Today in Your History — March
A look at the people, events and popular culture that shaped our lives
AARP Members Only Access, March 2022
- |
- Photos
-
- 1 of
PHOTO BY: CBS via Getty Images
March 31: Johnson won't seek reelection (1968)
In spring of 1968, as the country was bitterly divided over the Vietnam War, American audiences tuned in to Sunday night television expecting regularly scheduled programming. Instead, President Lyndon B. Johnson took to the airwaves to deliver an address. Over the course of 40 minutes, he discussed the toll of the war and spoke about pausing the bombing campaign. Then he dropped a bombshell of his own: He wouldn’t be seeking reelection. “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office — the presidency of your country,” he said. “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” The announcement was so unexpected (LBJ had won in a landslide in 1964) that some people thought the news was an elaborate April Fools’ joke, and that even the news anchors hadn’t been warned in advance. When CBS went back to Roger Mudd and Dan Rather for commentary, a stunned Mudd said, “What I’d rather do is go home and come back tomorrow morning and begin to talk about it.” Johnson’s decision would have far-reaching consequences, kicking off one of the most hotly contested and contentious primary brawls and general elections in American history. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 2 of
PHOTO BY: The White House/Getty Images
March 30: Ronald Reagan survives shooting (1981)
On March 30, 1981, just two months after his first inauguration, Ronald Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton when shots rang out. John Hinckley Jr. had fired his .22-caliber revolver at the president and his security team, and one of the special explosive bullets, or Devastators, ricocheted off the limousine and hit Reagan in the left armpit, breaking a rib and collapsing a lung. At first, the 70-year-old president didn’t even know he had been shot, and he walked under his own power into George Washington University Hospital, where he was reportedly in good spirits. He quipped to his wife, Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck,” and he later said to the surgeons, “Please, tell me you’re Republicans.” After a two-hour procedure, Reagan was stabilized, and he returned to the White House on April 11. But he wasn’t the only one injured in the assassination attempt, and while Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty also recovered relatively quickly, White House Press Secretary James Brady suffered permanent brain damage and later became a gun control advocate. You may remember that Hinckley was motivated to shoot the president because he thought it would impress Jodie Foster, with whom he had become obsessed. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was later immortalized as one of the characters in the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 3 of
PHOTO BY: Laura Patterson/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images
March 29: Bill Clinton says he didn’t inhale (1992)
In March 1992, as the presidential campaign was kicking into high gear, the New York Daily News printed a quote from then-candidate Bill Clinton in which he said that, regarding drug use, he had “never broken the rules of [his] country.” On March 29, during a televised candidates’ forum in New York, an interviewer pressed him on what he had meant by that, asking if he had instead ever broken state or international laws, perhaps when he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. His response: “I’ve never broken a state law. But when I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t inhale it and never tried it again.” Today, in an era of increased cannabis legalization, his response seems almost quaint, but it made headlines at the time — though it wasn’t the campaign ender it might have been in the past. Johnny Carson joked of the admission, “That’s the trouble with the Democrats. Even when they do something wrong, they don’t do it right.” Barack Obama later wrote in his 1995 book Dreams From My Father that he had used both marijuana and cocaine when he was younger, and at a 2006 event for magazine editors, he said, “I inhaled frequently — that was the point.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 4 of
PHOTO BY: Jack Kanthal/AP Photo
March 28: Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown (1979)
At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, disaster hit the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station (TMI), a power plant on Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River. At the plant’s second reactor, TMI-2, water coolant pumps failed — the result of either a mechanical or electrical failure — which led the reactor to overheat, melting half the core. It was the worst accident to that point in America’s nuclear history, though amazingly there were no deaths or injuries. As B. Drummond Ayres Jr. wrote in The New York Times a few weeks later, “It was an accident destined to threaten not only the lives of thousands, born and unborn, but also the future of nuclear power itself — an accident that would generate a week of doomsday fear, panicky flight, conflicting statements, noisy demonstrations and intense confusion.” The incident was rated at level 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale, signaling an “accident with wider consequences.” (For reference, there have been only two level 7 incidents, at Chernobyl in 1986 and at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011.) In one of the wildest twists, the accident at Three Mile Island occurred just 12 days after the release of the film The China Syndrome, a suspenseful thriller about a near-meltdown at a California nuclear power plant that starred Jane Fonda. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 5 of
