This day in history...

A lot to choose from today, but this first one seems appropriate to the times....

On March 27, 1915, Mary Mallon, alias "Typhoid Mary" is quarantined for life on North Brother Island in New York's East River. Mallon is believed to have been an asymptomatic carrier of typhus and infected 51 people - 3 of whom died - with the disease while working as a cook. She would die in isolation nearly 30 years later.


On March 27, 1977, two 747 jumbo jets crash into each other on the runway at an airport on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands, killing 582 passengers and crew members. The pilots of the Pan Am and KLM jets - both charters that had been rerouted to Tenerife due to a terrorist incident at their original destination - lost track of each other in heavy ground fog.


On March 27, 1964, the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the US strikes southern Alaska. The 9.2 quake and ensuing tsunami are responsible for 131 deaths and thousands injured.

On March 27, 1912, First Lady Helen Taft and the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador, plant two Yoshino cherry trees on the northern bank of the Potomac River, near the Jefferson Memorial. They are the first of more than 3,000 cherry trees given to the US as a gift from the Japanese government. They are planted in various locations around Washington DC.


On March 27, 1939, The University of Oregon defeats The Ohio State University 46–33 to win the first-ever NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Only 8 teams are invited to the first tournament that has now grown to 68 teams and come to be known as March Madness.

On March 27, 1905, brothers Albert and Alfred Stratton are convicted of the murders of prominent London shopkeepers Thomas and Ann Farrow, based mostly on one piece of evidence; a thumbprint lifted from the shop's cashbox is a perfect match with Alfred. It is the first murder conviction obtained in England based on the relatively new technique of fingerprinting.

On March 27, 1973, Marlon Brando wins the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Don Corleone in The Godfather. But Brando has boycotted the ceremony and sent in his place Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather. Called on stage, Littlefeather reads a statement from Brando in which he declines the award, and calls out the motion picture community for degrading the Native American community (he actually used the word "indian") for decades.

On March 27, 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves use of the drug Viagra, an oral medication that treats impotence. 'Nuff said.

 

Thanks, fixed

 

At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania) fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. Human error also played a part, as operators misunderstood what they were seeing and shut down water pumps that would have automatically cooled the reactor. By 8 am, the core had reached 4,000 degrees - meltdown occurs at 5,000 - and the operators turned the pumps back on. But by then, the entire plant was contaminated, and Governor Dick Thornburgh was considering an evacuation of the region. On March 30, he did urge pregnant women and pre-school age children living with a 5-mile radius of the plant to leave; panic ensued and more than 100,000 fled their homes. A nervous nation finally calmed down on April 1, when President Carter, who had been a trained nuclear engineer during his Navy days, visited the plant, conferring with experts who agreed the core was cooling. In the aftermath, no lives were lost, but a number of plant workers were left with health issues due to radiation exposure. The undamaged Unit 1 reactor resumed operation in 1985; Unit 2 never operated again; cleanup of the damaged core didn't finish until 1990. No new nuclear power plants have opened in the US since the Three Mile Island disaster.


On March 28, 1774, the British Parliament enacts the Coercive Acts. The aim of the legislation was to restore order in Massachusetts and punish Bostonians for their Tea Party. The Coercive Acts closed the Port of Boston until reparations were made for the Tea Party, restricted political gatherings in the colony, gave British officials diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution in Massachusetts, and required colonists to house British troops on demand, in their homes if necessary. Parliament hoped that the acts would cut off Boston and New England off from the rest of the colonies and prevent unified resistance to British rule. Instead, it united the colonies further and led to the calling of the 1st Continental Congress and the first organized resistance to British authority.

On March 28, 1984, Bob Irsay, owner of the Baltimore Colts, moves the team to Indianapolis. Without any sort of public announcement, Irsay hired movers to pack up the team’s offices in Owings Mills, Maryland in the middle of the night, while the city of Baltimore slept. The Colts had been a model sports franchise through the '50 and '60, but began to crumble when Irsay acquired the team in 1972. It hit rock bottom when the Colts used the number one pick in the 1983 draft on quarterback John Elway, who refused to report to the team and forced a trade with the Denver Broncos. When city officials refused to pay for improvements to Memorial Stadium, Irsay accepted an offer from the city of Indianapolis and pulled off his midnight move. Baltimore was without a team until 1996, when it lured the Browns out of Cleveland with the promise of a new publicly-paid for stadium.

