Today’s snapshot of what is going on locally
Turn to the Community Page today and every day for upcoming area activities and a look at local history.
Today is Tuesday, March 24, the 84th day of 2020. There are 282 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On March 24, 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez (vahl-DEEZ’) ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and began leaking an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil.
On this date:
In 1765, Britain enacted the Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers.
In 1882, German scientist Robert Koch (kohk) announced in Berlin that he had discovered the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis.
In 1955, the Tennessee Williams play “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” opened on Broadway.
In 1958, Elvis Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army at the draft board in Memphis, Tennessee, before boarding a bus for Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. (Presley underwent basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, before being shipped off to Germany.)
In 1975, Muhammad Ali defeated Chuck Wepner with a technical knockout in the 15th round of a fight in Richfield, Ohio. (Wepner, a journeyman known as the “Bayonne Bleeder,” inspired Sylvester Stallone to make his “Rocky” films.)
In 1976, the president of Argentina, Isabel Peron, was deposed by her country’s military. British war hero Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, 88, died in Alton, Hampshire, England.
In 1980, one of El Salvador’s most respected Roman Catholic Church leaders, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, was shot to death by a sniper as he celebrated Mass in San Salvador.
In 1988, former national security aides Oliver L. North and John M. Poindexter and businessmen Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair. (North and Poindexter were convicted, but had their verdicts thrown out; Secord and Hakim received probation after each pleaded guilty to a single count under a plea bargain.)
In 1995, after 20 years, British soldiers stopped routine patrols in Belfast, Northern Ireland.