View From the Shore

Who was Millard Kaufman, one may ask? Kaufman was a screen writer beginning in the late 1940s and into 1970s and was the co-creator of Mr. Magoo.

Born March 12, 1917, in Baltimore, Kaufman spent two years as a merchant seaman after high school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1939. After graduation he moved to New York City and worked as a newspaperman.

In 1942 he enlisted in the marines and served on Guadalcanal, landed at Guam with the 1st Marine Brigade (Provisional) then participated in Okinawa with the 6th Marine Division. While serving in the Pacific, Kaufman was stricken with malaria and dengue fever. He returned to New York only to discover he couldn’t tolerate the climate changes. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles.

In 1949, Kaufman wrote the screenplay for the short film Ragtime Bear, the first appearance of Mr. Magoo. He followed this up in 1950 with another Mr. Magoo film, Punchy de Leon. Quincy Magoo is a wealthy, short-statured retiree who gets into a series of sticky situations as a result of his nearsightedness.

Kaufman shared an agent with Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo, also a screenwriter, was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo co-wrote the screenplay for Gun Crazy, but it was Millard Kaufman’s name that was on the credits.\

A writer for most of his life it wasn’t until he was 90 that Kaufman published his first novel. Bowl of Cherries was released in October 2007. A second novel, Misadventure, was published in April 2010 a few weeks after his death. He died two days after his birthday at the age of 92.

The telegraph was invented by Samuel Morse in 1835 and it was Alexander Graham Bell’s intention to improve on the telegraph that lead to his invention of the telephone. It was on March 10, 1876 when Bell in one room and his assistant Thomas Watson in another when he shouted the words, “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you” into the transmitter. Watson was able to hear what was said and reported back to Bell the exact words. With this the first working telephone was born.

Bell’s experiments with the telegraph was an attempt to transmit multiple messages over the same wire at the same time. He felt that this could be done if each signal would have it’s own different pitch.

On February 14, 1876, Bell and Elisha Gray with his Western Electric Manufacturing Company, submitted their patients to the United States Patient Office in Washington DC. Bell’s paperwork with application fee was completed first, Gray’s caveat was entered first, but his filing fee was entered after Bell’s. On March 7, 1876, three days before the successful experiment, Bell received Patent Number 174,465.

Gray would file lawsuits challenging Bell’s patent. He would lose them all, mainly because it was determined that he failed to take actions to complete his caveat until others had demonstrated a working unit. Gray still wasn’t left in the dark since he did receive a patent for the telautograph, a way to transmit handwriting through telegraph systems. It can be called the first fax machine\

The Bell Telephone Company was created in 1877 and by 1886, 10 years after the first voice transmission, over 150,000 people in the United States owned telephones.

There really isn’t a sole inventor of the telephone. Bell’s ideas closely resembled Gray’s. The telephone’s transmitter was greatly improved when Edison’s carbon microphone was introduced. Not to mention that the entire idea of the telephone is really just an improvement and enhancement of Morse’s telegraph.

It was on February 28, 1827 that the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad Company was incorporated in Maryland, A week later on March 8th the incorporation was confirmed by Virginia. By the 24th of April, the company’s first Board of Directors had been elected with Philip E. Thomas as its first President.

Construction began on July 4, 1828 and nearly two years later on May 24, 1830, the first section, from Baltimore to the town of Ellicott’s Mills (now called Ellicott City) opened. The original terminus in Ellicott City is the oldest surviving station in America and now is a museum where there is a 40-foot model train layout showing the original thirteen miles of track.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the Maryland signers of the Declaration of Independence, laid the cornerstone of the Railway. The Carrollton Viaduct, the B&O’s first bridge and the world”s oldest railroad bridge still in use, was named for him.

The railroad was built to link the port of Baltimore in Maryland to the Ohio River at Wheeling and Parkersburg, Virginia, now West Virginia. The Baltimore harbor and the Ohio River were connected on the day before Christmas in 1852 when the line reached Wheeling.

On the same day as the groundbreaking for the B&O Railroad, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company broke ground for the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Canal. John Adams attended that groundbreaking. The 185 mile canal runs along the Potomac River from Alexandria, Virginia to Cumberland, Maryland.

Samuel Morse used the B&O Railroad right of way to send the first telegraph from the Capitol in Washington DC to Baltimore in 1844. The State of Maryland in 1833 chartered this spur of the railroad to Washington because of a demand for rail transportation between there and Baltimore.

On March 29, 1848 Niagara Falls stopped. For thirty hours the water of the falls ran at a trickle then just as suddenly as they stopped they started again. High winds caused the ice fields of Lake Erie to move the millions of tons of ice towards the source of the river. The ice blocked the channel until a change in the forces of nature allowed the water to flow again.

Cecil County, Maryland located at the headwaters of the Chesapeake Bay is the only county that has both an eastern and a western border on the Chesapeake Bay.

Even though Los Angeles is only a few miles from the Pacific Ocean and the State of Nevada is East of California, The City of Reno, Nevada is actually further west than Los Angeles. Nevada’s western border angles east as does Southern California.

The Four Corner point where the states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah meet, the only such point, is located within the Navajo Nation and Ute Mountain Tribal Lands. The point is marked by the Four Corner Monument at 36° 59′ 56.32″ N, 109° 2′ 42.62″ W.

The state of California has both the lowest point, Death Valley at 281 feet below sea level and highest point, Mount Whitney at 14,505 feet in the contiguous United States. Mount McKinley in Alaska at 20,320 feet is the highest point in the United States.

The Statue of Liberty sits on Liberty Island (formally Bedloe’s Island) which lies in the New Jersey waters of the New York Bay. However due to an agreement between New Jersey and New York dating from 1664 and reaffirmed in 1834 as part of the charter that created New Jersey, it is located in New York. The island in total is controlled and managed by the United States Park Service.