while the Congress was in harbor, a fire broke out. The ship had to be abandoned.This time, Charles Joughin got in the lifeboat.When asked about this later, he reportedly said something to the effect of: "I figured I'd already had my turn in the water."After the war, Charles continued working at sea and eventually settled in Paterson, New Jersey, where he lived quietly until his death in 1956 at age 78.He gave testimony at both the U.S. Senate inquiry and the British Wreck Commissioner's inquiry into the Titanic disaster. His accounts were detailed, consistent, and remarkably matter-of-fact. He never claimed to be a hero. He just described what he did.But what he did was extraordinary:

10/31/2025

When death came for him in 1898, it found Jim Baker exactly where he belonged—alone in his log cabin at the foot of the mountains that bore his name, his faithful Sharps rifle leaning nearby, and the endless Wyoming wind whispering through the pines. He had outlived wars, wild beasts, and the unforgiving frontier itself, his body scarred and his spirit unbroken. To the end, Baker remained a man of legend—a red-headed scout with stories so vast they seemed carved from the land itself. Both Wyoming and Colorado would later claim him as their own, for he had built the first cabins, scouted the wildest trails, and stood as the living heart of the untamed West.
But Jim Baker’s story was not one of comfort—it was forged in blood, fire, and love found and lost. Decades earlier, he had faced the fury of the plains near the Little Snake River, where a rising dust cloud became the omen of battle. Trappers and warriors collided in a storm of smoke and arrows, and when the fighting ended, the ground itself seemed to remember their names. Baker led the few survivors through the silence that followed, his courage marking him as one of the frontier’s rarest breeds. Later, fate spun him into the arms of Marina, a Shoshone chief’s daughter he rescued from her captors. She gave him a bear-claw necklace—a token of bravery—and for a brief moment, his wild heart knew peace. But tragedy found him again, and when Marina died, Baker returned to the wilderness, where grief and solitude became his constant trail companions.
The years that followed only deepened his legend. He guided lost soldiers through snowbound wilderness, where without him they would have frozen in nameless valleys. He helped uncover gold where Denver now stands, ferried wagons across raging rivers, and built his final home—half fortress, half sanctuary—in the Little Snake River Valley. As the frontier faded and railroads replaced mule trails, Baker grew old but never tame. When the last light flickered in his cabin that May evening, the West itself seemed to pause, mourning a man who had lived its truest story. Today, his cabin still stands, weathered but proud, a relic of the time when men like Jim Baker carved their legends out of danger, love, and endless sky.

10/31/2025

Gilda Radner: The Woman Who Made America Laugh — and Feel Seen
There was something unmistakable about Gilda Radner’s laugh — a sound that filled a room before she even spoke.
Born in Detroit in 1946, Gilda became one of the seven original cast members of Saturday Night Live in 1975, helping define a new kind of television — raw, fearless, and wildly human.
Her comedy was rooted in vulnerability. Characters like Roseanne Roseannadanna, Emily Litella, and Lisa Loopner weren’t just sketches — they were reflections of real people she’d grown up watching, from nosy neighbors to earnest misfits trying a little too hard. “Comedy,” Gilda once said, “is when you can be yourself and the audience recognizes themselves in you.”
She drew inspiration from her childhood heroes — Lucille Ball, Charlie Chaplin, and Sid Caesar — but brought something uniquely her own: emotional intelligence. Her humor was as warm as it was absurd. Even at her silliest, she made people care.
Offstage, Gilda radiated the same energy. Her friend Laraine Newman recalled that “she made you feel like the funniest person in the room — even when she was the one everyone came to see.”
When illness came, she faced it with the same unflinching humor. “Having cancer gave me membership in an elite club I’d rather not belong to,” she wrote — still finding laughter in the hardest truth.
Her passing in 1989 left a silence in comedy that’s never quite been filled. But her light continues through Gilda’s Club, the support network founded in her honor — a place where laughter is still healing people, every day.
Gilda once said: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”
In comedy and in life, she found grace in imperfection — and made millions of us laugh along the way.

