Scores On This Historic Day

April 1, 1923: Safety Last! premieres, starring one of the top comedians of the silent film era, Harold Lloyd. Harold Clayton Lloyd was born on April 20, 1893 in Burchard, Nebraska, and grew up in San Diego. Moving to Los Angeles, he became friends with film producer Hal Roach, and created Lonesome Luke, a character patterned after Charlie Chaplin's "Little Tramp." In 1917, he replaced this character with, as he put it, " an everyday young man in street clothes who faced comic situations with resourcefulness." The look, complete with glasses, is said to have inspired artist Joe Shuster to create the appearance of Clark Kent, alter ego of Superman. But, unlike Superman, he was not invulnerable. On August 24, 1919, while posing for some promotional still photographs in the Los Angeles Witzel Photography Studio, he picked up what he thought was a prop bomb and lit it with a cigarette.  It exploded and mangled his right hand, causing him to lose a thumb and forefi...

April 1, 1914: Rube Waddell dies. It was a tragedy. But it was not really a surprise. Indeed, it was appropriate that it occurred on April Fool's Day. It's hard to describe him , as he was one of a kind. That's probably a good thing. George Edward Waddell was born on October 13, 1876 in Bradford, Pennsylvania.  At the age of 3, he wandered over to a local fire station, and stayed there for several days. He did not attend school very often. He was lefthanded, and strengthened his arm as a child by throwing rocks at birds he encountered while working on his family's land. He also worked on mining and drilling sites as a youngster, which helped his conditioning. He reached the major leagues in 1897, with the Louisville Colonels. That team was absorbed by the Pittsburgh Pirates, the closest major league team to his home, in 1900, but they couldn't handle his shenanigans, and released him in 1901. The Chicago Cubs quickly signed him, and nearly as quickly released him. ...

Sign that you're old: You hear "Selena," and you think "Quintanilla" before you think "Gomez"; "Demi," and you think "Moore" before you think "Lovato"; and "Kylie," and you think "Minogue" before you think "Jenner." March 31, 1995: Selena Quintanilla-P é rez, the biggest star of "Tejano" music, is killed in her hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas -- by the president of her fan club. She was not quite 24 years old, and had just released her first all-English album. Like most Anglophone Americans, I never knew Selena was alive, until I knew she was dead. This would later be true of singer and plane crash victim Jenni Rivera -- although, having lived on the edge of a Mexican neighborhood in New Brunswick for a time, I had considerably less excuse for not knowing about her. But People magazine reported that, for the first time in their 21-year history, an entire press run of an issue so...

March 31, 1989: The film Heathers premieres. In 2019, for a 30th Anniversary column , Ben Schwartz wrote that it doesn't hold up well, through little more than divulging the plot: With archly funny emotional detachment, it depicts the school shootings, date rapes, self-loathing, eating disorders, and petty viciousness that made up high school in the 1980s. Intelligent, cynical Veronica (Winona Ryder ) has sold herself out to a popular but horrible high school clique, the Heathers. She reluctantly helps demean and trash other kids and even regularly assists one Heather (Shannen Doherty) by putting a finger down her throat to help with her bulimia. Then JD (Christian Slater), a dark, charismatic new kid, shows up at school. He attracts Veronica by pushing back violently on their cruel little bullying world with guns, poison, and, finally, a bomb. "Dear Diary," Veronica Sawyer writes, once the 2nd (and, simultaneously, 3rd) death she and Jason "JD" Dean are invol...

Hulk Hogan (left) and Mr. T March 31, 1985: The 1st WrestleMania is held. It marked the peak of fandom for what had come to be known as "professional wrestling." The event -- I won't call it a "sport" -- was a natural for TV, because, like boxing, the size of the "playing field" was small enough that a camera could easily cover the whole thing. Men like "Gorgeous" George Wagner, Wladek "Killer" Kowalski and Bruno Sammartino became legends. In 1984, Terry Bollea, using the name Hulk Hogan, became the heavyweight champion of the World Wrestling Federation. The year before, he had appeared in Rocky III, as a pro wrestler named Thunderlips. His blond hair, biker mustache, ripped physique and braggadocio made him the most popular pro wrestler ever. He called it "Hulkamania." Vince McMahon, president of the WWF, decided to strike while the iron was hot. So he set up WrestleMania for Madison Square Garden, which billed itself as...

March 31, 1976: The Supreme Court of the State of New Jersey rules in the case of  In re Quinlan,  that Karen Ann Quinlan, a hospital patient in a persistent vegetative state, can be disconnected from her ventilator. Karen had been born on March 29, 1954 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and grew up in Roxbury, Morris County, New Jersey. She graduated from Morris Catholic High School in Denville, and worked several jobs, moving to a house in Byram, Sussex County, with 2 roommates. On April 15, 1975, she attended a friend's birthday party at a local bar. Having  eaten almost nothing for 2 days, as part of a crash diet, she got drunk and took a Valium pill. Her friends took her home, and discovered her not breathing. She was taken to a hospital in Newton, Sussex County, but never regained consciousness. Unresponsive, she was taken to St. Clare's Hospital in Denville, which was better able to handle her condition: A persistent vegetative state. After doctors refused the request of...

