FRIDAY MAY 25
1787, four years after the end of the Revolutionary War, the Constitutional Convention, presided over byGeorge Washington, was convened in Philadelphia to begin writing a new constitution for the United States of America.
1895, playwright Oscar Wilde was convicted of a morals charge in London and sentenced to prison.
1927, Henry Ford stops producing the Model T car and begins production of the Model A.
1927 Author Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity) is born. He dies in 2001.
1927, The “Movietone News” was shown for the first time at the Sam Harris Theatre in New York City.Charles Lindbergh‘s epic flight aboard the “Spirit of St. Louis” was featured.
1935, Babe Ruth hit his 714th home run on this day. The record held for 39 years.
1950, New York City’s Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel opened as the longest tunnel in the U.S.
1955, The Disney movie Davy Crockett, King Of The Wild Frontier opens.
1961, President John F. Kennedy asked the nation to work toward putting a man on the moon “before this decade is out.”
1964, The closing of schools to avoid desegregation is ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Virginia’s Prince Edward County is forced to reopen and desegregate its schools.
1965, heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali knocked out Sonny Liston one minute into the first round in their rematch for Ali’s heavyweight title.
1968, the St. Louis Gateway Arch was dedicated.
1969, the Oscar-winning movie Midnight Cowboy, starring Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, premiered with an “X” rating – the first major commercial film with this rating.
1977, the ground-breaking science-fiction film Star Wars opened in theaters.
1979, 275 people died in America’s worst domestic air disaster when an American Airlines DC-10 crashed during takeoff at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.
1983, The movie Return Of The Jedi, the third in the Star Wars saga, opens. It’s also known as Star Wars: Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi. It stars Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, and Alec Guinness.
1986, seven million Americans took part in “Hands Across America” in an attempt to from a human chain across the country from Los Angeles to New York to raise consciousness and money for the nation’s homeless. They raised $24.5 million.
1988, NBC’s medical drama St. Elsewhere last aired.
1990, Actor Vic Tayback (Alice‘s Mel Sharples) dies at age 60.
1992, The Tonight Show With Jay Leno debuted after Johnny Carson’s retirement.
1996, Married With Children co-star Buck The Dog dies at age 13.
1999, Home Improvement airs its series finale on ABC.
SATURDAY MAY 26
1521, Martin Luther was banned from the Holy Roman Empire by the Edict of Worms because of his religious beliefs and writings against the Catholic Church. He had already been excommunicated by Pope Leo the Tenth.
1868, the Senate impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson ended with his acquittal when the vote fell one short of the two-thirds required for conviction.
1896 The Dow Jones Industrial Average, co-founded by Charles Dow, first appears in The Wall Street Journal. The Dow Jones Industrial 12-stock average posts a 40.94 for the day.
1907 Actor John Wayne (The Quiet Man, How The West Was Won, The Sons Of Katie Elder, The Green Berets, True Grit) is born. He dies in 1979.
1912 Actor Jay Silverheels (The Lone Ranger‘s Toto) is born. He dies in 1980.
1913 Actor Peter Cushing (he’s played Baron Frankenstein, Dracula’s Dr. Van Helsing, and Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars) is born. He dies in 1994.
1937 San Francisco Bay’s Golden Gate Bridge opens.
1953 The first 3-D sci-fi film, It Came From Outer Space, opens.
1971, Don McLean recorded the classic hit, “American Pie,” about the plane crash that killed singers The Big Bopper, Buddy Holly, and Ritchie Valens.
1978, the first legal casino in America outside Nevada opened in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
1979 John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd make their final appearances as regular cast members of Saturday Night Live.
1994, President Bill Clinton renewed trade privileges for China, and announced China’s trade status would no longer be linked with its human rights record.
1994, Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley tied the knot in a secret ceremony in the Dominican Republic. Presley filed for divorce 20 months later, citing irreconcilable differences.
1994, Price Is Right game show host Bob Barker admitted he’d had an affair with former prize model Dian Parkinson, but denied he sexually harassed her as she had accused.
