John F. Kennedy, 43, became the youngest man ever to be
elected president of the United States, narrowly beating
Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. He was also the
first Catholic to become president.

Richard Nixon (left) congratulates the new President.

In one of the greatest upsets in presidential election history,
Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman defeated his Republican challenger, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, by just
over two million popular votes. In the days preceding the vote,
political analysts and polls were so behind Dewey that on
election night, long before all the votes were counted, the
Chicago Tribune published an early edition with the banner
headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN”(above). 

Thomas Edmund Dewey
(March 24, 1902 – March 16, 1971)

“The War of the Worlds”—Orson Welles’s realistic radio
dramatization of a Martian invasion of Earth, was broadcast
on the radio on October 30, 1938.

Welles was only 23 years old when his Mercury Theater
company decided to update H.G. Wells’s 19th-century
science fiction novel The War of the Worlds for national
radio. 

It was not planned as a radio hoax, and Welles had little
idea of how legendary it would eventually become.

Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age
of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned
on. But most of these Americans were listening to Edgar
Bergen with his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and
only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch
ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story
of the Martian invasion was well underway.

George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985)

Battery-operated Toy car, Dick Tracy Squad Car No.1, c.1949,
by Marx Toys.

Dick Tracy is a comic strip featuring Dick Tracy (originally
Plainclothes Tracya tough and intelligent police detective
created by Chester Gould. It made its debut on Sunday,
October 4, 1931, in the Detroit Mirror, and was distributed
by the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate.

In the summer of 1977, members of the rock band Aerosmith
inspected an airplane they were considering chartering for
their upcoming tour—a Convair 240 (above) operated out of
Addison, Texas. Concerns over the flight crew led Aerosmith
to look elsewhere. a decision that saved one band but doomed
another. The aircraft in question was instead chartered by the
band Lynyrd Skynyrd, who were just setting out that autumn
on a national tour that promised to be their biggest to date.

On October 20, 1977, however, during a flight from Greenville,
South Carolina, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s
tour plane crashed in a heavily wooded area of southwestern 
Mississippi during a failed emergency landing attempt, killing
band-members Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and Cassie
Gaines as well as the band’s assistant road manager and the
plane’s pilot and co-pilot. Twenty others survived the crash.