9 August: Jesse Owens Day

Today is Jesse Owens Day. My best guess as to why, since it's not his birthday, is that it was on this date that he won his fourth gold medal at the 1936 Olympics, crushing Adolf Hitler’s myth of Aryan Supremacy.

Couldn't find any public domain pictures of Jesse Owens so here's
an Olympic race picture I took myself in 2012.

1. Jesse Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama on 12 September 1913 and was the youngest of Henry Cleveland Owens and Mary Emma Fitzgerald's ten children. They gave him the name James Cleveland Owens.
2. So where did the “Jesse” come from? The family used to call him by his initials, “J.C.”. When he was nine, the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio. When he went to enrol in school and the teacher asked his name, he said, “J.C.” This teacher misheard and thought he said “Jesse”. The name stuck.
3. He set three world records and equalled another before he went to the Olympics. On May 25th 1935, he was representing Ohio University at a university athletics event in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 45 minutes, he achieved world records in long jump, hurdles and sprinting. Nobody has ever equalled that, and it has been called "the greatest 45 minutes ever in sport".
4. He won 4 gold medals in the Berlin Olympics, one each in 100 meters, 200 meters, long jump and 4X100 meter relay. He won the fourth one because the team coach switched him into the relay team at the last minute. Jesse didn't want to do it at first but the coach said, "You'll do as you are told." It was 1984 before anyone else won four golds at a single games when Carl Lewis did it in Los Angeles.
5. His 8.13 m (26 ft 8 in) long jump record stood for 25 years, finally broken by Ralph Boston in 1960.
6. When asked the secret of his success, Owens said, "I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up."
7. The accepted account of the time was that Hitler snubbed Owens because he'd proved his Aryan supremacy theory wrong; that Hitler refused to congratulate any athletes at all after being told he must congratulate all or none of them. However, German journalist Siegfried Mischner claimed that Owens showed him a photograph of himself shaking Hitler's hand, a moment which had not been captured by anyone else, because it was taken from behind the honour stand. Owens showed Mischner the picture because he wanted to challenge the inaccuracies of the historical account. Sadly, no-one knows what has become of the photo.
8. If the photo did exist and Hitler really did shake his hand, it has to be said that Hitler treated him better than his own president did. While Owens was honoured in New York with a ticker tape parade, President Franklin D. Roosevelt never invited Jesse Owens to the White House. He didn't even send a message of congratulations because he was allegedly too busy. President Gerald Ford rectified that in 1976 when he awarded Owens the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Not to mention the fact that in Germany, black athletes stayed in the same hotels and used the same transport as white ones, but back in America, after the parade, Owens was not allowed to enter through the main doors of the Waldorf Astoria but had to use a freight elevator to get to his own reception.
9. In spite of his fame, he found it hard to find work after the Olympics, as an African-American man. He took on menial jobs like gas station attendant, playground janitor, and manager of a dry cleaning firm. He even filed for bankruptcy at one point and would race against race Horses for cash. Eventually, though, he was appointed as a US goodwill ambassador. He had a comfortable retirement, in which he could afford to own racehorses.
10. He started smoking when he was 32 and smoked a pack of cigarettes a day. He died in 1980, aged 66, from lung cancer.

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'We're not in Trinity anymore,' says Leonard Marx, quoting a line from an old Innovian  movie. The moon is different; the planes flying overhead are different. Nobody has any idea where they are or if it's possible to get home. 

In this strange new world, people from the highly technical Innovia and the less advanced Classica must co-operate in order to survive. In addition, travel through the inter-dimensional wormhole has given some people unusual and unexpected powers.

Innovia mourns the loss of its superhero, Power Blaster, last seen carrying a nuclear bomb to the upper atmosphere away from the inhabited Bird Island. They don't believe he could possibly have survived.  Power Blaster has survived, but is close to death and stranded in the new dimension. He is nursed back to health by a Classican woman, Elena. She has no idea who he is, only that she is falling in love with the handsome stranger.  

Shanna sets out to discover what happened to Nathan Tate, who didn't return from his hiking holiday, not knowing her life is about to be turned inside out and upside down. 

Meanwhile, Desi Troyes, the man responsible for the catastrophe, is at large on the new world, plotting how he can transfer his plans for world domination to the planet he now finds himself on - Earth. 

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