PHOTO BY: AP photo
March 27: Mount St. Helens begins to erupt (1980)
In March 1980, a new system of seismographs at the University of Washington began to detect some troubling earthquakes, often multiple times per day, underneath Mount St. Helens. The volcanic peak in Washington’s Cascade Range had sat dormant since 1857, but the U.S. Geological Survey issued an official Hazard Watch on the morning of March 27. At 12:36 that afternoon, a booming explosion signaled the start of the first volcanic eruption in the contiguous 48 states since California’s Lassen Peak in 1917. A column of ash and steam shot 6,000 feet into the air — or more than twice the height of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. The explosions opened up new cracks in the side of the mountain and formed a 250-foot-wide crater. But the devastation was far from over, and on May 18, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake triggered a massive eruption and lateral air blast that kicked off avalanches, mudflows and floods, leading to 57 deaths and $1.1 billion in damages. After the eruption, the mountain had dropped in elevation from 9,600 to 8,300 feet. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 6 of
PHOTO BY: Bob Daugherty/AP Photo
March 26: Egypt and Israel sign peace treaty (1979)
Egypt and Israel had been at war since 1948, but Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin hoped to finally change that. In September 1978, they met with President Jimmy Carter in Maryland for negotiations that would come to be known as the Camp David Accords, and for their efforts, they were jointly awarded that year’s Nobel Prize for Peace. On March 26, 1979, in a ceremony at the White House, the leaders finally signed the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, the first of its kind between Israel and an Arab country. Egypt formally recognized Israel and established diplomatic relations, and Israel agreed to leave the Sinai Peninsula, which they’d occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967. “During the past 30 years, Israel and Egypt have waged war,” President Carter said in a speech that day. “But for the past 16 months, these same two great nations have waged peace. Today we celebrate a victory — not of a bloody military campaign, but of an inspiring peace campaign. Two leaders who will loom large in the history of nations… have conducted this campaign with all the courage, tenacity, brilliance and inspiration of any generals who have ever led men and machines into the field of battle.” Despite the historic signing, problems were far from resolved in the Middle East: The Arab League suspended Egypt as a member, and in 1981, Sadat was assassinated by extremists. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 7 of
PHOTO BY: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images
March 25: Sally Field gives her famously misremembered Oscar speech (1985)
In 1985, Sally Field won her second Academy Award for best actress for the Depression-set drama Places in the Heart, and chances are you haven’t forgotten her infamous acceptance speech: “You like me, you really like me!” In fact, the Encyclopedia Britannica even lists the line in her biography. The only problem? Go back and watch the tape — she never said it. After accepting her award from Robert Duvall, she actually finished up her speech as follows: “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect. The first time I didn’t feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me! Thank you.” Almost immediately, the speech was scrutinized and picked apart, and it’s been a pop culture punchline for decades: During a Saturday Night Live monologue, for instance, Larry David said, “You tolerate me. You really, really tolerate me.” In a 2017 interview with CBS Sunday Morning’s Jane Pauley, Field said, “Wherever I go people would shout it at me, still, still, still. And you think, why did that resonate so much?” Her conclusion: “People can’t allow themselves to feel accepted.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 8 of
PHOTO BY: Rob Stapleton/AP Photo
March 24: Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster (1989)
On March 24, 1989, the United States experienced one of the most devastating ecological disasters in its history when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. At the time, the captain radioed the Coast Guard with a message that would prove to be a massive understatement: “Evidently we’re leaking some oil and we’re going to be here for quite a while.” When all was said and done, the tanker had spilled 11 million gallons of oil — enough to fill almost 17 Olympic swimming pool. The oil spread to 1,300 miles of shoreline and killed an estimated 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, up to 22 orca whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs. While President George H.W. Bush originally argued that it might be “counterproductive” for the federal government to help in the cleanup, he decided to send in troops by April to aid with the recovery. Two years later, Exxon agreed to a $1 billion settlement, paying $100 million for environmental crimes and $900 million to complete coastal cleanups. The disaster was fictionalized in a 1992 HBO movie called Dead Ahead: the Exxon Valdez Disaster, starring John Heard and Christopher Lloyd. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 9 of
