DECEMBER 21 — 1988 News about Libyan terrorist attack on PanAm flight hits American newspapers;\ 1891 First basketball game played at Springfield College; 1941 Japan sink two American oil ships near San Francisco; 1968 Apollo 8 crew sees Santa Claus; 1997 Barry Sanders becomes NFL’s 3rd best rusher; 1994 Tom Shales, Washington Post, cuts down Kathie Lee Gifford’s Christmas special.
DECEMBER 21
1988 — Here are the headlines: Arizona Daily Star: Jet with 258 Hit Scottish Village.
Daily Express: 295 Die in Jumbo Jet Fireball.
Time Magazine: The Untold Story of Pan Am 103.
The U.S. had actually been warned several weeks prior that of a Libyan bomb threat. Tensions between the US and Libya were reaching a boiling point. In March 86 two ships belonging to both navies fired at each other in disputed waters off the Libyan coast.
Just a few weeks after that another terrorist attack went off at a discotech in West Berlin, killing two American servicemen, two Turkish girls, and injuring hundreds more. This led to President Ronald Reagan sending airstrikes to the Libyan capital city of Tripoli. But that was 1986.
In July 1988, when Iranian flight 655; a passenger plane carrying 290 people including 66 children headed from Tehran to Dubai was mistakenly shot down by the US Navy. There were no survivors.
But the poor little town of Lockerbie in southwest Scotland somehow got caught in the line of fire between the US and the middle east on December 21 1988, at around 7:00 pm as Pan Am cruised to 31,000 feet on its second leg of a flight from London to New York City, as it prepared for the oceanic portion of the flight a time-detonated bomb inside a radio cassette player inside a suitcase went off, exploding the plane into shreds and dropping hundreds of people to the ground. Most of them American passengers. Several houses in the village of Lockerbie were incinerated when fireballs rained down, killing eleven people.
Pan Am would be unable to survive the ensuing backlash and litigations due to obvious security flaws and a few years later declared bankruptcy and went off of business.
The investigation found pieces of the bomb timer and traced it back to security officials for Libyan Arab Airlines named Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah . When the US demanded that Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi turned them over to US custody in 1991, he refused, insisting they would be tried for their crimes in Libya.
When the US and Security Council of the United Nations applied pressure, Qaddafi still wouldn’t budge. The Infernally tightened sanctions, restricted air travel and slapped an embargo on oil industry related equipment, and by 1998 Qaddafi was ready to cave and extradited the mow men.
After three years, 15,000 people interviewed and 180,000 pieces of evidence reviewed, al-Megrahi was convicted for the bombing and given 20 years time in a Scottish prison. However in 2009 he was released either due to a sympathetic Scottish government to his recently developed prostate cancer, or some entanglement with the company British Petroleum, or BP and its ties to the Libyan government.
Either way al=Megrahi was released and died in May 2012 of his cancer, just one year ironically after Qaddafi was captured and killed by militants of the anti-Qaddafi National Transitional Council during the Arab Spring.
But for this night following the disastrous headlines, President Ronald Reagan would come out on this rainy night to address the press by asking Americans for a special prayer this Christmas for those who died and their loved ones.
1970 – Nixon meets with….Elvis? I am not making this up, it’s on smithsonianmag.com. The King of Rock N Roll wanted to be a federal agent against drug use and the stigma it was attached to with regard to American hippie culture and rock and roll. Here’s what happened according to legend. Elvis Presley spent more than $100,000 on Christmas presents, mostly Mercedes Benz and handguns, and Priscilla started getting on his case. Elvis left rather irritated and showed up in L.A., where he told his longtime aide that he wanted a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. His aide to Elvis to DC where he handed a scribbled note to the guard at the white house, stating he merely wanted to “help his country out” and asked to be designated a federal agent at large.
Nixon agreed to see him, and Elvis showed up in a purple velvet suit with a huge belt buckle and a Christmas gift: a colt.45 in its display case, which naturally the Secret Service confiscated instantly. Nixon and Elvis had their picture snapped, and Nixon got Elvis a badge. Elvis then awkwardly hugged Nixon. Ironically enough, Elvis Presley would die of heart failure in 1977, labeled by the coroner as undetermined causes, but it’s generally assumed that his death was caused by a lethal mix of prescription drugs and obesity.
1891 First basketball game is played. 18 men,
Springfield College in Massachusetts, bored half to death during a cold winter, found a fun game to play that was made up by a Canadian named James Naismith. We wished him a happy birthday just last month on the 6th of November.
As a boy, James and some friends played a game they called duck on a rock. It was where you would place a small stone on a surface high in the air, I dunno say 10 feet, and the boys would take turns trying to knock it off by throwing a rock at it. Whoever threw the rock that knocked the stone off got a point. See where I’m going with this, right?
Later on after studying theology at McGill College, Naismith became a minister and began working at the Young Men’s Christian Association, or the YMCA as we know it today. He was asked by the director to lead a group of young men through a required hour of physical training inside the gym, since it was wintertime. Naismith tried taking outdoor sports, such as rugby, lacrosse and soccer, and attempted to make the games playable indoors. But it didn’t work. It was either too rigid, or too dangerous; there was no in-between.
Needing something that required running but also skill and accuracy, he used his Duck on a Rock concept, attached two peach baskets on either side of the balconies of the gym, came up with 13 rules, and on this day, assigned two team captains out of the group of 18 men, and they chose eight each.
They took their positions on the court, the two captains stepped up to the middle, and Naismith, standing between them, threw up a soccer ball into the air, and it my friends, was on. The score would end 1-0. No, I don’t know who one. In 1937, the National Basketball League was formed.
These days of course, over 300 million people play basketball around the world, in over 170 countries.
You’re welcome world!
1949 – Hedy Lamar and Victor Mature stars in Samson and Delilah which premiered in New York. In addition to being a great Austrian American actress, Hedy Lamarr also was a very beautiful science geek and worked with a composer named George Anthell to develop spread spectrum and frequency hopping technologies that would prevent radio communication jams in WWII. This contributed to today’s technologies of CDMA for our cell phones, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
1941 – Sunday, December 21, Japanese subs sunk twlo American oil sihps: the Emidio and Agriworld. What was most unsettling about this attack was that it happened jyust 15 miles from San Francisco. WWII was much closer than Americans had previously thought.
1968 – Frank Borman, James Lovell jr. and William Anders board the Apollo 8, and become the first earthlings in history to witness Santa Claus in action.While it would spend the next few days circling around the moon, snapping pictures, ol Saint Nick looked up at them while on his Christmas Eve route and gave them a nod.
1997 – As much of a Ladanian Tomlinson fan that I am, I gotta give props to Barry Sanders as on December 21 1997 he became the 3rd to rush for 2,000 yards in a season and became the one of the greatest players to never reach the super bowl.
1994 – Kathie Lee Gifford’s Christmas special premiered, and Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales cuts it down, calling it Kathie Lee’s Blight before Christmas in 94, A year later, he would write in the Grin that stole Christmas in 95, give Kathie lee enough tinsel and she’ll strangle herself with it.
In 1996, Mistletoe by a mile. Shales wrote we’re grateful on Thanksgiving Kathie Lee doesn’t have a thanksgiving special. 1997, Kathie Lee sings Christmas songs like she’s mad at them. What did they ever do to her? I998, he wrote what’s the difference between the 24-hour flu and a Kathie Lee Gifford Christmas special? Twenty three hours. Please, in the name of all that is holy, Let it stop, let it stop, let it stop.
