Mary Margaret O'Reilly (1865–1949) was the Assistant Director of the
United States Bureau of the Mint. One of the highest-ranking female
civil servants of her time, the "sweetheart of the Treasury" often
served as the Mint's acting director in the absence of the director from
1916 until 1924, when she was formally made assistant director. O'Reilly
lived her early life in Massachusetts. She left school around age 14 to
help support her widowed mother and her siblings, and worked in
Worcester for twenty years as a clerk. In 1904, O'Reilly succeeded in
gaining a position at the Mint Bureau. Her rapid rise in the hierarchy
was unusual for a woman at that time, and with many of the directors
under whom she served having little knowledge of or interest in the
bureau's operations, the task of running the Mint often fell to her.
Beginning in 1933, O'Reilly served under her first female director,
Nellie Tayloe Ross, and soon forged a strong bond with her. O'Reilly was
so indispensable to the bureau's operations that President Franklin
Delano Roosevelt postponed her retirement, scheduled for 1935, to 1938.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Margaret_O%27Reilly>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1805:
War of the Third Coalition: French forces under Marshal Michel
Ney defeated Austrian forces in Elchingen, present-day Germany.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Elchingen>
1888:
French inventor Louis Le Prince filmed Roundhay Garden Scene,
the earliest surviving motion picture, in Roundhay, Leeds, West
Yorkshire, England.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Le_Prince>
1912:
Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was shot in an
assassination attempt, but delivered a speech before receiving treatment
from preeminent surgeon John Benjamin Murphy.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Benjamin_Murphy>
1940:
Second World War: During the Blitz, a 1,400 kg (3,100 lb)
semi-armour piercing fragmentation bomb fell on the road above Balham
station, which was being used as an air-raid shelter, killing at least
64 people.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balham_station>
1981:
Hosni Mubarak was elected President of Egypt, one week after
Anwar Sadat was assassinated.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosni_Mubarak>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
dude-bro:
(slang) A hypermasculine man, especially one who is misogynist and/or
homophobic.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dude-bro>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life
differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would
undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a
change of attitude.
--Katherine Mansfield
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Katherine_Mansfield>