On September 20…
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
~Carl Sagan
1777 – Outside Paoli, Pennsylvania, General Charles Grey and nearly 5,000 British soldiers launched a surprise attack on a small regiment of Patriot troops commanded by General Anthony Wayne in what became known as the Paoli Massacre.
With the help of a Loyalist spy who provided a secret password and led them to the camp, General Grey and the British launched the successful attack on the unsuspecting men of the Pennsylvania regiment, stabbing them to death as they slept. The British soldiers took no prisoners during the attack, stabbing or setting fire to those who tried to surrender. Before it was over, nearly 200 Americans were killed or wounded.
1963 – President John F. Kennedy suggested that the Soviet Union and the United States cooperate on a mission to mount an expedition to the moon. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko applauded Kennedy’s speech and called it a “good sign,” but refused to comment on the proposal for a joint trip to the moon. To Washington insiders, the idea that America would cooperate with the Soviets in sending a man to the moon seemed unbelievable.
What might have come of Kennedy’s idea is unknown. Just two months later, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, abandoned the idea of cooperating with the Soviets.
1968 – U.S. military spokesmen defended the use of defoliants in Vietnam at a news conference in Saigon, claiming that the use of the agents in selected areas of South Vietnam had neither appreciably altered the country’s ecology, nor produced any harmful effects on human or animal life.
Defoliation had been used in Vietnam since 1961 to reduce the dense jungle foliage so communist forces could not use it for cover, as well as to deny the enemy use of crops needed for subsistence. During a nine-year period ending in 1971, over 19 million gallons of three major herbicides (Agents Orange, White, and Blue) would be used in Vietnam.
Despite the U.S. military’s assurances, the use of these agents was controversial, both during and after the war, because of the questions about long-term ecological impacts and the effect on humans who were either sprayed or handled the chemicals. Beginning in the late 1970s, Vietnam veterans began to cite the herbicides, especially Agent Orange, as the cause of health problems ranging from skin rashes to cancer and birth defects in their children.
1971 – Having weakened after making landfall in Nicaragua the previous day, Hurricane Irene regained enough strength to be renamed Hurricane Olivia, making it the first known hurricane to cross from the Atlantic Ocean into the Pacific.
1973 – In a highly publicized “Battle of the Sexes” tennis match, top women’s player Billie Jean King, 29, met Bobby Riggs, 55, a former No. 1 ranked men’s player. Riggs had boasted that women were inferior, that they couldn’t handle the pressure of the game and that even at his age he could beat any female player.
The match was a huge media event, witnessed in person by over 30,000 spectators at the Houston Astrodome and by another 50 million TV viewers worldwide. King beat Riggs 6-4, 6-3, 6-3.
1973 – Singer-Songwriter Jim Croce (‘You Don’t Mess Around With Jim’, ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’ ‘Time In A Bottle’ and ‘Operator’) died at the age of 30 when his chartered Beechcraft E18S crashed into a tree while taking off from the Natchitoches Regional Airport in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Five other passengers also died, including Croce’s 24-year old guitarist, Maury Muehleisen.
1984 – The Shi’a Islamic militant group Hezbollah, with support and direction from the Islamic Republic of Iran, carried out a suicide car bombing targeting the U.S. embassy annex in East Beirut, Lebanon. The attack killed twenty Lebanese and two American soldiers.
18 months earlier, another attack, this one on the United States embassy in Beirut had killed 63 people, including 17 Americans.
1998 – After playing in a record 2,632 consecutive games over 16 seasons, Cal Ripken Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles sat out a game against the New York Yankees.
2001 – In an address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, President George W. Bush declared a “War on Terror”. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
2005 – Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish Austrian Holocaust survivor who became famous after World War II for his work as a Nazi hunter, died at the age of 96.
He played a role – though not as large as he claimed – in locating Adolf Eichmann, who was captured in Buenos Aires in 1960 (and later hanged after being found guilty of war crimes), and worked closely with the Austrian justice ministry to prepare a dossier on Franz Stangl (commandant of the Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps who was convicted for the mass murder of 900,000 people), who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1971.
2015 – Actor Jack Larson, forever remembered for playing the role of Daily Planet photographer/cub reporter Jimmy Olsen on the television series Adventures of Superman, died at the age of 87.
Shameless Plug … If you want to play great oldies from the 50s, 60s and 70s, here’s the link to the Streamingoldies media player (remember to move that green volume line on the player all the way to the right once you click the link!
http://streamingoldies.com/player/
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2016 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.