1990—Six-inch flames shoot from Jesse Joseph Tafero’s head as Florida’s “Old Sparky” takes three jolts and seven minutes to kill him.
1989—Ollie North is found guilty for four Iran-Contra felonies. He later skates because Congress screwed up.
1981—“Inchon!” premieres in D.C. Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who funded the flick, claims MacArthur endorsed it from the grave. It flops anyway.
1970—In Haymarket Square, Chicago, a new cop statue replaces one destroyed by a bomb months earlier. This one gets blown up, too, months later.
1970—Ohio National Guard troops fire on a crowd of protestors at Kent State; 13 are hit, four of them die.
1961—The Freedom Rides begin.
1942—The Battle of the Coral Sea begins. In four days 14 ships are sunk or damaged, 159 planes destroyed, and 1,565 men killed; it was a great victory.
1930—A thousand economists warn Hoover and Congress: don’t pass Smoot-Hawley, those tariffs will wreck the economy. Ooops… .
1927—A motorman “sick of seeing that policeman with his arm raised” drives his streetcar into a nine-foot statue of a cop commemorating the Haymarket bombing.
1886—In Haymarket Square, Chicago, demonstrators against May 3rd police brutality at the McCormick Reaper plant are attacked by more police. A bomb kills seven cops; a dubious trial later convicts eight anarchists.