TIM MAGUIRE

Oliver Stone in Vietnam.

William Oliver Stone is a film director, producer, and screenwriter. He won an Academy Award for Best
Adapted Screenplay as writer of Midnight Express
(1978), and wrote the gangster film remake Scarface
(1983). Stone achieved prominence as writer and          
director  of the war drama Platoon (1986), which
won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best
Picture. Platoon was the first in a trilogy of films  
based on the Vietnam War, in which Stone served
as an infantry soldier. He continued the series with
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)—for which Stone
won his second Best Director Oscar. Stone is 76
years old today. 

ED DANAHUE

Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is an Austrian-American actor,
producer, businessman, retired bodybuilder, and former
politician who served as the 38th governor of California
from 2003 to 2011. Arnold is 74 today.

1984

TIM MAGUIRE

On this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer,
sighted Watling Island in the Bahamas. He believed that he had
found Asia while attempting to find a Western ocean route to
India. The same day he claimed the land for Isabella and
Ferdinand of Spain.

Explorer Christopher Columbus. 

The USS Cole bombing was an attack against the United States Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Cole on 12 October 2000, while it was being refueled in Yemen’s Aden harbor. 17 American sailors were
killed and 39 injured in the deadliest attack against a United States
naval vessel since 1987.

Casualties of the USS Cole being Returned To The United States.

On this day in 1960, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was reported
to have pounded a shoe on his desk during a dispute at a U.N.
General Assembly.

ED DANAHUE

It was on this day in 1975.

On this day in 1965, U.S. President Johnson (center) signed into law Social Security Act that established Medicare and Medicaid. It went
into effect the following year. Former President Harry S. Truman
is seated on the right. 

A photo of Truman’s application form.

Black Tom pier shortly after the explosion.

The Black Tom explosion on July 30, 1916, in Jersey City, New Jersey, was an
act of sabotage by German agents to destroy American-made munitions that
were to be supplied to the Allies in World War I.

The USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on
this day in 1945. The ship had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian. Only 316 out
of 1,196 men aboard survived the attack.

An artists illustration of the attack on The USS Indianapolis.

Henry Ford (July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947)

Henry Ford was an American industrialist and a business
magnate, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and the
sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique
of mass production.

Henry Ford with a Model T in Buffalo, New York, in 1921.

Actor Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger is 71 years old today.

Bodybuilder, actor, and politician who served as the governor of California
from 2003 to 2011. His best known films include Conan the Barbarian (1982) 
Predator (1987) The Terminator series (beginning in 1984) and Total Recall
(1990). In 1996 he portrayed Howard Langston in the holiday comedy film 
Jingle All the Way.

                
                   1994

(History) – An ammunition ship explodes while being loaded in Port Chicago, California, killing 332 people on this day in 1944. The United States’ World
War II military campaign in the Pacific was in full swing at the time. Lack of
training and poor procedures led to the disaster.

Port Chicago, about 30 miles north of San Francisco, was developed into a munitions facility when the Naval Ammunition Depot at Mare Island, CA,
could not fully supply the war effort.