2008—Because one maintenance crew fails to warn another that humid air confuses its sensors, a $1.4 billion B-2 bomber crashes in Guam.
2004—Rod Paige, U.S. Sec. of Education, calls the nation’s largest teachers union a “terrorist organization.”
1974—Days after presiding over his paper’s 100th birthday, and deep in debt to mobsters, Oakland Tribune owner and ex-Sen. William Knowland (R-Calif.), shoots himself dead.
1971—Lt. William Calley confesses to mass murder, and says his CO, Capt. Ernest Medina, ordered it.
1966—Barry Bondhus dumps human digestive byproduct on draft files in Elk River, Minn. He gets 14 months.
1954—Jonas Salk starts disrupting man’s natural relationship with polio.
1942—The huge [356-foot] Japanese submarine I-17 fires more than a dozen 5.5 inch rounds at the Richmond oil refinery near Santa Barbara, Calif.
1891—Two feuding newspapermen shoot it out during a Washington’s Birthday parade in Columbus, Ohio; an editor and a bystander are killed.
1775—“Give me liberty, or give me death,” says Patrick Henry—or words to that effect. Multiple accounts differ.
1669—Diarist Samuel Pepys, visiting Westminster Abbey with his family, kisses and fondles Katherine of Valois, interred more than 200 years earlier.
1455—In Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg completes the world’s first big print job, i.e., the Bible.