ED DANAHUE

Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins is 82 years old today.

Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins is best known for his portrayal of the
ingenious serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs 
(1991), a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. He
has also played roles in The Mask of Zorro (1998) and Nixon (1995).  

Hopkins turned to TV in 2016 upon landing a starring role on HBO’s
series Westworld.  He was encouraged by actor Richard Burton to
pursue acting at age 15.

In one of the first sit-down strikes in the United States, autoworkers occupied
the General Motors Fisher Body Plant Number One in Flint, Michigan. The autoworkers were striking to win recognition of the United Auto Workers
(UAW) as the only bargaining agent for GM’s workers; they also wanted to
make the company stop sending work to non-union plants and to establish
a fair minimum wage scale, a grievance system and a set of procedures that
would help protect assembly-line workers from injury. In all, the strike lasted
44 days.

General Motors’ workers celebrate the end of the historic Flint Sit-
Down Strike in 1937. As a result, 100,000 workers gained the right
to union representation.

   
German bomber flying over Britain during the Blitz.

On the evening of December 29, 1940, London suffers its most devastating
air raid when Germans firebomb the city. Hundreds of fires caused by the
exploding bombs engulfed areas of London, but firefighters showed a
valiant indifference to the bombs falling around them and saved much
of the city from destruction. The next day, a newspaper photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral standing undamaged amid the smoke and flames seemed to
symbolize the capital’s unconquerable spirit during the Battle of Britain.

The dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, visible through smoke generated by German incendiary bombs.

United Airlines Flight 173 was a scheduled flight from John F.
Kennedy International Airport in New York City to Portland
International Airport in Portland, Oregon, with a scheduled stop
in Denver, Colorado. On December 28, 1978, the aircraft flying
this route ran out of fuel while troubleshooting a landing gear
problem and crashed in a suburban Portland neighborhood
near NE 157th Avenue and East Burnside Street killing 10
people. 

Flight 173 was piloted by an experienced cockpit crew,
consisting of Captain Malburn McBroom (above), First
Officer Roderick "Rod" Beebe, and Flight Engineer
Forrest Mendenhall.  McBroom had been with United
Airlines for 27 years; he was one of the airline’s most
senior pilots with more than 27,600 hours of flight time,
of which about 5,500 hours had been as a DC-8 captain.

   
John Donald Imus Jr. (July 23, 1940 – December 27, 2019)

Don  Imus was a radio personality, television show host, recording
artist, and author. He was known for his radio show Imus in the
Morning which aired on various stations and digital platforms
nationwide until his retirement in March of  2018.

In March 2009, Imus was diagnosed with stage 2 prostate cancer. He
was hospitalized at Baylor Scott & White Medical Center in College
Station, Texas, on December 24, 2019. The exact cause of his death
was not immediately reported.