Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936)
Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling’s works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Kim, and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King".
On January 17, 1950, 11 men steal more than $2 million ($29 million today) from the Brink’s Armored Car depot in Boston, Massachusetts. It was the perfect crime—almost—as the culprits weren’t caught until January 1956, just days before the statute of limitations for the theft expired.
The robbery’s mastermind was Anthony “Fats” Pino, a career criminal who recruited a group of 10 other men to stake out the depot for 18 months to figure out when it held the most money. Pino’s men then managed to steal plans for the depot’s alarm system, returning them before anyone noticed they were gone.
Anthony “Fats” Pino.
The Brink’s building on Prince Street after the heist.
A detective examines the Brinks vault after the theft.
Burlap money bags recovered in a Boston junk yard from the Brink’s robbery.
The Columbia’s 28th space mission, designated STS-107, was originally scheduled to launch on January 11, 2001, but was delayed numerous times for a variety of reasons over nearly two years. Columbia finally launched on January 16, 2003, with a crew of seven.
Eighty seconds into the launch, a piece of foam insulation broke off from the shuttle’s propellant tank and hit the edge of the shuttle’s left wing.
When Columbia re-entered the earth’s atmosphere on the morning of February 1, 2003, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to penetrate the heat shield and destroy the internal wing structure, which caused the spacecraft to become unstable and break apart.
The first debris began falling to the ground in West Texas near Lubbock at 8:58 a.m. One minute later, the last communication from the crew of five men and two women was heard, and at 9 a.m. the space shuttle disintegrated over northeast Texas, near Dallas.
Crewmember helmet found in a field after the space shuttle Columbia disaster.
On January 15, 1967, the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League (NFL) smash the American Football League (AFL)’s Kansas City Chiefs, 35- 10, in the first-ever AFL-NFL World Championship, later known as Super Bowl I, at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles.
Martin Luther King Jr.(January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)
On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. is born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of a Baptist minister. King received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 helped organized the first protest of the African-American civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance to segregation in the South. The peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted, and the movement gained momentum.
A powerful orator, King appealed to Christian and American ideals and won growing support from the federal government and Northern whites.
In 1963, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph led the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; the event’s grand finale was King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Two hundred and fifty thousand people gathered outside the Lincoln Memorial to hear the stirring speech.