TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Friday, Oct. 1.
Today’s highlight:
On Oct. 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire from a room at the Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans at a concert below, leaving 58 people dead and more than 800 injured in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history; the gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Craig Paddock, killed himself before officers arrived.
On this date:
In 1908, Henry Ford introduced his Model T automobile to the market.
In 1910, the offices of the Los Angeles Times were destroyed by a bomb explosion and fire; 21 Times employees were killed.
In 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China during a ceremony in Beijing. A 42-day strike by the United Steelworkers of America began over the issue of retirement benefits.
In 1957, the motto “In God We Trust” began appearing on U.S. paper currency.
In 1961, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit his 61st home run during a 162-game season, compared to Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs during a 154game season. (Tracy Stallard of the Boston Red Sox gave up the round-tripper; the Yankees won 1-0.)
In 1971, Walt Disney World opened near Orlando, Florida.
In 1982, Sony began selling the first commercial compact disc player, the CDP-101, in Japan.
In 1987, eight people were killed when an earthquake measuring magnitude 5.9 struck the Los Angeles area.
In 1994, National Hockey League team owners began a 103-day lockout of their players.
In 1996, a federal grand jury indicted Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski in the 1994 mail bomb slaying of advertising executive Thomas Mosser. (Kaczynski was later sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years.) The federal minimum wage rose 50 cents to four dollars, 75 cents an hour.
In 2015, a gunman opened fire at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, killing nine people and then himself.
In 2019, a white former Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, was convicted of murder in the shooting death of her Black neighbor, Botham Jean; Guyger said she had mistaken his apartment for hers.
Ten years ago: More than 700 Occupy Wall Street protesters were arrested after they swarmed the Brooklyn Bridge and shut down a lane of traffic for several hours in a tense confrontation with police.
Five years ago: The New York Times reported that Donald Trump had reported losses of more than $900 million on his 1995 income tax returns that experts said could have allowed him to forgo paying federal income taxes for nearly two decades; Hillary Clinton’s campaign seized upon the report as evidence of “the colossal nature of Donald Trump’s past business failures.”
One year ago: President Donald Trump attended a fundraiser at his New Jersey golf club hours before announcing that he had the coronavirus. White House aide Hope Hicks tested positive for the coronavirus; she was among those who accompanied Trump to Minnesota for a fundraiser the previous day. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott dramatically reduced the state’s number of dropoff sites for mail-in ballots, a move the Republican said was needed to ensure election security, while Democrats quickly blasted it as an effort to suppress voters.