March 31, 1975: The Final of the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament is held at the San Diego Sports Arena. (It's now named the Pechanga Arena.) The NCAA Tournament had varied from between 22 and 25 teams since 1953. For the 1974-75 season, due to the frustrations of teams unable to win the Conference Tournaments, and thus qualify for the NCAA Tournament, despite previously having exceptional seasons, the NCAA expanded the Tournament to 32 teams, and allowed teams that failed to win their conference in. In the Mideast Regional Final, at the University of Dayton Arena in Dayton, Ohio, on March 22, Indiana, then undefeated at 31-0 and ranked Number 1 in the country, faced Number 5 Kentucky, who were 24-3, with 1 of their losses coming to Indiana in Bloomington. This time, Joe B. Hall's Wildcats beat Bobby Knight's Hoosiers, 92-90, and secure Kentucky's 1st berth in what would later be called "the Final Four" since losing the 1966 Final. This would b...

March 31, 1968: President Lyndon Baines Johnson announces that he is dropping out of this year's Presidential election. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Johnson, as Vice President, became President. He inherited JFK's national security team: Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and Bundy's brother, William Bundy, the  Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs . He also inherited JFK's problem in Vietnam. We will never know for sure how JFK would have handled Vietnam. We know how LBJ handled it: Badly. In his State of the Union Address in January, he said, "The enemy has been defeated in battle after battle." And it was true. But that didn't make a bit of difference. On January 31, the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive. In military terms, it was a massive bungle by the Communists. But in terms of perception, it was a victory...

March 31, 1943: The musical Oklahoma! premieres on Broadway, written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, beginning one of the great partnerships in musical history -- but also ending another. In 1919, composer Richard Rodgers began to write songs with lyricist Lorenz "Larry" Hart. It took them until 1925 to have their first Broadway success, The Garrick Gaeties . Over the next 15 years, they would produce many instances of what would later be called "standards" and "The Great American Songbook": "Thou Swell," "Ten Cents a Dance," "Isn't It Romantic?" "Blue Moon," "There's a Small Hotel," "Where Or When," "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady Is a Tramp," and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." By 1942, Hart had fallen so deep into alcoholism that he had become unreliable. So when Rodgers wanted to write his next musical, he turned to Oscar Hammerstein I...

March 31, 1939: The Hound of the Baskervilles premieres, the 1st of 14 films starring Basil Rathbone, coming off his villainous turn as Sir Guy of Gisbourne for the 1938 film The Adventures of Robin Hood , as "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes, and Nigel Bruce as his partner in crime-solving, Dr. John H. Watson. The Rathbone/Bruce series has defined the characters of Holmes and Watson ever since. Both characters were created by the man for whom Watson was a stand-in, Dr. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died in 1930, and thus had only seen stage plays and silent films based on the characters. Based on Conan Doyle's 1902 novel, Holmes is called on by Sir Henry Baskerville, heir to a family's country estate, to find out about a large, vicious dog that has allegedly killed much of the family. Holmes discovers that the dog belongs to another heir, who wants the family fortune for himself. This was followed later in 1939 by The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes , pitting ...

March 31, 1931:  Knute Rockne is killed in a plane crash. At that point, he was probably the most famous American ever to suffer that fate. It happened to aviator Wiley Post and entertainer Will Rogers in 1935, on the same flight, in America's northernmost city, Barrow, Alaska. It probably happened to pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, in the Pacific Ocean in 1937. It happened to early rock and roll stars Buddy Holly, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson and Ritchie Valens in Iowa in 1959; to soul singer Otis Redding in Wisconsin in 1967; to rock singer Jim Croce in Louisiana in 1973; to country-rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd in Mississippi in 1977; to early rock singer Ricky Nelson in Texas in 1985; pop singer John Denver off California in 1997; pop singer Aaliyah in the Bahamas in 2001; and banda singer Jenni Rivera in Mexico in 2012. It happened to labor leader Walter Reuther in Michigan in 1970; to Congressmen Hale Boggs and Nick Begich in Alask...

March 31, 1928: Every now and then, the English, who endlessly remind the Scots, the Germans, the Americans, and whoever else will listen that they invented "football" (soccer), and only they can truly play it, get a very rude reminder that this is not true. This was one of the earliest such reminders. From 1884 to 1984, t he  British Home Championship was contested between the national teams of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland -- and then, after the 1921 Partition of Ireland, between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The tournament was stopped in 1984, due to the rising hooliganism in British soccer. Scotland had failed to win either of their previous matches in the 1928 Home Championship,  losing 1–0 to Ireland and Hampden Park in Glasgow,  and drawing 2–2 with Wales at the Racecourse Ground in Wrexham. (Wrexham? Damn near killed 'em.) But England had been worse: They lost 2-0 to Ireland at Windsor Park in Belfast, and 2-1 to Wales at Turf Moor in Burn...