1988 Archives - PopHistory.org

Chicago Bears beat Philadelphia Eagles in freaky Fog Bowl

On December 31, 1988, the Chicago Bears defeat the Philadelphia Eagles, 20-12, in a playoff game plagued by a thick fog starting late in the first half. Playing conditions at Soldier Field in Chicago become problematic, and fans in attendance and television viewers struggle to see the game, dubbed the “Fog Bowl” by media.

The freak conditions were caused when cold air over Lake Michigan was blown by a breeze toward warm air at Soldier Field on the lakefront, according to the National Weather Service. Meteorologists said the fog was so thick that it was like having clouds on the ground.

“It will be remembered as the best game you never saw,” Fred Mitchell wrote in the first sentence of his game story in the next day’s Chicago Tribune.

“We couldn’t see anything—absolutely nothing,” CBS-TV play-by-play broadcaster Verne Lundquist told the Associated Press. “We had to look at the TV just like everyone else.” Lundquist’s color man, Terry Bradshaw, told viewers the game should have been suspended.

Bears defensive end Al Harris likened the bizarre conditions to playing in a cemetery. “I never saw anything like this,” he said.

The NFL considered suspending the game, but the league ultimately left the decision to referee Jim Tunney and the NFL commissioner’s representative.

“We felt the playing conditions were satisfactory,” Tunney said. “They were really tough in the middle of the third quarter … No word came to me that either coach wanted to stop play.”

Other NFL games have been plagued by thick fog. In 2017 in Foxboro, Massachusetts, fog was so thick for a game between the New England Patriots and Atlanta Falcons that NBC relied on its Skycam for most in-game coverage instead of the usual sideline cameras.

The week after the Fog Bowl, the Bears lost to eventual Super Bowl champion San Francisco in the NFC Championship Game.

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Louganis wins Olympic gold the day after suffering head injury

At the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea on September 20, 1988, American diver Greg Louganis wins the gold medal on the springboard despite nearly knocking himself unconscious during a qualifying round dive. With the improbable victory, Louganis—who won gold medals in the 3-meter springboard and 10-meter platform at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles—becomes the first man to win back-to-back gold medals in both events, solidifying his claim as the greatest diver ever.

In a qualifying round the previous day, Louganis suffered a serious head injury while attempting a reverse two-and-a-half somersault dive. Bloodied and dazed, he received five stitches from a doctor before returning to the board and finishing third.

“I knew as soon as I was coming off the board that I was going to be close because I could feel it in my own body,” he told ABC’s Barbara Walters in 1995. “What I was concerned about was hitting my hands … I started coming out of the dive and I heard this big hollow thud … and then I find myself in the water. I just held my head … I just wanted to hold the blood in.”

Louganis, who publicly disclosed that he was gay at the Gay Games in 1994, told Walters in 1995 that he and his coach, Ron O’Brien, knew that he was HIV-positive before the 1988 Olympics. But they didn’t tell the public or the Olympic Committee, sparking a controversy. Louganis was criticized for potentially putting at risk the doctor who treated him following his head injury in the qualifying round.

Louganis advocated for the LGBTQ movement following his retirement in 1988.

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Stealth bomber unveiled

Year: 1988

Month Day: November 22

In the presence of members of Congress and the media, the Northrop B-2 “stealth” bomber is shown publicly for the first time at Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California.

The aircraft, which was developed in great secrecy for nearly a decade, was designed with stealth characteristics that would allow it to penetrate an enemy’s most sophisticated defenses unnoticed. At the time of its public unveiling, the B-2 had not even been flown on a test flight. It rapidly came under fire for its massive cost–more than $40 billion for development and a $1 billion price tag for each unit.

In 1989, the B-2 was successfully flown, performing favorably. Although the aircraft had a wingspan of nearly half a football field, its radar signal was as negligible as that of a bird. The B-2 also successfully evaded infrared, sound detectors, and the visible eye.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the original order for the production of 132 stealth bombers was reduced to 21 aircraft. The B-2 has won a prominent place in the modern U.S. Air Force fleet, serving well in bombing missions during the 1990s.

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Teenager Debbie Gibson earns a #1 hit with “Foolish Beat”

Year: 1988

Month Day: June 25

Contrary to what some critics of teen pop might imagine, pop sensation Debbie Gibson saw herself not as the next Madonna, but as the next Carole King. And when her single “Foolish Beat” reached the top of the Biilboard Hot 100 on this day in 1988, she achieved something very much in keeping with that goal: She became the youngest person ever to write, produce and perform her own #1 pop single.

Debbie Gibson was the poster-child for everything a talented teenager might achieve if she set her mind to justifying her parents’ investment in music and voice lessons. Raised in suburban Long Island, New York, Gibson began piano lessons at age five with the same teacher who taught Billy Joel. She wrote her first song, “Know Your Classroom,” at age six and her first “hit” at age 12, with a song called “I Come From America,” which won her $1,000 in a songwriting contest and convinced her parents to hire a professional manager. Five years later, with more than 100 original unreleased songs to her credit, she signed a contract with Atlantic Records and recorded her debut album, Out Of The Blue.

