October 2011 - PopHistory.org

U.S. Olympian Louis Zamperini’s plane goes down in the Pacific

Year: 1943

Month Day: May 27

On May 27, 1943, a B-24 carrying U.S. airman and former Olympic runner Louis Zamperini crashes into the Pacific Ocean. After surviving the crash, Zamperini floated on a raft in shark-infested waters for more than a month before being picked up by the Japanese and spending the next two years in a series of brutal prison camps. His story of survival was featured in the 2010 best-selling book Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

Born in 1917 to Italian immigrants, Zamperini grew up in Torrance, California, where he was frequently in trouble with the law. As a teen, he channeled his energy into athletics and became a champion distance runner. At age 19, Zamperini competed for the United States at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany. He ran the 5,000-meter race and finished in eighth place; however, his fast final lap caught the attention of Adolf Hitler, who later asked to shake Zamperini’s hand. After the Olympics, he was a record-setting standout on the University of Southern California’s track team.

In the fall of 1941, Zamperini enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps and was eventually stationed in Hawaii. In May 1943, he was serving as the bombardier on a B-24 that was searching for a missing plane when his own aircraft developed mechanical problems and went down in the Pacific. Of the 11 people onboard, only the 26-year-old Zamperini, along with the pilot and the tail gunner survived the initial crash. The three men stayed alive in their small raft by drinking rainwater and eating the occasional seabirds and fish they were able to catch, all while facing strafing from Japanese bombers and the ever-present threat of shark attacks. After a month at sea, Francis McNamara, the tail gunner, perished. On their 47th day in the raft, Zamperini and fellow survivor Russell Allen Phillips, having drifted some 2,000 miles since the crash, were picked up by Japanese sailors.

For more than two years, the two men were held in a series of prison camps, where they were repeatedly beaten and starved. As an ex-Olympian, Zamperini was considered a propaganda tool by the Japanese and saved from execution; at the same time, however, he was singled out for particularly vicious forms of torture. The defiant American managed to survive and was released after the war ended in 1945.

Back home in California, Zamperini drank heavily and was haunted by his experiences in captivity. Then, after being inspired by evangelist Billy Graham to convert to Christianity in 1949, Zamperini went on to become an inspirational speaker, forgive his captors and publish an autobiography, Devil at my Heels. A wider audience learned about his life with the publication of Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand, author of the 2001 best-seller Seabiscuit: An American Legend, about the Depression-era champion racehorse.

Zamperini died in July 2014, in Los Angeles. He was 97.

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“Curious George” co-creator Margret Rey dies

Updated:: Dec 17, 2019
Original:: Oct 17, 2011

Year: 1996

Month Day: December 21

On December 21, 1996, Margret Rey, who with her husband Hans created the popular “Curious George” children’s books about a mischievous monkey, dies at age 90 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Reys, both German Jews, escaped wartime Europe in 1940 and fled to America. The following year, the first “Curious George” book was published in the United States.

Margret Rey was born Margarete Waldstein in Hamburg, Germany, in May 1906. She studied art in her homeland then later moved to Rio de Janeiro and worked as a photographer. In Brazil, she became re-acquainted with Hans Rey (born Hans Reyersbach), a fellow Hamburg native who she had met as a child. The couple married in 1935 then relocated to Paris, France, where Hans was a newspaper cartoonist and Margret wrote advertising copy. In 1939, “Raffy and the Nine Monkeys,” a children’s book written and illustrated by Hans, was published in France (an English-language version of the book was titled “Cecily G. and the Nine Monkeys”). One of the monkeys in the book, who was always getting in trouble, served as the model for Curious George.

As the Reys worked on the manuscript for what would become the first Curious George book, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party continued their rise to power in Europe. In June 1940, shortly before the Nazis entered Paris, Hans and Margret escaped the city on homemade bicycles, taking with them little more than a collection of their manuscripts. After traveling to Spain, Portugal and Brazil, the Reys sailed to New York late that same year. “Curious George” was published in 1941, and the Reys collaborated on six sequels, including “Curious George Takes a Job” (1947), “Curious George Flies a Kite” (1958) and “Curious George Goes to the Hospital” (1966). Hans illustrated the books while Margret did the writing. (Despite their partnership, Hans initially received sole credit on covers, as H.A. Rey, because the couple’s publisher thought it would distinguish their books from the glut of female children’s book authors at the time.) According to The Los Angeles Times: “Barely 5 feet tall and red-haired, Rey said she occasionally served as her artist husband’s human model for their impish little monkey. She would scrunch up her face, move her limbs about or even leap from one piece of furniture to another.”