10/30/2025

They buried their mother beneath a sun that showed no mercy. It was 1879, out on the Texas frontier, where the earth was hard as stone and grief came with dust in the lungs. May and Evelyn Harper had no one left — just a single rifle, a dying mule, and a home stripped bare by drought. They dug the grave with blistered hands, the dry soil cracking beneath each strike of the shovel. When the last handful of dirt fell, May whispered a prayer, and Evelyn swore no one would take what little they had left.
That night, the wind turned mean. Raiders rode through the valley — men who thought two young women alone would be easy prey. The sisters doused the lamp, pressed their backs to the cabin wall, and waited. When the door splintered, May fired first. The recoil slammed her shoulder, but she didn’t stop. Evelyn reloaded in silence, her hands steady even as bullets ripped through the dark. The fight lasted minutes, maybe seconds — long enough for courage to prove itself real.
When dawn broke, smoke curled from the barrel of their father’s old rifle, and the valley lay still again. The sisters stood side by side, blood on their skirts, the graves of their mother and their enemies cooling in the same sun. Folks later said they were too young, too small, too soft to survive out there. But Dust Valley never forgot their names — two sisters who faced the darkness and refused to bow.

10/30/2025

The Woman Who Saved 10,000 Children — and Was Forgotten by History
“She wasn’t a soldier — yet she saved 10,000 children from the horrors of war. Then history forgot her name.”
In a time when fear ruled Europe and compassion was considered weakness, one woman quietly rewrote what courage meant.
Her name was Diana Budisavljević — an Austrian-born nurse and mother living in Zagreb during World War II. When she learned that thousands of Serbian women and children were being held in concentration camps by the fascist Ustaše regime, she faced an impossible choice: stay silent or risk everything.
Diana chose humanity.
With no military power, no political backing, and no guarantee of survival, she began what became known as “The Action of Diana Budisavljević.” She gathered volunteers, begged for supplies, and somehow convinced authorities to let her deliver food and medicine into some of the most feared camps — Stara Gradiška, Jasenovac, and others.
But she didn’t stop there.
Every time she left a camp, she carried names — handwritten lists of children who might still have families somewhere. Those papers became her lifeline, a fragile promise that the children would not vanish into history.
Through unimaginable danger, Diana and her small network managed to rescue more than 10,000 children, finding them shelter, medical care, and, when possible, reuniting them with their families.
When the war ended, she returned to quiet life. Her heroism was forgotten for decades — buried under politics and indifference. She never asked for thanks. She never told her story.
It wasn’t until her diaries were discovered in the late 1970s that the world began to understand the scale of what she had done.
Diana Budisavljević didn’t wear a uniform. She never carried a weapon. But she saved more lives than most armies — proving that one person’s compassion can be stronger than an entire regime’s cruelty.
💬 “She didn’t fight for power. She fought for children — and won.”

10/30/2025

He carved her name with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. It was 1876, out on the Colorado plains, where the wind carried dust and sorrow in equal measure. Elijah Hunt buried his wife at sunrise beneath a cedar that grew near the edge of his land. She’d died giving birth to their daughter, a tiny thing with her mother’s eyes and his will to live. When the grave was filled, Elijah cut a branch from that same tree, shaping it into a cross and setting it firm in the hard earth — a promise carved in wood and grief.
The town was miles away, and the house he’d built stood lonely against the horizon. Each day, Elijah worked the soil, cooked, washed, and rocked his daughter through the long prairie nights. He’d hum the hymns his wife once sang, the same ones that used to fill their home with warmth. When storms rolled in, he’d sit by the window, whispering her name into the thunder. The neighbors said he spoke to ghosts, but Elijah knew better — he was keeping her close, reminding her that he hadn’t quit, that he was still standing.
Years passed, and the little girl grew into the heart of his world. Every morning, they’d walk to that cedar grave, her small hand tucked in his, and he’d whisper, “We’re doing fine.” The house aged, the land changed, but his faith never did. Elijah Hunt didn’t chase fortune or company; he built a life out of love, loss, and endurance. And though the plains could be cruel, they bore witness to a father’s quiet prayer — not for himself, but for the daughter who gave him reason to keep living.

