Saturday Scenes

On the 22nd of September 1904, Ellen Church was born in Cresco, Iowa. As a young girl, she watched aeroplanes perform at the country fair and decided that when she grew up, she would learn to fly. She studied nursing and worked at a hospital but she was able to fulfil her dream by taking flying lessons in her free time. She became a certified pilot.

She approached Boeing Air Transport hoping to be hired as a pilot but Boeing apparently would not consider female in that role. Not one to give up, she came up with a different angle: put nurses on planes to comfort passengers.

Airlines began passenger service in 1926, small planes carrying a two man flight crew and a dozen passengers. The co-pilot looked after the passengers and handed out box lunches, as well as comforting passengers who became frightened or airsick. Boeing Air Transport jumped at her offer and Ellen Church was hired as head stewardess. She recruited seven others to work with her.

PBS – Chasing the Sun – Ellen Church

The requirements for stewardesses in the 1930s were strict. In addition to being registered nurses, the women had to be single, younger than 25 years old; weigh less than 115 pounds; and stand less than 5 feet, 4 inches tall. The responsibilities of stewardesses in the early years were far from glamorous. In addition to accommodating the regular needs of passengers, stewardesses at times needed to haul the luggage on board, screw down loose seats, fuel planes, and even help pilots push planes into hangars. For their services, the first group of BAT stewardesses earned $125 a month.

In May of 1930, Ellen Church and her recruits offered the first flight attendant service on a Boeing 80A from Oakland/San Francisco to Chicago: a 20-hour journey with 13 stops and 14 passengers.

Meanwhile, on the 22nd of September, the following photographs were taken by high flyers all over the world:

And here are the amazing photographers who took them:

• dugghelen
• rnout
• ahpilot
• martin_chrisj
• elibrody
• icklemouse
• SockYarnShop
• _H1TCH
• JeannieKelly
• CallumDG
• thermalhound
• RAFairman
• JanetIsserlis
• carocat
• JMStockdale
• raumsinn
• FrauKulli
• ernmander
• ClareRevell
• akaSylvia
• Korwhai
• Pewari
• tradingnothing
• akrabat
• robdavies
• HeideSpruck
• annemnicholas
• mousewords
• evenstar84
• sahfenn
• dndtsa
• azmichelle
• jamesnnb
• dudleypj
• drewbenn
• CliffStanford

This Saturday, make sure to watch the @SatScenes 2012 list and you can see the photography as it happens! How cool is that?

If you want to get added to the list, just take part! Every Saturday, people share their photographs of their day, making the world that little bit smaller.

All you need to do is:

1. Take a photo on a Saturday
2. Send the link as a reply to @SatScenes on Twitter with the location
3. Bask in the glory of representing your corner of the world

So what are you waiting for?

Saturday is a such an important day! Many things happen just because it is Saturday. Here are a few that you might not have known about:

• Saturday’s child works hard for a living
• If a new moon occurs on a Saturday, then there will be twenty days of wind and rain
• If you find the first flower of Spring on a Saturday, it means misfortune
• In India, it is bad luck to buy oil or iron on a Saturday
• The word for Saturday in Maori means “washing-day”
• The Vikings called Saturday “bath day”
• In Sweden, Saturday is the only day of the week when children should eat sweets
• Saturday’s colour is purple
• If you are born on a Saturday, you can see vampires which are otherwise invisible.

And of course, if you take a photograph on a Saturday, it will be featured on Saturday Scenes!

On Saturday, the 15th of September, the following photographs were taken:

And here are the hard-working submitters who took them:

• martin_chrisj
• sahfenn
• JanetIsserlis
• FrauKulli
• ingridf
• pendrift
• Pewari
• oxonlady
• thermalhound
• icklemouse
• CallumDG
• raumsinn
• RAFairman
• pixelfreund
• JMStockdale
• carocat
• Vinjii
• ernmander
• KennPFC
• robdavies
• akrabat
• HeideSpruck
• Korwhai
• akaSylvia
• mousewords
• rnout
• evenstar84
• maidbloke
• jamesnnb
• JeannieKelly

Saturday Scenes is a wonderful way to celebrate Saturdays!

Taking part is easy:

1. Take a photograph on a Saturday
2. Send it to @SatScenes on Twitter
3. Wait for the webpage to get updated
4. Oooh and aah over all the great submissions from all over the world!

So take a photograph this weekend and send it to @SatScenes!

