Ralph Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. won the Busch Series Championship in 1998 and 1999
and the Daytona 500 in 2004 and 2014. He went on to become an analyst
for NASCAR on NBC-TV. He went into his first race with a car he co-owned
with his half brother Kerry. Junior, as he is often called, won his 12th
consecutive Sprint Cup Series Most Popular Driver Award in 2014.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the broadcast booth.
TIM MAGUIRE
On October 10, 1973, after months of maintaining his innocence,
Agnew pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion
and resigned from office. He was replaced by House Minority
Leader Gerald Ford (below).
Gerald Ford (center) was sworn in as Vice President Ford.
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985)
Wells is best remembered for the legendary 1938 radio broadcast of “The
War of the Worlds’’, and in film, Citizen Kane (1941), consistently ranked
as one of the greatest films ever made.
On this day in 1992, 18-year-old Michelle Knapp (above) is watching television
in her parents’ living room in Peekskill, New York when she hears a loud
crash in the driveway. Alarmed, Knapp ran outside to investigate. What
she found was startling, to say the least: a sizeable hole in the rear end
of her car, a 1980 Chevy Malibu (above); a matching hole in the gravel
driveway underneath the car; and in the hole, the culprit: what looked
like an ordinary, bowling-ball–sized rock. It was extremely heavy
for its size (it weighed about 28 pounds), shaped like a football and
warm to the touch; also, it smelled vaguely of rotten eggs. The next day,
a curator from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City
confirmed that the object was a genuine meteorite and is estimated to be
4.4 billion years old.
.
A portion of the Peekskill meteorite in the National Museum of Natural History.
JOHN BELMONT
Anthrax-laced letters were sent to Capitol Hill on this day in 2001.
On Oct. 7, 1985, the Italian cruise ship MS Achille Lauro was hijacked
by four members of the Palestine Liberation Front off the coast of
Egypt in the Mediterranean. The hijackers took the more than 400 passengers and crew members hostage and demanded the release
of 50 Palestinians from Israeli prisons.
On this day in 1985, the hijackers surrendered on the condition
that they and the hijacking mastermind Abu Abbas be given a
plane to escape. However, on Oct. 10, the plane was intercepted by
United States military aircraft and forced to land at a NATO base
in Sicily, where Mr. Abbas and the hijackers were arrested.
The four Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the cruise ship.
Released hostages of the Achille Lauro liner hijacking are shown
being taken ashore.
Palestinian militant Abu Abbas, mastermind of the 1985 Achille
Lauro cruise ship hijacking was captured in Iraq April 2003. He
died in US custody from a heart attack in 2004.
John Winston Ono Lennon (October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980)
John Lennon became one of the most influential songwriters in the history
of popular music after co-founding The Beatles with Paul McCartney and
George Harrison. In 2008, Rolling Stone ranked John Lennon the fifth-
greatest singer of all time. In 1987, he was posthumously inducted into
the Songwriters Hall of Fame and twice posthumously inducted into the
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: first in 1988 as a member of the Beatles and
again in 1994 as a solo artist.
One of the last photos of John Lennon before he was killed.
