Joseph Anthony Pepitone
(October 9, 1940 – March 13, 2023)
Pepitone was a professional baseball first baseman and
outfielder who played in Major League Baseball (MLB)
for the New York Yankees, Houston Astros, Chicago
Cubs, and Atlanta Braves from 1962 to 1973 and for the
Yakult Atoms of Nippon Professional Baseball in 1973.
Pepitone was a three-time MLB All-Star and won three
Gold Glove Awards.
On March 13, 1942, the Quartermaster Corps (QMC) of the United
States Army began training dogs for the newly established War
Dog Program, or “K-9 Corps.”
Well over a million dogs served on both sides during World War
I, carrying messages along the complex network of trenches and
providing some measure of psychological comfort to the soldiers.
The most famous dog to emerge from the war was Rin Tin Tin,
an abandoned puppy of German war dogs found in France in
1918 and taken to the United States, where he made his film
debut in the 1922 silent film The Man from Hell’s River. As the
first bona movie star, Rin Tin Tin made the little-known German
fide animal Shepherd breed famous across the country.
Rin Tin Tin
Three dogs are trained for guard duty at Camp Atterbury, Ind.
U.S. Army photo
Though today there is almost nothing as ubiquitous as a bottle
of Coca-Cola, this was not always the case. For the first several
years of its existence, Coke was only available as a fountain
drink, and its producer saw no reason for that to change. It was
not until March 12, 1894 that Coke was first sold in bottles.
Originally developed as a non-addictive substitute for morphine,
then marketed as a non-alcoholic "temperance drink," Coca-Cola
was invented by John Pemberton, a druggist in Columbus,
Georgia, in 1886.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his first "fireside chat"
on this day in history, March 12, 1933, to reassure and inform
a nation reeling from the effects of the Great Depression.
This was the first in a series of broadcasts in which FDR
spoke plainly and directly to every American within the
sound of his voice.
According to Britannica, the term "fireside chat" was coined
by Harry Butcher of the CBS radio network.
Bronze sculpture of a man listening to the 1930s valve radio. This sculpture by George Segal at the Franklin D Roosevelt Memorial, Washington, DC, commemorates the famous
fireside radio chats during the Great Depression.
On March 11, 1989, Cops, a documentary-style television series
that follows police officers and sheriff’s deputies as they go
about their jobs, debuted on Fox. Cops went on to become one
of the longest-running shows in television history. It went off
the air in 2020.
The show, which was created by John Langley and Malcolm
Barbour, was a pioneer in reality television. Crews with
camcorders followed law enforcement officers on patrol,
tracking down suspects and making arrests. The show was
unscripted, which worked in Langley and Barbour’s favor
when they pitched the original concept to Fox: At the time,
there was a writers’ strike in Hollywood, and the network
needed new programming that wouldn’t require writers.
In 1989, the debut episode of Cops featured the men and
women of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department in
Florida. The show
aired over 1,000 episodes and filmed in 140 U.S. cities, as
well as international locations including London and Hong
Kong. With its widely recognized theme song, “Bad Boys”
by the reggae group Inner Circle, Cops had spawned
numerous imitators in addition to parody shows.
Malcolm Barbour
John Russell Langley
(June 1, 1943 – June 26, 2021