10/30/2025

He was twelve when the raiders came, tearing through Dust Creek in the summer of 1881, leaving smoke and silence behind. Jonah Carter had hidden his father’s gun beneath the floorboards, his hands shaking as boots thudded outside. When the door burst open, he fired once — a single shot that split the air and sent grown men running. Alone in the cabin, the boy stood trembling, the echo of the gun fading into the Wyoming wind.
For three days he lived on what was left — a few scraps of jerky, a pail of water, and a will hardened by fear. The land was merciless, the nights colder than any child deserved, yet Jonah kept the fire lit and the wolves at bay. He buried his father beneath a cottonwood and swore he’d never run from anything again.
When a passing rancher found him, Jonah’s face was streaked with ash, his voice quiet but steady. They called him “the son of Dust Creek,” a boy who’d faced death and didn’t blink. And it makes you wonder — when the world turns against you, and no one’s left to stand beside you — would you have pulled the trigger?

10/30/2025

Hollywood taught us the Wild West was built by cowboys in hats—but some of the toughest frontier legends wore skirts and carried both a rifle and a mail bag.
When we picture the American frontier, we see the same images: dusty trails, cattle drives, men in wide-brimmed hats riding into crimson sunsets. Hollywood built an entire mythology around the cowboy—the rugged individual taming a wild land.
But that story is incomplete. And it erases some of the bravest people who actually built the West.
Because while the world was busy romanticizing white cowboys, Black women were doing the same backbreaking work—herding cattle across dangerous terrain, breaking wild horses, branding livestock, running homesteads, and staring down everything the frontier could throw at them.
They were daughters of formerly enslaved people who headed West seeking freedom, opportunity, and land they could finally call their own. They faced double the prejudice—racism and sexism—yet they carved out lives of remarkable independence and courage.
One name towers above the rest: Mary Fields.
Standing over six feet tall with a pistol on her hip and a rifle across her lap, Mary became one of the first Black women to carry mail for the U.S. Postal Service in Montana Territory. She was nearly 60 years old when she took the job—an age when most people were slowing down.
Not Mary.
She drove a stagecoach through blizzards that would freeze a man's breath in his throat. She forded icy rivers that could flip a wagon in seconds. She faced down wolves, bears, and bandits who thought an older Black woman would be easy prey.
They learned otherwise.
Mary never missed a delivery. When her stagecoach overturned in a snowstorm, she'd dig out the mail, strap it to her back, and walk miles through waist-deep snow to deliver it on time. When bandits approached, her reputation preceded her—most turned around when they realized who they were facing.
The people of Cascade, Montana, called her "Stagecoach Mary" and "Black Mary." Saloons that normally barred women made an exception for her. The mayor gave her permission to drink in any establishment in town—a privilege extended to almost no other woman, Black or white. She became such a beloved figure that when her house burned down, the entire town helped rebuild it.
But Mary Fields wasn't alone in writing this hidden history.
Across the frontier, Black women were running cattle operations, managing ranches, competing in rodeos, and proving every day that the West didn't belong to any single race or gender—it belonged to whoever was tough enough to survive it.
They trained horses with hands as skilled as any cowboy. They rode fence lines from dawn to dusk. They delivered calves in the middle of the night and defended their homesteads from claim jumpers and thieves. They built businesses, raised families, and created communities in places where civilization was still just a rumor.

