DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Friday, March 10, the 69th day of 2023. There are 296 days left in the year. On this date in:
1496: Christopher Columbus concluded his second visit to the Western Hemisphere as he left Hispaniola for Spain.
1785: Thomas Jefferson was appointed America’s minister to France, succeeding Benjamin Franklin.
1864: President Abraham Lincoln assigned Ulysses S. Grant, who had just received his commission as lieutenantgeneral, to the command of the Armies of the United States.
1876: Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, Thomas Watson, heard Bell say over his experimental telephone: “Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you” from the next room of Bell’s Boston laboratory.
1906: About 1,100 miners in northern
France were killed by a coal-dust explosion.
1913: Former slave, abolitionist and Underground Railroad “conductor” Harriet Tubman died in Auburn, New York; she was in her 90s.
1965: Neil Simon’s play “The Odd Couple,” starring Walter Matthau and Art Carney, opened on Broadway.
1969: James Earl Ray pleaded guilty in Memphis, Tennessee, to assassinating civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (Ray later repudiated that plea, maintaining his innocence until his death.)
1985: Konstantin U. Chernenko, who was the Soviet Union’s leader for 13 months, died at age 73; he was succeeded by Mikhail Gorbachev.
1988: Pop singer Andy Gibb died in Oxford, England, at age 30 of heart inflammation.
2015: Breaking her silence in the face of a growing controversy over her use of a private email address and server, Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded that she should have used government email as secretary of state but insisted she had not violated any federal laws or Obama administration rules.
2019: A Boeing 737 Max 8 operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed shortly after taking off from the capital, Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board; the crash was similar to one in October 2018 in which a 737 Max 8 flown by Indonesia’s Lion Air plunged into the Java Sea minutes after takeoff, killing all 189 people on the plane. (The aircraft would be grounded worldwide after the two disasters, bringing fierce criticism to Boeing over the design and rollout of the jetliner.)
Actor Chuck Norris is 83. Singer Dean Torrence of Jan and Dean is 83. Guitarist Tom Scholz of Boston is 76. TV personality/businesswoman Barbara Corcoran (“Shark Tank”) is 74. Singer-guitarist Gary Louris
of The Jayhawks is 68. Actor Shannon Tweed is 66. Actor Sharon Stone
is 65. Bassist Gail Greenwood of L7 (and of Belly) is 63. Magician Lance Burton is 63. Actor Jasmine Guy is 61. Bassist Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam is 60. Music producer Rick Rubin is 60. Singer Edie Brickell is 57. Actor Stephen Mailer
(“Reversal of Fortune”) is 57. Actor Philip Anthony-rodriguez (“Grimm”) is 55. Actor Paget Brewster (“Criminal Minds”) is 54. Actor Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”) is 52.