Talk:Hiram Bithorn

Untitled
The following is my recollection of what my grandfather said about Hiram Bithron's death. He told me the story sometime in late 1960s, early 1970s. My grandfather did not have a good opinon of Mexico. He compared Mexico with the Soviet Union - one party control of the police, military, and government.

As I recall, my Abuelo said that Hiram was walking back to his hotel but a few blocks from the hotel he was told by a Mexican soldier that he would have to take another, longer route. Apparently, the direct route to the hotel would have had Hiram walk past either the USSR's or USA's embassy. Hiram thought that that order was ridiculous and that there was no reason why go another way and ignored the order. Then he was shot. I think Abuelo said in the back but I am not sure.

The story that your grandfather told you is not completely correct. Hiram Bithorn was stoped by a policeman and requested his vehicle's documents. As Mr. Bithorn did not have the papers with him his was taken into custody but apparently an argument excalated and he was shot in the stomach. Visit www.hirambithorn.net for details about his life. In the website you can see newspaper clips about his career and death.

Hmmm. Thanks for the information. It looks like the "official" account, though, is suspect.

Language problem
There's an article on Hiram Bithorn in Spanish. It is not linked to the English or Portuguese articles. I tried to link it in, using "Edit links" on the left, but keep getting an error message which makes no sense whatsoever. Perhaps somebody with more Wiki expertise could tackle this problem. DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 15:31, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

See my change, of a few minutes ago, which is my own very crude solution to this problem. What would you have done? DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 22:48, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

I tried doing the same thing to Hiram's Spanish article, but got some dumb error messages. Evidently they are less forgiving of editors trying to sneak in interwiki links than the English Wikipedia is. DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 03:29, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

No pude hacer este cambio en español, mas esta estratégia funcionou muito bem em Português. Go figure! DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 04:30, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Language problem resolved!
After EmausBot deleted my manual linkage to Hiram's Spanish article yesterday, I almost fired off a nasty message to his master. But I thought I would take a stab at making Wikipedia's automatic language linkage system work before starting anything. So I went to the Spanish page, clicked on "editar los enlaces" on the left, saw that there wasn't any information on a Spanish article, then inserted that info. Voilà, suddenly the English and Portuguese pages both had links to the Spanish page!

So today's edit consists of removing the comment lines surrounding the language entry which I didn't want anybody to delete, but which EmausBot deleted anyway. I just made a similar change to Hiram's Portuguese page. DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 01:02, 19 May 2014 (UTC)

Apellido materno
When an ipuser changed Hiram's mother's surname a little while ago from Soto to Sosa, my first impulse was to revert it as vandalism. After all, wasn't my own May 27 update, adding Soto to his name in the heading, based on a biography which listed it that way?

But then I took a fresh look at that biography and saw that it now said Sosa. And I found a bunch of other places with the same information. But on the other hand, there are still a bunch of web sites which list his apellido materno as Soto. Which is right? I have no idea. Is there anybody in Puerto Rico who could investigate this issue in local sources? Is Hiram's birth record available in the Registro Civil de Santurce? DutchmanInDisguise (talk) 01:32, 31 October 2014 (UTC)

Conflicting date of death
Reliable sources indicate differing dates of death. MLB.com and baseball-reference.com indicated December 29 while thebaseballcube.com and retrosheet.org indicate December 30. As of now, the article uses December 29.

Bob305 (talk) 22:34, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

World War II service
Although Becker served in the United States Navy during World War II, no reliable sources found as of yet state that he served overseas in a war zone during the war. More specifically, the sources do not establish defining role in World War II. Accordingly, Category:American military personnel of World War II was removed from the article. Semper Fi! FieldMarine (talk) 11:46, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Waldemar Bithorn place of origin
Waldemar Bithorn was from the island of St. Croix in what is now the United States Virgin Islands and was previously the Danish West Indies.RichardBond (talk) 19:28, 24 January 2021 (UTC)