A Service of Kilgore Trout University
  
         Tin Lizzie            Wild Bill
Today – Aka The Tin Lizzie and The Fliver,  the last of Henry Ford’s iconic Model T automobiles rolled off the assembly line in Detroit 84 years ago today. In creating the first of 15 million vehicles in 1908,  Ford promised “a car for the great multitude (that) will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest of designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.”  Sic Transit Whatever.

Birthday Boy - Wild Bill Hickok was born 174 years ago today. In many ways, Hickok could be considered one of the first authentic celebrities by the nation's fledgling mass media  -- this following Hickok's quick-draw killing of a fellow gambler Davis Tutt, Jr. over a gambling debt in 1865. Exagerated reports of the shooting led to a stunningly inaccurate portrait of “Wild Bill Hitchcock” in the Harper’s New Monthly Magazine – which credited the former Civil War army teamster and hard drinking gambler with killing hundreds of men in gunfights throughout  America’s expanding West. More serious biographers would later credit Wild Bill with killing five men (one accidently) before the celebrated media darling was killed when “Broken Nose” Jack McCall fired a bullet into the back of the 39-year-old Hickok’s head during a card game in a Deadwood Dakota Territory saloon.