After Hans died in 1977, Margret went on to collaborate with Alan Shalleck on more than two dozen Curious George books as well as an animated TV show. When Margret died in December 1996, following complications from a heart attack, a new team continued to produce additional books in the series. Today, the Reys’ creation remains a beloved character in children’s literature. Curious George books have been translated into multiple languages, sold millions of copies and spawned a variety of merchandising deals.

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Amanda Knox murder conviction overturned in Italy

Year: 2011

Month Day: October 03

On October 3, 2011, in a decision that makes international headlines, an Italian appeals court overturns the murder conviction of Amanda Knox, an American exchange student who two years earlier was found guilty in the 2007 murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher, in Perugia, Italy. At the time of her 2009 conviction, Knox, then 22 years old, received a 26-year prison sentence, while her ex-boyfriend, Italian college student Raffaelle Sollecito, who also was convicted in the slaying, was sentenced to 25 years behind bars. The sensational, high-profile case raised questions in the United States about the Italian justice system and whether Knox, who always maintained her innocence, was unfairly convicted.

On November 2, 2007, the 21-year-old Kercher of Coulsdon, England, was found fatally stabbed in the bedroom of the home she shared with Knox and two other women in Perugia, the capital city of the Umbria region in central Italy. Investigators said the British exchange student had been slain the previous night. After questioning by police, Knox, a Seattle native and University of Washington student doing her junior year abroad in Italy, was arrested. She denied any wrongdoing, saying she was at computer science student Sollecito’s house the night the killing occurred. Police claimed Knox later gave them conflicting statements about her whereabouts at the time of the crime, and said she also accused her boss at the bar where she worked, who turned out to have a solid alibi, of Kercher’s murder. The American student, who was first questioned without an attorney or professional interpreter, said police coerced her into making the accusation as well as other incriminating statements. (The false accusation would later result in an extra year tacked on to Knox’s prison sentence.)

During the nearly yearlong trial that followed in 2009, Italian prosecutors charged that Knox, along with Sollecito and another man, Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast native, had viciously attacked Kercher in a sex game gone wrong. (Guede was convicted for his role in Kercher’s death in a separate, fast-track trial in 2008. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison, which was reduced to 16 years on appeal.) The prosecution’s main evidence against Knox included tiny traces of her DNA and that of Kercher’s on a knife discovered at Sollecito’s home. Traces of Knox’s DNA were also found on a bra clasp belonging to Kercher. Knox’s attorneys argued the bra clasp was found over a month after the murder at a contaminated crime scene, and that the knife blade couldn’t have made the wounds on the victim.

The case received extensive media coverage in the United States and Europe, where the attractive Knox was dubbed “Angel Face” and “Foxy Knoxy” by the tabloids. In the Italian and British press, Knox was painted as a promiscuous party girl. However, in America, she was often portrayed in the media as an innocent abroad, a young woman who had worked several jobs to earn money to study in Perugia, where she had been railroaded by an overzealous prosecutor.

Knox and Sollecito appealed their convictions, and at their subsequent trial court-appointed experts testified the original DNA evidence was unreliable and did not definitively link the young American and her former boyfriend to the crime. On October 3, 2011, an appellate court jury of two judges and six civilians in Perugia acquitted the two defendants of murder. (The court upheld Knox’s conviction on a charge of defamation for accusing her former boss at the bar of murdering Kercher. Knox was given time served along with a fine.) The 24-year-old Knox, who been jailed in Italy since her 2007 arrest, flew home to the United States the following day.

In 2013, Knox’s acquittal was overturned and she was again convicted of murder in 2014. Her conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court of Italy in 2015.

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