January 11, 1943: For the 1st time, the President of the United States flies in an airplane.
Theodore Roosevelt flew about an early Wright Brothers plane in St. Louis on October 11, 1910, but he was already out of office. On July 1, 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt flew to from New York to Chicago to accept his nomination at the Democratic National Convention, but he wasn't President yet.
He was the President on January 11, 1943, when FDR and his entourage showed up at the Pan American airways base in Miami, to board the Dixie Clipper, a Boeing 314 "flying boat," flying to Bathurst, Gambia. From there, the plane refueled, and flew to Morocco for the Casablanca Conference, so FDR could meet with Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union, whom neither Roosevelt nor Churchill had previously met.
For his flight to the Yalta Conference in early 1945, the Secret Service reconfigured a Douglas C-54 Skymaster for Presidential transport duty. The VC-54C aircraft, nicknamed the Sacred Cow, included a sleeping area, radiotelephone, and a retractable battery-powered elevator to lift Roosevelt in his wheelchair. But he used it only that once before his death.
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January 11, 1943 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And no games were scheduled in the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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