October 12, 1944: Frank Sinatra's Columbus Day Riot

A young Frank Sinatra shows actress Lana Turner some of his fan mail

October 12, 1944: Frank Sinatra appears at the Paramount Theater in New York's Times Square. A full house of 3,664 is on hand to see him. About 25,000 others, mostly teenage girls -- "bobbysoxers" in the lingo of the day -- are turned away, and they vent their frustrations by smashing store windows. You could say that they were the original "riot girls."

It becomes known as the Columbus Day Riot, and for those Sinatra fans who grew up to have kids screaming over Elvis Presley and/or the Beatles, complaining that they never acted that way over a musical act they liked, well, guess what, old-timers, some of you did.

Just as One Direction ain't no Beatles, and Justin Timberlake ain't no Elvis, singers from Bobby Darin to Harry Connick Jr. to Sean Combs have deluded themselves into thinking they were "the new Sinatra," but none of them is in Sinatra's league. The man has more charisma dead than any of them do alive.

Sinatra was a big sports fan. He sang "There Used to Be a Ballpark" about Ebbets Field, although he remained a Dodger fan after they moved to L.A. He was a great boxing fan who talked Life magazine into making him their official photographer for the 1971 "Super Fight" between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier – and, I have to say, he knew what he was doing: He took good pictures.

On a 1972 Pittsburgh Steelers roadtrip to San Diego, the Steeler fan club known as "Franco's Italian Army" (named after the half-black, half-Italian running back Franco Harris, as well as for the general whose "Italian Army" enabled him to win the Spanish Civil War) invited Sinatra, then living in nearby Palm Springs, and offered to make him an "Honorary General" in the Army. Although he had no connection to Pittsburgh, he posed for pictures with them and accepted a helmet with generals' stars on it.

In 1974, he gave a concert at Madison Square Garden, "the Mecca of Boxing." He called it The Main Event, and that became the title of the live album from it. To keep the analogy going, he was introduced by ABC Sports' boxing lead, Howard Cosell.

In a 2012 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Frank Sinatra, against "Nice" Peter Shukoff as Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the rock band Queen.

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October 12, 1944 was a Thursday. At the time, Columbus Day was celebrated on the actual anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World, October 12, 1492. Since 1971, America has observed the holiday on the 2nd Monday in October -- which is also Canada's Thanksgiving Day.

This was also the day that the Nazis retreated from Athens, ending their occupation of the capital of Greece. I have a separate entry for that event.

The baseball season ended with the World Series 3 days earlier. It was a Thursday, so there were no NFL scores. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the 1944-45 NHL season didn't begin until October 28. So there were no scores on this historic day.