MARCH 2 -1749 Happy birthday Revolution Spy Austin Roe (the Paul Revere of Long Island); 1769 Happy birthday politician DeWitt Clinton (Eerie Canal mastermind) 11877 Compromise gives 1876 Presidential Election to Rudd Hayes; SPORTS: 1951 1st NBA All-Star game; 1962 Wilt Chamberlain scores 100 points, 1982 Happy Birthday Ben Roethlesberger, 2005 Jackie Robinson posthumously awarded Congressional Medal of Honor
MARCH 2
1865 – Battle of Waynesboro, VA. Phillip Sheridan and George Armstrong Custer –V- Jubal Early. The result: Union victory. I cannot think of an American general who has been more controversial in US history than Custer. He was once labeled a brilliant military officer who was a general before he had turned thirty years old. Erol Flynn played him as a hero in Die With their boots on, but since the 1960s Custer has been seen as a racist exterminator who should have been brought up on war crimes in the eyes of many. On March 2 1865, Custer routed Confederate General Early’s forces, ending the conflict in the Sheneandoah Valley. Early lost his men, artillery, canon, ambulances, everything. Early himself was barely able to escape Custer’s forces, and the Confederate presence in the Shendnadoah Valley was there no more.
INVENTIONS/PATENTS:
1887 – Happy Birthday Harry Soref from Milwaukee Wisc, inventor of the padlock. By the end of WWI, the average lock wasn’t very strong and could easily be broken with a hammer. Using more steel would be too heavy and expensive, so he designed the lock by using layers of thin pieces of steel in a laminated costruction. Legend has it Harry Houdini, magician extraordinaire, taught Soref the secret on escaping a trap by hiding the key under his tongue and between his fingers. Soref died in 1957.
1972 – Pioneer 10 launched to Jupiter.
According to nasa.gov, Not only was Pioneer 10 the first NASA mission to the outer planets, it had, it was also the first vehicle placed on a trajectory to escape the solar system into interstellar space, the first spacecraft to fly beyond Mars, the first to fly through the asteroid belt, the first to fly past Jupiter, the first to use all0-nuclear electrical power, and the first human made object to fly beyond the orbit of the outermost known planet in our solar system. And on March 2 1973, Pioneer 10 was launched from Cape Canavral in Florida. It’s headed towards the Taurus constellation, and is scheduled to pass within three light years of the star Ross-246 sometime in the next 32,000 Earth years.
Don’t miss it!
1904 – Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!
When he was a young boy his mother would soothe him to sleep by chanting rhymes she remembered from her childhood. If only she knew the impact those rhymes would have on the rest of the world much later in life. Before the Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham and Fox and Socks and all the others, he wrote liberally political cartoons during WWII. In addition to 44 very successful childrens’ books his works have been shown in eleven children’s televisionspecials, a Broadway musical, and a feature-length motion picture, not to mention two academy awards, two Emnmy awards and the Pulitzer Prize.
1951 The first NBA All-Star game – East beat West 111-94 in Boston
1962 Philadelphia beats NY Knicks 169-147 – Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points – made 36 of 63 field goals, 28 of 32 free throws, and had 25 rebounds – ended the season with a NBA record 50.4 point average
1982 Ben Roethlisberger born
2005 Jackie Robinson is posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor