May 29th
At 11:30 in the morning on May 29, 1953, a beekeeper from New Zealand and a Sherpa from Nepal ran out of mountain to climb. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were standing on the summit of Mount Everest — 29,032 feet up, the literal highest point on the surface of the Earth. There was nowhere left to go but down. For the first time in human history, somebody was up there.
People had been trying to reach that spot for more than thirty years, and a number of them had died doing it. The mountain is so tall that the summit pokes into the jet stream, where winds can top 100 miles an hour and there’s roughly a third of the oxygen you’d get at sea level. Climbers call the zone above 26,000 feet the “death zone,” because your body is quite literally dying the whole time you’re up there. So Hillary and Tenzing didn’t just walk up. They spent weeks acclimatizing, hauling gear, and inching along a route nobody had ever completed — including a vertical rock face near the top that’s been called the “Hillary Step” ever since.
Here’s the part I love. The two of them famously never settled who actually stepped onto the summit first. Tenzing later said Hillary’s foot landed there a moment ahead of his, and Hillary basically shrugged the question off as missing the point — they climbed as a team, they got there as a team, end of story. Up on top, with maybe fifteen minutes of oxygen-starved time to spare, Hillary stuck out his hand for a businesslike handshake, and Tenzing pulled him into a hug instead. Then Hillary took a photo of Tenzing holding his ice axe with the flags of Britain, Nepal, the UN, and India flying off it. There is no photo of Hillary on top — because, as he put it, Tenzing wasn’t a photographer and the summit of Everest was not the place to start a lesson.
And then the news had to actually get off the mountain, which in 1953 meant a relay of runners carrying the message in padlocked bags down to a radio post, then on to Kathmandu. By a genuinely incredible piece of timing, word reached London just in time to be announced on the morning of June 2 — the day Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. Crowds lining the coronation route in the rain heard over the loudspeakers that a British expedition had conquered Everest, and the whole country lost its mind. Two achievements, one morning. Hillary spent the rest of his life going back to help build schools and hospitals for the Sherpa people. He always said the mountain belonged to them too.
Also On This Day…
1917 — A future president was born in a Brookline bedroom On May 29, 1917, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born in an upstairs bedroom of a modest house in Brookline, Massachusetts. He’d go on to become the youngest man ever elected president and the first Catholic to hold the office. The house still stands, and the bedroom he was born in is preserved as a National Historic Site — his mother, Rose, helped restore it decades later, right down to remembering which bassinet he slept in. Not bad for a room you can still walk through today.
1660 — A king came home, and England planted oak trees about it On May 29, 1660 — his thirtieth birthday, no less — Charles II rode into London to reclaim the throne after years of exile, ending England’s brief experiment without a monarchy. The welcome was enormous, and the date stuck around as “Oak Apple Day,” named for the oak tree Charles had once hidden in to escape capture after an earlier defeat. For generations afterward, the English celebrated by wearing oak leaves. Few people throw a birthday party that doubles as a national holiday, but Charles managed it.
1903 — One of the funniest men in America was born in England On May 29, 1903, Leslie Townes Hope was born in Eltham, England — though the world would come to know him simply as Bob Hope. He moved to America as a kid and went on to a career in comedy and entertainment that spanned nearly eighty years, much of it spent flying around the globe to perform for U.S. troops far from home. He lived to be 100 and got the birthday wish most of us never will: he was around long enough to celebrate his own centennial, in 2003, with a slice of California highway named after him.
It makes for quite a date — two men standing where no one had ever stood, a future president taking his first breath, a king coming home, and a kid from England who’d grow up to make America laugh for eighty years. May 29 has a habit of starting things.
