Showing posts with label this day in history january. Show all posts
Showing posts with label this day in history january. Show all posts

Friday, January 13, 2012

This Day in History



Jan 13 1943
Hitler declares "Total War".


Jan 13 1959
Raul Castro, brother of Fidel, lines up 71 Batista supporters in front of a trench and machine guns them. They are then buried by a tractor without any verification that the prisoners were killed.



Jan 13 1962
Television comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs drives his "unsafe at any speed" Corvair into a utility pole on Santa Monica Boulevard, killing him instantly and turning The Nairobi Trio into a Duo.

Jan 13 1979
The Young Men's Christian Association files a libel suit against the Village People for their popular Y.M.C.A hit.


Jan 13 1982
Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge over the Potomac River, killing all but four passengers and one flight attendant.

The aircraft was carrying 74 passengers and five crewmembers when it crashed during the failed takeoff attempt. The aircraft struck the 14th Street Bridge, which carries Interstate 395 between Washington, D.C. and Arlington County. It crushed seven occupied vehicles on the bridge and destroyed 97 feet of guard rail before it plunged through the ice into the Potomac River. The crash occurred less than two miles from the White House and within view of both the Jefferson Memorial and The Pentagon.

The accident killed 78 people, including four motorists on the 14th Street Bridge. The survivors were rescued from the icy river by civilians and professionals.


Jan 13 1987
New York mobsters Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno and Carmine "Junior" Persico sentenced to 100 years of prison for racketeering, along with six others. All were members of the Mafia "board of directors"

Jan 13 1991
Forty-two people are killed in a soccer stampede and melee at Johannesburg, South Africa.

Jan 13 1998
A woman taking a tour of the White House applies spray paint to two early 19th century marble busts modeled by Giuseppi Ceracchi. No clear motive exists for the vandalism, and it it not clear how spray paint was brought through White House security. Spokesman Mike McCurry stated, "it looks like a bad rouge job on the busts".

Thursday, January 12, 2012

This Day in History

Jan 12 1865
General William T. Sherman issues Special Field Order No. 15, entitling the household of each freed slave "a plot of no more than forty acres of tillable ground" along the Carolina coastline between Charleston and Jacksonville. After the Confederate surrender, the Johnson administration makes a halfhearted attempt to follow through on the acreage, but all efforts to parcel out the land in question are abandoned just a few months later.

Jan 12 1914
Industrialist Henry Ford offers the incredible sum of a $5 per day wage for unskilled labor (previously $2.34), but only to married white Christian men willing to subject themselves to surveillance and random home inspections by the company's Sociology Department.


Jan 12 1928
Murderer Ruth Snyder executed in the Electric Chair at Ossining. Photographer Thomas Howard catches the moment of death with a camera secretly strapped to his ankle, and the photo runs on the front page of the New York Daily News.

Jan 12 1965
At 10:58 a.m. PST, scientists conduct what they called a "controlled excursion", burning up a nuclear rocket in Nevada and putting a radioactive cloud over Los Angeles.

Jan 12 1966
Premiere on television of the homoerotic comedy "Batman" starring Adam West and Burt Ward.

Jan 12 1971
The first episode of "All in the Family" made television history by broadcasting the sound of a toilet flushing.


Jan 12 1979
One of the Hillside Stranglers, security guard Kenneth Bianchi, is arrested in Bellingham, Washington for a pair of rape/strangulations. After he moved north from Los Angeles he made the mistake of continuing his high profile hobby.

Jan 12 1993
A transcript of the infamous 1989 intercepted phone call between Camilla and Prince Charles is published by the Sun. "I'll just live inside your trousers or something".

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

This Day in History

Jan 11 1892
After sampling the services of many adolescent women in the tropics, the fifty year old painter Paul Gauguin marries Tehura, an awfully cute 13 year old Tahitian girl.


Jan 11 1960
Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas kills his 74 year old mother. He tells Toledo police that he raped her corpse, but later recants this. The murder ends his career as a serial killer; he is variously attributed to having killed between 100 and 600 people. The truth is probably below 100.




Jan 11 1962
In the Peruvian Andes, an avalanche buries 3,000 people alive as the volcano Huascaran erupts.

Jan 11 1964
The US Surgeon General warns against smoking for the first time. It's amazing how many dumbshits need to be told that inhaling smoke is harmful.



Jan 11 1966
Numerous people, including the mayor of Wanaque and their police chief, observe a UFO over Wanaque Reservoir, burning holes in the ice. The Air Force explained it as a weather balloon, but later withdrew that claim and called it a helicopter.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

This Day In History

Jan 4 1964
The Boston Strangler Albert DeSalvo kills his final victim, Mary Sullivan, age 19, at her Charles Street apartment.


Jan 4 1986
Phil Lynott, founder of heavy metal band "Thin Lizzy", dies from heart failure brought on by a drug overdose.

Jan 4 1997
Rumors run rampant through Israel, particularly over talk radio, that a UFO will land at Tel Aviv on the following day. The predictions are purported to have been made by spoonbender Uri Geller. Thousands flock to the beaches, but no saucers.

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

This Day in History

Jan 3 1946
William Joyce, the "Lord Haw-Haw" who broadcasted Nazi propaganda to Britain during World War II, is hanged for treason in London.


Jan 3 1958
The editor of the scandal magazine Confidential, Howard Rushmore, murders his wife and then suicides in the back of a taxicab in NYC.

Jan 3 1961
Three technicians -- John Byrnes, Richard McKinley, and Richard Legg -- are killed when the SL-1 experimental nuclear reactor explodes in Idaho Falls, Idaho. McKinley's corpse is found stuck to the containment dome ceiling, impaled on a control rod. The crewmen's radioactive bodies are so hot they have to be buried in lead-lined caskets.

Jan 3 1962
Pope John XXIII excommunicated Fidel Castro.

Jan 3 1967
Jack Ruby dead of natural causes.

Jan 3 1987
Four non-cancerous polyps are removed from President Ronald Reagan's colon.

Jan 3 1990
Manuel Noriega surrenders at the Papal Nunciature. He is brought to Miami and charged with drug trafficking and money laundering.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

This Day In History

Jan 5 1919
The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei is founded by Anton Drexler and others at the Furstenfelder Hof tavern in Munich. So much of early Nazi history seems to center around beer halls and homosexuals.

Jan 5 1967
Two buses of pilgrims collide south of Manila, Philippines, killing 83 in the worst traffic accident thus far.



Jan 5 1981
The Yorkshire Ripper, murderer of 13 women, is arrested. Peter Sutcliffe concentrated mostly on hookers, but still managed to terrorize mainstream England in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

Jan 5 1995
Connie Chung broadcasts Kathleen Gingrich's opinion of Hillary Clinton: bitch. We suspect it's merely a case of the pot calling the kettle black, and you can include Connie Chung in that.



Jan 5 1996
In Gaza, Israeli intelligence agents blow off the head of terrorist Yahya Ayyash, The Engineer, with a remote control cellphone bomb using plastic explosives. Ayyash purportedly ran the Hamas military wing, and was a proficient bomb maker; 100,000 people attended his funeral.


Jan 5 1998
Congressman Sonny Bono dead from blunt force trauma to his head after a direct collision with a pine tree at Heavenly Valley Ski Area. He is survived by his daughter Chastity and three other children.