Today in history

On March 24, 1958, Elvis Presley was inducted into the U.S. Army at the draft board in Memphis, Tennessee, before boarding a bus for Fort Chaffee. (Presley underwent basic training at Fort Hood, Texas, before being shipped off to Germany.)

In 1913, New York’s Palace Theatre, the legendary home of vaudeville, opened on Broadway.

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 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound and began leaking an estimated

11 million gallons of crude oil. In 1998, two students, ages 13 and 11, opened fire outside Jonesboro Westside Middle School, killing four classmates and a teacher. (The gunmen were imprisoned by Arkansas until age

18, then by federal authorities until age 21.)

Ten years ago: President George W. Bush pledged to ensure “an outcome that will merit the sacrifice” of those who had died in Iraq, offering both sympathy and resolve as the U.S. death toll in the five-year war hit 4,000.