PHOTO BY: TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images
March 23: Titanic wins 11 Oscars (1998)
James Cameron’s sweeping disaster epic Titanic entered the 1998 Academy Awards with 14 nominations, tying All About Eve for the most nods of all time; the 14-ers club later added a new member in 2017 with the musical La La Land. By the end of the night, the film would go on to win 11 awards, matching the record set by Ben-Hur (and later The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). In addition to its slew of technical category wins, the period romance picked up best picture, best director for James Cameron and, of course, best song for “My Heart Will Go On,” losing only best actress (Kate Winslet), best supporting actress (Gloria Stuart) and best makeup. Cameron ended his best director acceptance speech with the line, “Mom, Dad, there is no way I can express to you what I’m feeling right now, my heart is full to bursting, except to say, ‘I’m the king of the world!’” Some cringed at the boastfulness of the sentiment, and Cameron later addressed the controversy on a new Blu-ray edition of Titanic: “Look, it’s not that I regret it because it’s what I was feeling at the moment and I said what I was feeling. But, it sort of assumes that everybody there is a fan of your movie and knows the line and will celebrate the line. That’s just a step too far. The better path and the smarter path is humility which is to just be grateful that the movie and the team are being honored, but don’t quote your own film. If you ever win an Oscar, don’t quote your own movie.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 10 of
PHOTO BY: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
March 22: Bob Dylan goes electric with album (1965)
After coming up on the coffeehouse circuit in Greenwich Village, Bob Dylan went and did the unthinkable with his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home: He went electric. Released on this day in 1965, the album represented a sea change, with Dylan dipping a toe into the world of rock ‘n’ roll and challenging the orthodoxy of the folk movement. “When Bob Dylan entered Columbia Records’ Studio A in mid-January 1965 and blew out an 11-song LP in three days,” Will Hermes later wrote in Rolling Stone, “he didn’t merely go electric, invent film rock and transition from an acoustic troubadour to a boundary-pushing rock & roller. He conjured performances that would completely reimagine how pop music communicated — not just what it could say, but how it could say it… The fallout-shelter sign in the cover shot was on point: Bringing It All Back Home was the cultural equivalent of a nuclear bomb.” Dylan was soon labeled a sell-out by the folk music community, and in July of that year, when he strapped on an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival, he was met with perhaps just as many boos and sneers as cheers. In his book Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties, music historian Elijah Wald argues that Dylan’s stylistic evolution kicked off what we now think of as the Sixties, telling NPR that “it’s a real good marker for the divide between what had been the first half of the ’60s and what was coming.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 11 of
PHOTO BY: Arthur Schatz/Getty Images
March 21: J.R. Ewing is shot on 'Dallas' (1980)
On the March 21, 1980 episode of Dallas, in the final scene of the season finale, the villainous J.R. Ewing (Larry Hagman) was working late in his office when he heard a noise outside. Stepping out to investigate, he was shot twice by a mysterious assailant and fell to the ground. Did he survive? Did he die? And, most importantly, who shot J.R.?! After all, he did have many, many enemies. TV’s quintessential cliffhanger would come to dominate the national conversation for eight full months, as a Screen Actors Guild strike in the summer delayed production of the next season. Fans placed hundreds of thousands of dollars in bets on who pulled the trigger, and “Who shot J.R.?” bumper stickers reportedly outsold those for the Carter and Reagan campaigns, which were both in full swing. Even Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, couldn’t get an answer out of Hagman; upon meeting the actor, she reportedly said, “I won’t ask you,” to which he replied, “I couldn’t tell you anyway — not even you ma’am.” On November 21, she and more than 83 million Americans (or 76 percent of all TV viewers! ) tuned in to find out “Who Done It?” as the episode was called: It turned out to be none other than J.R.’s mistress and sister-in-law Kristin Shepard, who announced that she was pregnant with his baby. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 12 of
PHOTO BY: Getty Images
March 20: Gloria Estefan breaks her back (1990)
