On December 3, 1967, 53-year-old Louis Washkansky received
the first human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in
Cape Town, South Africa.

Washkansky, a South African grocer dying from chronic heart
disease, received the transplant from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-
old woman who was fatally injured in a car accident. 

The new heart recipient died eighteen days later of pneumonia,
largely brought on by the anti-rejection drugs that suppressed
his immune system.

Surgeon Christiaan Barnard, who trained at the University of Cape    
Town and in the United States, performed the revolutionary medical      
operation.

Christiaan Neethling Barnard (1922 – 2001)

As related in a letter dated the following day, General
George Washington wrote to Congress from his
headquarters in  Trenton, New Jersey, to report that
he had transported much of the Continental Army’s
stores and baggage across the Delaware River to
Pennsylvania on December 2, 1776.      

Most of the troops could not swim, and horses were
also transported. Additionally, eighteen pieces of
artillery had  to cross over the river.       

Washington’s famous crossing of the Delaware would come
less than a month later on December 25th.

A fire at a grade school in Chicago killed 87 children and three
nuns on December 1, 1958; five more children later died as a
result of their injuries.

The fire originated in the basement near the foot of a stairway.

The Our Lady of Angels School was operated by the Sisters
of Charity in Chicago.

The disaster led to major improvements in standards for school
design and fire safety codes.

School memorial.

In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white
man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws.

The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young
Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr., followed Park’s
historic act of civil disobedience.

“The mother of the civil rights movement,” as Rosa Parks is
known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913.

She worked as a seamstress and in 1943 joined the Montgomery
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – April 4)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks  (1913 –  2005)

On November 30, 1876, Yale defeated Princeton, 2-0, in
Hoboken, New Jersey in the first collegiate football game
played on Thanksgiving. Nearly 1,000 fans attend the
game, played in cold, rainy weather.

The football was oval and made of leather, the New York
Times noted, "similar to those used in Rugby Union rules."

The game resembled rugby more than a present-day football
game.

First Yale team playing under American intercollegiate
football rules. This team beat Harvard in the fall of ’76.”