“Eldorado” by Edgar Allan Poe. Public Domain. (buy now)

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow
Fell, as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength
Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow—
‘Shadow,’ said he,
‘Where can it be—
This land of Eldorado?’

‘Over the Mountains
Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,’
The shade replied,—
‘If you seek for Eldorado!’

 It’s the birthday of novelist Richard Powers, (books by this author) born in Evanston, Illinois (1957). He’s the author of 10 novels, including the National Book Award winner The Echo Maker (2006), which also was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

He started college as a physics major, but switched to English and ended up graduating with a degree in Rhetoric and a concentration in math and physics. While he was working on a Master’s in Literature, he spent his free time at the university’s computer lab where he’d sit and learn complex computer programs to relax and blow off steam. He said that after he graduated in 1980, he realized that the most “saleable” job skill on his résumé was that he could program computers. And that’s just what he got a job doing.

Meanwhile, he devised an ambitious and wide-ranging reading program for himself, and after coming home from a day of typing commands into computers, he would read books about politics, theoretical physics, world history, sociology, and all sorts of fiction and poetry, which he called “random pleasures, all over the map.” He’d go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston every Saturday morning, because that’s when admission was free. One Saturday morning, he saw a photograph that stopped him dead in his tracks. The photograph was a black and white one of German farm boys, taken in 1914 by August Sander. Powers said, “All of my previous year’s random reading just consolidated and converged on this one moment, this image, which seemed to me to [be] the birth photograph of the twentieth century.” Within two days, he’d quit his job to devote himself to writing full-time his first novel. He worked on it for two years straight, a fictional tale about the boys in the photograph embedded with a story about a modern tech magazine editor intrigued by the photo. When the novel, entitled Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, was published in 1985, it was a huge success.

On this day in 1923, Checker Taxi put its first cab on the street. The boxy yellow cars became American cultural icons, and featured in movies like Taxi Driver (1976), as well as the TV series Taxi, The Simpsons, and Friends. Checker was the first cab company to hire African-American drivers, and it was also the first to require its drivers to pick up all fares, not just Caucasian ones. You could grab a ride in a Checker cab in many American cities, but they became closely identified with New York City.

The last of the roomy gas-guzzlers rolled off the company’s Michigan assembly line in 1982, and The New York Times published the headline, “Checker Taxi, 60, Dies of Bulk in Kalamazoo.” The cars became an increasingly rare sight on the streets of New York, and the last Checker cab was retired in 1999, with almost a million miles on its odometer.

It’s the birthday of Sir Paul McCartney, born James Paul McCartney in Liverpool, England, in 1942. His dad, Jim, was a cotton salesman who occasionally led “Jim Mac’s Jazz Band” on the trumpet and piano; his mum, Mary, was a midwife, often riding off on her bicycle to deliver babies at odd hours. Mary developed breast cancer and died from an embolism after a mastectomy in 1956, when Paul was 14. And when he heard the news, he said, “What will we do without her money?” which he always regretted. In 1957, at a church festival, he saw an older boy, something of a troublemaker, who was singing on stage with his skiffle band. The boy kept getting the words wrong and making up new lyrics as he went along. This was John Lennon, and Paul got a chance to impress him after the show with his mastery of “Twenty Flight Rock.” He later recalled: “I also knocked around on the backstage piano and that would have been ‘A Whole Lot of Shakin’’ by Jerry Lee. That’s when I remember John leaning over, contributing a deft right hand in the upper octaves and surprising me with his beery breath. It’s not that I was shocked, it’s just that I remember this particular detail.” Lennon later invited McCartney to join his band, the Quarrymen, and one of music’s great partnerships was born.

In addition to being the subject of hundreds of books, McCartney has produced a couple of his own: a volume of poetry (Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics, 1965-2001[2002]), and a children’s book, High in the Clouds (2005), about a young squirrel thrust into the adult world by the death of his mother. He’s been an art collector since the 1960s, and he took up painting in 1983 after getting to know Willem de Kooning. He’s written movie scores and classical music, too, including “Liverpool Oratorio” (1991), which was first performed at the Liverpool Cathedral, where McCartney had once failed an audition as a choirboy.

He’s been a vegetarian and supporter of animal rights since early in the 1970s, and wrote a letter to the carnivorous Dalai Lama in 2008 to convince him to go veggie, since eating animals is incompatible with the Buddhist tenet of nonviolence. “I found out he was not a vegetarian, so I wrote to him saying, ‘Forgive me for pointing this out, but if you eat animals then there is some suffering somewhere along the line,'” he said in an interview with Prospect magazine. “He replied saying that his doctors had told him he needed it, so I wrote back saying they were wrong.”