 

On March 29, 1973, under the terms of the Paris Peace Accords, the last US combat troops leave Vietnam. American troops had been fighting on the side of the South Vietnamese against communist North Vietnam for 8 years, at a cost of more than 58,000 dead and 300,000 wounded. Roughly 7,000 civilian Department of Defense employees remain in Saigon as advisors, and they will also leave in 2 years.

On March 29, 1865, Union troops under General Ulysses S. Grant begin to drive Confederate troops from their entrenched defensive positions around Petersburg, Virginia. General Robert E. Lee will be forced to pull his dwindling army from its positions within 4 days and begin the retreat that will end later in the month at Appomattox.

On March 29, 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for their role in passing atomic secrets to the Soviets during and after World War II. The conviction of the Rosenbergs was the climax of a chain of espionage that began to unravel 13 months earlier with the arrest of a British physicist, accused of selling secrets to the Russians. The physicist fingered his American courier, who fingered a lab tech, who accused his sister, Ethel, and her husband of masterminding the operation. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953; having never backed off their claim of innocence. (below: the Rosenbergs embrace moments before Julius is strapped into the electric chair)

 

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest as he exits a Washington DC hotel. Reagan had just finished a speech and was headed for his limo when a deranged drifter named John Hinckley Jr. fired six shots, wounding Reagan, a Secret Service agent, a DC policeman and White House Press Secretary James Brady. Reagan was struck once, by a bullet that pierced his left lung and just missed his heart. Doctors removed the bullet and Reagan was back at his desk by April 11. Brady's wound was the most serious; as he suffered permanent brain damage. Hinckley, who had previously been found legally insane by the state of Tennessee after a weapons charge, was found not guilty by reason of insanity. His legal team's defense centered around his obsession with actress Jodie Foster, and argued that he was in fact acting out the plot of the movie 1976 Taxi Driver, which co-starred Foster and centered around an assassination attempt of a fictional senator. Hinckley spent the next 18 years confined to a DC mental hospital.


On March 30, 1870, following its ratification by the requisite three-fourths of the states, the 15th Amednment, granting African American men the right to vote, is formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution. On March 31, Thomas Peterson-Mundy of Perth Amboy, New Jersey becomes the first African American to legally cast a vote in an American election.

On March 30, 1867, U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward signs a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska for $7 million. Seward is a big believer in territorial expansion, and the price is right; roughly 2 cents per acre for a property that will increase the nation's total area by about 17 percent. Detractors nevertheless ridiculed the move as “Seward’s Folly,” and “Seward’s icebox.” For awhile they were right, as Alaska attracted few settlers until gold was discovered in 1898. Since then, Alaska has proven to be a land of plentiful natural resources for the nation.

 

On March 31, 1991, the Warsaw Pact—the military alliance between the Soviet Union and its eastern European satellites—comes to an end. Formed in 1955 after the US and the other members of NATO voted to admit West Germany and allow the nation to rearm, the Warsaw Pact included the USSR and 7 other nations. The Soviets claimed the aim of the Pact was defensive, but it would invoke its terms with Hungary in '56 and Czechoslovakia in '68 to oppress anticommunist movements. The stability of the Pact began to crumble in the late '80s when the two Germany's began to move toward reunification.

On March 31, 1889, the Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris in a ceremony presided over by Gustave Eiffel, the tower’s designer, and attended by French Prime Minister Pierre Tirard. Built in less than 2 years and with the loss - remarkable for the times - of only one life, the tower is the tallest structure in the world (984 feet), until surpassed by the Chrysler building in NYC in 1930.


Here you go, @shane0911 ... On March 31, 1943, Oklahoma! opens on Broadway. The new production is a tough sell early; it's off-Broadway debut in in New Haven, Connecticut - under the title, Away We Go - does not awe the critics. Famed columnist Walter Winchell would write "No girls. No legs. No chance." There's no name star either, but it does have the music of renowned composer Richard Rogers, working for the first time with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. The material itself is a gamble; Oklahoma! strays away from the normal Broadway formula of big show-stopping spectacle for a combination of music and dance that moves the story along. The gamble pays off; on opening night, the crowd simply won't let the cast leave. They perform the encore number three times, and the audience continues to call for more. Oklahoma! would set a Broadway record of 2,212 performances before finally closing 5 years later.