Today is the birthday of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish writer and former physician, best known for his creation of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle went to school in his native Scotland, to become a doctor. He served as the doctor on exploration voyages traveling to Australia, West & South Africa, and the Arctic Ocean.

You could say that Doyle failed at becoming a doctor. He had plenty of experience and more education than required but was never able to gain a decent following of patients. 

In the time Doyle waited to see patients, which ended up being most of his time, he wrote short stories and novels. A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel, was published in 1887 and is arguably one of the first novels in the detective genre. 

The novel was well-liked, but it wasn’t until the second Sherlock novel was syndicated in a magazine that Sherlock became the household name he is today. Sherlock-centered short stories in magazines and periodicals increased readers’ appetites for the polymath detective and his partner Watson.

To Doyle, Sherlock was just another one of his characters and he confessed to his mother he’d rather like to kill Sherlock off so he could focus on his other works. His mother replied “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!” 

He didn’t. Instead he raised the price for Sherlock stories to an amount that he was sure the publishers wouldn’t pay. But pay they did, making Doyle one of the best-paid writers during his lifetime. 

Doyle finally managed to kill Sherlock and Moriarty in “The Final Problem”. There was so much outrage however that Doyle effectively raised Sherlock from the dead a few years later in The Hound of the Baskervilles. 

Doyle was a polymath like Sherlock. In addition to being a physician and a writer, he dabbled in semi-pro sports, excelling at soccer and cricket. He also had a hand in exonerating two wrongly convicted men.

And today is the birthday of Jim Thorpe, Olympic Gold medalist and astounding American athlete. He was born to a half-Irish, half-Native American father and a half-French, half-Native American mother. He was the first Native American to win an Olympic Gold. 

At age 20, Thorpe returned to school at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. On campus one day, he walked by a track practice in session and got in line for the high-jump. When it was his turn, he made an astounding 5’9” jump, beating all the other track members while still in his street clothes. 

He was a multi-sport athlete at Carlisle and even excelled in ballroom dancing winning the intercollegiate ballroom dancing competition in 1912. That same year he lead the Carlisle football team in a winning season, defeating the favorite Army team where future-president Dwight D. Eisenhower played. Of Thorpe, Eisenhower said “He could do anything better than any other football player I ever saw.”

He competed in the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, easily winning the pentathlon, as if it was just a warm up for the decathlon, which he also won handily. 

King Gustav V presented Thorpe with an ornate silver chalice at the end of the Games, saying “You, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world.” Thorpe responded with a simple “Thanks, King.”

Unfortunately, his athletic grace did not save him from intense racial prejudice. A year later he was stripped of his medals and the gift. The rhetoric used suggests it was motivated by the racially prejudiced American Amateurs Union who stirred up a technicality. 

In 1982, thirty years after his death, Thorpe’s medals and the gift from King Gustav were restored to his adult children. He has since been recognized as the greatest athlete of the 20th Century and honored in multiple Halls of Fame, townships, and colleges.  

Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

I will be the gladdest thing  

    Under the sun!  

I will touch a hundred flowers  

    And not pick one.  

  

I will look at cliffs and clouds

    With quiet eyes,  

Watch the wind bow down the grass,  

    And the grass rise.  

  

And when lights begin to show  

    Up from the town,

I will mark which must be mine,  

    And then start down!