Reagan signs Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA)

Year
1981
Month Day
August 13

On August 13, 1981, at his California home Rancho del Cielo, Ronald Reagan signs the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), a historic package of tax and budget reductions that set the tone for his administration’s overall economic policy.

During his campaign for the White House in 1980, Reagan argued on behalf of “supply-side economics,” the theory of using tax cuts as incentives for individuals and businesses to work and produce goods (supply) rather than as an incentive for consumers to buy goods (demand). In Congress, Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, and Senator Bill Roth, Republican of Delaware, had long supported the supply-side principles behind the ERTA, which would also be known as the Kemp-Roth act. The bill, which received broad bipartisan support in Congress, represented a significant change in the course of federal income tax policy, which until then was believed by most people to work best when used to affect demand during times of recession.

The ERTA included a 25 percent reduction in marginal tax rates for individuals, phased in over three years, and indexed for inflation from that point on. The marginal tax rate, or the tax rate on the last dollar earned, was considered more important to economic activity than the average tax rate (total tax paid as a percentage of income earned), as it affected income earned through “extra” activities such as education, entrepreneurship or investment. Reducing marginal tax rates, the theory went, would help the economy grow faster through such extra efforts by individuals and businesses. The 1981 act, combined with another major tax reform act in 1986, cut marginal tax rates on high-income taxpayers from 70 percent to around 30 percent, and would be the defining economic legacy of Reagan’s presidency.

Reagan’s tax cuts were designed to put maximum emphasis on encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship and creating incentives for the development of venture capital and greater investment in human capital through training and education. The cuts particularly benefited “idea” industries such as software or financial services; fittingly, Reagan’s first term saw the advent of the information revolution, including IBM’s introduction of its first personal computer (PC) and the rise or launch of such tech companies as Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Compaq and Cisco Systems.

Economists have argued to what degree Reagan’s economic policy drove the boom of the 1990s, but his tax program undoubtedly set in motion powerful forces of change that would result in both short- and long-term economic gains. On the other hand, critics of so-called “Reaganomics” point out that his tax cuts and the effects of steady economic growth disproportionately benefitted the wealthy, and increased the gap between the nation’s rich and poor.

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Fidel Castro born

Year
1926
Month Day
August 13

Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro is born in the Oriente province of eastern Cuba. The son of a Spanish immigrant who had made a fortune building rail systems to transport sugar cane, Fidel attended Roman Catholic boarding schools in Santiago de Cuba. He became involved in revolutionary politics while he was a student and in 1947 took part in an abortive attempt by Dominican exiles and Cubans to overthrow Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. In the next year, he took part in urban riots in Bogota, Colombia. The most outstanding feature of his politics during the period was his anti-American beliefs; he was not yet an overt Marxist.

In 1951, he ran for a seat in the Cuban House of Representatives as a member of the reformist Ortodoxo Party, but General Fulgencio Batista seized power in a bloodless coup d’etat before the election could be held. Various groups formed to oppose Batista’s dictatorship, and on July 26, 1953, Castro led some 160 rebels in an attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba’s second largest military base. Castro hoped to seize weapons and announce his revolution from the base radio station, but the barracks were heavily defended, and more than half his men were captured or killed in the attempt. Castro was himself arrested and put on trial for conspiring to overthrow the Cuban government. During his trial, he argued that he and his rebels were fighting to restore democracy to Cuba, but he was nonetheless found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Two years later, Batista felt confident enough in his power that he granted a general amnesty to all political prisoners, including Castro. Castro then went with his brother Raul to Mexico, and they organized the revolutionary 26th of July Movement, enlisting recruits and joining up with Ernesto “Che” Guevara, an idealist Marxist from Argentina.

On December 2, 1956, Castro and 81 armed men landed on the Cuban coast. All of them were killed or captured except for Castro, Raul, Che, and nine others, who retreated into the Sierra Maestra mountain range to wage a guerrilla war against the Batista government. They were joined by revolutionary volunteers from all over Cuba and won a series of victories over Batista’s demoralized army. Castro was supported by the peasantry, to whom he promised land reform, while Batista received aid from the United States, which bombed suspected revolutionary positions.

