The recessed W. Thacher Longstreth agreed to meet several juvenile people who wanted to celebrate his mother Earth.
In the spring of 1970 they called it Earth’s Day.
“At first I thought it was just a confrontation,” Longstreth, a long -term Member of the City Council and President Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, said Daily News in 1990. “They assured me that they had constructive ideas and do not want confrontation.”
Planners of the first day of Earth quickly received a establishment cooperation in Philadelphia, where it evolved into a weekly holiday, which the planners called Earth Week.
The city used it best, limiting the celebrations on April 22, 1970, during a six -hour Fairmount Park festival. The final of the weekly event attracted from 25,000 to 30,000 pure air lovers.
It was a meeting in the city that the inhabitants called “Filthydelphia” It helped throw pressure on a lighter and cleaner future.
“It was the largest event in the country that day, unusual, taking into account that in countless cities and towns the events of the Earth were held and in about 2,000 universities and 10,000 high schools,” wrote the Daily News reporter.
The idea for the first official celebration of our third planet from the Sun was created from the US Senator Gaylord Nelson.
Wisconsin Democrat proposed his idea for a national event focused on the environment, in the autumn of 1969.
He provided for classes and teachings taking place throughout the country, and mainly throughout the university campus, to educate society about the power and fragility of nature.
The term Day of the Earth was invented later.
But in Philadelphia these four juvenile students from the University of Pennsylvania took Nelson’s idea and ran with him.
One of the largest events took place evening before the Earth Day, when the chestnut parade precedes the rally in the Independence Shopping Center, which attracted 7,000 people.
And on a real day of Earth, on a brilliant and clear day with temperatures floating in the 1950s, thousands of clothing colored with a tie gathered around the Museum of Art in Philadelphia.
Then Paraded to the Belmont plateau for a six -hour event.
“Crowds listened to the Gospel of environmental rights, cheered, sang more,” according to The Daily News.
Earth Day, said poet Allen Ginsberg, was a “educational picnic”.
The best part?
Thousands of revelers raised rubbish.