During the summer of 1987, Debbie Gibson earned her first Top-10 hit with her debut single, “Only In My Dreams.” After two more hits with “Shake Your Love” and “Out Of The Blue,” she earned her record-setting #1 hit with the self-produced original song, “Foolish Beat.”

Like so many teen stars before and after her, Debbie Gibson did not remain a viable pop star for long, but she made the most of her time in the spotlight, earning another #1 hit in early 1989 with “Lost In Your Eyes,” from her second album, Electric Youth, which reached the top of the Billboard album charts and inspired a pioneering foray into the youth cosmetics market with the creation of Electric Youth by Debbie Gibson perfume and cologne spritz by Revlon.

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Guns N’ Roses make popular breakthrough with “Sweet Child O’ Mine”

Year: 1988

Month Day: July 23

In the 1980s, Los Angeles was a mecca for so-called “glam rock” bands and the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” lifestyle with which they came to be associated. On any given night inside clubs like the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go, you could not only hear bands like Hanoi Rocks and Mötley Crüe or, later, Winger and Warrant, but you could also witness an expression of that lifestyle as decadent as any the music world had seen. The rise of “grunge” bands like Nirvana and alternative rock effectively put an end to that scene in the early 1990s, but the first blow was struck by one of their own: Guns N’ Roses, the band that made its big popular breakthrough on July 23, 1988, when their first hit single, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” entered the Billboard Top 40.

To the guys in pop-metal groups like Poison, Guns N’ Roses might have seemed at first to be just another fellow hair band, but Axl Rose and the rest of the classic GN’R lineup—Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan and Steven Adler—were interested in rock and roll that was much more raw, angry and honest than what the pop-metal bands were playing. Originally formed out of the ashes of two other groups—L.A. Guns and Hollywood Rose—Guns N’ Roses played in a style that owed much more to the pure hard rock of the 1970s than to the showy heavy metal of the 1980s. Signed to Geffen in 1986, GN’R released their first full-length album, Appetite For Destruction, the following summer, and with it their debut single, “Welcome To The Jungle.” Appetite For Destruction would eventually be certified 15-times Platinum, and “Welcome To The Jungle” would become a massively popular Top 10 hit, but neither the album nor its first single was an immediate success. It took nearly a year of touring and the release of a second single, “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” to earn Guns N’ Roses a place in music history.

Built around an opening riff that GN’R guitarist Slash considered a silly throwaway, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” went on to become not just a #1 hit on this day in 1988, but also a true rock classic. Voted onto “greatest” lists by Rolling Stone, Blender, the RIAA, BBC and the like, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” made stars out of Guns N’ Roses, and it made so-called “power ballads” like Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” seem weak by comparison.

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U.S. warship downs Iranian passenger jet

Year: 1988

Month Day: July 03

In the Persian Gulf, the U.S. Navy cruiser Vincennes shoots down an Iranian passenger jet that it mistakes for a hostile Iranian fighter aircraft. Two missiles were fired from the American warship—the aircraft was hit, and all 290 people aboard were killed. The attack came near the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when U.S. vessels were in the gulf defending Kuwaiti oil tankers. Minutes before Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down, the Vincennes had engaged Iranian gunboats that shot at its helicopter.

Iran called the downing of the aircraft a “barbaric massacre,” but U.S. officials defended the action, claiming that the aircraft was outside the commercial jet flight corridor, flying at only 7,800 feet, and was on a descent toward the Vincennes. However, one month later, U.S. authorities acknowledged that the airbus was in the commercial flight corridor, flying at 12,000 feet, and not descending. The U.S. Navy report blamed crew error caused by psychological stress on men who were in combat for the first time. In 1996, the U.S. agreed to pay $62 million in damages to the families of the Iranians killed in the attack.

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Supreme Court defends right to satirize public figures

Year: 1988

Month Day: February 24

The U.S. Supreme Court votes 8-0 to overturn the $200,000 settlement awarded to the Reverend Jerry Falwell for his emotional distress at being parodied in Hustler, a pornographic magazine.

In 1983, Hustler ran a piece parodying Falwell’s first sexual experience as a drunken, incestuous, childhood encounter with his mother in an outhouse. Falwell, an important religious conservative and founder of the Moral Majority political advocacy group, sued Hustler and its publisher, Larry Flynt, for libel. Falwell won the case, but Flynt appealed, leading to the Supreme Court’s hearing the case because of its constitutional implications.

In February 1988, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the lower court’s decision, ruling that, although in poor taste, Hustler‘s parody fell within the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech and the press.

