1824 The Presidential election went to the House of Representatives which voted for John Quincy Adams, though Andrew Jackson had more popular votes. There were two other candidates. Curiously both Adams and Jackson had the same Vice Presidential running mate, John Calhoun. Jackson had campaigned vigorously on the program of the corruption of Congress, only to discover he had no friends there.
1917 Father Flanagan founded Boys Town in Omaha. Quite a story. Seen Spencer Tracey do it. Been there more than once.
1955 In Montgomery, Alabama Rosa Parks was jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws. In those angry, volatile, and murderous times she had volunteered to be a test case for the NAACP.
1987 Under great pressure from the Fitzgerald corruption investigation Country Party Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen resigned as Queensland’s longest-serving Premier (1967-1987). He freely manipulated electoral boundaries to weight sparsely populated country seats. Recalling his garbled speech reminds me of President Tiny.
1990 Shortly after 11 am, hand-held drills penetrated the last rock wall and to connect the Chunnel linking Great Britain with the European mainland for the first time in 8,000 years. It took four more years to bring the it into service. Been through it a couple of times. Napoleon had an engineering assessment of such a tunnel in 1804. It was assumed in ‘The Trans-Atlantic Tunnel’ (1935) discussed elsewhere on this blog.
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