Battery-operated Toy car, Dick Tracy Squad Car No.1, c.1949,
by Marx Toys.
Dick Tracy is a comic strip featuring Dick Tracy (originally
Plainclothes Tracya tough and intelligent police detective
created by Chester Gould. It made its debut on Sunday,
October 4, 1931, in the Detroit Mirror, and was distributed
by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate.
Chester Gould (November 20, 1900 – May 11, 1985)
Donald T. McNeill (December 23, 1907 – May 7, 1996)
Don McNeill was born in Galena, Illinois. He graduated from
Milwaukee’s Marquette University in 1928 and joined local
station WISN. In 1933, he drove to Chicago to audition for
a struggling morning program called The Pepper Pot. Don
re-organized the hour show as The Breakfast Club and
Within a decade, The Breakfast Club had become radio’s
first, and most successful morning program. By 1941,
McNeill and his cast were were receiving over 100,000
letters a year.
For 15 years, the show was broadcast live from Chicago’s
Merchandise Mart over WLS/Chicago and the Blue Network
(later ABC). For its last 20 years, the show was broadcast
on ABC from various Chicago hotels, including the Allerton.
The Breakfast Club ended its remarkable 35-year network
run on December 27, 1968. It was inducted into the Radio
Hall of Fame in 1989.
In the summer of 1977, members of the rock band Aerosmith
inspected an airplane they were considering chartering for
their upcoming tour—a Convair 240 (above) operated out of
Addison, Texas. Concerns over the flight crew led Aerosmith
to look elsewhere. a decision that saved one band but doomed
another. The aircraft in question was instead chartered by the
band Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were just setting out that autumn
on a national tour that promised to be their biggest to date.
On October 20, 1977, however, during a flight from Greenville,
South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s
tour plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of southwestern
Mississippi during a failed emergency landing attempt, killing
band-members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie
Gaines as well as the band’s assistant road manager and the
plane’s pilot and co-pilot. Twenty others survived the crash.
