Scores On This Historic Day

May 31, 1889: The Johnstown Flood kills 2,208 people, one of the worst man-made disasters in history. Johnstown, Pennsylvania is 67 miles east of Pittsburgh. It sits at the confluence of the Little Conemaugh River and the Stonycreek River, as they form the Conemaugh River. That river eventually flows into the Kiskiminetas River, which flows into the Allegheny River, which combines with the Monongahela River at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio River. Like so many other Pennsylvania towns in the 19th Century, Johnstown became a producer of iron, coal and steel. But it flooded pretty much every year. On May 30, 1889, they had a Memorial Day parade, and got it done before the rain came. But the rain kept coming, and coming. The next day, at 2:55 PM, the South Fork Dam, which had formed Lake Conemaugh, burst. The City of Johnstown, 14 miles downriver, never had a chance: It was hit with over 14 million cubic meters of water, about the average annual flow of the Mississippi River, coming at 40 m...

May 30, 1982: The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Baltimore Orioles, 6-0 at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore. The Jays get a 1-hit shutout from Jim Gott (6 innings) and Roy Lee Jackson (3). The only hit is a single by Rick Dempsey in the 5th inning. Playing shortstop for the Orioles, and batting 8th, is Cal Ripken Jr., the 20-year-old son of a team coach. He goes 0-for-2, but does draw a walk. Although he had been featured on the Orioles' "Future Stars" card in the 1982 Topps baseball card set -- along with shortstop Bob Bonner and pitcher Jeff Schneider -- he had, to this point, appeared in a grand total of 65 major league games. And the Orioles' most recent one hadn't been one of them. He must have impressed manager Earl Weaver, because Earl put Cal in the next game as well. And the next. And so on. By the time Ripken next missed a game (for reasons other than a strike), he was 38, and had played in 2,632 in a row, breaking the record of 2,130 set from 1925 to 1939 by ...

May 30, 1979: Nottingham Forest Football Club win the European Cup, the tournament now known as the UEFA Champions League. It is the crowning achievement of their manager, Brian Clough. Less than 5 years earlier, Clough looked finished as a top-flight manager. Now, he was the boss of the Champions of Europe. Clough was a native of Middlesbrough, in the North-East of England, and had starred as a striker for the hometown soccer team, Middlesbrough FC. Don Revie was also a Middlesbrough native, and had also starred as a striker, for Manchester City. Both men subsequently played for Sunderland FC, ostensibly Middlesbrough's arch-rivals, and for the England national team -- albeit Clough only twice, and Revie only 6 times, as that period, the late 1950s and early 1960s, was when the forward position on the England team was dominated by Tom Finney of Preston North End, Johnny Haynes of Fulham, Bobby Charlton of Manchester United, and Jimmy Greaves of Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur. Both...

May 30, 1968: The inevitable fall of the government of France has come. But not in the way that was expected: Through an election, not a revolution. In February, the French Communist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International  formed an electoral alliance. Communists had long supported Socialist candidates in elections, but in the "February Declaration," the 2 parties agreed to attempt to form a joint government to replace President  Charles de Gaulle and his Gaullist Party. This was a bold move. de Gaulle had already been seen by the French public as having saved the country twice: Helping to liberate it from the Nazis in 1944, and settling the unrest that brought the Fourth Republic down in 1958, founding the Fifth Republic. The 6-foot-5 de Gaulle was, figuratively, the biggest man in the country. But he was 77 years old, and increasingly conservative. A lot of people thought it was time for a change, and he didn't seem ready to hand the Presidency o...

That's right: They had to slide wearing skirts and bare legs. Not tights, and certainly not pants. Those would have been "unladylike." May 30, 1943: The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League begins play. Intended to fill in the gaps provided by the male players lost to World War II, it kept going after the war, all the way until 1954. Its 1st season had 108 games, with 4 teams, all in the Midwest: The Rockford Peaches in Illinois, the Kenosha Comets and the Racine Belles in Wisconsin, and the South Bend Blue Sox in Indiana. The idea was to provide an alternative, a novelty, to the war-weakened major league games. In the Opening Game, South Bend defeated Rockford, 4-3 in 14 innings, at Beyer Stadium in Rockford. The league's total attendance for the year was be 176,612 . Pennants would be won by the Racine Belles in 1943 and 1946; the Milwaukee Chicks of Wisconsin in 1944; the Rockford Peaches in 1945, 1948, 1949 and 1950; the Grand Rapids Chicks of Michigan...

May 30, 1937: Chicago Police Department officers kill 10 unarmed demonstrators. It becomes known as the Memorial Day Massacre. United States Steel, nicknamed "Big Steel," had signed a contract with the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), a unit of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). But smaller companies, known as "Little Steel," including Republic Steel, refused to go along. So the SWOC called a strike. From 1868 to 1970, America observed Memorial Day on May 30, no matter what day of the week on which it fell. Since 1971, it's been celebrated on the closest Monday to that date, anywhere between May 24 and May 30. On May 30, 1937, a Sunday and a Memorial Day,  unionists, their families and sympathizers gathered at Sam's Place, a former tavern and dance hall at 113th Street and Green Bay Avenue, on the South Side of Chicago, that served as the headquarters of the SWOC.  There was an outdoor picnic lunch, speakers, and songs. The crowd was ...

May 30, 1935: A doubleheader is played at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia. The National League's Philadelphia Phillies beat the Boston Braves, 11-6 in the 1st game, and 9-3 in the 2nd game. A full house of 18,000 comes out to the rickety ballyard at the corner of Broad Street and Lehigh Avenue in North Philadelphia, 7 blocks to the east of the home of the American League's Philadelphia Athletics, Shibe Park. It wasn't much of a matchup. The Braves would finish 8th and last, winning only 38 games and losing 115, the most of any NL team between the 1899 Cleveland Spiders and the 1962 New York Mets. The Phillies were much better, but still finished 7th, at 64-89 -- and, by their standards, that was a good finish. The Braves' season was so bad, that for the 1936 season, they decided to, as would be said today, rebrand: They changed their name to the Boston Bees, and the name of their ballpark from Braves Field to National League Park, a.k.a. the Bee Hive. The new names never ca...