On July 18, 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who first took
office in 1933 as America’s 32nd president, was nominated
for an unprecedented third term.         

       
Roosevelt, a Democrat, would eventually be elected to a record
four terms in office, the only U.S. president to serve more than
two terms.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945)

ROSS SIMPSON

Shortly after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator
Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile
off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped
the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo
Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car
accident for 10 hours.

In a ceremony held at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, General
Dwight D. Eisenhower (above) appointed Florence Blanchfield to
be a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, making her the first
woman in U.S. history to hold permanent military rank.

A member of the Army Nurse Corps since 1917, Blanchfield secured
her commission following the passage of the Army-Navy Nurse Act
of 1947 by Congress.

Blanchfield had served as superintendent of the Army Nurse Corps during World War II and was instrumental in securing passage of
the Army-Navy Nurse Act.

In 1951, Blanchfield received the Florence Nightingale Award from
the International Red Cross. In 1978, a U.S. Army hospital in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was named in her honor.

Florence Aby Blanchfield (April 1, 1884 in Shepherdstown,
West Virginia – May 12, 1971)

Disneyland, Walt Disney’s metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy and
futurism, opened on July 17, 1955. The $17 million theme park
was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim,
California, and soon brought in staggering profits.

On July 17, 1944, the Port Chicago Naval Magazine near San
Francisco experienced a catastrophic explosion when two
ammunition ships, the SS E.A. Bryan and the SS Quinault
Victory, detonated while loading munitions for Pacific troops.