On the 8th of September in 1987, Minnie Winston stepped out of the bath to find her house was full of a dark red substance. The floor was “spurting blood like a sprinkler”, she said. Mr and Mrs Winston phoned the police, who came to the scene and reported “copious amounts of blood” splattered on the walls and floors all across the house. The State Crime Lab confirmed that the substance was human blood, type O. Both Mr and Mrs Winston have type A blood.

Source of Blood in Atlanta House Still a Mystery – New York Times

“We have no leads at this time,” sadi Police Lieut. Horace Walker. “We will continue a routine investigation and if we find that no crime was committed, we’re through with it. As we see it now, there has been no crime.”

“Someone could have done this as a hoax,” he said. “It concerns me that we don’t have any answers.”

A month later, Mr Winston publicly denied that there was ever any blood in his home, claiming first that it was red dye from a carpet and later that it was rusty pipes in the house. He stated he was tired of calls and visits from curiosity seekers. Meanwhile, the homicide detective investigating insisted that they were still on the case: “We have not stopped looking because we know houses don’t bleed.”

Meanwhile, on the 8th of September in 2012, the following curious but entirely comprehensible photographs were taken.

And these are the entirely not suspicious people who took them:

• evilrooster
• martin_chrisj
• FrauKulli
• CarolineBignell
• ClareRevell
• akrabat
• RAFairman
• Pewari
• JeannieKelly
• raumsinn
• phpGargoyle
• AlistairRae
• ahpilot
• JanetIsserlis
• embee
• ernmander
• HeideSpruck
• twasntme
• CallumDG
• icklemouse
• oxonlady
• rnout
• robdavies
• max1018
• dndtsa
• mousewords
• Korwhai
• jamesnnb
• dudleypj
• drewbenn
• carocat
• azmichelle
• pixelesh
• akaSylvia
• evenstar84

Why don’t you join in?

We’d love to see your photos! Just take a picture on a Saturday and send it to @SatScenes with a location.

See you next week!

On the 1st of September in 1914, Martha died. Martha, named after Martha Washington, was the last known living passenger pigeon. Passenger pigeons were the most abundant birds in the world, believed to constituted 20%-40% of all the birds in the US. They were known for their enormous migratory flocks. Audubon estimated there were as many as 1 billion pigeons in a single flock. One sighting in 1866 in southern Ontario was described as being 1 mile (1.5 kilometres) wide and 300 miles (500 kilometres) long, and taking 14 hours to pass a single point, with number estimates in excess of 3.5 billion birds in the flock.

However, these large colonies and communal breeding (with hundreds of nests in a single tree) made them easy to find and as a result, easy to hunt.

Martha, the World’s Last Passenger Pigeon | Around The Mall

As pigeon meat began to be sold in stores as a cheap source of protein, the threat from hunters became even more significant than that of lost habitat. The pigeons’ intensely social nature, once a strength, became a liability. “Commercial hunters would get word that a flock had showed up at some locality, and the hunters would go and set off nets or just fire repeatedly with their shotguns,” Dean says. “The flock was such a tight-knit group that even as individuals were falling and dying, the rest of the flock wouldn’t leave.” Other methods of killing were crueler, with some hunters soaking grain in alcohol to make them easier to kill.

After Martha’s death, she was frozen in a 300-pound block of ice and sent to the Smithsonian, where she was stuffed and mounted into a display case with the following notation:

MARTHA

Last of her species, died at 1 p.m.,
1 September 1914, age 29, in the
Cincinnati Zoological Garden.
EXTINCT.

Almost a hundred years later, on the 1st of September 2012, these wonderful moments were recorded for posterity:

And here are the photographers (and some budding zoologists) who took them:

• thermalhound
• Pewari
• martin_chrisj
• elibrody
• akrabat
• JeannieKelly
• JanetIsserlis
• arcticpixie
• raumsinn
• phpGargoyle
• dudleypj
• RAFairman
• CallumDG
• twasntme
• robdavies
• ernmander
• akaSylvia
• carocat
• jamesnnb
• mousewords
• timewind
• Denrael
• icklemouse
• CarolineBignell
• gwenthing
• fembat
• azmichelle
• dndtsa

Shouldn’t you save a photograph of your day-to-day life for posterity? It’s easy!

1. Take a photograph on a Saturday
2. Upload the photograph
3. Send a tweet to @SatScenes with the url and the location
4. Bookmark http://twitter.blog.me.uk/ for future descendants to find

I’m looking forward to seeing your photograph in the next edition!