Darrell Lee Waltrip
Darrell Lee Waltrip is a motorsports analyst, author, former
national television broadcaster, and stock car driver. He
raced from 1972 to 2000 in the former NASCAR Winston
Cup Series (now called the NASCAR Cup Series), most
notably driving the No. 17 Chevrolet for Hendrick
Motorsports (below).
From left: Mike Joy, Darrell Waltrip and Jeff Gordon in the Fox Sports booth.
Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer
(December 13, 1929 – February 5, 2021)
Christopher Plummer, the legendary actor best known for
his roles in “Sound of Music” and “All the Money in the
World,” died in his home in Weston, Connecticut after
suffering complications from a fall.
Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer while filming The Sound
of Music (1965).
James Dexter Weatherly (March 17, 1943 – February 3, 2021)
(Fox News) – Jim Weatherly was a singer-songwriter in his own
right, notably working in the pop and country genres, but was
also known for the songs he penned for other artists, including
“Midnight Train to Georgia” for Glady Knight & The Pips. He died
Wednesday at his home in Brentwood, Tennessee of natural
causes.
Jim Weatherly (center) with Gladys Knight & the Pips in 1973.
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst (above), the 19-year-old
granddaughter of newspaper publisher William Randolph
Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley,
California, by three armed strangers. Her fiancee, Stephen
Weed, was beaten and tied up along with a neighbor who
tried to help.
Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA),
a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a local
radio station that it was holding Hearst as a “prisoner of
war.” Four days later, the SLA demanded that the Hearst
family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy person from
Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. This done, said the SLA,
negotiation would begin for the return of Patricia Hearst.
In April, however, the situation changed dramatically when
a surveillance camera took a photo of Hearst participating
in an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank (below), and
she was also spotted during a robbery of a Los Angeles
store. She later declared, in a tape sent to the authorities,
that she had joined the SLA of her own free will.
Despite her claim that she had been brainwashed by the
SLA, Hearst was arrested on September 18, 1975 and
convicted of armed robbery on March 20, 1976. She was
sentenced to seven years in prison. She served 21 months
before her sentence was commuted by President Carter.
After leaving prison, she returned to a routine existence
and later married her bodyguard who died in 2013. She
was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001.
Patty Hearst will be 67 years old on February
20.
From left, American rock and roll legends Ritchie Valens, 17, Buddy Holly, 22, and J.P. ‘Big Bopper’ Richardson, 28, who died in a small-
plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, in 1959.
Rising American rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P.
“The Big Bopper” Richardson were killed when their chartered Beechcraft Bonanza plane crashes in Iowa a few minutes after
takeoff from Mason City on a flight headed for Moorhead,
Minnesota. Investigators blamed the crash on bad weather and
pilot error. Holly and his band, the Crickets, had just scored a
No. 1 hit with “That’ll Be the Day.”