By mid-1958, a number of other Cuban groups were also opposing Batista, and the United States ended military aid to his regime. In December, the 26th of July forces under Che Guevara attacked the city of Santa Clara, and Batista’s forces crumbled. Batista fled for the Dominican Republic on January 1, 1959. Castro, who had fewer than 1,000 men left at the time, took control of the Cuban government’s 30,000-man army. The other rebel leaders lacked the popular support the young and charismatic Castro enjoyed, and on February 16 he was sworn in as prime minister of the country’s new provisional government.

The United States initially recognized the new Cuban dictator but withdrew its support after Castro launched a program of agrarian reform, nationalized U.S. assets on the island, and declared a Marxist government. Many of Cuba’s wealthiest citizens fled to the United States, where they joined the CIA in its efforts to overthrow Castro’s regime. In April 1961, with some training and support by the CIA, the Cuban exiles launched a disastrously unsuccessful invasion of Cuba known as the “Bay of Pigs.” The Soviet Union reacted to the attack by escalating its support to Castro’s communist government and in 1962 placed offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba. The discovery of the missiles by U.S. intelligence led to the tense “Cuban Missile Crisis,” which ended after the Soviets agreed to remove the weapons in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.

Castro’s Cuba was the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere, and he would retain control of it into the 21st century, outlasting nine U.S. presidents who opposed him with economic embargoes and political rhetoric. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Castro lost a valuable source of aid, but he made up for it by courting European and Canadian investment and tourism. In late July 2006, an unwell Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul. He officially stepped down in February 2008. Castro died on November 25, 2016, at 90.

READ MORE: How the Castro Family Dominated Cuba for Nearly 60 Years

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“Hound Dog” is recorded for the first time by Big Mama Thornton

Year
1952
Month Day
August 13

Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” (1956) is one of the biggest and most instantly recognizable pop songs in history. It’s a song so closely associated with the King of Rock and Roll, in fact, that many may mistakenly assume that it was a Presley original. In fact, the story of the song that gave Elvis his longest-running #1 hit (11 weeks) in the summer of 1956 began four years earlier, when “Hound Dog” was recorded for the very first time by the rhythm-and-blues singer Ellie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton in Los Angeles, California.

Big Mama Thornton was a native of Montgomery, Alabama, who came of age on the R&B circuit in the 1940s after starting her professional career in 1941 at the age of 14. In 1951, she signed her first record contract with Peacock Records and was soon paired with another of its artists, bandleader Johnny Otis, who brought Thornton out to join his band in California. It was there, in late 1952, that Otis asked two young songwriters on the Los Angeles music scene if they would write something especially for Thornton. Those songwriters were Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, who would go on to have an enormous impact on R&B and early rock and roll through their work with groups like the Coasters and the Drifters. But hits like “Yakkity Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “Stand By Me,” “Jailhouse Rock” and “Love Potion No. 9″ were still ahead of Lieber and Stoller when they did what Otis asked and came back to him with a 12-bar country blues tune called “Hound Dog.”

On this day in 1953, Big Mama Thornton and the Johnny Otis Band recorded “Hound Dog” and turned it into a smash hit on the R&B charts, where it stayed at #1 for seven weeks. It wasn’t Thornton’s recording, however, that inspired Elvis to record “Hound Dog” three years later. Presley’s inspiration came from a rewrite by a singer named Freddie Bell, who changed the original lyrics to include the now-familiar “Cryin’ all the time” and “You ain’t never caught a rabbit.” During his first Las Vegas engagement in the spring of 1956, Elvis Presley heard Freddie Bell and the Bellboys performing the reworked “Hound Dog” and added it to his repertoire almost immediately.

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Aztec capital falls to Cortés

Year
1521
Month Day
August 13

After a three-month siege, Spanish forces under Hernán Cortés capture Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire. Cortés’ men leveled the city and captured Cuauhtémoc, the Aztec emperor.

Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325 A.D. by a wandering tribe of hunters and gatherers on islands in Lake Texcoco, near the present site of Mexico City. In only one century, this civilization grew into the Aztec empire, largely because of its advanced system of agriculture. The empire came to dominate central Mexico and by the ascendance of Montezuma II in 1502 had reached its greatest extent, extending as far south as perhaps modern-day Nicaragua. At the time, the empire was held together primarily by Aztec military strength, and Montezuma II set about establishing a bureaucracy, creating provinces that would pay tribute to the imperial capital of Tenochtitlán. The conquered peoples resented the Aztec demands for tribute and victims for the religious sacrifices, but the Aztec military kept rebellion at bay.

Meanwhile, Hernán Cortés, a young Spanish-born noble, came to Hispaniola in the West Indies in 1504. In 1511, he sailed with Diego Velázquez to conquer Cuba and twice was elected mayor of Santiago, the capital of Hispaniola. In 1518, he was appointed captain general of a new Spanish expedition to the American mainland. Velázquez, the governor of Cuba, later rescinded the order, and Cortés sailed without permission. He visited the coast of Yucatán and in March 1519 landed at Tabasco in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche with 500 soldiers, 100 sailors, and 16 horses. There, he won over the local Indians and was given a female slave, Malinche—baptized Marina—who became his mistress and later bore him a son. She knew both Maya and Aztec and served as an interpreter. The expedition then proceeded up the Mexican coast, where Cortés founded Veracruz, mainly for the purpose of having himself elected captain general by the colony, thus shaking off the authority of Velázquez and making him responsible only to King Charles V of Spain.

At Veracruz, Cortés trained his army and then burned his ships to ensure loyalty to his plans for conquest. Having learned of political strife in the Aztec empire, Cortés led his force into the Mexican interior. On the way to Tenochtitlán, he clashed with local Indians, but many of these people, including the nation of Tlaxcala, became his allies after learning of his plan to conquer their hated Aztec rulers. Hearing of the approach of Cortés, with his frightful horses and sophisticated weapons, Montezuma II tried to buy him off, but Cortés would not be dissuaded. On November 8, 1519, the Spaniards and their 1,000 Tlaxcaltec warriors were allowed to enter Tenochtitlán unopposed.

Montezuma suspected them to be divine envoys of the god Quetzalcatl, who was prophesied to return from the east in a “One Reed” year, which was 1519 on the Aztec calendar. The Spaniards were greeted with great honor, and Cortés seized the opportunity, taking Montezuma hostage so that he might govern the empire through him. His mistress, Marina, was a great help in this endeavor and succeeded in convincing Montezuma to cooperate fully.

In the spring of 1520, Cortés learned of the arrival of a Spanish force from Cuba, led by Pánfilo Narvez and sent by Velázquez to deprive Cortés of his command. Cortés led his army out of Tenochtitlán to meet them, leaving behind a garrison of 80 Spaniards and a few hundred Tlaxcaltecs to govern the city. Cortés defeated Narvez and enlisted Narvez’ army into his own. When he returned to Tenochtitlán in June, he found the garrison under siege from the Aztecs, who had rebelled after the subordinate whom Cortés left in command of the city massacred several Aztec chiefs, and the population on the brink of revolt. On June 30, under pressure and lacking food, Cortés and his men fought their way out of the capital at heavy cost. Known to the Spanish as La Noche Triste, or “the Night of Sadness,” many soldiers drowned in Lake Texcoco when the vessel carrying them and Aztec treasures hoarded by Cortés sank. Montezuma was killed in the fighting–in Aztec reports by the Spaniards, and in Spanish reports by an Aztec mob bitter at Montezuma’s subservience to Spanish rule. He was succeeded as emperor by his brother, Cuitláhuac.

During the Spaniards’ retreat, they defeated a large Aztec army at Otumba and then rejoined their Tlaxcaltec allies. In May 1521, Cortés returned to Tenochtitlán, and after a three-month siege the city fell. This victory marked the fall of the Aztec empire. Cuauhtémoc, Cuitláhuac’s successor as emperor, was taken prisoner and later executed, and Cortés became the ruler of a vast Mexican empire.

The Spanish conquistador led an expedition to Honduras in 1524 and in 1528 returned to Spain to see the king. Charles made him Marqués del Valle but refused to name him governor because of his quarrels with Velázquez and others. In 1530, he returned to Mexico, now known as New Spain, and found the country in disarray. After restoring some order, he retired to his estate south of Mexico City and sent out maritime expeditions from the Pacific coast. In 1540, he returned to Spain and was neglected by the court. He died in 1547.