Cuban-born pop sensation Gloria Estefan was sleeping on her tour bus as it drove along a snowy Pennsylvania highway when disaster struck: A semi truck plowed into the back of the bus, throwing Estefan to the ground and leaving her with a broken back. On a recent episode of her Facebook Watch series Red Table Talk: The Estefans, she described the scene as “mayhem,” and recalled, “I tried to get up. I had the taste of electricity in my mouth, that’s the only way I can describe it. The pain was excruciating.” Early reports indicated that she might not be able to walk again, but doctors were able to successfully stabilize her spine with two titanium rods. Nearly a year later, she made her emotional return to the stage at the 1991 American Music Awards, with a performance of her comeback single “Coming Out of the Dark” — a scene that later served as the inspirational climax of her Broadway musical On Your Feet! Estefan told the Los Angeles Daily News at the time, “I hate pity. I’m very self-reliant and independent, and I’m used to that role. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me. So I wrote ‘Coming Out of the Dark’ to let the people around me know how important they are to me. But that was as far as I wanted to go with the accident. I didn’t want it to become ‘the album on the accident.’ What am I going to sing—’Oh, this bus hit me’?” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 13 of
PHOTO BY: Paul Harris/Getty Images
March 19: Reagan on 'Diff'rent Strokes' (1983)
This year, former First Lady Michelle Obama appeared as herself on ABC’s Black-ish, but it wasn’t the first time a First Lady had made a cameo on a sitcom. In March 1983, Nancy Reagan, who had gotten her start as a film actress, used an appearance on Diff’rent Strokes as an opportunity to promote her “Just Say No” anti-drug initiative. In the episode, Arnold (Gary Coleman) writes an article for the school newspaper about drugs being sold on campus, and Reagan shows up to chat with the faculty and students about addiction. Actor Todd Bridges later told The Hollywood Reporter that the studio audience was filled with members of the Secret Service — and the way he could tell was that they laughed at everything the First Lady said! Bridges went on to deal with a severe crack cocaine addiction, and he said that he often thought about Reagan’s cameo as he fought to get sober: “At my lowest point, I started remembering what she was talking about and the reason why the stuff was so bad. Once you figure out the root cause — what makes you do something [self-destructive] — you figure out how to stop. It’s really all about you when it comes down to it.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 14 of
PHOTO BY: Josh Reynolds/AP Photo
March 18: Thieves steal 13 priceless works
At 1:24 a.m. on the morning of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers buzzed the door at the entrance of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, pretending to be responding to a disturbance. After they were let in by the guards on duty, they announced their intentions: “Gentlemen, this is a robbery.” They quickly overpowered the guards and handcuffed them in the basement, and within 81 minutes, they had pulled off the greatest art heist in modern history. By the time they were finished, they had made off with 13 priceless works of art by the likes of Johannes Vermeer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet, and more, not to mention an ancient Chinese gu (bronze drinking vessel) dating back to the 12th century B.C. Amazingly, more than 30 years later, the works of art — which are valued at about $500 million — have still never been recovered, and the case was made into a Netflix docuseries last year called This Is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist. The museum, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s office are still on the hunt for the missing art, and just in case you happen to know anything about their whereabouts, they’re offering a $10 million reward for any information! —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 15 of
PHOTO BY: AFP/Getty Images
March 17: S. Africans vote to end apartheid (1992)
After taking the presidency in 1989, F. W. de Klerk openly committed to ending the appallingly racist apartheid system of segregation, which had officially been the law since 1948. In spring of 1992, he took the risky move of putting the decision to the people in a widely publicized referendum, which asked voters — only white voters, of course — if they supported his antiapartheid reforms. In a move that would mirror the Brexit vote decades later, big businesses and international leaders voiced their opinions, with major corporations throwing their weight (and money) behind the “yes” vote. An advertisement in the Sunday Times read, “This is what we have achieved since 1990: we have already been accepted back into the international fold; sanctions have been lifted, trade is starting to prosper; investment capital is pouring in, creating new jobs, new opportunities. This is what a ‘No’ vote will destroy overnight.” Much to de Klerk’s relief, white South Africans voted to end apartheid by wide margins, with 68.6 percent nationally — and 85 percent in Cape Town — choosing “yes.” “Today we have closed the book on apartheid,” de Klerk said. “It doesn’t often happen that in one generation a nation gets an opportunity to rise above itself. The white electorate has risen above itself in this referendum.” Nelson Mandela put it more simply: “In principle, the referendum signaled the end of white privilege.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 16 of
PHOTO BY: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
March 16: Mississippi formally ratifies the Thirteenth Amendment (1995)
