On March 12…
“Death, mounted on a wave of swirling waters, seventy feet high, and beginning at a crumbling dam high up in San Francisquito canyon, rode in devastating wrath to the sea. Sweeping through the most fertile valley in the Southland. And in his wake he left death, and devastation, and ruin, where a short hour before his passing people slept in peace, security and happiness.”
~ The ‘Fillmore American’
Editorial on the St. Francis Dam collapse
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?
Initially, they were called Girl Guides until the name was officially changed a short time after the group’s founding.
1912 – A German submarine sank an unarmed U.S. merchant ship, the Algonquin.
President Woodrow Wilson had issued an executive order four days earlier to arm U.S. merchant ships.
The U-boat opened fire on the Algonquin from a distance of 4,000 yards, firing twenty shells. These failed to sink the steamer, so men from the submarine carrying bombs boarded the Algonquin and detonated the bombs to sink her.
The crew of 26 men, eleven of them Americans, put off in small boats and after 27 hours of rowing, landed safely at Penzance on the Cornish coast on March 14.
1928 – The St. Francis Dam, built to create a large regulating and storage reservoir for the city of Los Angeles, failed.
After the reservoir was filled to capacity for the first time on March 7, William Mulholland, manager and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works and Supply inspected the dam and proclaimed it safe – even though several cracks and leaks were observed in the dam and its abutments, causing dirty water to run through the dam.
Mulholland dismissed these as normal.
It wasn’t.
At 11:57:30 p.m. – a time pegged to the loss of electricity from the Southern California Edison transmission lines – water began to seep through the cracks.
At 12:03 a.m., the wall of water, more than ten stories high, swept into the community
The dam’s reservoir of 12.5 billion gallons of water poured down the narrow canyon, initially in a 125-foot-high wall of water, and swept 431 people to their deaths.
As the flood carved out a path to the sea, it lay waste to Castaic Junction, Piru, Fillmore, Santa Paula and Saticoy before emptying into the Pacific Ocean, more than 50 miles away.
An investigation into the disaster concluded that it had been caused primarily by poor engineering and the unsuitability of the San Francisquito rock for supporting a dam and a reservoir.
1938 – The “Anschluss” (a united Austria and Germany forming a “Greater Germany”) took place as the 8th Army of the German Wehrmacht crossed the border into Salzburg, Austria.
Although the invading forces were badly organized and coordination among the units was poor, it mattered little because the Austrian government had ordered the Austrian armed forces not to resist.
That afternoon, Adolf Hitler crossed the border at his birthplace, Braunau am Inn, with a 4,000 man bodyguard. In the evening, he arrived in Vienna and was given an enthusiastic welcome.
The following day, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Chancellor of Austria, announced the revocation of Article 88 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which prohibited the unification of Austria and Germany.
Hitler appointed a new Nazi government and Austria existed as a federal state of Germany until the end of World War II.
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.
1965 – Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs released Wooly Bully on MGM Records.
The song – written by lead singer Domingo “Sam” Samudio – had been released on the small Memphis-based XL label in 1964 and was picked up in 1965 by MGM.
It sold three million copies and reached # 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed in that chart for 18 weeks, the longest time for any song in 1965. It was named Billboard’s number-one song of the year despite never reaching #1.
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 that he would neither seek nor accept the nomination of his party for re-election.
1969 – At the 11th annual Grammy Awards, Glen Campbell’s By The Time I Get To Phoenix won the Grammy for Album of The Year.
The other nominees were Jose Felicano (Felicano!), Richard Harris (A Tramp Shining), Simon & Garfunkel (Bookends), and the Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour).
Record of The Year went to Mrs. Robinson by Simon & Garfunkel.
The other nominees were Bobby Goldsboro (Honey), Glen Campbell (Wichita Lineman), Jeannie C. Riley (Harper Valley P.T.A.), and the Beatles (Hey Jude).
Song of The Year (honor goes to the songwriter) went to Bobby Russell for Little Green Apples.
The other nominees were Bobby Russell (Honey), John Lennon and Paul McCartney (Hey Jude), Paul Simon (Mrs. Robinson), and Tom T. Hall ( Harper Valley P.T.A.).
1969 – Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman at Marylebone Register Office.
“I really don’t remember whether or not I invited any of the band to the wedding,” McCartney later recalled. “Why not? I don’t know, really. Maybe it was because the group was breaking up.”
Even if he had invited George Harrison, his bandmate would not have been able to attend.
Infamous London police officer Det. Sgt. Norman Pilcher, well-known for singling out and busting rock stars – often planting “evidence” when he arrived – entered Harrison’s house in Esher, Surrey, England and arrested the Beatle and his wife Pattie for possession of marijuana.
Pilcher had previously busted Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Donovan, Eric Clapton and John Lennon, and had particularly focused on the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones.
Karma Factoid: On November 8, 1972, Pilcher was charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice after it was alleged he had committed perjury in a drug-related case. He resigned from the police force before the matter came to trial.
In September 1973, Pilcher was convicted and sentenced to four years imprisonment, with the judge admonishing the disgraced ex-policeman, “You poisoned the wells of criminal justice, and set about it deliberately.”
Anyway, let’s get back to Paul and Linda.
1974 – John Lennon and Harry Nilsson were thrown out of the Troubadour nightclub in Los Angeles for heckling the headlining Smothers Brothers.
“It was my first night on Brandy Alexanders – that’s brandy and milk, folks,” Lennon later recalled, “so I was drunk. When it’s Errol Flynn, the showbiz writers say: ‘Those were the days, when men were men,’ but when I do it, I’m a bum. So it was a mistake, but hell, I’m human.”
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 – Woody Hayes died of a heart attack at the age of 74.
A College Football Hall of Fame coach (career record of 205–61–10 at Ohio State), his 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.
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 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. On May 25, 2011, after finally being ruled competent to stand trial in March 2010, was convicted that December and sentenced to life in federal prison.
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.
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.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2020 RayLemire.com / Streamingoldies.com. All Rights Reserved.