On this day in 1917, U.S. Congress passed the Jones Act, granting American citizenship to all Puerto Ricans. The first issue of Time magazine appeared on this day in 1923. On this day in 1924 at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, William Butler Yeats attended the dress rehearsal of Sean O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock. Yeats said to Lady Gregory, the theater's patroness, that the last act reminded him of a Dostoyevsky novel. On this day in 1925, the Federal Government instituted a system of highway numbering that still exists today.
Numbers increase from east to west, north to south.
Gainesville is at the intersection of US 82 and old 77. The next highway north is US 70, then, between Tulsa and Oklahoma City, fabled Route 66. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, was born on this day in 1931. On the same day, the contemporary novelist and nonfiction writer Tom Wolfe was born. I read his early stuff but could not stay interested in either The Right Stuff or Bonfire of the Vanities .