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Roscoe Alfred Fillmore (July 10, 1887-1968) was a Canadian social activist and horticulturalist. He wrote extensively about the Communist movement throughout his life, meanwhile enjoying a career as a gardener and plant breeder in Nova Scotia. His Green Thumbs: The Canadian gardening book (1953) remained in print for more than ten years.

Life and career

New Brunswick

He was born in the rural community of Lumsden, Albert County, New Brunswick, the son of Willard Fillmore, a lumberman and labourer. As a child, he observed paternalism among certain of his father's employers, which affected his outlook on the distribution of wealth. At age 16, he left school and went to Portland, Maine where his grandmother lived and there he found work as a labourer. He also discovered his first calling as a socialist when he heard Rev. George Littlefield, a Massachusetts preacher and member of the newly-formed Socialist Party of America, speak on the subject of socialism. He quickly became a proselytizer himself. As he later wrote, “To me [Socialism] means a decent way to believe and live, and for a long time I was obsessed with the idea that all we had to do was explain its meaning to people and they would immediately begin to work and vote for the co-operative society. Alas, youth and its enthusiasms.” After a year-and-a-half in Portland, Fillmore returned to Albert where for a time he resumed his schooling, now reading deeply into philosophy. In 1905 his father purchased a plant nursery in Albert, New Brunswick, established in 1860 by Agreen Tingley. There, the younger Fillmore learned the basics of horticulture. He left school in grade 11 and "Great Harvest Excursion" eventually obtained work for the wealthy lawyer and politician Arthur Reid Slipp in Burton, New Brunswick, running Slipp’s large commercial apple orchard for nine years. While he would work for slipp for nine years, their competing political interests gradually interfered with their relationship, Slipp's conservatism clashing with Fillmore’s socialism.

Siberia

As an agricultural worker, Fillmore was exempt from war service. He was nonetheless deeply affected by the war.

By 1919, Fillmore was a seasoned advocate of communism and he was in Amherst in the spring of 1919 helping to inspire workers to strike. The Amherst General Strike took place in xxx.

By now married, in 1923 Fillmore took a leave of absence from the Slipp orchard and travelled alone to Russia to work at the Kuzbass Autonomous Industrial Colony in Siberia. There he worked for one year to develop a horticultural program for the nascent Soviet workers’ community.

Nova Scotia

When he returned to New Brunswick, Slipp was no longer interested in employing Fillmore. Thus, in 1924, Fillmore moved to Centreville in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley where friends had suggested conditions were ripe to spread the socialist gospel. in Centreville, he met regularly with several like minded socialists including Charles Macdonald. In 1945, he ran unsuccessfully as a member of the Farmer-Labour party in the 1945 provincial election.

In xxx, he accepted a post with the Dominion Atlantic Railway as horticulturist for the Grand-Pré National Historic Site. The seventeen-acre park had been established on an early Acadian settlement of Grand Pre to commemorate the Expulsion of the Acadians in 1755.

Maritime Gardener

He first discovered the power of radio when started advertising his plant nursery on a local station in Kentville. By the early 1950's he had become so well known and was fielding so many gardening inquiries, he decided to publish a book, Green Thumbs: The Canadian gardening book (1953). Green Thumbs was was one of the earliest gardening books aimed at a Canadian audience. The first was xxx by Annie Jack of Montreal. He followed it up with four other books over the next xx years.

Between xxx and xxx, he hosted The Maritime Gardener, a popular weekly show on the CBC Radio which was broadcast from its Halifax studios.

Recognition and legacy

The Canadian and Ontario Nursery Trades Associations recognized him as one of 24 "Great Canadians in Horticulture" in 1967.

His son Frank Fillmore, and grandson Nick Fillmore were co-founders of The 4th Estate in Halifax, an alternate weekly newspaper (1969-1978).

==

Publications

• Green Thumbs, Ryerson, 1953

References

• Nicholas Fillmore, Maritime Radical: The Life & times of Roscoe Fillmore, Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1992.

Ludvik Joseph Koci (1908- September 28, 1999) was a Czech-born American inventor. He is credited with several inventions related to household appliances including his perfecting the automatic toaster. According to the Chicago Tribune, “he changed the way Americans lived.”

He immigrated as a child to the United States, settling in Chicago. As a young man he studied electrical and chemical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He obtained work at the Chicago Flexible Shaft Co., which later became the Sunbeam Corporation. His key invention was the compensating thermostat (1943), which he and others applied over several years to many inventions (or improvements on earlier ideas). Other inventions included:

• Electric iron, (1941, improving on a 1939 British invention), improved in 1963 with a controllable thermostat
• Electric vacuum coffee maker filter assembly (1940, shared patent)
• Combined waffle baker and grill (1959)

His most famous patent was the automatic toaster, which Sunbeam marketed as a premium priced product between 1948 and the company’s bankruptcy in 1997.

He retired from Sunbeam after 37 years. At Sunbeam, he was associated with Ivar Jepson. In the 1960s he developed designs for rail trucks on behalf of General Motors. He also taught advanced mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He died at age 91.

