July 28, 1900 was shaping up to be an average summer day for lunch wagon owner and Danish immigrant Louis Lassen, who was serving sandwiches and other hot meals to factory workers in New Haven during their lunch breaks. Suddenly, a local businessman, Gary Widmore, rushed up to Lassen’s wagon and desperately asked for…
Tag: new haven
July 25: New Haven-born Duo Tops the Charts with “an Oldie But a Goodie”
Today in 1970, an iconic pop music duo consisting of a New Haven-born brother and sister, experienced the first major breakthrough of their musical careers. They did so with a song that had previously been recorded by a host of other performers. The pair achieved “overnight stardom” (after a decade of effort) with their…
June 16: The Liberty Bell’s Whirlwind Tour of Connecticut
Today in 1903, just after 6:00 p.m., one of the most iconic symbols of American freedom — the Liberty Bell — arrived in Connecticut. Over the next 24 hours, it would visit five Connecticut cities and towns, giving tens of thousands of Connecticans a chance to see and be seen in its presence, before…
June 15 Connecticut’s First Television Station
Today in 1948, Connecticut’s first television station WNHC-TV, Channel 6 (now WTNH Channel 8) began broadcasting in New Haven. The introduction of this new media to Connecticut was the brainchild of Aldo DeDomenicis, an Italian pasta-wholesaler who had previously found success buying radio time on Italian programs and selling that time as radio ads…
June 11: UCONN’s 1st Black Basketball Player
Harrison “Honey” Fitch, arrived on the University of Connecticut (then Connecticut State College) in the fall of 1932 and he made a solid impression, fast. Fitch, the first Black basketball player for the University of Connecticut (then Connecticut State College) and at the time the only Black student, had already earned the nickname “Honey”…
June 7: A Landmark Supreme Court Case Guarantees Your Right to Privacy —and Birth Control
The introduction of the birth control pill in 1960 launched a sexual revolution that posed a fundamental challenge to long-standing federal and state “morality laws.” These Victorian era laws had been enacted to stop the sale or distribution of materials intended for “immoral uses,” such as having sex merely for enjoyment, or limiting family…
May 14: A Very Busy — and Unusually Talented — Minister
What didn’t he do? Today in 1752, Timothy Dwight IV, minister, scholar, theologian, war chaplain, songwriter, political leader, travel writer, college president, and one of a group of early American poets and writers known as the Hartford Wits, was born. The eldest of 13 children born into an influential family in Massachusetts, Dwight graduated…
May 4: Landscape Art for an Industrializing Country
Today in 1826, iconic American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church was born in Hartford. The internationally famed artist’s Connecticut roots ran deep: he was a direct descendant of one of the original English Puritans who settled Hartford with Rev. Thomas Hooker. His father, a prominent silversmith, also became a director of Hartford’s Aetna Insurance…
May 2: The Baby Boomer’s Baby Doctor
Most people reading this story were either raised, or raised their own children, following advice they found written in a book by pediatrician Benjamin Spock, who was born in New Haven today in 1903. The most influential doctor of the Baby Boomer generation and a graduate of Yale University and Columbia University’s College of…
April 25: Oliver Winchester Aims for Success in The Rifle Industry.
In early 1857, businessman Oliver Winchester bought controlling interest in a struggling Connecticut firearms company from two inventors named Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson. With access to machine tools, raw materials, and a number of valuable patents — especially rights to the Henry Repeating Rifle, the world’s first multiple-round-firing longarm — Winchester formed the…
April 24: New Haven Founded as a “New Jerusalem”
In the 1630s, John Davenport, like many Puritan ministers preaching in cosmopolitan and decadent London, yearned to create a “New Jerusalem.” This “heavenly city” would be located in a place free from the religious persecution and political pressures Puritans experienced in England. Its settlers would all live pure and godly lives. Arriving in the…
April 4: Saving the Elm City’s Elm Trees
Today in 1909, the last in a series of “campaign documents” aimed at mobilizing citizens to save the trees that had given New Haven its reputation as one of the world’s most beautiful cities was published in the New Haven Sunday Union. Decades before the 1936 arrival of the devastating Dutch elm disease,…