Today’s snapshot of what is going on locally
Turn to the Community Page today and every day for upcoming area activities and a look at local history.
Today is Friday, March 22, the 81st day of 2019. There are 284 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlights in History:
On March 22, 1765, the British Parliament passed the StampAct to raise money from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax. (The Stamp Act was repealed a year later.)
On this date:
In 1882, President Chester Alan Arthur signed a measure outlawing polygamy.
In 1894, hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played; home team Montreal defeated Ottawa, 3-1.
In 1933, during Prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure to make wine and beer containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol legal.
In 1941, the Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington state officially went into operation.
In 1963, The Beatles’ debut album, “Please Please Me,” was released in the United Kingdom by Parlophone.
In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the commander of American forces in Vietnam, would leave that post to become the U.S. Army’s new Chief of Staff. Students at the University of Nanterre in suburban Paris occupied the school’s administration building in a prelude to massive protests in France that began the following May. The first Red Lobster restaurant opened in Lakeland, Florida.
In 1978, Karl Wallenda, the 73-year- old patriarch of “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act, fell to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
In 1988, both houses of Congress overrode Presi- dent Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act.
In 1990, a jury in Anchorage, Alaska, found former tanker captain Joseph Hazelwood not guilty of three major charges in connection with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but convicted him of a minor charge of negligent discharge of oil.
In 1991, high school instructor Pamela Smart, accused of recruiting her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, Gregory, was convicted in Exeter, New Hampshire, of murder- conspiracy and being an accomplice to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
In 1997, Tara Lipinski, at age 14 years and ten months, became the youngest ladies’ world figure skating champion in Lausanne, Switzerland.
In 2004, Hamas spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin (shayk AKH’-mehd yahSEEN’) was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, enraging Palestinians. Terry Nichols went on trial for his life in the Oklahoma City bombing. (Nichols, already serving a life sentence for his conviction on federal charges, was found guilty of 161 state murder charges, but was again spared the death penalty when the jury couldn’t agree on his sentence.)
Ten years ago: A singleengine turboprop plane headed to a Montana ski resort nose- dived into a cemetery short of a runway in Butte, killing all 14 aboard, including seven children. The Mount Redoubt volcano in Alaska began erupting (it took about six months to settle down). Friends and family gathered in a small Hudson Valley, N.Y., town to say a final farewell to Tony Awardwinning actress Natasha Richardson, 45, who had died in a skiing accident.