“The person I’m interviewing has not been subpoenaed. He’s in charge of himself, and he lives with his subject matter every day. All I’m armed with is research.”
~Mike Wallace


1922 – President Warren G. Harding’s Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall, set in motion the Teapot Dome scandals.
Fall leased the Teapot Dome oil reserves in Wyoming to Harry Sinclair of Mammoth Oil, a subsidiary of Sinclair Oil Corporation. He also leased the Elk Hills reserve to Edward L. Doheny of Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company. Both leases were issued without competitive bidding.
The lease terms were very favorable to the oil companies, which secretly made Fall a rich man. Fall had received a no-interest loan from Doheny of $100,000 (about $1.4 million today) in November 1921.
He received other gifts from Doheny and Sinclair totaling about $404,000 (about $5.67 million today). The money changing hands was illegal, not the leases.
An investigation, led by Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana, began in October of that year.
For two years, Walsh pushed forward while Fall stepped backward, covering his tracks as he went. No evidence of wrongdoing was initially uncovered, but records kept disappearing mysteriously.
Fall had made the leases appear legitimate, but his acceptance of the money was his undoing. By 1924, the remaining unanswered question was how Fall had become so rich so quickly and easily.
Money from the bribes had gone to Fall’s cattle ranch and investments in his business. Finally, as the investigation was winding down with Fall apparently innocent, Walsh uncovered a piece of evidence Fall had failed to cover up: Doheny’s $100,000 loan to Fall.
This discovery broke open the scandal.
Fall was convicted on charges of accepting a bribe from Doheny. The first Cabinet member convicted of a crime committed while in office, Fall was fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison.


1945 – The Yamato, the largest battleship ever constructed, was sunk by American aircraft.
With a length of 862 feet and armed with nine 46cm (18.1 in) Type 94 main guns – the largest guns ever mounted on a warship – Yamato was commissioned one week after the attack on Pearl Harbor, spending most of its time moving between the major Japanese naval bases of Truk and Kure in response to American threats.
By early 1945, the Japanese fleet was depleted and badly hobbled by critical fuel shortages. In a desperate attempt to slow the Allied advance, Yamato was dispatched on a one-way mission to Okinawa in April 1945, with orders to beach herself and fight until destroyed protecting the island.
It never got the chance.
The battleship, along with nine other Japanese warships, were attacked by U.S. carrier-borne aircraft before reaching Okinawa. Yamato was hit by at least 11 torpedoes and eight bombs. It sank rapidly, losing an estimated 3,100 of her 3,330 man crew


1947 – Auto pioneer Henry Ford died at age 83.
He was the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production.
That’s the good part.
Ford was also widely known for his pacifism during the first years of World War I, and for promoting anti-Semitic content, including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, through his newspaper The Dearborn Independent and the book The International Jew, having an influence on the development of Nazism and Adolf Hitler.


1949 – Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific opened at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway.
The advance sale was $400,000, and an additional $700,000 in sales was made soon after the opening. The first night audience was packed with important Broadway, business, and arts leaders. The audience repeatedly stopped the show with extended applause, which was sustained at length at the final curtain.
When it closed on January 16, 1954, after 1,925 performances – and ten Tony Awards – it was the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history (after Oklahoma!).


1954 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower described his “domino theory” – referring to communism in Indochina – during a news conference.
“Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.“


1958 – The Los Angeles Dodgers were forced to make a drastic change to their ballpark.
The Dodgers played four seasons at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum while waiting for their permanent stadium to be constructed. The Coliseum was a perfect fit for football and track and field events, but it was a joke when used for baseball.
The distances in center and right-center field (425 feet and 440 feet) made hitting home runs to those parts of the field a prodigious task, and while the right field foul pole was a short 301 feet from home plate, the wall extended out so quickly that home runs there were next to impossible.
The real culprit was in left field where it was only 251 feet down the line.
To cut down on home runs in that part of the stadium, Commissioner Ford Frick ordered the Dodgers to construct a screen 40 feet high.


1970 – At the 42nd Academy Awards, Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.
It became the first – and so far, the only – X-rated film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its rating has since been downgraded to R.
John Wayne (True Grit) won Best Actor and Maggie Smith (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) won Best Actress.


2001 – Academy Award winning actress Beatrice Straight died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. She was 86.
In her long career, she actually did little work in films, preferring to perform on the stage. She debuted on Broadway in 1935 and was awarded the Best Supporting Actress Tony Award for her performance in The Crucible.
Although her film credits were few, she is best remembered for role as Louise Schumacher in Network, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
She was on screen for only five minutes and two seconds – the shortest performance to win an Academy Award for acting – but her performance as the devastated wife confronting her husband for his infidelity was nothing short of amazing.


2012 – Hard hitting journalist Mike Wallace died of natural causes at the age of 93.
One of the original correspondents for CBS’ 60 Minutes, which debuted in 1968. Wallace retired as a regular full-time correspondent in 2006.
A reporter with the presence of a performer, Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years.
His on-air confrontations with Barbra Streisand, Roger Clemens, John Ehrlichman, and countless others helped make 60 Minutes the most successful prime time television news program in history.
His 60 Minutes colleague Harry Reasoner once said, “There is one thing that Mike can do better than anybody else. With an angelic smile, he can ask a question that would get anyone else smashed in the face.”

Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2019 RayLemire.com / Streamingoldies.com. All Rights Reserved.