1930 Corbin (KY), Food: Harland Sanders opened the first Kentucky Fried Chicken store. It was an adjunct to a motel he owned and operated. It soon become more profitable and easier to run than the motel. I ate some KFC once when a penurious graduate student and that was enough to last my lifetime.
1934 Fort Myers (FL), Sports: For the Philadelphia Athletics Babe Didrikson pitched one inning in a spring training exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers, after hitting the lead-off man, she retired the side in order. Mildred ‘Babe’ Didrikson was a versatile athlete who won 82 golf tournaments and every Olympic event she was permitted to enter. Despite her prowess, or because of it, the Professional Golfers Association refused to let her compete with men, though she repeatedly applied to do so. She inspired the film ‘Pat and Mike’ (1952) and appeared in it in a cameo as herself.
1942 Terowie (South Australia), History: This rail head is one hundred and fifty miles north of Adelaide, it was the change of gauge junction for the railway north to Alice Springs, west to Kalgoorlie and east to Broken Hill. Each line had a different gauge so trains of one gauge would pull up on one side of a platform and goods and luggage were manhandled across to a waiting train on a different gauge track on the other side of the platform. Passenger were awoken to do the same. In 1942 after having refused to obey several earlier Presidential orders to leave Corregidor, it was here, while changing trains as described above, that General Douglas MacArthur said to the waiting press about the Phillipines: ‘I shall return.’ A biography of this caesar is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clicking. Terowie is now derelict.
1977 Paris, Politics: For the first time more than a century Paris had a mayor. The post was created as a sinecure, and intended to be purely ceremonial. In it Jacques Chirac saw an opportunity and he campaigned for it and was elected. His many enemies, rivals, and opponents congratulated themselves on seeing him sidelined in this meaningless job. They started re-postioning themselves to fill the void he left, they thought. Ah uh. He used the publicity of the position to prepare for higher office rather than as a pension to the surprise and irritation of many.
1985 Nome (AK), Sports: Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the Iditarod trail sled dog race from Anchorage to Nome. She outpaced the man who finished second by several hours. She and the thirteen dogs had taken eighteen days to travel through a sub-zero blizzard. The dogs often wore boots and goggles. The trail is 1,112 miles long over mountains, across glaciers, along cliffs; it was once a mail route. Her example stimulated other members of the weaker sex to enter this race and the next three races were also won by women. If the PGA ran this race, women would have been banned.
Skip to content