TIM MAGUIRE

William Oliver Stone is 73 years old  today.

 1991

JFK was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including
Best Picture, Best Director for Stone and Best Supporting
Actor for Jones and won two for Best Cinematography and 
Best Film Editing. It was the most successful of three films 
Stone made about American presidents, followed by Nixon
(1995) with Anthony Hopkins in the title role and W. (2008)
with Josh Brolin as George W. Bush.

TIM MAGUIRE

On this day in 1996, a single homemade pipe bomb left in a knapsack exploded amid a crowd of spectators in Centennial Olympic Park,
near the main sites of the Olympic Games in Atlanta. The blast
caused by the crude device killed one person and injured 112
others.  

Eric Robert Rudolph, the Olympic Park Bomber.

The monument dedicated to the victims of the balloon bomb.
    

In Lakeview, Oregon on this day in 1945, Mrs. Elsie Mitchell and five
neighborhood children are killed while attempting to drag a Japanese
balloon (similar to the one shown above) out of the woods.

Unbeknownst to Mitchell and the children, the balloon was armed, and
it exploded soon after they began tampering with it. They were the first
and only known American civilians to be killed in the continental United
States during World War II. The U.S. government eventually gave $5,000
in compensation to Mitchell’s husband, and $3,000 each to the families
of Edward Engen, Sherman Shoemaker, Jay Gifford, and Richard and
Ethel Patzke, the five slain children.

The explosive balloon found at Lakeview was a product of one of only
a handful of Japanese attacks against the continental United States,
which were conducted early in the war by the Japanese.

MIKE  GRACIA

    

On this day in 1958, Explorer 1 became the United States’ first
satellite in space. The launch of the satellite — twice the size
of a basketball — was an important moment for the country,
as the Space Race with the Soviet Union was just beginning.

The three men responsible for the success of Explorer 1, at left is Dr. William H. Pickering, former director of JPL, which built and operated
the satellite. Dr. James A. van Allen, center, of the State University of Iowa, designed and built the instrument on Explorer that discovered
the radiation belts which circle the Earth. At right is Dr. Wernher von Braun, leader of the Army’s Redstone Arsenal team which built the
first stage Redstone rocket that launched Explorer 1.

On this day in 1945, Private Eddie Donald Slovik became the only
U.S. soldier since the American Civil War to be executed for
desertion.

The British Parliament enacted The Stamp Act in the American
colonies on this day in 1765. The act was repealed in March of
1766 on the same day that the Parliament passed the Declaratory
Acts which asserted that the British government had free and
total legislative power of the colonies.

On this day in 1952, the United States exploded the first hydrogen
bomb on Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands.