Browsing: October

A Brief History On October 31, 2016, millions of kids across the United States will go out in costumes trick or treating for Halloween, while millions more adults will attend costume parties for the spooky holiday. One thing it is highly advisable not to wear? Clown costumes! Digging Deeper In the months preceding Halloween 2016 a craze had spread across the United States of people dressing up in ultra-creepy clown outfits and then terrifying people by stalking them, staking out their houses, accosting them on dark sidewalks and the like. This latest fad degenerated into kids donning their clown outfits…

A Brief History On October 30, 1806, 5,300 Prussian soldiers defending the city of Stettin surrendered to only 800 French soldiers commanded by General Lassalle, falling for the ruse that the French force was much larger. Lieutenant General Friedrich von Romberg must have been awful embarrassed when he found out the blunder he had made! Stettin, now known as Szczecin, Poland, was a fortified city, making the surrender all the more ridiculous. Apparently during campaigns at this time Prussian soldiers were not the Spartans of their day that Prussians are often portrayed as, since other surrenders to inferior forces had…

A Brief History On October 29, 1998, former fighter pilot, test pilot, pioneering astronaut and US Senator from Ohio, John Glenn, blasted off aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, becoming the oldest person at age 77 to go into space. And he was an actively sitting US Senator at the time! Digging Deeper Despite John Glenn’s long, varied, and illustrious career, he is best remembered as the first American to orbit the Earth, when he took three laps around the planet in his Mercury 7 space capsule in 1962. Glenn had been a US Marine Corps fighter pilot in World War…

A Brief History On October 28, 1956, Elvis Aron Presley (yes, only one “a” in Aron) made medical history by being inoculated with a Polio vaccine shot on national television, demonstrating to a dubious country that getting such a vaccine was safe. Digging Deeper This gesture by the most famous Rock and Roller of all time was instrumental in raising the number of American children inoculated against Polio from .6% to a whopping 80+% in only 6 months. The Polio family of disease had been devastating American (and world wide) children, including 4 term US President Franklin Roosevelt. Researchers had…

A Brief History On October 27, 1988, President Ronald Reagan made one of his most shocking Cold War related announcements while President when he decided to have the newly completed US Embassy in Moscow mostly destroyed and started over again! Digging Deeper The US and Soviet Union were nearing the end of the Cold War that had gone on since the end of World War II, and each country had a hard line leader that was unlikely to back down. President Reagan in the US was a staunch anti-communist and cold-warrior, and the USSR was led by Mikhail Gorbachev, a…