Scores On This Historic Day

July 1, 1916: Charles Vansant, a 23-year-old Philadelphia native, is attacked by a shark in the Atlantic Ocean, off Beach Haven, on Long Beach Island on the New Jersey Shore. A lifeguard and a bystander tried to rescue him, but he had lost too much blood, and died. Over the next few days, 3 other people would be killed and another badly injured in shark attacks on the Jersey Shore.  The incidents occurred while there was both a Summer heat wave and a polio epidemic, causing people to flee steaming hot New York City, Philadelphia, and the cities of New Jersey for the Shore. The bigger crowds on the beaches gave the sharks an unexpected food source. The second major attack occurred on July 6, further north in Spring Lake. Charles Bruder, 27, was a bell captain  at the Essex & Sussex Hotel. Lifeguards reached him, but his legs had been severed, and he died before they reached shore.  Guests and workers at the Essex & Sussex and neighboring hotels raised money for Br...

British "Tommies" emerging from the trenches and "going over the top" July 1, 1916: The Battle of the Somme breaks out, along the River Somme, outside Ovillers-la-Boisselle, 100 miles north of Paris. It becomes the 2nd-longest battle of World War I, behind the Battle of Verdun -- which started earlier in the year, and finished after the Somme -- and is the war's largest battle in terms of manpower. On one side: Imperial Germany, with 1 million men, commanded by Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria. On the other side: France, defending their homeland with 1.3 million men, commanded by Marshal Ferdinand Foch; and Britain, assisting their ally with 1.2 million men, commanded by General Douglas Haig. Douglas Haig The 1st day at the Somme was one of the few days on which the Allies made significant progress in World War I. But it was also one of the bloodiest: In one day, the British lost 19,240 men. To put that in perspective: America lost its mind when nearly 60,000...

July 1, 1898:  The Battle of San Juan Hill is fought near Santiago, Cuba, as part of the Spanish-American War. This battle has become part of the myth of American greatness, military and civilian. The truth is a bit more complicated. In the 1890s, the people of Cuba rebelled against their colonial overlords from Spain. Many Americans wanted to go to war to free Cuba. Most of those, however, were business lords who wanted to exploit Cuba's natural resources, without Spain keeping them out. They had tried to make deals with Spain, and failed. So they needed to get Spain out of Cuba. All they needed was an excuse. On February 15, 1898, they got their excuse. The battleship USS  Maine  was berthed in Havana Harbor, when there was an explosion, killing 261 sailors. An official U.S. Navy investigation ruled that an external mine caused the explosion. Witnesses among the American survivors denied this, and a much more likely cause for the explosion was a coal fire in the boiler....

July 1, 1893: President Grover Cleveland undergoes surgery for oral cancer. It is kept a secret for the rest of his life, but at least he has a "rest of his life." Cleveland had been elected President in 1884, then lost the Electoral Vote despite winning the popular vote in 1888, and regained the office in 1892. Through the election of 2020, he remains the only former President ever to regain the office. He, Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt are the only 3 men to win the popular vote for President at least 3 times. And yet, on none of those 3 occasions did Cleveland win a majority. Just 2 months into his new term, the Panic of 1893 took place, with the stock market crashing. Cleveland took measures to stop the emergency, but the nation slipped into depression anyway. And while this was going on, he had  soreness on the roof of his mouth.  Clinical samples were sent anonymously to the  Army Medical Museum , and t he diagnosis was oral cancer. Like a previous President...

June 30, 1959: The St. Louis Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs, arch-rivals, play each other at Wrigley Field in Chicago. A strange thing happens, as they occasionally do when the Cubs are involved. The Cardinals scored a run in the 1st inning, and another in the 2nd. The Cubs pulled one back in the 3rd, so that it was Cardinals 2, Cubs 1, with 1 out in the top of the 4th, when... this happened. Stan Musial came to the plate. With a count of 3 balls and 1 strike, Cub pitcher Bob Anderson threw a bad pitch, which got past catcher Sammy Taylor, and rolled to the backstop. Musial had checked his swing. Home plate umpire Vic Delmore called ball 4, and awarded 1st base to Musial. That should have been the end of the play. Anderson and Taylor argued with Delmore, saying that, in checking his swing, Musial had foul-tipped the ball, meaning it should be strike 2, and the at-bat should continue. Seeing this, and knowing that neither Delmore nor any other umpire had stopped play, Musial -- in his ...

June 30, 1936: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia speaks before the League of Nations, at the Palais Wilson on the shore of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Ethiopia was one of the few independent nations in Africa when Italy invaded on October 2, 1935, in fascist dictator Benito Mussolini's bid to create a new Roman Empire. At the end of the year, for his resistance,  Time  magazine named Haile Selassie its Man of the Year.  On May 7, 1936, Italy completed its annexation of the country. Two days later, Mussolini declared the colony of Italian East Africa, also including Eritrea and Somalia. Like all who had sat on his throne, Haile Selassie claimed to trace his lineage back to the affair between Solomon, one of the Biblical Kings of Israel, and the Queen of Sheba, known in modern Ethiopia as Makeda. But now, the man known to his people as  King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Elect of God, and Lion of Judah  had been overthrown, and had to flee his country. The League of ...

