QUOTE UNQUOTE
“Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”
MADELEINE L’ENGLE, Today’s highlight in history
On Sept. 6, 1985, all 31 people aboard a Midwest Express Airlines DC-9 were killed when the Atlantabound jetliner crashed just after takeoff from Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport.
On this date
In 1901, President William McKinley was shot and mortally wounded by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. (McKinley died eight days later; Czolgosz was executed on Oct. 29.)
In 1916, the first self-serve grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, was opened in Memphis, Tenn., by Clarence Saunders.
In 1954, groundbreaking took place for the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in western Pennsylvania.
In 1970, Palestinian guerrillas seized control of three U.S.-bound jetliners. (Two were later blown up on the ground in Jordan, along with a London-bound plane hijacked on Sept. 9; the fourth plane was destroyed on the ground in Egypt. No hostages were harmed.)
In 1975, 18-year-old tennis star Martina Navratilova of Czechoslovakia, in New York for the U.S. Open, requested political asylum in the United States.
In 1997, a public funeral was held for Princess Diana at Westminster Abbey in London, six days after her death in a car crash in Paris.
In 2002, meeting outside Washington, D.C., for only the second time since 1800, Congress convened in New York to pay homage to the victims and heroes of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Ten years ago: Opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti died in Modena, Italy, at age 71.
Five years ago: Drew Peterson, the former Illinois police officer who gained notoriety after his muchyounger wife, Stacy, vanished in 2007, was convicted of murdering a previous wife, Kathleen Savio. (Peterson was later sentenced to 38 years in prison.)
One year ago: Hospital officials in northern France announced the death the previous April of Isabelle Dinoire, a Frenchwoman who received the world’s first partial face transplant; she was 49.