Forget April Fools’ Day! Today, when abbreviated in standard American style, is 4-1-14. It’s a numerical palindrome, and that’s significant. A palindrome, for the uninitiated, is a series of numbers and/or letters which read the same backward to forward as they do forward to backward.
How many palindromic dates are there in a given year? Well, 2014 has 11 of them, all of which occur this month. In addition to today, April 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 all qualify. But while something that occurs on 36.6 percent of the days of a given month may not seem so special, something that’s true on just 3.01percent of the days of this year, less than 1 percent of the days in other years, and not at all in 10 years out of every century ought to be worth celebrating.
The last 4-1-14 wasn’t terribly kind to Rube Waddell, who did such a good job pitching for the Philadelphia Athletics and five other Major League Baseball teams that he ultimately was elected to the sport’s Hall of Fame. Unfortunately, Rube wasn’t around to see himself enshrined in 1946; in fact, April 1, 1914 was the poor fellow’s last day on Earth. According to Wikipedia (a Latin phrase which, literally translated, means “fascinating, often true information”) the eccentric lefthander (a redundancy, according to many veteran baseball people) succumbed that day to tuberculosis, a malady to which he fell victim after contracting pneumonia while helping to save the city of Hickman, Ky. from the horrific spring flood of 1912.
But not every palindromic date from a century ago was fraught with heartache and loss. On April 11, 1914 (4-11-14), a mere 10 days after George Edward Waddell breathed his last, little Robert Lorne Stanfield was born in Truro, Nova Scotia. Who knew he’d grow up to graduate from Dalhousie University, become the first Canadian to serve as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and ultimately rise to serve more than 10 distinguished years as the premier of his native province?
There were only two dates in 1939 that read the same backward and forward, but one was momentous: Sept. 3 (9-3-39) was when the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand and Australia all declared war on Germany. Nepal followed suit the next day, but 9-4-39 wasn’t palindromic, which was probably just one of the reasons the Nepalese declaration didn’t exactly have the Nazis shaking in their jackboots. The other eligible date that year (9-30-39) wasn’t unusually significant in the United States, but students of European history undoubtedly recall Sept. 30 as the date that year on which Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski became the prime minister of the Polish government, albeit a government-in-exile.
But maybe we shouldn’t scoff at numerology. May 4, 1945 (5-4-45) was the date on which the North German army surrendered unconditionally to British Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery. Denmark and the Netherlands were liberated on that date as well, which would have troubled Adolf Hitler terribly had he not taken his own life four days earlier.
Palindromic dates weren’t always unkind to Germans, though. On May 5, 1955 (5-5-55) West Germany was officially recognized as a sovereign nation by important western countries including the United States, Canada, France and the United Kingdom. Ultimately, most of the rest of the world followed suit, and the nation prospered until Germany’s reunification in 1990.
The International Palindromic Date Society prohibits placing a zero in front of a single-digited month in order to create an artificial palindrome, such as 09-11-90, which means that years ending in 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 in the decades of the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s,’80s or ’90s are allotted only one palindromic date each.
Does being born on such a date guarantee success? Perhaps not, but don’t tell that to actor Jeremy Renner (born 1-7-71) rock star Axl Rose (2-6-62), saxophonist Kenny G (6-5-56), 7-time Winston Cup-winning NASCAR driver Richard Petty (7-3-37), anthropologist Jane Goodall (4-3-34), or Baseball Hall-of-Famer Ernie Banks (1-31-31).
It would also be proper not to crack wise about birthdays that read the same in either direction to actors Roscoe Lee Browne (born 5-2-25) or Donna Reed (1-27-21), but since both are currently dead, there’s little chance of anyone committing that particular faux pas.
Numeric palindromes have always taken a back seat to the more traditional type: those constructed with words. It’s tough for mere numbers to compete with memorable phrases like, “Devil never even lived,” “Harpo not on Oprah,” or “Put Eliot’s toilet up,” never mind, “Ma is a madam, as I am,” or, “A slut nixes sex in Tulsa.”
But is a clever, word-based palindrome really more significant than a numerical one?
No, it is opposition.
— Andy Young consulted Wikipedia and visited palindromelist.net to help construct this essay. However, there is no such organization as the IPDS; Mr. Young just made it up. His children sometimes think their pa’s a sap.
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