SANDY KOZEL

Analysts have argued the election of 1968 was a major realigning election
as it permanently disrupted the New Deal Coalition that had dominated
presidential politics for 36 years.

PORTLAND, Ore. — Portland radio has lost a legendary voice. Steve
Pringle died Sunday after battling stage 4 cancer since June of this
year. For 26  years, Steve played jazz, and blues music on radio
stations KINK, KMHD and KGON.

Black Bart (Charles Earl Boles)
(b. 1829; d. after February 28, 1888)

Authorities almost catch the California bandit and infamous
stagecoach robber called Black Bart; he manages to make
a quick getaway, but drops an incriminating clue that eventually
sends him to prison.

Black Bart was born probably in the state of New York around
1830. As a young man, he abandoned his family for the gold
fields of California, but he failed to strike it rich as a miner and
turned to a life of crime.

By the mid-1850s, stagecoaches and Wells Fargo wagons transported
much of the huge output of gold from California. Often traveling in
isolated areas, the Wells Fargo wagons and stagecoaches quickly
became favorite targets for bandits; over the course of about 15
years, the company lost more than $415,000 in gold to outlaw
robbers.

It is believed that Boles committed his first stagecoach robbery in
July 1875.

MIKE  GRACIA

On this day in 1947, Howard Hughes flew his "Spruce Goose," a
huge wooden airplane, for eight minutes in California. It was the
plane’s first and only flight. The "Spruce Goose," nicknamed
because of the white-gray color of the spruce used to build it,
never went into production.

Howard Robard Hughes Jr.
(December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976)

The United States detonates the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the
hydrogen bomb, on Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific. The test gave the United
States a short-lived advantage in the nuclear arms race with the Soviet
Union. 

Following the successful Soviet detonation of an atomic device in 1949,
the United States accelerated its program to develop the next stage in
atomic weaponry, a thermonuclear bomb. Popularly known as the
hydrogen bomb, this new weapon was approximately 1,000 times more
powerful than conventional nuclear devices. Opponents of development
of the hydrogen bomb included J. Robert Oppenheimer, one of the fathers
of the atomic bomb. He and others argued that little would be accomplished
except the speeding up of the arms race, since it was assumed that the
Soviets would quickly follow suit.The opponents were correct in their
assumptions. The Soviet Union exploded a thermonuclear device the
following year and by the late 1970s, seven nations had constructed
hydrogen bombs. The nuclear arms race had taken a step forward.