2015—The winter’s first snow falls in Portsmouth. It will not be the last.
2001—GOP hack Rich Galen reports (falsely) that outgoing Gore staffers slashed all the power cords in the Office of the Vice President.
1999—Joe DiMaggio, watching “Dateline NBC,” is disturbed to read in the “crawl” that he has died.
1992—Gov. Bill Clinton flies to Arkansas so the execution of self-lobotomized cop-killer Ricky Ray Rector—who asks jailers to save the dessert from his last meal “for later”—will enhance his campaign for President.
1963—The tail falls off a B-52 flying over Maine at 500 feet—one-seventieth of its design altitude—and it crashes into Elephant Mountain. Two men survive the crash, seven don’t.
1961—A disintegrating B-52 releases a pair of 3.8 megaton H-bombs over Goldsboro, N.C. One parachutes “safely”—a single safety switch prevents detonation. The other falls freely, and remains 180 feet underground.
1955—RIP Iwo Jima flag raiser Ira Hamilton Hayes, of exposure, at 32.
1946—President Truman, swearing in Rear Admiral Sidney Souers to head the Central Intelligence Group, presents him with a cloak and dagger.
1935—The first-ever canned beer [Kreuger] goes on sale in Richmond, Va.
1692—French priest Louis-Pierre Thury and hundreds of Abenaki raid York, Maine killing 100 and taking 100 hostage.