He is believed to have died on March 17, 460 AD and it is on this day that the Irish and those once a year Irish celebrate St. Patrick Day.

Even before St. Patrick, who is credited as banishing all snakes from the island, there weren’t any snakes so he couldn’t have banished any. He was a converted Christian and helped transform the island from their pagan beliefs to Christianity.

St. Patrick Day has a celebrated history of parades. The first St. Patrick Day parade was not in Ireland, but in New York City. On March 17, 1762 Irish soldiers serving in the English military marched through the city.

Leprechauns and St. Patrick are classic symbols of Ireland. Now a natural combination. Leprechauns have their origins from old Celtic folklore and were cranky souls known for their trickery to protect their much-fabled treasure.
Until Walt Disney and the film Darby O’Gill & the Little People which introduced a cheerful, friendly leprechaun, they were not really a part of the Irish celebration.

Many of us will have Corn Beef and Cabbage on St. Patrick day, but this too is a fairly recent invention. Cabbage has long been a Irish food, it was usually served with bacon. That was until around the beginning of the 20th century when immigrants in New York City substituted corned beef to save money. The idea came from their Jewish neighbors.

Myth. There has never been a death that has been proven to have occurred due to ingestion of the leaves or any other part of the flower. The myth began in 1919 when the child of an army officers died and the poinsettia was thought to have been the cause. A study bu the Ohio State University fed high doses of ground poinsettia leaves to rats with no side effects to the rats.

Eating poppy seeds can cause a false positive in a drug test.

Fact: The poppy seeds on your favorite bagel or bread comes from a similar type of poppy seeds as the opium poppies, the raw material of drugs such as heroin and morphine.

The Texas bluebonnet, the State flower of Texas, can not be picked legally in Texas.

Myth: As long as you have permission of the owner of the property to pick the flower there isn’t a law making it illegal to pick. However that is not true for all state’s and their state flowers. In Minnesota it is illegal to pick the pink-and-white lady’s slipper.

Tulips are native to Netherlands (Holland).

Myth: The origin of the tulip is believed to have been in Asia with their introduction to Europe being in the 16th Century.

The Daisy were at one time called ‘Day’s Eye’.

Fact: Since the daisy will close at night and open during the day, it was originally called a ‘Day’s Eye’, with over time the pronunciation being contracted to the current daisy.

Flowers in a Hospital room will consume all of the oxygen in the room.

Myth: Over the course of a 24 hour period flowers can actually give off 10 times more oxygen than they consume. More oxygen is actually used by visitors than flowers.

The first European settlement in Maine was in 1604 by a French party that included Samuel de Champlain. The first English settlement in Maine was established by the Plymouth Company at Popham in 1607. This was the same year as the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia.

The Popham Colony was abandoned after only one year. This may have been mostly due to changes in the leadership ranks than lack of success. The loss of life of the colonists in 1607 and 1608 at Popham was fewer than that at Jamestown. Even with its failure the first ship built by the English in the New World was completed in Popham Colony and was sailed the colonist back to England.

The City of Portland is Maine’s largest city and until 1832 it was the state’s capital. It was moved to Augusta which is more central within the state.

The town of York, located in South East Maine was chartered in 1641. This may be the oldest Chartered town in America.

US Route 1 ends at Fort Kent, Maine near the Canadian border. The route is the major north–south Highway serving the East Coast of the United States and runs south to Florida and the Florida Keys ending at Key West.

Daylight Saving Time is not a modern idea. Benjamin Franklin first mentioned it in a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784. He didn’t really say that the clocks should be changed, but that to take advantage of the extra daylight, one should arise from bed earlier.

It wasn’t put into practice until the German government put it in place in 1916 between April 30 and October 1. In the same year the United Kingdom adopted it from May 21 to October 1.

The U.S. Congress established it at the same time they formally adopted the Rail Road Time Zones in 1918, observing it for seven months in 1918 & 1919 It became so unpopular that the law for DST was repealed in 1919.

In 1942, during World War II, DST was reinstated in the U.S. although from the end of the war in 1945 until 1966, there wasn’t a Federal Law that addressed DST.

In 1966 DST was established and has been in place since, although the law gave states the capability to exempt themselves and a few, such as Arizona and Hawaii have. Many countries follow some sort of DST plan.

Born March 12, 1917, in Baltimore, Kaufman spent two years as a merchant seaman after high school. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University in 1939. After graduation he moved to New York City and worked as a newspaperman.

In 1942 he enlisted in the marines and served on Guadalcanal, landed at Guam with the 1st Marine Brigade (Provisional) then participated in Okinawa with the 6th Marine Division. While serving in the Pacific, Kaufman was stricken with malaria and dengue fever. He returned to New York only to discover he couldn’t tolerate the climate changes. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles.

In 1949, Kaufman wrote the screenplay for the short film Ragtime Bear, the first appearance of Mr. Magoo. He followed this up in 1950 with another Mr. Magoo film, Punchy de Leon. Quincy Magoo is a wealthy, short-statured retiree who gets into a series of sticky situations as a result of his nearsightedness.

Kaufman shared an agent with Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo, also a screenwriter, was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Trumbo co-wrote the screenplay for Gun Crazy, but it was Millard Kaufman’s name that was on the credits.

A writer for most of his life it wasn’t until he was 90 that Kaufman published his first novel. Bowl of Cherries was released in October 2007. A second novel, Misadventure, is scheduled for publication in April 2010.

In 1587 a small company made up of 90 men, 17 women and 9 children colonized the island of Roanoke just off the coast of North Carolina. John White, the governor of the second colony, went back to England to gather more supplies. He intended to return to Roanoke Island right away, but war between England and Spain delayed him. Three years later when returning with supplies the colony was gone. The only clue the word “Croatan” was carved on a tree.

On November 5, 1872 the Mary Celeste set sail from New York for Italy. A month later on December 5th it was discovered as a derelict. The ship was in perfect order with no sign of trouble and still carried ample supplies. The captain, his family and its 14-member crew have never been found.

In 1913 author Ambrose Bierce joined the army of Pancho Villa as an observer of the Mexican Revolution. It is known that he accompanied Villa’s army as far as Chihuahua since a letter to a close friend was sent from there on December 26, 1913. Afterward he vanished and investigations into the disappearance provided no answers.

On August 6, 1930 New York Supreme Court associate justice Joseph F. Crater was seen walking out of a New York restaurant. He entered a taxi after waving goodbye to some friends and was never seen again. In October, a grand jury began looking into the case and ended up calling 95 witnesses and amassing 975 pages of testimony. Some of the evidence uncovered was that a safe-deposit box had been emptied and two briefcases missing. The conclusion was: “The evidence is insufficient to warrant any expression of opinion as to whether Crater is alive or dead, or as to whether he has absented himself voluntarily, or is the sufferer from disease in the nature of amnesia, or is the victim of crime.”

On March 4, 1983 13-year-old Shannon Lee Potter of Parkville, Maryland climbed out of her bedroom window to attend a party. She has not been seen since.

While not a disappearance, the Legend of the Lost Dutchman’s mine in the Superstition Mountain of Arizona has caused a few disappearances with people lost trying to discover its location. In the 1870’s Jacob Waltz is said to have located a mine that he worked with his partner Jacob Weiser. Waltz was German, mistaken for Dutch, and he is the Dutchman where the name originated. Most stories place the mine in the vicinity of Weaver’s Needle, a well-known landmark in the mountains.