Earth Days and Unicorns

It began on today's date in 1970...

No, not the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's birthday -- surely that's a mere coincidence -- but rather, the very first Earth day commemoration. (Official history by Earth Day founders here for those interested.)

Philadelphia was one of the cities that had festivities on that special inaugural day. The Bulletin, a Philly paper, has an article on it.

Ira Einhorn (called "Unicorn" because the German last name translates into "one-horn") is said to have played a significant role in the original Earth Day Festivities in Philadelphia. Unicorn. It has a nice eco-friendly ring to it, don't you think?

[To be fair, this detail is contested by some who insist that he only claimed to have played a part in it -- but with what comes next, it could also been seen why people would want to distance themselves from him, whether they had dealings or no.]

He was a prominent protester (some say Hippie) of his day, and lived the life so often associated with the "Summer of Love".

Then his girlfriend went missing...

Then his neighbors complained about a rotting stench coming from his apartment...

Original Earth Day participant keeps rotting corpse of girlfriend in trunk of apartment??? Packed in (no kidding!) plastic bags and styrofoam.

There is an article detailing the entire story of the arrest (with some editing errors, but interesting reading nevertheless).

A teaser:

"Ira had a dark side at odds with the values he professed," Newsweek asserted. "It ranged from his overpowering ego to his domineering and sometimes violent relationships with women. Yet he never paid a price for this. During the live-and-let-live 1960s, Ira was almost never called on to answer for his behavior. (Before he met Holly) there were episodes in which he attacked women who had rejected him. He strangled one of them until she fell unconscious. Several years later after hitting a second woman over the head with a Coke bottle, he wrote in his journal, 'Violence always marks the end of a relationship.'"

Despite being caught red-handed with an ex-girlfriend decomposing in his closet, he managed to get enormous support from the expected defenders of such people, and a few of the unexpected defenders... but you'll have to read that, and which currently-sitting senator got him off with only $4000 bail (the Unicorn naturally fled the country for Europe once free) in the story link.