Tomorrow would be his 90th birthday had Martin Luther King, Jr. lived. As it was, he was assassinated when he was 39. His family wanted his life to be remembered rather than the events of his death and his birthday to be a day of remembrance. The official holiday is now the third Monday of January each year. Because the day of the month travels around the calendar, last year we celebrated on the actual day. This year we are as far as possible from that date, with our celebration landing a week from today on January 21. It is clearly important for us to remember the minister and activist who was the nation’s most visible spokesperson and leader of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. His insight and leadership was born in deep religious traditions and his memory is an excellent opportunity for us to rededicate ourselves to the cause of justice.

But, since the holiday moves round the calendar, I thought that it might be worth a journal entry to note another anniversary that occurs on January 15. A lot of people in this part of the country don’t know that tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the Great Boston Molassas Flood. The tragedy killed 21 and hurt 150. And that’s just the people. Horses, domestic animals and other creatures also perished in the sticky mess.

According to an article by Robert S. Davis, published in the Washington Post, Boston was enjoying a bit of uncharacteristically warm weather. The temperature was 40 degrees after having been only 2 degrees earlier in the week. A group of firefighters were settling down to a game of cards when they heard a strange staccato sound. It turned out that what they were hearing were the rivets failing on a 50-foot-high storage tank. A dull roar followed. Firefighter Paddy Driscoll took a look. “Oh my god!” he exclaimed, “Run!” A torrent of dark molasses sewed from the tank and engulfed Boston’s waterfront in a 25-foot tall tidal wave. The tank, holding 2.3 gallons of molasses, belonged to U.S. Industrial Alcohol.

It was a wave of sugary doom, traveling at 35 mph. That much molasses weighs 26 million pounds. It was enough force to rip the fire station from its foundation and rip away a support beam from the elevated train tracks. It took only seconds for two city blocks to be inundated. Some buildings had molasses as high as the third story. Public works department horses were smothered in their stalls. Boston harbor was stained brown for weeks. The USS Nantucket sent rescuers and sailors who struggled through the muck to assist people. Many were so coated with molasses that rescuers couldn’t tell if they were human or animals.

Theories about why the tank failed began to circulate by rumor. Some said that a bomb had doomed the tank. Others said that the tank had been leaking prior to the failure and that the company had painted the tank brown to disguise the leaks. Others theorized that the previous record-setting warm summer weather had lead to rapid fermentation of the molasses and increased pressure in the tank. The lawsuits that followed led to a court ruling in 1925 that the tank suffered a structural failure because the walls of the tank were too thin and that the owners, U.S. Industrial Alcohol, was liable for $628,000 in damages to victims and their families.

A flood of molasses was followed by a flood of lawsuits.

The aftermath was grim as rescuers struggled through the glop, tried to clean it up, and find all of the victims. It took four months to find the last victim of the flood.

According to journalist Edward Park, “the smell of molasses remained for decades as a distinctive, unmistakable atmosphere of Boston.”

When I think of Boston, I think of baked beans and the main ingredients in baked beans are beans, salt pork and molasses. The molasses is what gives the beans their distinctive flavor and aroma. It hardly makes me think of disaster.

I once dropped a quart jar that was nearly full of honey. The jar didn’t break, but it had no lid and the sticky stuff ran out in a messy puddle on the floor. It was harder than you might think to clean up the mess. I tried spooning the honey into a bowl and got some of it that way. I tried using a rubber scraper to get the next layer. Then it was soap and water and elbow grease. It took several scrubbings to get the stickiness off of the floor. I’m pretty careful with jars of honey to this day. We buy molasses in even smaller quantities, usually less than a quart. I’m having trouble imagining 2.3 million gallons of molasses. That’s a lot.

So tomorrow is the centennial of the flood. I haven’t heard of any special commemorations of the event. I’m thinking it is about time that we stood up to all of those chocolate cookie elitists and teach them the truth about why real molasses cookies are hands down the best cookies of all. I’m talking about the chewy ginger molasses ones. You mix the dough and then put it in the refrigerator until it is very cool. Then you roll out balls and bake. The result is a wonderful super-soft and chewy cookie that is irresistible.

Let’s see. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to a tank failure to baked beans to molasses cookies. That’s a strange progression of thought for a journal entry. Maybe it is a sign of a flawed thinking process. I prefer to think, however, that many good thoughts lead to good food. At least I think about food a lot. I think, however, that someone who survived the great Boston molasses flood might have lost their appetite for molasses in general - at least for a little while.

Thank goodness we have laws and safety inspectors to protect us from another similar flood.

Copyright (c) 2019 by Ted E. Huffman. I wrote this. If you would like to share it, please direct your friends to my web site. If you'd like permission to copy, please send me an email. Thanks!