Remembering Valentine's Day.

First of all, Happy Valentine’s Day from all of us at the Howdygram! Hope you have something fun planned today. I’m going to do a heap of laundry, make homemade chicken barley soup and watch Here Comes Mr. Jordan with Robert Montgomery and Claude Rains. It’s a full life.

And now, here are some famous events that occured on February 14 in other years.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1929). Four of Al Capone’s goons disguised as police officers entered gangster Bugs Moran’s headquarters on North Clark Street in Chicago, lined seven of Moran’s henchmen against a wall and shot them to death with machine guns. This was the high spot of an ongoing gang war.

The Discovery of Penicillin (1929). Bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery led to one of the great developments of modern medicine. He left a plate of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered in his lab and later noticed that a blob of mold had fallen on the culture and killed most of the bacteria. He identified the mold as a strain similar to the kind found on old bread and named it “penicillin.” Personally, I would’ve named it “pumpernickel.”

California Begins Exporting Oranges (1886). The first trainload of oranges grown by southern California farmers leaves Los Angeles via the transcontinental railroad. This must have been quite a big hoo-hah in L.A., which was still a small town of 48,000 with no smog, no traffic and no nail salons. At least they had decent citrus fruit.

Thank you for reading this.