W. E. McMonagle William Emmet McMonagle (xxx - November 29, 1942) was the mayor of Moncton, New Brunswick between 1937 and 1939. Born in xxx, he attended school xxx and had a career as a lawyer in Moncton. He married Alice xxx in xxx and they had xxx children.

During his administration, a site was selected for the Moncton Airport and work began on its construction in xxxx. He was mayor of Moncton at the start of World War II. He stepped down to run as a member of the National Government party in the 1940 federal election but he was defeated by the incumbent Henry Read Emmerson with 62 percent of the vote.

On January 8, 1938 he attended a Maple Leaf's hockey match in Toronto where he presented a watch to Gordon Drillon of Moncton, the NHL scoring leader for the 1937-8 season. foster hewitt mispronounced his name as "Mayor McGonagle" and he was chided about this later on his return to Moncton. A wag went so far as to place a street name on a lane saying McGonagle Lane. Later, the sign was replaced with an official street sign, this time spelled correctly. <photo>

McMonagle died of a heart attack during an air raid drill in 1942.

David Zentner (dates) is an American editor and publisher, best known for his association with "adult" book and magazine market. He was associated with and/or founded the Bee-Line, Century, Epic Books, Citadel, and Pinnacle imprints. With Walter Weidenbaum and Donald Pendelton, he created the highly popular "Executioner Series" of mens' action novels, which sold under the Pinnacle banner beginning in 1969.

Publications

Mens magazines

Through his company Douglas Publishing, he published the glossy mens' magazine Topper in an effort to compete with Playboy, eventually reaching sales of xxx copies per month. The publication ran for 240 issues (January 1961 - December 1980). He also published another mens' magazine called Escapade (1955 to xxx). He is currently president of Eton Publishing Co., Inc. in New York, publisher of Velvet magazine.

Books

Bee Line published pulp "adult" titles such as

Pinnacle books became "one of the few consistent self-selling successes in publishing" by focusing on the production of action-adventure serial novels, at one time releasing 37 titles per month.

In 19xx he commissioned the journalist John Dean to write House of Evil: The Indiana Torture Slaying. The book sold 55,000 copies in its original edition.

He sold his trade paperbacks division, Citadel and Pinnacle to Michigan General Corporation in 1973. He remained president of the new company, Pinnacle Books Inc. and also retained management of Bee-Line.

Influence

Charles Neutel has stated about Zentner, "Just about every professional [writers and editors] in the field has gone through his offices, insofar as working directly for him or selling stuff to him. He was for some difficult to work with; for others simply a problem to work around. He was tough. He helped a lot of people become professionals."

BRK

Year	Event	Location	Perpetrator(s)	Deaths	Injuries	Comments
1871	Attack on the Mosel	Bremerhaven	Alexander Keith, Jr.	80	unkn.	bomb set for insurance fraud purposes; detonated prematurely
1910	Los Angeles Times bombing	Los Angeles	John J. McNamara and James B. McNamara	21	100	Union-related action
1916	Preparedness Day Bombing	San Francisco	Labor leaders Thomas Mooney and Warren Billings	10	40	Isolationist political action
1920	Wall Street bombing	New York City	Anarchists (suspected)	38	400	Followed other bombings in 1919
1939	Bürgerbräukeller	Munich	Georg Elser	7	63	Assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler
1942	St. Nazaire Raid	St. Nazaire, France	Royal Navy, British Commandos	590 in battle	unkn.	Intended to render servicing the Nazi fleet more costly
1972	Aldershot Bombing	Aldershot, UK	IRA	7	18	A Ford Cortina contained a 280lb time bomb
1974	M62 Coach Bombing	West Yorkshire	IRA	12	38	Continuing anti-British campaign
1974	Birmingham pub bombings	Birmingham, UK	IRA (suspected)	21	182	Continuing anti-British campaign
1974	Guildford pub bombings	Guildford, UK	IRA	5	65	Targeted against Army personnel
1977	Lucona sinking	Indian Ocean	Udo Proksch	6	0	Attempted insurance fraud
1984	Brighton hotel bombing	Brighton, UK	IRA	5	31	Attempt to assassinate PM Margaret Thatcher
1987	Korean Air Flight 858	Andaman Sea	North Korea	115 (all)	0	State terrorism against South Korea
1987	Remembrance Day bombing	Enniskillen, Northern Ireland	IRA	12	63	Continuing anti-British campaign
1988	Pan Am flight 103	Lockerbie, Scotland	Libya	243 passengers and 16 crew (all)	0	Reprisal against US
1989	Deal barracks bombing	Deal, Kent, UK	IRA	11	21	Targeted against Army personnel
1994	Philippine Airlines Flight 434	Between Cebu and Tokyo	Ramzi Yousef	1	10	Foiled attempt; Ramzi Yousef was the Al-Qaeda mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
1999	Russian apartment bombings	Buynaksk Moscow Volgodonsk	unkn.	293	651	4 bombs over 4 days; purpose still unknown; subject to conspiracy theories
2006	Moscow market bombing	Moscow	Eight members of racialist organization	13	46	Racially-motivated attack