10/30/2025

A Black inventor from Suriname solved the biggest problem in shoemaking—and made shoes affordable for millions. You've never heard of him.
In the late 1800s, shoes were a luxury most people couldn't afford.
They were expensive—costing weeks of wages for a working-class family. They took days to make, with each pair being crafted entirely by hand by skilled artisans. And there was one step in the process that was so difficult, so labor-intensive, that it created a bottleneck in the entire shoe industry:
"Lasting"—attaching the upper part of the shoe to the sole.
This step required extraordinary skill. A master "laster" could produce about 50 pairs of shoes per day—and they were paid well for this specialized work because no one had figured out how to mechanize it. Inventors had tried for decades to create a lasting machine, but the process was too complex, too delicate. Everyone said it couldn't be done.
Then came Jan Ernst Matzeliger.
Matzeliger was born on September 15, 1852, in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana (now Suriname). His father was a Dutch engineer, his mother was a Black Surinamese woman. In the colonial society of Suriname, his mixed-race background placed him in a complicated social position.
As a young man, he worked as an apprentice in machine shops, learning mechanics and engineering. At age 19, he left Suriname and spent two years working on ships, eventually landing in the United States in 1873 at age 20 or 21.
He settled in Lynn, Massachusetts—which was, at the time, the shoe capital of the world. Lynn's factories produced millions of pairs of shoes annually, and the entire city's economy revolved around footwear.
Matzeliger found work in a shoe factory, and it was there that he saw the problem: the lasting process was the bottleneck preventing mass production.
Skilled lasters were in high demand, commanding high wages. Shoe manufacturers were limited by how many skilled workers they could employ. And despite decades of attempts, no one had successfully mechanized the lasting process.
Matzeliger decided to solve it.
There was just one problem: he barely spoke English. He'd arrived speaking Dutch and Portuguese. He taught himself English while working long factory shifts. At night, he taught himself mechanical drawing and engineering through books and observation.
And he started designing a lasting machine.
For six years (approximately 1877-1883), Matzeliger worked on his invention—often late into the night, after 10-hour factory shifts. He built model after model, testing, failing, refining. He faced skepticism from everyone. Investors thought it was impossible. Fellow workers doubted him. As a Black man in 1880s America, he faced constant racism and discrimination that made securing funding and support even harder.
But on March 20, 1883, Jan Ernst Matzeliger received Patent No. 274,207 for his lasting machine.
And it worked.
Matzeliger's machine could do the work of multiple skilled lasters—and do it faster and more consistently.
The exact productivity increase varied, but estimates suggest his machine could produce 150 to 700 pairs of shoes per day, depending on the model and conditions. This was three to fourteen times faster than the best hand-lasters.
The impact was immediate and revolutionary:
Shoe prices dropped by about 50%. What had been a luxury item became affordable for working-class families. For the first time, durable, well-made footwear was accessible to ordinary Americans.
Think about what that meant: children could have shoes that fit properly. Workers could have footwear that protected their feet. People didn't have to choose between buying shoes and buying food.
Jan Ernst Matzeliger's invention changed daily life for millions of people.
But success came at a cost.
To get his invention into production, Matzeliger had to sell controlling interest in his patent to investors. He received some payment and stock, but he never fully benefited financially from his revolutionary invention. The lasting machine eventually became part of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, which dominated the industry for decades—making fortunes for its owners.
Matzeliger himself continued working, refining his machine, developing improvements. But the long hours, the years of stress, and the poor working conditions took their toll.
He contracted tuberculosis—a disease that was often fatal in that era, particularly for people without access to proper medical care or rest.
On August 24, 1889, Jan Ernst Matzeliger died. He was 37 years old.
He'd lived just six years after patenting his invention. He died before he could see the full impact of his work—before his machine became standard in factories worldwide, before shoe manufacturing was transformed completely, before his invention helped create the modern footwear industry.

Yesterday's Memories

10/31/2025

10/31/2025

10/31/2025

10/31/2025

10/31/2025

10/31/2025

10/30/2025

10/30/2025

10/30/2025

10/30/2025

10/30/2025

10/30/2025

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category