Mar 3 in History
1585 — The Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, designed by Andrea Palladio, is inaugurated with a production of Greek tragedian Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” (first performed around 429BC). The theatre is virtually abandoned after only a few productions, but is still in use today. The wood-and-stucco (streets of Thebes) scenes created for “Oedipus Rex” are never removed. Designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi, who took over after Palladio’s death in August 1580, the scenes live on despite bombings and other vicissitudes.
1875 — The first recorded indoor ice hockey match is organised by James Creighton, who captains one of the two nine-man teams, at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, Canada. A fight follows with skating club members who feel hockey takes away hours from other skating activities and damages the ice. The Daily British Whig of Kingston, Ontario, reports:
“Shins and heads were battered, benches smashed and the lady spectators fled in confusion.”
1923 — Time magazine is published for the first time. 1924 — The 407-year-old Ottoman Empire (aka Turkish Empire) is abolished, Caliph Abdülmecid II deposed, Kemal Atatürk’s Republic of Turkey established and the modern Middle East created. 1925 — Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of Keystone, South Dakota — the 18mhigh carved granite faces of US presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln — receives Congressional approval. The 1923 brainchild of historian Doane Robinson, it is sculpted by Gutzon Borglum, his son Lincoln and 400 workers between October 4 1927 and October 31 1941 … with no fatalities.
1931 — “The Star-Spangled Banner”becomes the US national anthem. The lyrics are from Francis Scott Key’s 1814 poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry”. The music was written circa 1773 by British composer John Stafford Smith for “The Anacreontic Song”.
1971 — The SABC lifts its ban on the Beatles (in place since August 8 1966), but not on John Lennon.
1974 — Turkish Airlines Flight 918, a DC-10, en route from Istanbul Yesilköy Airport to Heathrow, crashes in the Ermenonville Forest shortly after takeoff from Orly Airport in Paris, killing all 346 people on board. It remains the deadliest single-aircraft disaster.
1991 — Arthur Murray (born Moses Teichman in Podhajce, Kingdom of Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire), 95, founder of the Arthur Murray Dance Studios franchise in 1939, dies in Honolulu, Hawaii. 2005 — Jody Kollapen releases the SA Human Rights Commission’s “Report on the Inquiry into the Human Rights Violations in the Khomani San Community in South Africa”, saying it details “a sad story of neglect and indifference ... a community fast losing hope”.