Scores On This Historic Day

March 1, 1905: The City of Los Angeles has seen many big trials since this date. This was when the 1st big one concluded. Griffith Jenkins Griffith was born on January 4, 1850 in Bettws, Wales. He came to America in 1865. In 1873, he moved to San Francisco, California, and became manager of the Herald Publishing Company. This led to him making contacts in the mining industry, where he made a fortune.  In 1882, he moved to Los Angeles. In 1887, he married Mary Agnes Christina Mesmer, known as Tina. Their son, Vandell Mowry Griffith, was born the next year. In 1896, Griffith J. Griffith donated 3,015 acres to the City of Los Angeles for use as a public park. He told the City Council, "It must be made a place of rest and relaxation for the masses, a resort for the rank and file, for the plain people. I consider it my obligation to make Los Angeles a happy, cleaner, and finer city. I wish to pay my debt of duty in this way to the community in which I have prospered."  It was...

March 1, 1875: President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Civil Rights Act of 1875 into law. Sometimes called the Enforcement Act or the Force Act, it was a United States federal law enacted during the Reconstruction era in response to civil rights violations against African Americans. The act was designed to "protect all citizens in their civil and legal rights," providing for equal treatment in public accommodations and public transportation and prohibiting exclusion from jury service. It was originally drafted in 1870, by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who had been one of the leading abolitionists before the American Civil War. However, Sumner died on March 11, 1874, about a year before the Act was passed. The law was not effectively enforced, partly because Grant had favored different measures to help him suppress election-related violence against blacks and Republicans in the Southern United States. In 1883, in the case of U.S. v. Stanley , the U.S. Supreme Court ru...

Old Faithful March 1, 1872:  President Ulysses S. Grant signs the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act, establishing the park of the same name. It is the beginning of America's National Park Service, and it makes Yellowstone the 1st national park anywhere in the world. The park is known for its wildlife, its subalpine forest, and its many geothermal features, especially a geyser known as Old Faithful. First observed in 1870, its e ruptions can shoot 3,700 to 8,400 gallons of boiling water to a height of 106 to 185 feet, lasting from 1½ to 5 minutes. The average height of an eruption is 145 feet. The name "Old Faithful" came because it supposedly erupted once an hour. This isn't quite accurate, but close.  Intervals between eruptions have ranged from 34 to 125 minutes, averaging 66½ minutes in 1939,  slowly increasing to an average of 90 minutes apart since 2000, which may be the result of earthquakes  affecting subterranean water levels. Yellowstone is in the nor...

At the time, the winners of Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress -- regardless of race -- got a smaller trophy, on a plaque. Note: I would have written an entry for this event, regardless of the date on it. But I wanted to have an entry that happened on a February 29, and this was the best of the rather small bunch. February 29, 1940: The 12th Academy Awards are held, at the Coconut Grove ballroom of The Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. For the 1st time, the host is actor Bob Hope. He will go on to host "the Oscars" 19 times. Through 2022, this remains a record. Surprising no one, Gone with the Wind , having been nominated for 13 Oscars, wins 8 of them, including Best Picture for producer David O. Selznick, Best Director for Victor Fleming, Best Actress for Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, and Best Screenplay, divided between Margaret Mitchell for the original 1936 novel, and Sidney Howard for his film adaptation. It was the 1st posthumous Oscar: Howard had ...

Emily Saliers (left) and Amy Ray February 28, 1989: Indigo Girls – officially, no "The" in the name – release their self-titled debut album. They won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording, but lost Best New Artist -- to Milli Vanilli. Making them, I suppose, the Mike Greenwell of rock and roll. This was actually their 2nd album. On May 1, 1987, they released Strange Fire in Canada only. It got the attention of Epic Records, who signed them in 1988. Emily Ann Saliers was born on July 22, 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut. At age 11, her father, Don Saliers, a noted theologian, got a teaching job in Decatur Georgia, where Amy Elizabeth Ray had been born on April 12, 1964. Emily and Amy attended school together. Although they went to different colleges, they stayed in touch, and, by 1985, both had transferred to Emory University in Atlanta, where they formed Indigo Girls. By this point, Georgia had already developed a major music scene, particularly among gay performers...

February 28, 1984: "Weird Al" Yankovic releases his album "Weird Al" Yankovic in 3-D . It contains his best-known song, "Eat It." Alfred Matthew Yankovic was born on October 23, 1959 in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, California, and grows up in neighboring Lynwood. Known as "Weird Al" Yankovic (always billed with the nickname in quotation marks) rose to fame copying Michael Jackson, turning Jacko's songs "Beat It" into "Eat It" (which actually hit Number 12 in the Billboard Hot 100, an extraordinary feat for a parody) and "Bad" into "Fat." Early on, he seemed to specialize in food, turning The Knack's "My Sharona" into "My Bologna," Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" into "I Love Rocky Road," and Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," from the film Rocky III , into "The Rye or the Kaiser." Years later, he became a vegan, and people aske...

