A drink with a kick
25 years ago — 1993
LITTLE ROCK — Friends, family and government officials joined President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, Friday at an hour-long private funeral for Mrs. Clinton’s father, Hugh Rodham. Rodham, 82, a retired Chicago drapery manufacturer, suffered a stroke March 19 and died Wednesday. Rodham retired in 1970 and moved with his wife to Little Rock in 1987 to be near their daughter and granddaughter. Rodham suffered a stroke not long after the move and had been in frail health. But he was an occasional visitor with his son-in-law to baseball games of the Arkansas Travelers, a minor league team for the St. Louis Cardinals.
50 years ago — 1968
ATLANTA — The long, wavering lines that followed him in life, followed him in death Tuesday as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the architect of the modern civil rights movement and the apostle of nonviolence, led his final march. Behind his casket, borne on a wagon drawn by two Georgia mules, came more than 150,000 mourners — the great and the small — their eyes misty and their hearts heavy as they carried their leader to his church, to his college, and finally, to his grave. Thus, in the fields of Atlanta’s South View Cemetery, ended 13 years of historic struggle and six days of national rage which exploded in the aftershock of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis last Thursday.
75 years ago — 1943
LONDON — Gen. Charles de Gaulle has rejected a proposal that Gen. Henri Honore Giraud be named chief of state in a unified French empire, to include French North Africa. Informants say de Gaulle is determined to keep the French underground movement in France proper.
100 years ago — 1918
FREEPORT, Ill. — A well-known businessman here who openly criticized America’s role in the war was forced to kneel on the courthouse steps before a large crowd and kiss the American flag, making a pledge that he would never again speak against the government. He also promised to buy Liberty Bonds. In Washington the Senate Judiciary Committee is drafting a bill prescribing 20 years’ imprisonment for anyone who “supports the cause of the German empire…or by word or act opposes the cause of the United States…or attempts to obstruct any enlistment in the Army…or utters any seditious language against the President.”
125 years ago — 1893
Every taxpayer in Memphis should give careful attention to the report of Maj. George B. Fleece concerning street paving. He clearly demonstrates that brick pavement is the cheapest and the most durable of all the types now in use on city streets. A good example is the perfect condition of the brick paving on Court Street, compared to the much newer stone pavement on Main which is already full of bad places. To say brick will not stand heavy traffic is a silly superstition.