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Soviets agree to withdraw from Afghanistan

Year: 1988

Month Day: April 14

Representatives of the USSR, Afghanistan, the United States and Pakistan sign an agreement calling for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. In exchange for an end to the disputed Soviet occupation, the United States agreed to end its arms support for the Afghan anti-Soviet factions, and Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed not to interfere in each other’s affairs.

In 1978, a Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan installed a new communist government under Nur Mohammad Taraki. However, in 1979, a second coup toppled Taraki’s government in favor of Hafizullah Amin, a Muslim leader less favorable to the Soviets. In December 1979, Soviet tanks and troops invaded Afghanistan, and Amin was murdered in a Soviet-backed coup. Babrak Karmal, a product of the KGB, was installed in his place.

Despite early gains, the Soviet army met with unanticipated resistance from Muslim guerrillas, who launched a jihad, or “holy war,” against the foreign atheists. Armed by the United States, Britain, China and several Muslim nations, the muhajadeen, or “holy warriors,” inflicted heavy casualties on the Russians. In the USSR, the Red Army’s failure to suppress the guerrillas, and the high cost of the war in Russian lives and resources, caused significant discord in the Communist Party and Soviet society. In April 1988, after years of stalemate, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed a peace accord with Afghanistan. In February 1989, the last Soviet soldier left Afghanistan, where civil war continued until the Taliban’s seizure of power in the late 1990s.

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Stacy Allison becomes first American woman to reach summit of Mt. Everest

Year: 1988

Month Day: September 29

Stacy Allison of Portland, Oregon, becomes the first American woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which at 29,035 feet above sea level is the highest point on earth. Allison, a member of the Northwest American Everest Expedition, climbed the Himalayan peak using the southeast ridge route.

Mount Everest sits on the crest of the Great Himalayas in Asia, lying on the border between Nepal and Tibet. Called Chomo-Lungma, or “Mother Goddess of the Land,” by the Tibetans, the English named the mountain after Sir George Everest, a 19th-century British surveyor of South Asia. The summit of Everest reaches two-thirds of the way through the air of the earth’s atmosphere–at about the cruising altitude of jet airliners–and oxygen levels there are very low, temperatures are extremely cold, and weather is unpredictable and dangerous.

In May 1953, climber and explorer Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay of Nepal made the first successful climb of the peak. Ten years later, James Whittaker of Redmond, Washington, became the first American to top the peak, reaching Everest’s summit with his Sherpa climbing partner Nawang Gombu. In 1975, Japanese mountaineer Junko Tabei became the first woman to conquer the mountain. Three years later, Reinhold Messner of Italy and Peter Habeler of Austria achieved what had been previously thought impossible: climbing to the Everest summit without oxygen. In 1988, American Stacy Allison successfully scaled Everest. About two dozen climbers died in attempts to reach the top of Everest in the 20th century.

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Pan Am Flight 103 explodes over Scotland

Updated:: Dec 17, 2019
Original:: Nov 24, 2009

Year: 1988

Month Day: December 21

On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A bomb hidden inside an audio cassette player detonated in the cargo area when the plane was at an altitude of 31,000 feet. The disaster, which became the subject of Britain’s largest criminal investigation, was believed to be an attack against the United States. One hundred eighty nine of the victims were American.

Islamic terrorists were accused of planting the bomb on the plane while it was at the airport in Frankfurt, Germany. Authorities suspected the attack was in retaliation for either the 1986 U.S. air strikes against Libya, in which leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s young daughter was killed along with dozens of other people, or a 1988 incident, in which the U.S. mistakenly shot down an Iran Air commercial flight over the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people.

Sixteen days before the explosion over Lockerbie, the U.S. embassy in Helsinki, Finland, received a call warning that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am flight out of Frankfurt. There is controversy over how seriously the U.S. took the threat and whether travelers should have been alerted, but officials later said that the connection between the call and the bomb was coincidental.

In 1991, following a joint investigation by the British authorities and the F.B.I., Libyan intelligence agents Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhimah were indicted for murder; however, Libya refused to hand over the suspects to the U.S. Finally, in 1999, in an effort to ease United Nations sanctions against his country, Qaddafi agreed to turn over the two men to Scotland for trial in the Netherlands using Scottish law and prosecutors. In early 2001, al-Megrahi was convicted and sentenced to life in prison and Fhimah was acquitted. Over the U.S. government’s objections, Al-Megrahi was freed and returned to Libya in August 2009 after doctors determined that he had only months to live.

In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the bombing, but didn’t express remorse. The U.N. and U.S. lifted sanctions against Libya and Libya agreed to pay each victim’s family approximately $8 million in restitution. In 2004, Libya’s prime minister said that the deal was the “price for peace,” implying that his country only took responsibility to get the sanctions lifted, a statement that infuriated the victims’ families. Pan Am Airlines, which went bankrupt three years after the bombing, sued Libya and later received a $30 million settlement.

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