In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which formally abolished slavery, passed the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, but it wasn’t ratified by the required three-fourths of states until December of that year. But that was far from the end of the amendment’s story. After rejecting the amendment in 1865, the state of Mississippi didn’t officially ratify it until 130 years later, when its legislature unanimously voted to abolish slavery on March 16, 1995. And if you can believe it, that still wasn’t the end of the story! After seeing the movie Lincoln, University of Mississippi neurobiology and anatomical sciences professor Dr. Ranjan Batra got curious about the ratification process, and he discovered on a website called usconstitution.net that Mississippi had failed to notify the U.S. Archivist about their 1995 ratification; as a result, the ratification was not official. He and a colleague worked to contact Mississippi’s secretary of state, who quickly filed the paperwork, and the Thirteenth. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 17 of
PHOTO BY: Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
March 15: The Godfather opens in New York (1972)
A day after The Godfather premiered at New York’s Loews State Theatre in the middle of a blizzard, the viewing public got their chance to see the three-hour Mafia epic when it opened in five theaters across the Big Apple, before expanding to Toronto (March 17), Los Angeles (March 22) and then the rest of the U.S. and Canada on March 24. Mario Puzo’s novel was already a major hit, so it was no surprise that audiences would be hungry to see the adaptation, but the response was bigger than anyone could have anticipated: The film was screened every hour from 9 a.m. to midnight, with lines stretching around the block, and befitting the picture’s criminal storylines, attendees tried bribery to skip the queue. A theater manager was even shot in the arm when robbers made off with $13,000 in ticket sales from a single day. By the end of the week, The Godfather, which had a budget of $6.2 million, had already grossed a record-breaking $465,000. Producer Al Ruddy later told Vanity Fair about seeing the film with a general audience on that opening night; he went to a theater with Al Pacino, and they sneaked out after the beginning and came back just before the ending. “The lights come on,” he remembers, “and it was the eeriest feeling of all time: There was not one sound. No applause. The audience sat there, stunned.” The Godfather went on to be the highest-grossing film of 1972 and won three Academy Awards, including best picture, and it’s often cited as the greatest movie of all time. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 18 of
PHOTO BY: AP photo
March 14: John McCain is released from a POW camp (1973)
On March 14, 1973, a little under two months after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, future politician and presidential candidate John McCain was finally released from a North Vietnamese POW camp after five and a half years of torture and imprisonment. On October 26, 1967, McCain, then a 31-year-old lieutenant commander in the Navy, had been flying over North Vietnam when his Skyhawk dive bomber was shot down; he parachuted into a lake in Hanoi, and he was quickly beaten, bayoneted and imprisoned at the so-called “Hanoi Hilton.” When his father was named commander of U.S. forces less than a year later, the North Vietnamese offered to release McCain early, but he refused. As he later said, “I knew that every prisoner the Vietnamese tried to break, those who had arrived before me and those who would come after me, would be taunted with the story of how an admiral's son had gone home early, a lucky beneficiary of America's class-conscious society.” His heroic refusal to be released was met with even harsher torture, causing him to eventually sign a false confession to war crimes that he described as his “breaking point.” When, in 1973, he was finally released alongside 106 other U.S. soldiers and an American civilian, Associated Press photojournalist wrote of the scene at Gia Lam Airport, “Only one of the POWs, Lt. Cmdr. John McCain III, son of an admiral, had trouble getting out of the bus. He walked with a heavy limp but went unaided to his evacuation plane.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 19 of
PHOTO BY: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
March 13: Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio is elected pope, taking the name Francis I (2013)
In late February 2013, Pope Benedict XVI made the nearly unprecedented move of resigning — the first time a pope had stepped down in nearly 600 years. As a result, 115 cardinal-electors arrived at the Vatican to debate and decide who would fill his seat. After two days of voting and five ballots, shortly after 7 p.m. on March 13, white smoke (or fumata) began billowing out of the chimney over the Sistine Chapel, indicating that one of the candidates had passed the two-thirds majority threshold and would become the new pope. That turned out to be Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, who would take the name Francis. And while he may have looked like many of the popes before him, Francis represented a whole host of firsts: He was the first named Francis, the first from the Western Hemisphere, the first from the Jesuit order, the first to be born outside of Europe since the Syrian-born Gregory III in the eighth century and, we assume, the first to have worked as a nightclub bouncer. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 20 of
PHOTO BY: Barry Thumma/AP Photo
March 12: Janet Reno becomes the first female attorney general (1993)
