On August 19, 1909, the first race was held at the Indianapolis
Motor Speedway, now the home of the world’s most famous
motor racing competition, the Indianapolis 500.

Built on 328 acres of farmland five miles northwest of
Indianapolis, Indiana, the speedway was started by local
businessmen as a testing facility for Indiana’s growing
automobile industry.         

       
The idea was that occasional races at the track would pit cars
from different manufacturers against each other. After seeing
what these cars could do, spectators would presumably head
down to the showroom of their choice to get a closer look.

In that first five-mile race, 12,000 spectators watched Austrian
engineer Louis Schwitzer win with an average speed of 57.4
miles per hour. The track’s surface of crushed rock and tar
proved a disaster, breaking up in a number of places and
causing the deaths of two drivers, two mechanics and two
spectators.

William Bourque passes by judges.

                             
CAMILLE
BOHANNON

Robert Redford at 10.

1962
    
   

Charles Robert Redford Jr. is a retired actor and filmmaker. He
has received numerous accolades such as an Academy Award,
a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the
Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994, the Screen Actors Guild Life
Achievement Award in 1996, the Academy Honorary Award in
2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, the Presidential
Medal of Freedom in 2016, and the Honorary César in 2019. He
was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people
in the world in 2014 (below). He is 88 today.

On August 17, 1998, President Bill Clinton became the first
sitting president to testify before the Office of Independent
Counsel as the subject of a grand-jury investigation.

The testimony came after a four-year investigation into
Clinton and his wife Hillary’s alleged involvement in several
scandals, including accusations of sexual harassment,
potentially illegal real-estate deals and suspected “cronyism”
involved in the firing of White House travel-agency personnel.

The independent prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, then uncovered
an affair between Clinton and a White House intern named
Monica Lewinsky.

When questioned about the affair, Clinton denied it, which
led Starr to charge the president with perjury and obstruction
of justice, which in turn prompted his testimony on August 17.

HISTORY Channel[email protected]

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CAMILLE BOHANNON

Singer Madonna (Louise Ciccone) the”Queen of Pop” is
66  years young today.    

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On August 15, 1969, the Woodstock music festival opened on
a patch of farmland in White Lake, a hamlet in the upstate New
York town of Bethel.

Promoters John Roberts, Joel Rosenman, Artie Kornfield and
Michael Lang originally envisioned the festival as a way to raise
funds to build a recording studio and rock-and-roll retreat near
the town of Woodstock, New York.

The longtime artists’ colony was already a home base for Bob
Dylan and other musicians. Despite their relative inexperience,
the young promoters managed to sign a roster of top acts,
including the Jefferson Airplane, the Who, the Grateful Dead,
Sly and the Family Stone, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival and many more.