TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Tuesday, Jan. 16, the 16th day of 2024. There are 350 days left in the year. On this date in:
27 B.C.: Caesar Augustus was declared the first Emperor of the Roman Empire by the Senate.
1920: Prohibition began in the United States as the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect, one year to the day after its ratification. (It was later repealed by the 21st Amendment.)
1991: The White House announced the start of Operation Desert Storm to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. (Allied forces prevailed on Feb. 28, 1991.)
2020: The first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump opened in the Senate, with senators standing and swearing an oath of “impartial justice.” Trump would later be acquitted on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
2023: Italy’s No. 1 fugitive, convicted Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested at a private clinic in Palermo, Sicily, after three decades on the run.
Joyce Randolph, a veteran stage and television actor whose role as the savvy Trixie Norton on “The Honeymooners” provided the perfect foil to her dimwitted TV husband, has died. She was 99.
Randolph died of natural causes Saturday night at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, her son Randolph Charles told The Associated Press Sunday. She was the last surviving main character of the beloved comedy from television’s golden age of the 1950s.
“The Honeymooners” was an affectionate look at Brooklyn tenement life, based in part on star Jackie Gleason’s childhood. Gleason played the blustering bus driver Ralph Kramden. Audrey Meadows was his wisecracking, strongwilled wife Alice, and Art Carney the cheerful sewer worker Ed Norton. Alice and Trixie often found themselves commiserating over their husbands’ various follies and mishaps, whether unknowingly marketing dogfood as a popular snack or trying in vain to resist a rent hike, or freezing in the winter as their heat is shut off.
The second annual “Reportin’ For Duty” benefit concert will take place on Feb. 17 in Shelbyville, Tenn. The concert features a star-studded lineup, with 100% of the proceeds going toward EB Research Partnership – a nonprofit that raises money to cure a rare skin disorder.
Performers include Post Malone, Pearl Jam vocalist and guitarist Eddie Vedder, The War And Treaty, Jelly Roll, Jake Wesley Rogers and Dan Spencer. The event will be held at the world’s longest bar, Humble Baron at Nearest Green Distillery, an astounding 525 feet long.
The benefit concert tradition began last February when friends of the late actor Leslie Jordan gathered to pay tribute with an evening of performances in his honor.
The EBPR funds research to treat and cure epidermolysis bullosa – a group of rare diseases that causes fragile skin that blisters easily. EB is a life-threatening genetic illness that affects children from birth and creates constant pain.
Ruth Ashton Taylor, a trailblazing journalist who was the first female newscaster to work in television on the West Coast, has died. She was 101.
Taylor died Thursday at an assisted living facility in San Rafael, California, according to her family. No cause of death was released.
Her daughter, Laurel Conklin, said her mother was born in Long Beach in 1922 and had a career in radio and television news that spanned more than 50 years. Taylor graduated from Scripps College in Claremont, California, and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University before taking a job as a news writer and producer at CBS radio in New York.