Queen Elizabeth passed away last week, Thursday, September 8, 2022, at 96. She was born on April 21, 1926, and had one sibling, a younger sister named Margaret, born August 21, 1930.

When ten, Elizabeth discovered she was next in line to inherit England’s throne, whenever her father, King George VI, would pass away. Eight-year-old Margaret asked Elizabeth, “Does this mean you have to be the next Queen?” Elizabeth replied, “Someday.” Margaret said, “Poor you.”

When a child, Elizabeth understood that her life was mapped out in front of her.

On November 20, 1947, when twenty-one, Elizabeth married Philip, and they had four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward.

Her father, King George VI, passed away on February 6, 1952, and that same day her privy and executive councils named her Queen of England. At twenty-five, she ascended to the throne.

Her coronation though did not convene until June 2, 1953, and was held at Westminster Abbey, in London. At Prince Philip’s suggestion, it was televised, and millions across the world watched as the twenty-seven-year girl and mother was crowned Queen of England.

She marked her silver jubilee, after twenty-five years, in 1977; her golden jubilee, after fifty years, in 2002; and her platinum jubilee, after seventy years, on the first weekend in June 2022. She sat on England’s throne for seventy years, 214 days, the longest of any British monarch.

After the Queen passed forty years on the throne, she gave a remarkable speech on November 24, 1992, and said, “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. It has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis.’” a Latin phrase meaning a “horrible year.” What was going on?

On Friday, November 20, 1992, a tragic fire broke out in Windsor Castle, her main residence, and destroyed 115 rooms. The fire had started when a spotlight had pressed against a curtain.

Beyond that, and more at home, in 1992, three of her oldest children’s marriages were unravelling: Charles and Diana, Anne and Mark Phillips, and Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.

Charles and Lady Diana had created a series of scandals that year when rumors surfaced that the two were not getting along, due to incompatibility and the twelve years age difference. She said, “He made me feel so inadequate in every possible way. Each time I came up for air, he pushed me down.”

Lady Diana charged Prince Charles with loving Camilla, a former girlfriend, more than herself. In light of Charles and Camilla’s long-term marriage after his and Diana’s 1996 divorce, that accusation may have been true.

Lady Diana said, “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

On December 20, 1995, when the Queen had had enough of the tabloids and scandals, she wrote letters to her son and daughter-in-law, and advised them to divorce. It was finalized August 28, 1996, and a year later, on August 31, 1997, at 36, in a Paris tunnel, in a tragic car crash, Lady Diana died.

The nation wept.

Prince Anne divorced her first husband, Mark Phillips, in 1992; and in early 1992, after six years of marriage, Andrew and Sarah Ferguson legally separated. Their divorce was final four years later.

Further into that speech on November 24, 1992, the Queen said, “Criticism is good for people, but we are all part of the same fabric of our national society, and that scrutiny can be just as effective if it is made with a touch of gentleness, good humor, and understanding.”

A disgusting event occurred a decade before. At 7:15 a.m., on July 9, 1982, Michael Fagan, an Englishman with a checkered past, crawled over a wall at Buckingham Palace, climbed up a drainpipe, entered the Queen’s bedroom, and woke the Queen. Security arrived soon to escort Fagan out the door.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, passed away on April 9, 2021, at the age of 99, 62 days short of his 100th birthday.

During Elizabeth’s reign, 179 individuals served as her Commonwealth’s prime ministers, in places as far apart as Antigua and Barburda in the Caribbean, to Uganda in east Africa.

There were fifteen United Kingdom prime ministers, beginning with Winston Churchill in 1952, and ending with Liz Truss, the newest, who met the Queen at Balmoral Castle, in Scotland, on September 6, 2022, two days before the Queen’s passing.

Along the way, there was Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson.

The Queen knighted twenty seven Americans during her seventy-year rein, including: Bill and Melinda Gates, Angelina Jolie, Ralph Lauren, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bloomberg, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Rudy Giuliani, Alan Greenspan, and Billy Graham.

Three world famous Englishmen also received that designation: Elton John, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney. That is why the former Beatle, in all due respect, is called Sir Paul McCartney.

A trivia question, “Queen Elizabeth’s last name?” Windsor, perhaps named after the castle.

On June 26, 1284, officials in a German town called Hamelin hired a musician to rid the town of its rats. The “rat-catcher’s magical flute” hypnotized the rats that followed the piper out of Hamelin’s gates and into the Weser River, where they all drowned.

Although the story is based upon verifiable historical facts, it has since passed into folklore, as a fairy tale once told by the Brothers Grimm. One can only wish for as simple a solution as a magic flute to drown and destroy all forms of pestilence.

For example, the wheat stem sawfly severely reduced yields in this year’s winter wheat crop.

Long a threat to spring wheat production in the northern plains of North and South Dakota, and Montana, “it has now emerged as a significant pest of winter wheat as well,” in southeastern Wyoming, Nebraska’s Panhandle, and also, since 2010, in northeastern Colorado.

The female sawfly, “wasplike in appearance, with a shiny black body with three yellow bands around her abdomen,” lays 30 to 50 eggs” inside a wheat stem. The larvae then crawl down the stem towards soil level, where it cuts a notch in the stem. The upper stem then breaks off just before harvest.

Various forms of insect infestations have plagued the western states since the first settlers arrived.

Brigham Young arrived in the Great Salt Lake area on July 24, 1847. He and his fellow Mormons were determined to build farms there, but the crickets, actually katydids, most impressed them.

“The ground seems alive with very large black crickets crawling around the grass and bushes,” said one farmer. Brigham Young said, “Mammoth crickets abound in the borders of the Valley.”

Early the next spring they plowed the soil and planted seeds, hopeful of a good crop. A farmer said, “wheat, corn, beans, and peas are all up and looking grand, and grass is 6 inches high.”

Then, in mid-May, a swarm of the dreaded crickets attacked the tender young green plants.

One of Young’s wives said, “the crickets came by millions, sweeping everything before them. They first attacked a patch of beans, and in twenty minutes, there was not a vestige of them to be seen. They next swept over the peas. We went out with a brush to drive them out, but they were too strong for us.”

Horrified, the Mormons tried to combat this army of invaders with noise, mallets, fire, and water. One technique they tried was for two guys to pull a rope back and forth across the tops of the grain to knock the climbing crickets off the stem, before they reached the heads and devoured the grain kernels.

Nothing seemed to work though, because of the crickets’ vast numbers. Then, on June 9, they witnessed, what they later called, a miracle, when seagulls arrived and began consuming the crickets.

In a letter to Brigham Young, his fellow farmers wrote, “The sea gulls have come in large flocks from the lake and sweep the crickets as they go.” The Mormons claim that those gulls saved the Mormons’ crop that season.

Utah’s state bird is now the California gull, and a monument to that gull stands in front of the Salt Lake Assembly Hall on Temple Square, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Another insect invasion occurred, but this time on the Great Plains. Called the Locust Plague of 1874, it began on July 20, when a swarm of the Rocky Mountain locusts — migratory and destructive grasshoppers — fled east, from the mountains onto the plains, in a frantic search for food.

The swarm soon stretched from Canada and the Dakotas in the north, to as far south as Texas. Residents throughout the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, eastern Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Oklahoma and Missouri all witnessed the locusts’ destructive talent.

An editor of a Wichita newspaper wrote,

“They came upon us in great numbers, in untold millions, in clouds upon clouds, until their fluttering wings looked like a sweeping snowstorm in the heavens, until their dark bodies covered everything green upon the earth.

“In a few hours many fields that had hung thick with long ears of golden maize were stripped of their value and left only a forest of bare yellow stalks that in their nakedness mocked the farmer.”

A New York Times reporter, in Kansas, said, “The air is literally alive with them. They beat against the houses, swarm in at the windows, covering the passing trains. They work as if sent to destroy.”

Bad news soon turned good. The next spring, “a late snowstorm and a hard frost killed most of the immature insects, trillions of them, allowing farmers time to replant their crops.” As the years passed, the Rocky Mountain locust thinned, disappeared, and went extinct. It was last seen in 1902.