February 28, 1983: The final episode of M*A*S*H airs on CBS, after 11 seasons, even though the Korean War, which it depicted, lasted 3 years. In its 1st season, 1972-73, M*A*S*H aired on Sundays at 8:00; 2nd season, Saturdays at 8:30; 3rd, Tuesdays at 8:30; 4th, 5th and 6th, Tuesday at 9:00; and then, late in the 6th season, 1978, to the end, Mondays at 9:00. The finale aired a little earlier, at 8:30 PM on a Monday night, and ran for two and a half hours. The episode is titled "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen." It was directed by Alan Alda, who played Captain Benjamin Franklin Pierce, M.D., U.S. Army Reserve, a.k.a. Hawkeye. He also wrote it, with several other writers for the series: Longtime producer Burt Metcalfe, John Rappaport, Dan Wilcox, Thad Mumford, Elias Davis, David Pollock and Karen Hall. The episode got 106 million viewers, making it the most-watched TV show in American history, breaking the record set a little over 2 years earlier, when Dallas revealed "Who ...

February 28, 1973:   A group of 200 Oglala Sioux  members of the American Indian Movement  (AIM) seized the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota,  located within the borders of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The town had been the site of the last major conflict between the U.S. government and Native Americans, in 1890, when the U.S. Army shot and killed 250 Natives in one of the worst massacres, committed by any side, in American history. The occupation was launched after the Oglala Sioux were  unable to remove the Oglala Reservation Chairman, Dick Wilson, whom they accused of corruption since his election the year before.  Frank Fools Crow,  the senior elder of the Oglala, and AIM leader Russell Means  led the occupation. Fools Crow later said, " We called our brothers and AIM to help us because we were being oppressed and terrorized. They answered our call." Frank Fools Crow The occupation  lasted for 71 days,  until an agreement was...

February 28, 1960: The U.S. team wins the Gold Medal in hockey at the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, near Lake Tahoe. In 2022, the town changed the name to Olympic Valley, to remove the insensitive Native American name. Despite being the 2nd-biggest hockey-player-producing country behind Canada, where the sport was invented, America had struggled in the sport in the Olympic Games. We had won the Silver Medal at the 1st tournament in 1920, and again in 1924, '32, '52 and '56; and the Bronze Medal in 1936; but won no medal in 1928 and '48, and had never won the Gold Medal. All hockey games at the 1960 Winter Olympics, and also the figure skating events, were held at the Blyth Arena, which was torn down in 1983. The U.S. was put into Group C, and beat Czechoslovakia 7-5 on February 19, and Australia 12-1 on February 21. (This remains the only time Australia has entered a hockey team into the Winter Olympics.) This put them int...

February 28, 1905: Jane Stanford is murdered -- on the 2nd try. Jane Elizabeth Lathrop was born on August 25, 1828 in Albany, New York. Like any other good little rich girl of her time, she was expected to have no ambitions, marry a rich man, have as many rich children as possible, and do nothing on her own. Well, she certainly married a rich man: Leland Stanford, a lawyer from nearby Watervliet. He became one of the wealthiest lawyers in Wisconsin. But in 1852, a fire in his office cost him his law library, a vital thing for a lawyer to have. He took Jane west, opened a dry goods store with his brothers, took advantage of the Gold Rush, and built a fortune. In 1861, he was among the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, and was elected Governor of California, serving a single 2-year term. As for the other thing, it didn't work out. For whatever reason, she didn't have a child until she was 39, and he would be the only one. On March 13, 1884, Leland Stanford Jr. died of ty...

February 27, 2010: Arsenal Football Club, of North London, travel to Staffordshire in the West Midlands, to play Stoke City, a team already known for its thuggish behavior. A month earlier, Stoke, hosted Arsenal at the Britannia Stadium (now named the Bet365 Stadium), in the 4th Round of the FA Cup. Stoke played its usual starters, while Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger, surveying what had become an annual event, an injury crisis, fielded a team of prospects and washed-up veterans, and lost, 3-1, getting knocked out of the tournament. I had begun following and supporting Arsenal the season before, 2008-09, by going into New York City and watching games with British expatriates and American fans of the Premier League, in bars that had the cable-TV package necessary to show the games. For reasons I've since forgotten, I did not make the trip to see this game. And with the cable TV package I had at the time, I could not have watched this game at home. So I only found out about what happ...

T-Pain as the Monster (left) and host Nick Cannon February 27, 2019: The 1st season of the American version of The Masked Singer comes to a close, with the choosing of a winner. The show's concept began in South Korea in 2015. Celebrities sing while wearing costumes that completely cover them, and, when not singing, their voices are disguised as they drop clues as to their identity. The American version is broadcast on Fox, and hosted by actor and TV-show host Nick Cannon. The regular panel of celebrities who analyze the performances and make guesses as to who the singers really are have been: * Robin Thicke, singer, songwriter and producer, son of actor-singers Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring, best known for singing the controversial song "Blurred Lines." * Jenny McCarthy, actress, who became famous for hosting the game show Singled Out on MTV, wife of actor and former New Kids On the Block singer Donnie Wahlberg. * Ken Jeong, physician, comedian, actor. And... * Nicole...