ED DONAHUE
    
    
    

Space Shuttle Columbia’s last Launch.     
     
 

The Columbia’s 28th space mission, designated STS-107, was originally
scheduled to launch on January 11, 2001, but was delayed numerous
times for a variety of reasons over nearly two years. Columbia finally
launched on January 16, 2003, with a crew of seven.

Eighty seconds into the launch, a piece of foam insulation broke off
from the shuttle’s propellant tank and hit the edge of the shuttle’s
left wing.

When Columbia re-entered the earth’s atmosphere on the morning of
February 1, 2003, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to
penetrate the heat shield and destroy the internal wing structure,
which caused the spacecraft to become unstable and break apart.

The first debris began falling to the ground in West Texas near Lubbock
at 8:58 a.m. One minute later, the last communication from the crew of
five men and two women was heard, and at 9 a.m. the space shuttle
disintegrated over northeast Texas, near Dallas.  
     
     
    

      
        
                      
     
    
   
       
 
Crewmember helmet found in a field after the space shuttle Columbia 
disaster.

On January 15, 1967, the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League
(NFL) smash the American Football League (AFL)’s Kansas City Chiefs, 35-
10, in the first-ever AFL-NFL World Championship, later known as Super
Bowl I, at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles.

Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)

On January 15, 1929, Martin Luther King, Jr. is born in Atlanta, Georgia,
the son of a Baptist minister. King received a doctorate degree in theology
and in 1955 helped organized the first protest of the African-American civil
rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated civil disobedience and nonviolent
resistance to segregation in the South. The peaceful protests he led
throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King
and his followers persisted, and the movement gained momentum.

A powerful orator, King appealed to Christian and American ideals and
won growing support from the federal government and Northern whites.

In 1963, Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph led the massive March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; the event’s grand finale was King’s 
famous “I Have a Dream” speech. Two hundred and fifty thousand people
gathered outside the Lincoln Memorial to hear the stirring speech. 

   
    
  
          ROSS SIMPSON
   

Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married on this day in
1954. The marriage only lasted nine months.

  
Ernie’s 1962 Chevrolet Corvair.

On January 13, 1962, Ernie Kovacs, a comedian who hosted his own
television shows during the 1950s and is said to have influenced such
TV hosts as Johnny Carson and David Letterman, died at the age of 42
after crashing his Chevrolet Corvair into a telephone pole in Los Angeles, California, while driving in a rainstorm. Kovacs, who often appeared on
camera with his trademark cigar, was found by police with an unlit cigar,
leading to speculation that he had been reaching for the cigar and lost
control of his vehicle. The Corvair was later made infamous by Ralph
Nader’s groundbreaking 1965 book “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-
In Dangers of the American Automobile,” about unsafe practices in the
auto industry.

Ernest Edward Kovacs (January 23, 1919 – January 13, 1962)

   
Kovacs as Poet Laureate Percy Dovetonsils.