Of pestilence, the poets write, “The locust has no king, just noise and hard language.” “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” I say, find that magic flute, and pay the piper.

The logo for the Broadway musical “1776” features an eaglet inside a broken eggshell, biting down on a flagpole. The small flag atop the pole shows its colors: red and white stripes, and a blue field in the upper left corner. Across the bottom portion of the egg appears a larger English flag.

The musical begins with John Adams alone in the Pennsylvania State House’s belfry, four floors up, leaning on a massive bell. A messenger approaches and informs him that he must return to the hall.

He races down the steps, walks into the hall where the thirteen colonies’ fifty-plus delegates are seated at tables. There he strides across the room, all the while talking. “One useless man is a disgrace,” he says, “two is called a law firm, and three is a Congress.”

To a person, the other delegates shout at him, in song, “Sit down, John. It’s ninety degrees! Have mercy, John. It’s hot in Philadelphia. Someone ought to open a window. No! No! No! Too many flies.”

The delegates are upset with John, because he wants a vote for a declaration of independence from England, both King and Parliament, now. Most of the delegates favor reconciliation, but not a stubborn lawyer from Massachusetts named John Adams, who has read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.”

The next day the world-famous Dr. Benjamin Franklin takes Adams aside and says, “John, really. You talk as if independence was the rule. No colony has ever broken from the parent in the history of the world. John, why don’t you give it up? Nobody listens to you. You’re obnoxious and disliked.

Franklin says, “Let someone else introduce a vote for independence.”

Adams responds, “Never,” but he warms to the idea. Franklin and Adams ask Richard Henry Lee, a Virginia delegate, to introduce a motion that permits discussion on independence. The motion passes.

During the debate, John Adams surprises everybody when he calls for a postponement on all future discussion until a document is written for the delegates’ review. Franklin seconds the motion, and the motion passes.

According to the history books, on June 11, 1776, the 2nd Continental Congress appointed five to the committee to write the declaration: Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, John Adams of Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York.

Adams and Franklin ask Jefferson to write the document, and he agrees, but is reluctant. He has not seen his wife Martha for six months, but out of duty he stays and writes during those hot summer days.

At one point in the musical, prior to the vote, John finds himself alone in the state house late at night, and he begins to sing, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see? They want me to quit. They say, John, give up the fight. Still to England I say ‘Good night.”

Then, in a second verse, he sings, “Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see? I see fireworks! I see the pageant and pomp and parade. I hear bells ringing out. I hear cannons roar. I see Americans—all Americans, free forever more.”

The musical “1776” first appeared on March 16, 1969, on a stage at the 46th Street Theatre, two and a half blocks west of Broadway, now called the Richard Rodgers Theatre. William Daniels played the part of John Adams, Ken Howard played Jefferson, and Howard Da Silva played Franklin.

The play ran for 1,217 performances and won three Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

In 1972, the film producer Jack Warner adapted the play for a film, and he hired the same actors for the movie as appeared on the stage. “I want the whole cast,” he said.

Many of you may know of William Daniels. In addition to playing John Adams, he also played John Quincy Adams in “The Adams Chronicles,” in the mid-1970s on PBS, and also Dr. Mark Craig in “St. Elsewhere,” an arrogant, irritable, but brilliant heart surgeon.

Perhaps his longest stint as a television actor though was as George Feeny, a history teacher at John Adams High School in Philadelphia, on “Boy Meets World,” a sitcom that ran for 7 seasons, from 1993 until 2000, 158 episodes. Cory, Topanga, and Shawn each received life lessons from Mr. Feeney.

Last March, William Daniels turned 95 years old, and he and his wife reside in southern California.

One other piece of trivia. On August 6, 2015, Lin-Manual Miranda staged his musical, “Hamilton,” also at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. In 2016, Lin-Manual Miranda and William Daniels talked.

In their interview, Daniels said that his dressing room, when he played John Adams, is the same as the actor who plays George Washington in “Hamilton,” stage right, with a little door facing the audience.

Miranda summed up their respective musicals, “The truth is more interesting than anything a writer could make up.”

I hope each of you enjoyed your Fourth of July holiday!