1995 Animation legend Isadore “Friz” Freleng dies at age 88. He created Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Speedy Gonzales, Sylvester The Cat, Tweety Bird, Yosemite Sam, and The Pink Panther.
2000, Barry Grunow an English teacher at Lake Worth Community Middle School in Florida, was shot to death by Nathaniel Brazill, a seventh grader who’d been sent home for throwing water balloons on the last day of classes.
SUNDAY MAY 27
1647, The first recorded American execution of an accused witch took place in Massachusetts.
1703, Czar Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg as the new capital of Russia.
1894 Author Dashiell Hammett (The Thin Man, The Maltese Falcon) is born. He dies in 1961.
1911 Actor Vincent Price (The House Of The Seven Gables, The Three Musketeers, House Of Wax, The Ten Commandments, The Fly, House Of Usher, Pit And The Pendulum, The Masque Of The Red Death,The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Edward Scissorhands) is born. He dies in 1993.
1919 The pop-up toaster is patented by Charles Strite of Minneapolis.
1933, Walt Disney‘s Academy Award-winning animated short The Three Little Pigs was first released.
1937, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opened.
1941, The British Navy sunk the German battleship “Bismarck” off France, with a loss of 2300 lives.
1949, Hollywood actress and pin-up girl Rita Hayworth married playboy Muslim Prince Ali Khan.
1964 The James Bond film From Russia With Love, starring Sean Connery and Robert Shaw, opens.
1964 Eleven boys are suspended at a school in Coventry, England for having hair styles like Mick Jagger.
1977, New York City fined “human fly” George H. Willig $1.10 — one penny for each of the 110 stories of the World Trade Center he’d scaled the day before.
1993, five people were killed in a bombing at the Uffizi Museum of Art in Florence, Italy. About three dozen paintings were ruined or damaged in the attack.
1994, late-night talk show The Arsenio Hall Show aired for the last time.
1995, Superman actor Christopher Reeve was thrown from his horse during a jumping event in Virginia, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.
1997, the Supreme Court ruled that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit againstPresident Bill Clinton while he was still in office.
1998, Michael Fortier, the government’s star witness in the Oklahoma City bombing case, was sentenced to 12 years in jail after he apologized for not warning anyone about the plot.
1999, a U.N. tribunal indicted Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity, alleging he was personally responsible for the horrors in Kosovo and the purge of its ethnic Albanians.
1999, the latest restoration of “The Last Supper” by Leonardo da Vinci, an effort that took 22 years, went on display in Milan, Italy.
2001 Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler sings “The Star Spangled Banner” before the start of the Indianapolis 500 race. Tyler angers some military veterans when he changes the last line of the song from “the home of the brave” to “the home of the Indianapolis 500.” He later apologizes.
MONDAY MEMORIAL DAY
1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, which mandated that all American Indians had to resettle west of the Mississippi River.
1892, the ecology group the Sierra Club was organized by John Muir in San Francisco.
1897, Jell-O gelatin was introduced.
1908 James Bond creator Ian Fleming is born. He died in 1964.
1954 The movie Dial ‘M’ For Murder, starring Ray Milland and Grace Kelly, opens.
1957, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was established. This is the organization that gives out the Grammy Awards every year.
1957, the National League gave its approval for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams to move to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively.
1961 Amnesty International is founded.
1984, President Ronald Reagan led a state funeral at Arlington National Cemetery for an unidentified American soldier killed in the Vietnam War, who was laid to rest at the Tomb of the Unknowns. In 1988, the soldier was identified as Air Force First Lieutenant Michael J. Blassie, and his remains were disinterred and sent to his family for burial.
1996, President Bill Clinton’s former business partners in the Whitewater land deal, James and Susan McDougal, and Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, were convicted of fraud.
1998 Actor-comedian Phil Hartman (Saturday Night Live, Blind Date, NewsRadio; also did several voices on The Simpsons) dies at age 49. He was shot by his wife, Brynn, who then shot herself.
2002, NATO declared Russia a limited partner in the alliance, accepting its former Cold War enemy as an ally. The arrangement gave a Russia a voice, although not a veto, in NATO.
