On This Day October 25

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History Highlights
History Highlights

1962 – Tensions escalate between the United States and Soviet Union over the Cuban Missile Crisis. During a U.N. Security Council meeting, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson demands that his Soviet counterpart confirm whether his country is installing missiles in Cuba, saying, “I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over.”

1971 –  Sixteen years after Disneyland opens in Anaheim, California, the official dedication of Walt Disney World takes place in Orlando, Florida. Walt Disney’s brother, Roy O. Disney, and Mickey Mouse preside, followed by a grand opening parade through the Magic Kingdom. The celebration is taped for a special that airs on NBC four days later.

1982 – The sitcom “Newhart” premieres on CBS, starring Bob Newhart as an author and Vermont innkeeper.

1983 – The U.S. and its Caribbean allies invade Grenada just days after the island nation’s leader is killed in a coup.

1994 – In a case that garnered international attention, Susan Smith notifies South Carolina authorities that she was carjacked by a man who sped off with her two young boys still buckled in the back seat of her car. Nine days later, she confesses that she made up the story after driving her own car into a lake to drown the kids because she was having an affair with a man who did not want children. Smith is convicted of two counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

2002 – Golden Globe and Grammy-winning actor and singer Richard Harris, whose career spanned six decades and included starring roles in movies like “Camelot” and the “Harry Potter” series, dies of cancer at age 72. Harris had a 1968 hit single, “MacArthur Park,” which Donna Summer later covered.

On this Day June 24

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History Highlights
History Highlights

1901 – The first major exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s artwork opens in Paris.

1947 – Pilot Kenneth Arnold reports seeing strange objects near Mount Rainier, Washington. He describes them as “saucers skipping across the water,” and so the term “flying saucers” is born.

1948 – The Soviet Union begins a blockade of Berlin. Allied forces respond with what would be known as the Berlin Airlift, flying in more than two million tons of supplies over the next year.

1953 – Jacqueline Bouvier and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy publicly announce their engagement. They marry three months later in Newport, Rhode Island. Kennedy wins election as 35th U.S. president in 1960, and as first lady, Jackie, as she was known, makes restoration of the White House her first major project. 

1975 – Wind shear from thunderstorms is blamed for the crash of an Eastern Airlines 727 on final approach to New York’s JFK Airport that leaves 113 dead. The accident leads to the installation of low-level wind shear detectors at airports.

1993 – Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter is seriously injured while opening his mail when a padded envelope explodes in his hands. The bombing, along with 14 others since 1978 that killed three people and injured 23 others, was eventually linked to “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski.

1997 – U.S. Air Force officials release a 231-page report dismissing long-standing claims of an alien spacecraft crash in Roswell, New Mexico, almost exactly 50 years earlier.