At 8:32 a.m. PDT on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens, a volcanic
peak in southwestern Washington, suffered a massive eruption,
killing 57 people and devastating some 210 square miles of
wilderness.
Called Louwala-Clough, or “the Smoking Mountain,” by Native
Americans, Mount St. Helens is located in the Cascade Range
and stood 9,680 feet before its eruption.
(WP) – Dabney Coleman, a Texas-born character actor who
created an acclaimed gallery of comically macho throwbacks
in films including “9 to 5” and “Tootsie” and TV shows such
as “The Slap Maxwell Story” and “Buffalo Bill,” died May 16
at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 92.
1980
The body of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh’s baby was found
on May 12, 1932, more than two months after he was kidnapped
from his family’s Hopewell, New Jersey, mansion.
Lindbergh, who became the first worldwide celebrity five years
earlier when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic,
and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh discovered a ransom note
in their 20-month-old child’s empty room on March 1.
The kidnapper had used a ladder (below) to climb up to the open
second-floor window and had left muddy footprints in the room.
In barely legible English, the ransom note (below) demanded
$50,000. The crime captured the attention of the entire nation.
Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
(FOX N EWS) – Susan Backlinie, famously known as the first
victim in the 1975 film "Jaws," has died.
Her husband of 30 years, Harvey Swindall, said death was
"very unexpected." She died at their California home on
Saturday morning from a heart attack.
"Let Valor Not Fail" by Dan Nance, Battle of Hamburger
Hill, 1969.
Hamburger Hill was the scene of an intense and controversial
battle during the Vietnam War. Known to military planners as
Hill 937 (a reference to its height in meters), the solitary peak
is located in the dense jungles of the A Shau Valley of Vietnam,
about a mile from the border with Laos.
The Vietnamese referred to the hill as Dong Ap Bia (or Ap Bia
Mountain, “the mountain of the crouching beast”). Though the
hill had no real tactical significance, taking the hill was part of
Operation Apache Snow, a U.S. military sweep of the A Shau
Valley. The purpose of the operation was to cut off North
Vietnamese infiltration from Laos and enemy threats to the
cities of Hue and Da Nang.
