Each Christmas Eve people all over the world will log on to the official Santa Tracker to follow his progress through U.S. military radar. I remeber the local NBC station would break in with updates on Santa’s location. As a kid, I always thought it was so cool. Tracking Santa all started in 1955, with a misprint in a Colorado Springs newspaper and a call to Col. Harry Shoup’s secret hotline at the Continental Air Defense Command, now known as NORAD.

The Santa Tracker tradition started with this Sears ad, which instructed children to call Santa on what turned out to be a secret military hotline. Kids today can call 1-877 HI-NORAD (1-877-446-6723) to talk to NORAD staff about Santa’s exact location.

Shoup’s children, Terri Van Keuren, Rick Shoup, and Pam Farrell, recently visited StoryCorps to talk about how the tradition began. Col. Shout had two phones on his desk, one was the “red” phone that only Shoup and a four-star general at the Pentagon had the number. Of course, this was the 1950s during the height of the Cold War. Shoup was the first line of defense against a nuclear attack.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it. On the line was a small voice that asked “Is this Santa Claus?” Shoup was a serious, disciplined, and straight-laced colonel and was immediately annoyed at the call, thinking it was a joke. Then the little voice began to cry, Shoup realized it wasn’t a joke. So, Shoup went into Santa mode. He talked to the young boy, said a few “HO-HO-HOs” and asked if he’d been a good boy this year. Then Col. Shoup asked to speak to the boys mother. And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number.

That was the first of many phone calls that the Continental Air Defense Command received on the red phone. Shoup decided to assign a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus. It became a big joke at the command center. Col. Harry Shoup came to be known as the “Santa Colonel.”

The airmen had a large glass board with the United States and Canada on it so that they could track airplanes in the skies. On Christmas Eve of 1955, when Shoup walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole. Shoup asked, “What is that?” The airmen replied, ‘Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Shoup looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, he had called the radio station and had said, ‘This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and ask, “Where’s Santa now?”

Later in life, Shoup got letters from all over the world, people saying, ‘Thank you, Colonel,’ for having a sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information. The letters were important to him. He had been an important man for America’s defense in the Cold War, but he was also known as Colonel Santa.

Col. Shoup died in 2009. How many of you have fond memories of tracking Santa all thanks to this straight-laced military man who turned out to have a good-natured sense of humor?

I have been fascinated by the story of Alan Turing for many years. He is a great unsung hero of the Second World War, and he has just recently begun getting some recognition for his genius. He’s often forgotten because he was gay, convicted in England for gross indecency in 1962, and forced to take estrogen treatments to curb his sexuality. He committed suicide two years later. Below is an article from the Huffington Post Gay Voices:

Alan Turing’s Biographer On The Truth About The Troubled Genius And His Tragic Death
By David Freeman

Sixty years after his tragic death, the brilliant English mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) has come back to life, if only virtually, in the new movie The Imitation Game.

The movie spotlights Turing’s work as a codebreaker during World War II. That’s a logical choice given his success in cracking a key German naval code known as Enigma.

The feat, which is believed to have shortened the war by at least two years and saved millions of lives, led Winston Churchill to say that Turing had made the single biggest contribution to the Allied victory over the Nazis.

But if cracking Enigma was Turing’s most tangible achievement, his greatest scientific legacy is his earlier theoretical work in the field now known as computer science. So says Andrew Hodges, the author of “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” the newly republished 1983 Turing biography on which The Imitation Game was based.

“The thing that really singles him out is his theoretical work in the 1930s, published at the end of 1936 [in his famous paper On Computable Numbers], in which he brought up this idea of the universal Turing machine,” Hodges says in a recent interview with The Huffington Post’s senior science editor, David Freeman. “And he said, rather tantalizingly, we can now invent a machine…and that really is the generalized idea of the computer as we now know it.”

Ultimately, the computer visionary and cryptanalyst–who was gay–broke not only the Enigma code but also the legal code of post-war England, which criminalized sexual contact between men. Turing was convicted of gross indecency in 1952. Two years later, in the aftermath of harrowing estrogen treatments intended to curb his sexual impulses, he died of cyanide poisoning.

Some have argued that the poisoning was accidental. But Hodges said it was a suicide he had carefully planned to minimize the emotional pain felt by his survivors.

“He’d been using cyanide in this home chemistry experiment,” Hodges, a mathematician at the Wadham College, Oxford University, says in the interview. “And I have no doubt at all that this experiment was there as a cover which allowed people, especially his mother, to believe that it was an accident.”

Turing received a posthumous royal pardon on Dec. 24, 2013.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/01/alan-turing-biographer-genius-death_n_6205838.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay%20Voices

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
The Declaration of Independence is arguably one of the most influential documents in American History. Other countries and organizations have adopted its tone and manner in their own documents and declarations. For example, France wrote its ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ and the Women’s Rights movement wrote its ‘Declaration of Sentiments’. However, the Declaration of Independence was actually not technically necessary in proclaiming independence from Great Britain.

A resolution of independence passed the Philadelphia Convention on July 2. This was all that was needed to break away from Britain. The colonists had been fighting Great Britain for 14 months while proclaiming their allegiance to the crown. Now they were breaking away. Obviously, they wanted to make clear exactly why they decided to take this action. Hence, they presented the world with the ‘Declaration of Independence’ drafted by thirty-three year old Thomas Jefferson.

The text of the Declaration has been compared to a ‘Lawyer’s Brief’. It presents a long list of grievances against King George III including such items as taxation without representation, maintaining a standing army in peacetime, dissolving houses of representatives, and hiring “large armies of foreign mercenaries.” The analogy is that Jefferson is an attorney presenting his case before the world court. Not everything that Jefferson wrote was exactly correct. However, it is important to remember that he was writing a persuasive essay, not a historical text. The formal break from Great Britain was complete with the adoption of this document on July 4, 1776.

Jefferson wrote the Declaration in a way that was meant to be read aloud. The first two paragraphs are some of the most powerful words ever written. Each year when I teach about the Declaration in my Civics, Government, and history classes, I make sure that it is read aloud so that the students get the full effect. The most popular way to do this is to play the following video: http://youtu.be/jYyttEu_NLU. My students tend to pay more attention to the famous actors who read the Declaration of Independence.

HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, MY FELLOW AMERICANS!

My nephew was born yesterday, and he and his mother are doing great. I’m a very proud uncle times two, and I’m so happy that my niece is so excited about her baby brother.

A few weeks ago, I posted the poem “Libido” by Rupert Brooke and mentioned a letter he wrote that described his first sexual experience. It took me a while to find the full letter, but I wanted to post it and a little bit more about Brooke’s sexuality. I hope you enjoy. I have italicized the steamiest portion of the letter.

Henry James met Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) in Cambridge in 1909, when Brooke acknowledged “I pulled my fresh, boyish stunt” and bewitched the novelist. James’s last published writing, in response to Brooke’s death in the Great War, and shortly before his own, celebrated Brooke’s “wondrous, heroic legend.” Brooke’s war poems were already famous even before he died at Skyros in April 1915, of an infection rather than in battle. Winston Churchill consolidated the icon: “Joyous, fearless, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England’s noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered.” His war poetry was popularized precisely because its rosy images denied the realities of war, and ironically drew many young men to join up and go to their own deaths. He was widely celebrated as a golden-haired Apollo – his photograph at age twenty-five is the first modern icon of beauty – and was desired by everyone, male and female, who came within the Bloomsbury magic circle. The following letter describes the weekend of October 29, 1909 when he decided to lose his virginity, with a friend of the same age from Rugby school, Denham Russell-Smith (the more attractive younger brother of his closer friend Hugh Denham-Smith). But Brooke, as he later described himself, was one-half outright heterosexual, one-quarter outright homosexual and one-quarter sentimental homosexual (i.e. his idealized homoerotic longing for young men is a longing for his own youth at public school). In the same year that he bedded Russell-Smith, he was determined to marry Noel Oliver, who resisted his advances. By 1911 he was in a passionate relationship with Ka Cox, who herself was having an affair with Henry Lamb, the bisexual “wife” of Lytton Strachey, and he also had a brief fling with Arthur Hobhouse, former boyfriend of both Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey. The first half of his Poems published in 1911, are implicitly homosexual and explicitly neo-pagan. The Bloomsberries prided themselves on their freedom from conventions, but Brooke felt trapped by the double standards of society, and could not live out his hidden desires without guilt. Sexual confusion drove him to a nervous breakdown in 1912 and six weeks of psychiatric care. It was during his convalescence that he wrote this letter to James Strachey, Lytton’s brother, also gay, as a therapeutic exorcism of his sexual identity. He decided, in effect, that he was a golden boy with a rotten core, and he came to reject Bloomsbury out of shame, and to seek purification through death in war. He was commissioned in August 1914, and his “1914” sonnet sequence shows a desire for death as the only resolution to his inner conflict.