Janet Reno came a long way since her childhood on the edge of the Everglades, where she lived with her newspaper reporter parents in a log cabin populated by the likes of alligators, pigs, skunks, macaws, geese, raccoons and more. (We’re sure that upbringing prepared her for the wilds of D.C.!) Since 1978, Reno served as state attorney for Miami, and though she was a liberal Democrat in a very Republican area, she was re-elected to five terms. In 1993, Bill Clinton nominated her for U.S. attorney general, after it was revealed that his first two choices had hired illegal immigrants as domestic help. Reno’s nomination sailed through Congress with 98 yeas, 0 nays and 2 not voting. Joe Biden, then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, remarked of the first female attorney general, “I would submit that President Clinton — albeit not the first time at bat — has hit a home run.” The 6-foot-2, Harvard-educated lawyer would go on to serve as attorney general until 2001, making her the longest-serving person in that role since 1829. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 21 of
PHOTO BY: Sadatsgu Tomizawa/AFP via Getty Images
March 11: An earthquake and tsunami trigger a nuclear accident in Japan (2011)
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan caused a massive tsunami that inundated the coast, killing about 19,500 people and destroying or partially collapsing more than a million buildings. When the earthquake struck, the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, 137 miles northeast of Tokyo, shut down as planned, and emergency diesel generators switched on to keep the cooling system running. But when a 46-foot-high wall of water struck the plant and flooded the generators, the reactors’ fuel rods overheated and partially melted down, causing radiation to be released. The incident was only the second in history (after Chernobyl) to be ranked a Level 7 (“major threat”) on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s International Nuclear Event Scale, though the Japanese disaster released only about one-tenth as much radioactive material into the atmosphere. Amazingly, the UN released a report last year upon the incident’s 10-year anniversary stating that the accident had “no adverse health effects” on area residents. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 22 of
PHOTO BY: Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images
March 10: Prince Charles survives an avalanche while skiing in the Alps (1988)
In the late 1980s, Prince Charles was facing an avalanche of bad press related to his marriage to Diana, but on March 10, 1988, he faced a real avalanche during a trip to the Swiss ski resort of Klosters. The Prince of Wales was off-piste near the Wang run, a famously treacherous slope on Gotschnagrat Mountain, with a group of friends, when tragedy struck: At 2:45 p.m., snow that had built up during a heavy fall the day before swept down the mountain, killing the prince’s friend, Major Hugh Lindsay, the former equerry to the Queen, and injuring a second member of the group, Patricia Palmer-Tomkinson. According to reports, Charles and other members of the group had frantically tried to dig out his buried friend with his bare hands, but it was too late. Diana and Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, had stayed behind at the chalet, and, according to Andrew Morton in his 1992 Diana: Her True Story — In Her Own Words, it was the princess who helped convince a still-in-shock Charles that they should cancel the remainder of their holiday and return home with Lindsay’s body. In her interview with Morton, Diana had recalled, “The whole thing was ghastly, and what a nice person he was. Out of all the people who went it should never have been him.” The incident was recently dramatized in a 2020 episode of The Crown. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 23 of
PHOTO BY: John D. McHugh/AFP via Getty Images
March 9: Barbie makes her debut (1959)
The 11-inch-tall, blonde-haired Barbie doll made her world-changing debut on March 9, 1959, when Mattel first introduced her at the American Toy Fair in New York City. At a time when most dolls looked like babies or little girls, Barbie was the country’s first mass-produced adult woman doll marketed to girls. Mattel cofounder Ruth Handler was inspired to invent Barbie after watching her daughter Barbara play with paper dolls that looked like teenagers and adults. As she wrote in her 1994 autobiography Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, “My whole philosophy of Barbie was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices.” While future aspirations may have been the general inspiration for Barbie, her actual design came from a much more risqué place: Her shape was inspired by the Bild Lili doll, a German novelty toy that originated in a comic strip about a high-end call girl and was sold in bars and tobacco shops. While Lili was traditionally bought as a gag gift for bachelor parties, Handler and her 15-year-old daughter picked up three while on vacation in Switzerland — and the rest is history. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 24 of
PHOTO BY: AP Photo
March 8: Joe Frazier defeats Muhammad Ali in “The Fight of the Century” (1971)
Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier both entered Madison Square Garden as undefeated heavyweight champions on the night of March 8, 1971, for what would prove to be one of the most storied fights in sports history. Ali had been stripped of his title in 1967 when he refused to be inducted into the U.S. Army and spoke out against the Vietnam War, and the match came to represent a much larger culture clash. As Sports Illustrated described it in its list of the 25 greatest fights ever (on which the Fight of the Century ranked third), “Battle lines were drawn as it split the nation in two. Ali was seen as a symbol for the left-wing, anti-war movement, while conservative, pro-war supporters naturally adopted Frazier as their champion.” In front of a crowd of 20,455 that included Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Dustin Hoffman and Sammy Davis Jr., Frazier and Ali traded punches and stayed evenly matched until the 11th round, when Frazier landed a left hook that nearly knocked out Ali. In the final round, Ali was knocked down and managed to get back up, but the damage had been done: After 15 rounds, Frazier won by unanimous decision, handing Ali the first defeat of his professional career. Each fighter received a reported $2.5 million purse, and the match was viewed by some 300 million around the globe. In The New York Times the next day, Dave Anderson wrote, “In a classic 15-round battle, Joe Frazier broke the wings of the butterfly and smashed the stinger of the bee.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 25 of
PHOTO BY: Chris Pizzello
March 7: Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win best director at the Oscars (2010)
In 2010, Kathryn Bigelow became only the fourth woman in Oscar history to be nominated for best director, after Lina Wertmüller for Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for The Piano and Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation. Her earlier films had included such action-packed thrillers as Blue Steel, about a policewoman being stalked by a killer, and Point Break, in which an FBI agent joins a bank-robbing gang of surfers. But The Hurt Locker was something different: a taut, gritty, low-budget thriller about bomb detonators in Iraq that earned raves among critics and audiences alike. On the night of March 7, Barbra Streisand — who had herself become the first female director to win a Golden Globe for her work on Yentl — presented Bigelow with her best director trophy, saying, “Well, the time has come!” One of the four men she bested? Her ex-husband James Cameron, who had been nominated for Avatar. “This really is,” she said in her acceptance speech, “there’s no other way to describe it, it’s the moment of a lifetime.” That night, The Hurt Locker went on to win a total of six Academy Awards, including best picture and best original screenplay, but Bigelow’s win also ushered in an exciting new era for female filmmakers: Since 2010, other female directors to earn nominations are Greta Gerwig for Lady Bird, Chloé Zhao for Nomadland (she also won!), Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman and Jane Campion for this year’s The Power of the Dog. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 26 of
PHOTO BY: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
March 6: Walter Cronkite signs off his last broadcast (1981)
“This is my last broadcast as the anchorman for the CBS Evening News,” Walter Cronkite said on the night of March 6, 1981. “For me, it’s a moment for which I long have planned, but which nevertheless comes with sadness. For almost two decades, after all, we’ve been meeting like this in the evenings, and I’ll miss that.” Since taking the anchor chair in 1962, Uncle Walter had guided Americans through assassinations and riots, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, the Iran hostage crisis and Watergate. At the time, the network had a mandatory retirement age of 65, so Cronkite was forced to leave behind his post, though he stayed on at CBS as a special correspondent. And he finished up, as he always did, with a familiar line: “And that’s the way it is, Friday, March 6, 1981. I’ll be away on assignment, and Dan Rather will be sitting in here for the next few years. Good night.” The next day, Tom Shales wrote in The Washington Post, “As a new entry in the annals of momentous farewells, it lacked the grandeur of MacArthur’s to Congress, the pathos of Nixon’s to his staff, the emotionalism of Babe Ruth’s to New York. But who’s to say that someday grandchildren won’t be sitting on laps asking grandparents where they were when Walter Cronkite signed off as anchorman of the CBS Evening News.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 27 of
PHOTO BY: AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
March 5: Martha Stewart is found guilty on four counts (2004)
Domestic goddess Martha Stewart was known as America’s most put-together and in-control businesswoman, but cracks started to form in that carefully crafted facade when she was charged with insider trading in 2003. In February of the next year, a federal judge dropped the most serious charge against Stewart, securities fraud, but on March 5, after a headline-grabbing, five-week trial, she was found guilty on four counts of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators. In a statement on her website, the former CEO wrote, “I am obviously distressed by the jury’s verdict but I continue to take comfort in knowing that I have done nothing wrong and that I have the enduring support of my family and friends. I will appeal the verdict and continue to fight to clear my name. I believe in the fairness of the judicial system and remain confident that I will ultimately prevail.” Later that summer, Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of house arrest, but she ended up emerging arguably more popular than ever before — complete with a softened, friendlier, cooler image and a friendship with rapper Snoop Dogg. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 28 of
PHOTO BY: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images
