0:00 On November fourteenth, 1851, an American author put out a book about an albino whale that critics dismissed as unreadable gibberish, never suspecting that future generations would crown it the Great American Novel.0:17 Now, yesterday we stood on the National Mall in Washington looking at that black granite wall that began to heal a wounded nation.0:27 Today, looking back down the tracks of November fourteenth, you see a date packed to the rafters with folks who launched themselves right out into the wide blue yonder without the faintest clue of how the world would remember them.0:46 Take Herman Melville.0:47 When Harper and Brothers published Moby-Dick in New York on this date, Melville reckoned he had poured his whole soul into it.0:58 But, well, readers hated it, and he died forty years later with his masterpiece out of print and forgotten.1:06 Ten years after his passing, folks started to see what was actually standing right in front of them: a monument of language.1:16 And Melville wasn't the only one taking a wild leap into the fog on November fourteenth.1:23 In 1889, a twenty-five-year-old newspaper reporter named Nellie Bly stepped onto a steamship in Hoboken, New Jersey, aiming to beat the fictional eighty-day record around the world, you know, from that Jules Verne tale.1:41 She didn't just beat it; she came back in seventy-two days, six hours, and eleven minutes.1:48 Then jump ahead to 1910, down off Hampton Roads, Virginia.1:53 A civilian fella named Eugene B.1:55 Ely climbed into a Curtiss Pusher biplane sitting on a makeshift wooden platform over the cruiser USS Birmingham.2:04 Look, nobody had ever flown an airplane off a naval ship before.2:09 He rolled down eighty-three feet of timber, dipped so low his wheels kissed the salty brine, and then clawed his way up into the sky.2:20 Naval aviation was born in that five-second gamble.2:24 Just thirty years later, on this exact evening in 1940, over five hundred German bombers laid waste to Coventry, England, obliterating its medieval cathedral in a raid so fierce that British folks had to coin a grim new word for total ruin.2:43 Fast forward to 1960.2:45 In New Orleans, a six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges walked through a screaming mob of adults, flanked by four federal marshals, to integrate William Frantz Elementary School.2:59 She thought it was a parade.3:02 In 1965, the United States Army fought its very first major clash in Vietnam at the Battle of Ia Drang.3:10 Four years after that, in 1969, Apollo 12 took off for the moon in a driving rainstorm, got struck by lightning twice in the first minute, and still kept right on climbing toward the stars.3:25 On this day in 1972, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above one thousand for the very first time, finishing at one thousand and three.3:36 And in 1993, Don Shula over in Miami clinched his three hundred and twenty-fifth win to become the winningest coach in football history, finishing his thirty-three-year run with three hundred and forty-seven victories.3:54 And I would be a poor railroader if I didn't tip my hat to November fourteenth, 1989.4:01 That was the morning the first cabooseless Canadian Pacific train rolled out of Winnipeg, Manitoba, bound for Thunder Bay.4:10 An electronic blinking box on the rear coupler took my old job away, but, well, that is progress on the steel ribbon.4:20 Along the way, this date gave us some remarkable souls.4:24 Claude Monet was born in Paris on November fourteenth, 1840, painting light the way nobody had ever seen it.4:33 Robert Fulton was born in 1765, fixing to put steam engines on rivers.4:39 The beloved Swedish storyteller Astrid Lindgren arrived in 1907.4:44 King Charles the Third turns seventy-eight today.4:48 Condoleezza Rice was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1954.4:52 Now, you stay with me here, because there's two stories on this day that show you the stark distance between what folks imagined was happening and what history was actually building.5:07 The first one takes us way back to November fourteenth, 1680, in the German town of Coburg.5:14 An astronomer named Gottfried Kirch was peering out into the early morning chill.5:21 Now, astronomers had been watching comets since folks were carving pictures on cave walls.5:28 But Gottfried Kirch did something nobody in human history had ever done before: he found a brand-new comet using a two-and-a-half-foot telescope.5:40 Up until that very morning, if your naked eye couldn't spot a streak in the black, the comet simply didn't exist to you.5:49 Kirch changed the rules of sky-watching forever.5:53 Within days, that icy traveler—the Great Comet of 1680—blew up into a spectacle so bright you could see it in broad daylight.6:03 A Jesuit priest named Eusebio Kino tracked it from Spain before sailing to Mexico, where he published one of the earliest scientific treatises in the Americas.6:16 Down in Chile, an English buccaneer named Basil Ringrose jotted in his pirate logbook that its tail stretched twenty degrees across the heavens right before his crew raided a Spanish harbor.6:31 At the time, folks saw that comet and trembled, convinced God was fixing to punish the world with pestilence or war.6:40 But looking back, that wasn't an omen of doom at all.6:45 It was the exact threshold where human curiosity swapped superstition for precision glass.6:52 But this day carries a far heavier memory in these Appalachian hills.6:58 On November fourteenth, 1970, Southern Airways Flight 932, a chartered twin-engine jet, was heading home to Huntington, West Virginia.7:08 On board were thirty-seven players from the Marshall University football team, their coaches, the team doctor, local boosters, and the flight crew.7:20 Seventy-five people in all.7:22 They had just played East Carolina University, lost seventeen to fourteen, and were flying back into a drizzling, fog-choked night.7:33 A little after seven thirty in the evening, coming in on final approach toward Tri-State Airport, that plane clipped the treetops on a hillside less than a mile short of the runway.7:47 It went down instantly.7:49 All seventy-five souls were lost.7:52 It remains the deadliest sports-related disaster in American history.7:57 In Huntington, an entire generation of civic leadership, mothers and fathers, and the pride of a college town vanished in a single fiery breath.8:09 Six children in one family were orphaned in an instant.8:13 At the time, folks looked at that smoking hillside and honestly believed Marshall University football was buried forever.8:23 I mean, how could a program—or a town—ever dig out from that kind of grief?8:29 There was serious talk of shutting the athletic program down entirely.8:35 But here's the thing.8:36 That terrible night wasn't the end of their story.8:40 It became the bedrock of an impossible resilience.8:44 A young coach named Jack Lengyel came in, rounded up freshmen, walk-ons, and basketball players, and they took the field the next autumn.8:55 Decades later, they built a powerhouse program.8:59 That tragedy could have wiped that college clean off the map, but instead, it forged an identity so fierce that when folks in those hills yell "We Are Marshall," every holler shakes with the memory of the seventy-five who never made it back to the depot.9:20 You see, that is the great gift of looking back from ten or fifty or a hundred years out down the track.9:28 When Herman Melville was sitting at his desk, sweating over Captain Ahab and that white whale, he was broke and terrified he had ruined his career.9:40 When Nellie Bly grabbed her carpetbag, newspaper editors scoffed that a woman couldn't handle travel without an escort.9:49 When Eugene Ely felt his tires brush the Atlantic swell off that cruiser's bow, naval officers were still convinced the future belonged strictly to sixteen-inch guns and thick iron armor.10:04 And when little Ruby Bridges climbed those school steps in New Orleans in her neat little coat, clutching her ruler, folks on the sidewalk thought their hatred would stop the march of human dignity dead in its tracks.10:22 They were wrong, weren't they?10:24 We tend to live our days looking through a locomotive's windshield into the dark, guessing at what's around the next switchback.10:34 We see disasters and call them final chapters.10:38 We see failures and call them wasted effort.10:42 But history reminds us that what looks like a dead-end siding today is often just the beginning of the main line.10:51 Well.10:51 That is about the size of it.10:53 You keep your lantern trimmed, friend.10:56 I will see you down the line tomorrow.