He was also the subject of the “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory. In September 1967, a man named Tom called in to a Detroit radio station to report a rumor, which had been circulating on college campuses for some time, that McCartney had been killed in a car accident. He’d died on November 9, 1966 — or so the rumor went — and the record company forced the Beatles to replace him with William Campbell, the winner of a look-alike contest. Fred LaBour, a student at the University of Michigan, turned the rumor into an article and embellished the tale even further. He claimed that Lennon, particularly upset at the cover-up of his friend’s death, had planted a host of clues in the band’s songs and album covers. Suddenly, everyone was an expert in obscure symbolism, and the rumor persisted, even after LaBour admitted his article was tongue-in-cheek. Any references to death or images of red or black were scrutinized, songs were played backward, and album covers held up to mirrors to reveal their secrets. Finally, Lifemagazine sent a photographer to track down McCartney in Scotland, and the rumors subsided after the magazine’s cover story featuring an annoyed, but very much alive, pop star. McCartney released an album in 1993, called “Paul is Live,” the cover of which poked fun at all the supposed clues.

 On this day in 1812, Congress declared war on Great Britain. The War of 1812, as it came to be known, was triggered in part by the Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France. Neither of the two squabbling nations wanted the United States to trade with its rival; Britain went a step further by seizing U.S. citizens off of American ships and impressing them into service with the Royal Navy. This didn’t sit well with Americans, who were irritated with the British for not withdrawing from territory around the Great Lakes, and for supporting the Indians in conflicts with settlers in the northeastern United States. President Jefferson first tried to put pressure on Great Britain through its pocketbook, with trade embargoes; these ended up devastating the American shipping economy without doing much to hurt either Britain or France. Finally, in 1812, President Madison signed a Declaration of War, which was narrowly approved by Congress. Unknown to the United States, Britain had agreed to repeal the offending trade orders two days before, but the news didn’t reach our shores for nearly a month.

Most of the land battles took place along the border with Canada, and Britain also set up a naval blockade off the U.S. coast. British forces more or less had the upper hand in 1814, and even occupied and burned Washington, D.C.; after Napoleon’s first surrender and exile to Elba, they could devote more resources to fighting the Americans, but after having been at war in Europe for more than 20 years, the British were tired of fighting. Peace was eventually negotiated through the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814. Again, the news was slow to arrive to American shores, and one of the most decisive battles of the war — in which Andrew Jackson and his army defended New Orleans against British forces — actually occurred after peace had been declared.

Today is the birthday of philanthropist and oil tycoon Henry Clay Folger, born in New York City (1857). After he graduated from college, he took a job as a clerk at an oil company. He learned the oil business, worked his way up, and became president of Standard Oil in 1911.

Folger loved Shakespeare, and studied the Bard in college. He married Emily Jordan, an intelligent woman who shared her husband’s enthusiasm for the poet. She wrote to a noted Shakespeare expert of the day, Horace Howard Furness, and asked him how she could go about educating herself. His advice to her was this: “[R]ead a play every day consecutively. At the end of the thirty-seven days you will be in a Shakespearian atmosphere that will astonish you with its novelty and its pleasure, and its profit. Don’t read a single note during the month.” She followed his advice and eventually earned a master’s degree from Vassar.

The Folgers began collecting Shakespeareana; over the years they amassed the largest collection of First Folio editions in the world. After World War I, Henry Clay Folger and his wife began looking for a location to build a Shakespeare library. They planned the project for nine years, and found the spot they were looking for in Washington, D.C., on Capitol Hill. Congress approved the purchase of the land in 1928, and the library’s cornerstone was laid in 1930. Unfortunately, Folger died soon afterward and never saw his plans come to fruition. The library opened on April 23 — Shakespeare’s birthday — in 1932. Emily Folger remained active in funding and administering the library until her death in 1936. It’s now run by trustees of Amherst College.

It was on this date in 1940 that Winston Churchill gave his famous “finest hour” speech. He had only been prime minister for about a month. Nazi Germany had conquered Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and had taken Paris. France had just asked Germany for an armistice agreement, and now Britain stood alone against Hitler and his war machine. Churchill addressed the House of Commons just before four p.m. and talked for about 40 minutes.

His speech concludes: “Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.'”