March 4: John Lennon says his infamous “more popular than Jesus” quote (1966)
On March 4, 1966, the London Evening Standard published a profile of John Lennon by reporter Maureen Cleave, who was friendly with the Beatles. Entitled “How Does A Beatle Live? John Lennon Lives Like This,” the article included a seemingly offhand remark by the 25-year-old singer-songwriter about the state of modern religion: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first — rock & roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” As Rolling Stone’s Jordan Runtagh pointed out, when it was first published, the statement barely made a ripple: It didn’t appear in the headline, it wasn’t highlighted in the layout and there wasn’t a single column or op-ed written about it in the British press. In fact, it wasn’t until later that summer when the American teen magazine Datebook republished the story that, frankly, all hell broke loose. Bible Belt DJs started a “Ban the Beatles” campaign, the KKK nailed their records to a cross and burned them, and the Fab Four even received death threats. The incident was such a PR and safety nightmare that the Beatles stopped touring altogether. —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 29 of
PHOTO BY: CARL DE SOUZA/AFP via Getty Images
March 3: Steve Fossett circumnavigates the globe without refueling in 67 hours (2005)
American aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett was always on the hunt for his next world record, eventually setting more than 100 in five sports, including becoming the first person to circumnavigate the globe alone in a hot air balloon in 2002. He also sledded in the Iditarod, competed in Ironman Triathlons and conquered the seas as a speed sailor. In 2005, Fossett pulled off a staggering feat when he became the first person to fly solo around the world without refueling. So how did he do it? On Feb. 28, Fossett took off from Salina, Kansas, in a custom carbon-composite airframe called the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. It’s 13 fuel tanks allowed Fossett to stay in the air for just over 67 hours without ever pulling over for gas, and on March 3, Fossett landed back in Kansas a little before 2 p.m. As he left the cockpit, Richard Branson sprayed him with champagne as a marching band played, and Fossett made a brief statement: “I’m feeling better than I have for the past couple of days. I might take a shower, and I wouldn’t mind finding a toilet. There are just certain things that are missing on this aircraft.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 30 of
PHOTO BY: AP photo/Paul Vathis
March 2: Wilt Chamberlain scores 100 points in a game, a record that still stands (1962)
On this date in 1962, Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain scored a monumental 100 points, leading the Philadelphia Warriors to a 169-147 victory over the New York Knicks. It’s an impressive number on its own (he scored 59 percent of the team’s points that game!), but what makes it all the more staggering is that it still stands as the most points ever scored in an NBA game 60 years later — and no one has even come close. In fact, the runner-up for the most-points crown is Kobe Bryant, who scored 81 in a game in 2006. While Wilt the Stilt only managed to hit triple digits once, he was no stranger to racking up the points: There have only been 11 NBA games in which a player has scored 70 or more points, and the 7-foot-1 legend occupies six of the spots on that list. Sports Illustrated included the game on its (unranked) 75 best moments in NBA history, with Chris Herring writing, “The record has stood for nearly 60 years and could easily stand for another 60.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
-
- 31 of
PHOTO BY: MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images
March 1: Pink Floyd releases Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
On March 1, 1973, Pink Floyd released one of the defining records of the rock era with Dark Side of the Moon. But who could have ever guessed that a psychedelic concept album about religion, death and mental illness would become such a megahit? Though it only spent one week at number 1, the album has been a Billboard chart mainstay for a staggering 961 nonconsecutive weeks, the most of any album in music history, and it went on to go 15-times platinum. Over the years, that iconic prism album cover has appeared as a poster on many a dorm room wall, and countless viewers have synced up the album with The Wizard of Oz to glean some deeper meaning. While the album was snubbed at the Grammys, earning only a nomination for best engineered nonclassical recording, it later appeared at number 55 on the latest iteration of Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. As they put it, “Dark Side is one of the best-produced rock albums ever, and “Money” may be rock’s only Top 20 hit in 7/4 time.” —Nicholas DeRenzo
Members Only Access content
Find exclusive interviews, smart advice, free novels, full documentaries, fun daily features and much more — all a benefit of your AARP membership — on Members Only Access.
Find exclusive interviews, smart advice, free novels, full documentaries, fun daily features and much more — all a benefit of your AARP membership — on Members Only Access.
Not a member? Join
Already a member? Link Your Membership
Renew your membership today and save 25% on your next year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal. Get instant access to discounts, programs, services, and the information you need to benefit every area of your life.