2008: A year of
many centennials
1908 a momentous year
for America and the world

Let me be among the last to wish you a Happy New Year! Yes, that’s right, it’s 2008. Time to change that wall calendar and start thinking about all the details that go into making a leap year a successful social event. Chips and dip for the Summer Olympics? Check! Birthday cards for friends born on February 29th? Check! Make sure I know where to go to vote in the presidential election? Check!

The Italian team poses for a photograph during the 1908 New York to Paris Road Race. Not surprisingly, they came in second.

2008, as it turns out, is a landmark year for a lot of people, places and things. A lot of that is because 1908 was quite a busy year indeed. 2008 is the centennial (hundredth anniversary) of the Arkansas 4-H club, the Boy Scouts, the observance of Mother’s Day, the National Governor’s Association, James Madison University, the University of the Philippines, Cameron University, Montclair State University and the American Phytopathological Society. The APS, as it is more commonly known, has spent the past century fighting plant diseases worldwide! Right now the society is in a headlock with the woolly adelgid, the tiny critter that has been putting a hurting on the Blue Ridge Mountains’ lovely hemlock trees. Good luck APS!

Speaking of trees, 2008 is also the centennial of several of our nation’s most beautiful national parks including the Tumacacori National Park in Arizona and the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge in northern California and southern Oregon. Klamath has been called a “birdwatcher’s paradise” and 274 different species can be found in the refuge depending on what time of year you visit. Another 77 casual and accidental species have been spotted there at one time or another.

2008 is also the centennial of the New York to Paris Road Race. It sounds like a simple matter of driving down to the docks, putting the car on an ocean liner and sailing to the coast of France. Nope. These early automobile racers actually headed west from New York, across the North American continent (where decent roads were few and far between) to San Francisco where they sailed north to Seattle, then went by steamship to Vladivostock in Manchuria after a brief promotional tour of Japan. From there they drove through the yak-and-cart traffic of Asia toward Paris.

Six cars started the race on Lincoln’s birthday in Times Square as a crowd of a quarter million people looked on. Three cars were from France, while automakers from the United States, Germany and Italy entered one apiece. One of the French cars, a single-cylinder Sizaire-Naudin, broke its axle before reaching Albany and dropped out of the race. American prejudice against French-built autos has been pretty much a given ever since.

The American entry, the Thomas Flyer, built by the now defunct Thomas Motor Car Co. and driven by 25-year-old Montague Roberts, pulled up to the Paris office of the newspaper Le Matin at 8 p.m. on July 30, 1908. The race had taken 169 days but the Americans had won, beating the second place Italian Zust by a month and 18 days. Not exactly a photo finish…unless you have a really wide angle lens.

Roberts celebrated his victory by ordering a French dip with a side of French fries and French kissing all the female road race fans he met in Paris.

Fortunately for the Americans, the team finished the Siberian leg of the road race before June 30, 1908. On that date a large meteoroid or comet fragment exploded about five miles above Siberia near the Tunguska River. The resulting blast is estimated to have been in the 10-15 megaton range, roughly about 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima 37 years later. The explosion leveled an estimated 80 million trees over an 800-square-mile area.

The explosion, now called the Tunguska Event, killed relatively few people because it happened in such a remote part of the world. Scientists estimate that due to the rotation of the Earth, if the event had occurred four hours and 47 minutes later, it would have destroyed Saint Petersburg, then the capital city of Imperial Russia.

On a lighter note, 1908 also introduced the world to the first horror movie (the silent Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), the first passenger flight in an airplane, and Henry Ford’s famous Model T.

It is also the first year that Gideon’s International started putting the Holy Bible in hotel room night stands. The first ones were placed in the Superior Hotel in Superior, Montana in November of 1908. Since then the books have become omnipresent in motel rooms across the world and have been referenced in songs by The Beatles (“Rocky Racoon”), John Cale (“Gideon’s Bible”) and Jethro Tull (“Locomotive Breath”), among others.

It was in 1908 that the University of Pittsburgh football team became the first to put numerals on their uniforms. Before that, football radio announcers were forced to say things like, “The big guy hikes it to the guy standing behind him, who hands it off to another guy, some other guys try to tackle him, but he pitches it back to another guy, who fumbles the ball! Some guy recovers it on the 40 yard line!”

A number of famous people were born in 1908, most of which were not as famous until a few years later. Can you imagine the world without the contributions of Bette Davis, Louis L’Amour, Edward Teller, Estee Lauder, Edward R. Murrow, Milton Berle, Richard Wright, William Saroyan, Jimmy Stewart, LBJ, Lawrence Welk or Ethel Merman? I’m not sure that’s a world I care to contemplate.

I would have to say that my favorite person born in 1908 was the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Considered the father of modern photojournalism, he is famous for his street photos and portraits of famous people as well as defining the photojournalist’s hunt for “the decisive moment.” The best thing about Cartier-Bresson is that he never limited himself as a photographer, embracing every subject as if it could become his greatest work of art. He once said, “In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject.”

That’s a good philosophy to have in 2008, not just about photography but about all our endeavors.