RUPERT BROOKE TO JAMES STRACHEY

10 July 1912

How things shelve back! History takes you to January 1912 – Archaeology to the end of 1910 – Anthropology to, perhaps, the autumn of 1909. –
The autumn of 1909! We had hugged & kissed & strained, Denham and I, on and off for years – ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two small dorms. An abortive affair, as I told you. But in the summer holidays of 1906 and 1907 he had often taken me out to the hammock, after dinner, to lie entwined there. – He had vaguely hoped, I fancy, – – – But I lay always thinking Charlie [Lascelles].
Denham was though, to my taste, attractive. So honestly and friendlily lascivious. Charm, not beauty, was his forte. He was not unlike Ka [Ka Cox, with whom Brooke had an affair], in the allurement of vitality and of physical magic – oh, but Ka has beauty too. – He was lustful, immoral, affectionate, and delightful. As romance faded in me, I began, all unacknowledgedly, to cherish a hope – – – But I was never in the slightest degree in love with him.
In the early autumn of 1909, then, I was glad to get him to come and stay with me, at the Orchard. I came back late that Saturday night. Nothing was formulated in my mind. I found him asleep in front of the fire, at 1.45. I took him up to his bed, – he was very like a child when he was sleepy – and lay down on it. We hugged, and my fingers wandered a little. His skin was always very smooth. I had, I remember, a vast erection. He dropped off to sleep in my arms. I stole away to my room: and lay in bed thinking – my head full of tiredness and my mouth of the taste of tea and whales, as usual. I decided, almost quite consciously, I would put the thing through the next night. You see, I didn’t at all know how he would take it. But I wanted to have some fun, and, still more, to see what it was like, and to do away with the shame (as I thought it was) of being a virgin. At length, I thought, I shall know something of all that James and Harry] Norton and Maynard [Keynes] and Lytton [Strachey] know and hold over me.
Of course, I said nothing.
Next evening, we talked long in front of the sitting room fire. My head was on his knees, after a bit. We discussed sodomy. He said he, finally, thought it was wrong . . . We got undressed there, as it was warm. Flesh is exciting, in firelight. You must remember that openly we were nothing to each other – less even than in 1906. About what one is with Bunny (who so resembles Denham). Oh, quite distant!
Again we went up to his room. He got into bed. I sat on it and talked. Then I lay on it. Then we put the light out and talked in the dark. I complained of the cold: and so got under the eiderdown. My brain was, I remember, almost all through, absolutely calm and indifferent, observing progress, and mapping out the next step. Of course, I planned the general scheme beforehand.
I was still cold. He wasn’t. “Of course not, you’re in bed!” “Well then, you get right in, too.” – I made him ask me – oh! without difficulty! I got right in. Our arms were round each other. “An adventure!” I kept thinking: and was horribly detached.
We stirred and pressed. The tides seemed to wax. At the right moment I, as planned, said “come into my room, it’s better there . . .” I suppose he knew what I meant. Anyhow he followed me. In the large bed it was cold; we clung together. Intentions became plain; but still nothing was said. I broke away a second, as the dance began, to slip my pyjamas. His was the woman’s part throughout. I had to make him take his off – do it for him. Then it was purely body to body – my first, you know! I was still a little frightened of his, at any sudden step, bolting; and he, I suppose, was shy. We kissed very little, as far as I can remember, face to face. And I only rarely handled his penis. Mine he touched once with his fingers; and that made me shiver so much that I think he was frightened. But with alternate stirrings, and still pressures, we mounted. My right hand got hold of the left half of his bottom, clutched it, and pressed his body into me. The smell of the sweat began to be noticeable. At length we took to rolling to and fro over each other, in the excitement. Quite calm things, I remember, were passing through my brain. “The Elizabethan joke `The Dance of the Sheets’ has, then, something in it.” “I hope his erection is all right” – and so on. I thought of him entirely in the third person. At length the waves grew more terrific; my control of the situation was over; I treated him with the utmost violence, to which he more quietly, but incessantly, responded. Half under him and half over, I came off. I think he came off at the same time, but of that I have never been sure. A silent moment: and then he slipped away to his room, carrying his pyjamas. We wished each other “Good-night.” It was between 4 and 5 in the morning. I lit a candle after he had gone. There was a dreadful mess on the bed. I wiped it clear as I could, and left the place exposed in the air, to dry. I sat on the lower part of the bed, a blanket round me, and stared at the wall, and thought. I thought of innumerable things, that this was all; that the boasted jump from virginity to Knowledge seemed a very tiny affair, after all; that I hoped Denham, for whom I felt great tenderness, was sleeping. My thoughts went backward and forward. I unexcitedly reviewed my whole life, and indeed the whole universe. I was tired, and rather pleased with myself, and a little bleak. About six it was grayly daylight; I blew the candle out and slept till 8. At 8 Denham had to bicycle in to breakfast [in Cambridge] with Mr Benians [his tutor], before catching his train. I bicycled with him, and turned off at the corner of –, is it Grange Road? –. We said scarcely anything to each other. I felt sad at the thought he was perhaps hurt and angry, and wouldn’t ever want to see me again. – He did, of course, and was exactly as ever. Only we never referred to it. But that night I looked with some awe at the room – fifty yards away to the West from the bed I’m writing in – in which I Began; in which I “copulated with” Denham; and I felt a curious private tie with Denham himself. So you’ll understand it was –p not with a shock, for I am far too dead for that, but with a sort of dreary wonder and dizzy discomfort – that I heard Mr Benians inform me, after we’d greeted, that Denham died at one o’clock on Wednesday morning, – just twenty-four hours ago now.

SOURCE: Paul Delany, The Neo-pagans: Friendship and Love in the Rupert Brooke Circle (London: Macmillan, 1987).