MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1995
In a year when baseball needed all the healing it could get, Cal Ripken provided plenty simply by doing what he has always done. He went out and played. Every day. Every game. And in early September, he reached one of the sport’s most cherished records, playing in his 2,130th consecutive game, matching the mark set by Lou Gehrig. To mark the occasion, he hit a home run. The next night, Ripken was back again for the record-breaker, No. 2,131. And he hit a home run that night, too. When the record was official, the fans interrupted the game with a 22-minute standing ovation.. And then he went out and played again, and again, and again, pushing the record by season’s end to 2,153 games. Ripken’s relentless pursuit of Gehrig’s record was voted Associated Press Story of the Year on Tuesday, receiving 155 of 252 first-place votes cast by sports editors, broadcasters and writers. The Ripken story finished with 2,221 points, almost a full thousand points ahead of the death of Mickey Mantle, which was second with 1,280.
50 years ago — 1970
“Merry Christmas” grunted Cleo the camel, as she proudly presented the Overton Park Zoo a little camel for Christmas. “Merry Christmas to you, Mrs. Cleo,” said director Robert H. Mattlin and promptly named the little fellow Noel in honor of the season. Cleo, it seems, picked up the slack when Julie the hippo missed the Yuletide boat. Last Christmas it was Julie who gave birth to a small hippo two days before Christmas, but this year she’s going to be about a month late with her present.
75 years ago — 1945
PINEVILLE, Ky. – Grim rescue crews, battling past underground fires, falling slate and broken timbers, Wednesday night penetrated to within almost half a mile of the spot where 31 to 50 miners were trapped or killed when an explosion ripped through a mountain slope coal mine. The 20man emergency squads extinguished two fires deep inside the sloping shaft and drove ahead in a desperate, but apparently hopeless attempt to save the entombed men. Not a single one of the day shift workers in the No. 1 mine of the Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Co. had emerged since 8:30 a.m., and there was little hope that any of them would be found alive.
100 years ago — 1920
The basketball team of the Y.M.C.A. will swing into action tomorrow night against their ancient rivals, “Vanderbilt University,” in the cage of the local “Y.” The local dribblers are down to hard work trying to perfect their passing combine for this special fray. Vandy broke fifth-fifty with the fast 1919-20 “Y” team, for they gave the locals an awful drubbing up in Nashville, but failed to repeat when brought to the local court and were beaten, but only after a fast and exciting game.