Today In History... (Two items)

...June 5, 1752…Benjamin Franklin flew a kite for the first time to demonstrate that lightning was a form of electricity.

In September of 1971, I had a date to explore Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with Grant Moses.

Here I am posing in front of a very famous statue - The Thinker is a bronze and marble sculpture by Auguste Rodin.

Everything seemed to have Benjamin Franklin's name associated with it.  We went to the Franklin Institute which was a science museum, we went to the Franklin Mint where they make money, we explored up and down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.  While there though, I had the opportunity to see where Benjamin Franklin lived and also where he was buried.

One of the things I noticed on his grave marker was all the pennies left on his gravestone.  I found out this is an American tradition for the pennies to be left on his grave. There is a photo of his funeral in Philadelphia; his grave is adorned with pennies, no doubt placed there as a token by some of the 20,000 people that came that day to pay their respects. This custom was eventually associated with good luck and may have spread to graves in general in America. Some use pennies as a prayer token for the line "In God we trust" which appears on the American penny.



It started as an old tradition to leave a penny at the grave site of a loved one as a gesture of deep love and missing. However, when tourists pay their respect to Benjamin Franklin, pennies dot his tombstone, as a local tradition claims that such a practice will bring the penny-tosser luck.

• Of course he is a a man famous for the line, "A penny saved, is a penny earned".

For dinner that evening, Grant took me to eat at the Benjamin Franklin Hotel (nickenamed "The Ben") which was a very swanky place with cloth napkins.  That was something new for me at the time.  Yes, I did "borrow" the napkin as a memento.

 

June 5, 1968…The favorite for the Democratic Party nomination for President, U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy was mortally shot after a rousing speech in Los Angeles. Kennedy died from his wound the following day.

I wrote about this earlier in a blog post dated and named Thursday, June 5, 2008  Remembering RFK and the Bambi Motel - 40 Years Later