Left to right: Adolf Hitler, Gregor Strasser, Ernst Röhm and  Hermann  Göring, 1932. June 30, 1934: Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of Germany and  Führer  (Leader) of the Nazi Party, as paranoid as ever, consolidates his power with a "purge" that becomes known as "The Night of the Long Knives." Ernst Röhm was the co-founder and leader of the Sturmabteilung (SA, meaning "Storm Division," or "Storm Troopers," also known as the "Brownshirts"),  the Nazi Party's original paramilitary  wing, which played a significant role in Hitler's rise to power. He and Hitler were close friends. But Hitler began to see the independence of the SA, and the penchant of its members for street violence ,as a direct threat to his newly gained political power. He also wanted to appease leaders of the Reichswehr ,  the German military, who feared and despised the SA as a potential rival, in particular because of Röhm's ambition to merge the army and the S...

June 30, 1908: The Tunguska Explosion -- also called the Tunguska Event or the Tunguska Incident -- occurs at 7:17 AM over the Podkamennaya, Tunguska River, in what is now Kransnoyarsk Krai, central Siberia, in Russia. The explosion is estimated to have a yield of at least 3 megatons of TNT. To put that in perspective: Little Boy , the Hiroshima bomb, had a yield of 15 kilotons -- so the Tunguska Explosion was 200 times more powerful. The explosion over the sparsely populated East Siberian taiga (snowforest, the Arctic equivalent of a rainforest)  flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 830 square miles, and eyewitness reports suggest that at least 3 people may have died in the event. Had it been over a city, thousands could have been killed. A 1929 photo, showing the still-flattened, not-yet-removed trees The explosion is generally attributed to a meteor air burst: T he atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid, about 200 feet across.  The asteroid appro...

June 30, 1906:  President Theodore Roosevelt signs the Pure Food and Drug Act into law. This was one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history, and it may have saved your life and mine. It was necessary because, with the growth of American cities in the 19th Century, the time food took to get from farm to table got longer, and food spoiled and became poisonous before many people could get to it. Methods of preventing this including chemicals that were every bit as poisonous as the natural process would have been, including alcohol, opium and cocaine. (Coca-Cola was invented in 1886, and, yes, it did contain a small amount of cocaine at the time, about 9 milligrams per glass. A typical "line" of cocaine is between 50 and 75 milligrams. In 1903, they dropped the ingredient for something safer -- but hardly completely safe.) On February 25, 1906, Upton Sinclair's novel  The Jungle  was published. A Socialist, Sinclair had hoped it would lead to workers ...

June 30, 1900: A fire breaks out on piers owned by Norddeutscher Lloyd (NDL), a German shipping company, on the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey. It kills at least 326 people. The fire began when cotton bales stored on NDL's southernmost wharf caught fire, and winds carried the flames to nearby barrels of volatile liquids, such as turpentine  and oil, which exploded in rapid succession. It burned NDL's Hoboken piers to the waterline, consumed or gutted nearby warehouses, gutted 3 of NDL's major transatlantic liners, and damaged or destroyed nearly two dozen smaller craft. Most of the victims were seamen and other workers, but included women visiting one of the ships. The piers were at the foot of 3rd and 4th Streets, across the Hudson from West 12th Street in Manhattan, New York City. Pier C Park is on the site today. This is 5 blocks north of where the Hoboken Terminal of the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad was built in 1907, now serving New Jersey Transit and the Port Author...

June 30, 1894:  Tower Bridge opens to traffic in London, its access ramp at the northeast corner of the Tower of London. Of course, this means foot, bicycle, horse-drawn wagon and horse-drawn carriage traffic. Not very many automobiles were on the streets of London at this point. The bridge was constructed to give better access to the East End, w hich had expanded its commercial potential in the 19th century. The bridge was opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales, later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. It should not be confused with London Bridge, the next bridge up the River Thames, 8/10ths of a mile to the west.  Tower Bridge has become an icon, not just of London but of the United Kingdom itself, every bit as much as the Palace of Westminster, 3 miles up the Thames. It became the logo of Thames Television, the franchise holder of network ITV from 1968 to 1992. (In America, we would call it a network affiliate. Actually, Thames only broadcast from Monday morning to la...

June 29, 2019: The 1st regular-season Major League Baseball game in Europe was played, between the 2 biggest rivals in the sport, the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, at the London Stadium, the main venue for the 2012 Olympic Games, and now the home of East London soccer team West Ham United. Here's what I wrote at the time : Britain's royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, a.k.a. Prince Harry, former British Army helicopter pilot and fan of many things American; and Meghan Markle, a former actress who is one of the American things of which he's a fan. They visited each team in their locker rooms, and both teams gave them a baby-onesie version of their uniforms, with the Number 19 (for the year) and the name Archie on the back for their newborn son. An all-black choir wearing Caribbean style outfits sang "The Star Spangled Banner" and "God Save the Queen," and Harry and Meghan looked on as a group kids representing baseb...