TIM MAGUIRE
Carlos Humberto Santana Barragán is 78 years old today.
In 2023, Rolling Stone named him the 11th greatest guitarist
of all time. He has won 10 Grammy Awards and three Latin
Grammy Awards, and was inducted along with his namesake
band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998.
On July 20, 1988, Die Hard, an action film starring Bruce
Willis as wisecracking New York City cop John McClane,
opened in theaters across the United States.
A huge box-office hit, the film established Willis as a movie
star and spawned three sequels. Die Hard also became
Hollywood shorthand for describing the plot of other
actions films, as in “Speed is Die Hard on a bus.”
Bruce Willis (70) was spotted in public for the second time
since announcing his battle with frontotemporal dementia
and aphasia, on January 22.
At the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, a
woman’s rights convention—the first ever held in the
United States—convened with almost 200 women in
attendance.
The convention was organized by Lucretia Mott and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, two abolitionists who met at
the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.
As women, Mott and Stanton were barred from the
convention floor, and the common indignation that
this aroused in both of them was the impetus for
their founding of the women’s rights movement in
the United States.
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.
