On October 29…
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.”
~ Irving Fisher, Ph.D. in Economics
12 Days Before Black Tuesday
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1901 – President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was electrocuted at Auburn Prison in New York.
His last words were, “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”
1929 – Black Tuesday: Stock prices collapsed on the New York Stock Exchange amid panic selling.
The crash had started on October 24 (“Black Thursday”) and continued until October 29 when share prices on the New York Stock Exchange totally collapsed.
In the first half hour, 3,259,000 shares were traded. $30 billion was lost. This was more than twice the U.S. national debt. Some stocks actually had no buyers at any price that day.
Aftermath: In 1930, 12 million people were out of work, 20,000 companies went bankrupt and around 23,000 people committed suicide.
By 1933, when the Depression reached its lowest point, some 15 million Americans were unemployed and nearly half the country’s banks had failed.
The Great Depression lasted from 1929 to 1939 and was the worst economic downturn in history.
1956 – The Huntley-Brinkley Report premiered as NBC’s nightly TV newscast.
It was anchored by Chet Huntley in New York City, and David Brinkley in Washington, D.C. It succeeded the Camel News Caravan, anchored by John Cameron Swayze.
The Huntley-Brinkley Report ran for 15 minutes at its inception but expanded to 30 minutes on September 9, 1963, exactly a week after the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite did so.
The news program’s last broadcast came on July 31, 1970.
1971 – Musician Duane Allman was killed in a motorcycle crash at the age of 24.
Allman, a guitarist and founder of the Allman Brothers Band, was riding his Harley-Davidson Sportster motorcycle at high speed in Macon, GA. A flatbed truck carrying a lumber crane stopped suddenly at an intersection, forcing him to swerve sharply.
He struck either the back of the truck or the ball on the lumber crane and was thrown from the motorcycle, which landed on top of him and skidded another 90 feet with him pinned underneath it.
As a member of the Allman Brothers Band, he is best remembered for the classic At Fillmore East (considered by some critics to be one of the greatest live albums in rock music history) and Eat A Peach albums.
He also contributed greatly to the 1970 album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, by Derek and the Dominos.
While he will always be recalled for his incredible ability to make a guitar sing, he also had a much softer side…
1994 – Francisco Martin Duran fired over two dozen shots at the White House.
Dressed in a trench coat, Duran approached the fence overlooking the north lawn of the White House and fired a SKS semi-automatic rifle at a group of men on the White House lawn.
Secret Service agents immediately began running across the lawn but citizens on the street tackled Duran and pinned his arms until he could be subdued.
Duran pleaded not guilty and mounted an insanity defense, claiming that he was trying to save the world by “destroying an alien mist,” connected by an umbilical cord to an alien in the Colorado mountains.
The jury rejected the insanity defense and convicted Duran of attempting to assassinate President Bill Clinton and sentenced him to 40 years in prison.
1997 – Anton LaVey died of pulmonary edema at the age of 67.
He was the founder of the Church of Satan and wrote several books on the subject of Satanism. Although some consider him to be the “most evil man in the world,” he was a “showman” who created a myth surrounding his life although it was later learned most of the stories about him had been false.
1998 – Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off on STS-95 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
77-year-old U.S. Senator John Glenn was on board, making him the oldest person to go into space. He had been the first American to orbit the Earth, circling it three times in 1962 on board Friendship 7.
2004 – Osama bin Laden, in a videotaped statement, directly admitted for the first time that he had ordered the Sept. 11 attacks.
Al Jazeera network broadcast excerpts bin Laden addressing the people of the United States. In the video, he accepted responsibility for the September 11 attacks, condemned the Bush government’s response to those attacks, and presented those attacks as part of a campaign of revenge and deterrence motivated by his witnessing of the destruction in the Lebanese Civil War in 1982.
2012 – Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast of the United States, killing 148 directly and 138 indirectly.
The hurricane affected 24 states, including the entire eastern seaboard from Florida to Maine and west across the Appalachian Mountains to Michigan and Wisconsin, with particularly severe damage in New Jersey and New York.
Its storm surge hit New York City on October 29, flooding streets, tunnels and subway lines and cutting power in and around the city.
Damage in the United States amounted to $65 billion.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2019 RayLemire.com / Streamingoldies.com. All Rights Reserved.