I could not let the week go by without wishing Benjamin Franklin a happy 300th birthday (which was Tuesday, January 17). As a "founding father", his credentials are unassailable. Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, took the lead in negotiating military assistance from France and the peace treaty at the end of the Revolutionary War and was part of the Constitutional Convention. In his "spare time", he was also one of the foremost scientists and publishers of the age. He prized tolerance and had a reputation for a wicked sense of humor.
How could you not want to celebrate someone who was described as "equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bugs Bunny" ?
(Quoted from
op-ed piece in Tuesday's New York Times by Stacy Schiff, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America .)
Ernster, the Virtual Library Cat
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