On this day in Motown: Calendar has daily history, both trivial and grand

Sometimes history will jump up and bite you in the rump. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea, for instance, for Detroit to present a well-known world leader a key to the city in 1980.

The guy had dropped a $250,000 donation on Chaldean Sacred Heart Church in Highland Park a year before, and at a point where a lot of Americans wanted to pave Iran, he disliked the place even more than we did. So when a delegation from the church visited the presidential palace, it passed along a ceremonial key from mayor Coleman Young to our kind, generous buddy:

Saddam Hussein.

I didn't find that in "Days of Detroit," the 2010 calendar from the Detroit Historical Society, but I didn't expect to. That's a lot of information to pack into a 1 ˝ -inch square, especially when you have to leave room for helpful family notations like "Hockey practice 5 a.m.," or "Reminder: Make kids quit hockey."

The society did, however, come up with a factoid for every day, and as a factoid kind of guy, I appreciate that.

On April 17, 1802, for instance, the first city tax was assessed on every adult. It was 25 cents.

Twenty-five cents was also the price to see the first leopard exhibited in the United States, back on Feb. 2, 1802. That's not in the calendar, either, because it happened in Boston.

Let the misbegotten Red Sox fans put it in their calendar.

But on Feb. 2, 1704, a priest performed the first baptism in Detroit, with the guest of honor being Marie Therese Cadillac, the daughter of the huckster who founded our fair city.

I'd have paid a quarter to learn that.

Not all of the facts will thrill and amaze you. For Nov. 23 -- a Tuesday next year, in case you're planning ahead -- it's "2007: Newly renovated Detroit Institute of Arts reopened."

That's very nice for the DIA, and for us. But it's not as illuminating as Nov. 26 (ordinance requires city sidewalks, 1827) or as illuminated as Nov. 9 (fire destroys Ford Rotunda in Dearborn, 1962).

On the other hand, I think we can crown Nov. 4 as the most inconsequential day in the history of Detroit, if this is the best the staff of feverishly researching historians could come up with. "1993: Detroit Neon admitted to Continental Indoor Soccer League."

Sometimes the news in the little square is jarring. In 1886, the heaviest snowfall in Detroit history dropped 24 ˝ inches ... and it was only April 6. Fortunately, the calendar discloses, the Detroit Tigers didn't play their first game at Michigan and Trumbull until April 28, 1896, so the snowstorm didn't cancel Opening Day.

The calendar can be found for $12.95 at the Detroit Historical Museum, the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, all of the major bookstores, a bunch of the small and plucky ones, and the online store at http://www.detroithistorical.org">www.detroithistorical.org.

There's good news in the calendar (March 24, 2008, Kwame Kilpatrick charged with perjury) and weird news (Aug. 24, 1915, bounty of 5 cents apiece offered for dead rats) and sad news (Aug. 18, 2007, 65-foot cabin cruiser seized with cargo of 114 half-barrels and 300 cases of beer), and no shortage of reasons to keep turning pages.

There is not, however, a hippopotamus.

For June 22, the calendar notes that in 1937, Joe Louis defeated James Braddock to become the world heavyweight boxing champion of the world. It fails to reveal that on that date in 1863, a circus hippo on a boat steaming up the Detroit River escaped from its cage, jumped into the water and made a break for freedom.

Its keeper and the keeper's dog managed to herd it onto the riverbank, where it was detained and hauled to wherever it was supposed to be going.

Unlike history, the hippo did not nip anybody's hindquarters.