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102 years ago today in the Calgary Herald
A 19-year-old New York teen named Samuel Diamond, who was tired of big city life, arrived in Calgary after walking 4,000 miles. It was all part of his quest to show he could cross the continent on foot — a journey he started with 50 cents in his pocket. When he arrived in Calgary, he still had 20 cents left.
Along the way Diamond would pick up the occasional odd job, while also making a point of meeting the mayor of each town or city where he stopped. Diamond would gather each mayor’s signature in a notebook he carried and many of those mayors would purchase one of the postcards he was selling, giving him a few cents to buy a meal. At night, he usually slept outside with a canvas cover and blanket for warmth. In Calgary, he was given a bed at the YMCA.
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Diamond’s long-term goals? To embark on a bicycle trip around the world after his cross-continent hike, and then get married and settle down.
77 years ago in the Calgary Herald
A story in the Calgary Herald 76 years ago also, coincidentally, focused on happy wanderers. Russell and Nita Rosene — a couple from Los Angeles described as marathon hitchhikers — came to Calgary to visit an uncle. They’d hitchhiked along the East Coast of the United States, the Northwest part of that country and up through the prairies into Canada, where they proclaimed Canadian campgrounds the nicest they’d found. A 2014 obituary for Russell showed he died at age 92, noting he became known for frequently taking photos of nature.
52 years ago today in the Calgary Herald
The truth was out there — people just didn’t know what the heck the truth was in 1972, when an unidentified flying object repeatedly showed up in the sky northwest of Sydney, Australia, at 7:10 each morning for several weeks. The cigar-shaped object was a mystery until astronomers said it was “almost certainly” the planet Venus that was seen.
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27 years ago today in the Calgary Herald
In the old days, when people used to buy vinyl records, a Herald article noted that the hottest selling record in September 1997 was Elton John’s re-recording of his song Candle in the Wind — reworked as a tribute to Diana, the former Princess of Wales who’d been killed in a Paris car crash the previous month. In Liverpool, people lined up for nine hours to buy the record, the article noted. Nine million copies of the song had been ordered at the time. Guinness World Records later noted the record racked up sales of 33 million and became “the biggest-selling single since U.K. and U.S. singles charts began in the 1950s.”
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