DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Friday, Oct. 30, the 304th day of 2020. There are 62 days left in the year.
On this date in:
1735 (New Style calendar): the second president of the United States, John Adams, was born in Braintree, Massachusetts.
1885: Poet Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho.
1912: Vice President James S. Sherman, running for a second term of office with President William Howard Taft, died six days before Election Day. (Sherman was replaced with Nicholas Murray Butler, but Taft, the Republican candidate, ended up losing in an Electoral College landslide to Democrat Woodrow Wilson.)
1961: The Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb, the “Tsar Bomba,” with a force estimated at about 50 megatons.
The Soviet Party Congress unanimously approved a resolution ordering the removal of Josef Stalin’s body from Lenin’s tomb.
1974: Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round of a 15-round bout in Kinshasa, Zaire, known as the “Rumble in the Jungle,” to regain his world heavyweight title.
1975: The New York Daily News ran the headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead” a day after President Gerald R. Ford said he would veto any proposed federal bailout of New York City.
1984: Police in Poland found the body of kidnapped pro-solidarity priest Father Jerzy Popieluszko, whose death was blamed on security officers.
1985: Schoolteacher-astronaut Christa Mcauliffe witnessed the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, the same craft that would carry her and six other crew members to their deaths in Jan. 1986.
1995: By a razor-thin vote of 50.6 percent to 49.4 percent, Federalists prevailed over separatists in a Quebec secession referendum.
2001: Ukraine destroyed its last nuclear missile silo, fulfilling a pledge to give up the vast nuclear arsenal it had inherited after the breakup of the former Soviet Union.
2002: Jam Master Jay (Jason Mizell), a rapper with the hip-hop group RunDMC, was killed in a shooting in New York. He was 37.
2005: The body of Rosa Parks arrived at the U.S. Capitol, where the civil rights icon became the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda; President George W. Bush and congressional leaders paused to lay wreaths by her casket.
Songwriter Eddie Holland of Holland-dozier-holland is 81. Singer Grace Slick is 81. Singer Otis Williams of The Temptations is 79. Actor Henry Winkler is 75. Actor Kevin Pollak is 63. Actor Michael Beach (“Soul Food,” “Third Watch”) is 57. Singer-guitarist Gavin Rossdale of Bush is 55. “Cash Cab” host Ben Bailey is 50. Actor Nia Long is 50. Actor Gael Garcia Bernal (“Babel,” “The Motorcycle Diaries”) is 42. Actor Matthew Morrison (“Glee”) is 42. Actor Fiona Dourif (“When We Rise,” “True Blood”) is 39. Actor Janel Parrish (“Pretty Little Liars”) is 32. Actor Tequan Richmond (“Everybody Hates Chris”) is 28. Actor Kennedy Mcmann (TV’S “Nancy Drew”) is 24.