TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY IS THURSDAY, MARCH 22, the 81st day of 2018. There are 284 days left in the year.
TODAY IN HISTORY: On this date in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, would leave that post to become the U.S. Army’s new Chief of Staff. Students at the University of Nanterre in suburban Paris occupied the school’s administration building in a prelude to massive protests in France that began the following May. The first Red Lobster restaurant opened in Lakeland, Fla. In 1312, Pope Clement V issued a papal bull ordering dissolution of the Order of the Knights Templar. In 1638, religious dissident Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for defying Puritan orthodoxy. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax. (The Stamp Act was repealed a year later.) In 1894, hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played; home team Montreal defeated Ottawa, 3-1. In 1929, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel sank a Canadian-registered schooner, the I’m Alone, which was suspected of carrying bootleg liquor, in the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1933, during Prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure to make wine and beer containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol legal.
In 1941, the Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington state officially went into operation.
In 1958, movie producer Mike Todd, the husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor, and three other people were killed in the crash of Todd’s private plane near Grants, N.M. In 1978, Karl Wallenda, the 73-yearold patriarch of “The Flying Wallendas”
high-wire act, fell to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
In 1988, both houses of Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.
In 1991, high school instructor Pamela Smart, accused of recruiting her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, Gregory, was convicted in Exeter, N.H., of murder-conspiracy and being an accomplice to murder, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In 1992, 27 people were killed when a USAir Fokker F-28 jetliner bound for Cleveland crashed on takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport; 24 people survived.
TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: Composerlyricist Stephen Sondheim and Evangelist broadcaster Pat Robertson are 88. Actor William Shatner is 87. Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is 84. Actor M. Emmet Walsh is 83. Actor-singer Jeremy Clyde is 77. Singer-guitarist George Benson is 75. Writer James Patterson is 71. CNN newscaster Wolf Blitzer and composer Andrew Lloyd Webber are 70. Actress Fanny Ardant is 69. Sportscaster Bob Costas is 66. Country singer James House and actress Lena Olin are 63. Singer-actress Stephanie Mills is 61. Actor Matthew Modine is 59. Country musician Tim Beeler is 50. Actor-comedian Keegan-Michael Key and actor Will Yun Lee are 47. Olympic silver medal figure skater Elvis Stojko is 46. Actors Guillermo Diaz and Cole Hauser, and actress Anne Dudek are 43. Actresses Kellie Williams and Reese Witherspoon are 42. Rock musician John Otto (Limp Bizkit) is 41. Actress Tiffany Dupont and rapper Mims are 37. Actress Constance Wu is 36. Actor James Wolk is 33. Rock musician Lincoln Parish (Cage the Elephant) is 28.