May 30

The “Goddess of Democracy” was a ten meter high statue created during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The statue was constructed in only four days out of Styrofoam and paper-Mache over a metal armature by students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The students made the statue as large as possible so that the government would be unable to dismantle it, forcing them to either destroy it or leave it standing.

The students began building the statue on May 27 at their university. It was built in the hopes that it would be invigorate the movement which was perceived to be losing some of its momentum. The students were influenced by the work of Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina, associated with the school of revolutionary realism.

When the State Security Bureau heard that the students planned to transport pieces of the statue to the Square, they declared that any truck drivers helping them would lose their licenses. The students hired six Beijing carts and leaked false information to throw off the authorities. It worked and at dusk on May 29, with fewer than 10,000 protesters remaining in the Square, the students began assembling the statue. By the early morning of May 30, the statue was fully assembled in Tiananmen Square and unveiled to as many as 300,000 spectators.

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May 29

Sir Edmund Hillary was born on July 20, 1919. He was a New Zealand mountaineer and explorer. On May 29, 1953 at the age of 33, he and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt.

The route to Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet and Nepal only let one expedition in a year. A Swiss expedition had attempted to reach the summit in 1952 but was turned back by bad weather at 80 feet. Hillary almost pulled out of the 1953 expedition was convinced to stay on. Hunt named two teams for the assault with Hillary and Tenzing as one of them.

The expedition totaled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and 10,000 lbs of baggage. Hillary forged a route through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall. The first team failed when their oxygen system failed. It took Hillary and Tenzing three days to reach the summit and they spent 15 minutes there before going back down.

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May 28

Ian Fleming was British author, journalist, and World War II Navy Commander. He is best known for creating the character of secret agent James Bond and chronicling his adventures in 12 novels and 9 short stories.

Fleming was born in Mayfair, London on May 28, 1908 to Valentine Fleming, a Member of Parliament, and his wife Evelyn St. Croix Fleming. Fleming was educated at Sunningdale School in Berkshire, Eton College, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. After graduating from school, he worked as a journalist for the Reuters news service and later as a stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman. In 1952, he married Anne Charteris in Jamaica, witnessed by his friend and playwright Noel Coward.

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Fleming was recruited by the Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy and his work for them during the war provided the background for his spy novels. He published his first novel, Casino Royale, in 1953 and introduced secret agent James Bond, also famously known by his code number, 007. Initially, the Bond novels were not bestsellers in the United States, but when President John F. Kennedy included From Russia with Love on his list of favorite books, sales increased dramatically. Fleming wrote 14 books in all with The Living Daylights being the last in 1966.

The financial success of these books allowed Fleming to retire to his estate in Jamaica and he died of a heart attack on August 12, 1964 in Kent, England.

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May 27

CHUM AM is a Canadian radio station licensed to Toronto, Ontario. Broadcasting at 1050 on the AM dial, it was a legendary Top 40 powerhouse between the late 1950s and 1970s. It currently airs an oldies format.

CHUM was launched as a dawn to dusk radio station on October 28, 1945 by Jack Q’Part, an entrepreneur in the business of patent medicines. The station was taken over in December 1954 by Allan Waters, a salesman from the patent medicine business. On May 27, 1957, he switched to a Top 40 format that had proven itself popular in some United States cities. Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up” was the first song played.

The station pioneered rock ‘n’ roll radio in Toronto and hosted the 1957 Elvis Presley and the 1964, 1965, and 1966 Beatles concerts. By the mid-1980s, CHUM was losing ratings to Top 40 competitor CFTR AM and FM-based music stations. In 1986, CHUM dropped its Top 40 format for an adult contemporary format. By 1989, it adopted an oldies format. In 1999, CHUM obtained the radio broadcast rights to Toronto Blue Jays baseball games marking a shift towards sports programming.

In 2001, CHUM went completely sports-oriented but this did not prove successful because of strong competition from long-time sports station CJCL. In 2002, the station returned back to an oldies format.