March 12th History Lesson
U.S. and World History
1894 – Coca-Cola was bottled and sold for the first time in Vicksburg, Mississippi by local candy company owner Joseph Biedenharn.
1912 – The Girl Scouts organization was founded. Juliette Gordon Low of Savannah, Georgia is the person credited with starting this group for young girls, figuring, of course, that if there were Boy Scouts, why not Girl Scouts, too? At first, the girls weren’t called Girl Scouts at all. They were called Girl Guides until the name was officially changed a short time after the group’s founding.
1930 – Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi began a 200-mile march to protest a British tax on salt.
1938 – Greeted by enthusiastic crowds, Adolf Hitler accompanied German troops into Austria to annex the German-speaking nation for the Third Reich. Hitler appointed a new Nazi government and Austria existed as a federal state of Germany until the end of World War II.
1940 – Three months after the Soviet Union invaded Finland, initiating the so-called Winter War, the Finns sued for an armistice and handed the northern shores of Lake Lagoda and the small Finnish coastline on the Arctic Sea to the Soviet Union.
1947 – In a dramatic speech to a joint session of Congress, President Harry S. Truman asked for U.S. assistance for Greece and Turkey to forestall communist domination of the two nations. Historians have often cited Truman’s address, which came to be known as the Truman Doctrine, as the official declaration of the Cold War.
1951 – The cartoon Dennis the Menace by Hank Ketcham made its syndicated debut in 16 newspapers.
1964 – Jimmy Hoffa, president of the powerful American Teamsters union, was sentenced to eight years in jail on bribery charges.
1968 – Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota), an outspoken critic of the Johnson administration’s policies in Vietnam, polled 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire s Democratic presidential primary. President Lyndon Johnson got 48 percent. A Harris poll later showed that anti-Johnson, rather than antiwar, sentiment provided the basis for McCarthy’s surprisingly strong performance.
Johnson, frustrated with his inability to reach a solution in Vietnam and stunned by his narrow victory in New Hampshire, announced on March 31, 1968, that he would neither seek nor accept the nomination of his party for re-election.
1978 – Actor John Cazale died of lung cancer at the age of 42. He appeared in five full-length feature films while alive, plus a sixth using archival footage; The Godfather, The Godfather II, Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather III.
With his appearance in The Godfather III (in archive footage 12 years after his death), Cazale became the only actor in motion picture history to have every feature film in which he appeared be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Despite being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, Cazale continued to work with his real life romantic partner, Meryl Streep, in The Deer Hunter. Director Michael Cimino rearranged the shooting schedule with Cazale and Streep’s consent, so Cazale could film all his scenes first. Cazale completed his scenes, but died before the film was finished.
1980 – A Chicago jury found John Wayne Gacy Jr. guilty of the sexual assault and murders of 33 boys and young men in a series of killings committed between 1972 and 1978. He was sentenced to death and after a lengthy series of appeals, he was executed by lethal injection on May 9, 1994.
1987 – Les Miserables opened at The Broadway Theatre. The musical moved to the Imperial Theatre in 1990. After a combined 6,680 performances in sixteen years, it closed on May 18, 2003, but has been revived twice; in 2006 at the Broadhurst Theatre (for 479 performances), and again in 2014 (it’s still running) at the Imperial Theatre.
1987 – Woody Hayes, College Football Hall of Fame coach (career record of 205–61–10 at Ohio State) whose career ended when he was fired after punching Clemson middle guard Charlie Bauman for intercepting an Ohio State pass with two minutes left in the 1978 Gator Bowl, died of a heart attack at the age of 74.
2001 – Morton Downey, Jr., controversial (and loud) radio and television host (The Morton Downey, Jr. Show) died of lung cancer at the age of 68.
2003 – 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart was finally found in Sandy, Utah, nine months after being abducted from her family’s home. Her kidnappers, Brian David Mitchell, a drifter who the Smarts had briefly employed at their house, and his wife, Wanda Barzee, were charged with the kidnapping, as well as burglary and sexual assault.
Mitchell was declared mentally unfit to stand trial in July 2005 and December 2006; Barzee, who filed for divorce from Mitchell in December 2004, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for her role in the kidnapping in November 2009. On May 25, 2011, after being ruled competent to stand trial in March 2010 and convicted that December, Mitchell was sentenced to life in federal prison.
2008 – New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned two days after reports had surfaced that he was a client of a prostitution ring.
2009 – Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty in New York to pulling off perhaps the biggest swindle in Wall Street history. Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies and admitted his wealth management system was a massive Ponzi scheme.
All told, the money missing from client investment accounts, including fabricated gains, was almost $65 Billion. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
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