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Berlin is divided

Year
1961
Month Day
August 13

Shortly after midnight on this day in 1961, East German soldiers begin laying down barbed wire and bricks as a barrier between Soviet-controlled East Berlin and the democratic western section of the city.

After World War II, defeated Germany was divided into Soviet, American, British and French zones of occupation. The city of Berlin, though technically part of the Soviet zone, was also split, with the Soviets taking the eastern part of the city. After a massive Allied airlift in June 1948 foiled a Soviet attempt to blockade West Berlin, the eastern section was drawn even more tightly into the Soviet fold. Over the next 12 years, cut off from its western counterpart and basically reduced to a Soviet satellite, East Germany saw between 2.5 million and 3 million of its citizens head to West Germany in search of better opportunities. By 1961, some 1,000 East Germans—including many skilled laborers, professionals and intellectuals—were leaving every day.

READ MORE: Why the Berlin Airlift Was the First Major Battle of the Cold War

In August, Walter Ulbricht, the Communist leader of East Germany, got the go-ahead from Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to begin the sealing off of all access between East and West Berlin. Soldiers began the work over the night of August 12-13, laying more than 100 miles of barbed wire slightly inside the East Berlin border. The wire was soon replaced by a six-foot-high, 96-mile-long wall of concrete blocks, complete with guard towers, machine gun posts and searchlights. East German officers known as Volkspolizei (“Volpos”) patrolled the Berlin Wall day and night.

Many Berlin residents on that first morning found themselves suddenly cut off from friends or family members in the other half of the city. Led by their mayor, Willi Brandt, West Berliners demonstrated against the wall, as Brandt criticized Western democracies, particularly the United States, for failing to take a stand against it. President John F. Kennedy had earlier said publicly that the United States could only really help West Berliners and West Germans, and that any kind of action on behalf of East Germans would only result in failure.

The Berlin Wall was one of the most powerful and iconic symbols of the Cold War. In June 1963, Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”) speech in front of the Wall, celebrating the city as a symbol of freedom and democracy in its resistance to tyranny and oppression. The height of the Wall was raised to 10 feet in 1970 in an effort to stop escape attempts, which at that time came almost daily. From 1961 to 1989, a total of 5,000 East Germans escaped; many more tried and failed. High profile shootings of some would-be defectors only intensified the Western world’s hatred of the Wall.

Finally, in the late 1980s, East Germany, fueled by the decline of the Soviet Union, began to implement a number of liberal reforms. On November 9, 1989, masses of East and West Germans alike gathered at the Berlin Wall and began to climb over and dismantle it. As this symbol of Cold War repression was destroyed, East and West Germany became one nation again, signing a formal treaty of unification on October 3, 1990.

READ MORE: The Surprising Human Factors Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall

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New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle dies

Year
1995
Month Day
August 13

Former New York Yankees star Mickey Mantle dies of liver cancer at the age of 63. While “The Mick” patrolled center field and batted clean-up between 1951 and 1968, the Yankees won 12 American League pennants and seven World Series championships.

Mantle was born in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, on October 20, 1931. He grew up in nearby Commerce, and played baseball and football as a youth. With the help of his father, Mutt, and grandfather, Charlie, Mantle developed into a switch-hitter. Mutt pitched to Mantle right-handed and Charlie pitched to him left-handed every day after school. With the family’s tin barn as a backstop, Mantle perfected his swing, which his father helped model so it would be identical from either side of the plate. Mantle had natural speed and athleticism and gained strength working summers with his father in Oklahoma’s lead mines. “The Commerce Comet” eventually won a scholarship to play football for the University of Oklahoma. However, baseball was Mantle’s first love, so when the New York Yankees came calling, Mantle moved to the big city.

Mantle made his debut for the Yankees in 1951 at age 19, playing right field alongside aging center fielder Joe DiMaggio. That year, in Game 2 of the World Series, Willie Mays of the New York Giants hit a pop fly to short center, and Mantle sprinted toward the ball. DiMaggio called him off, and while slowing down, Mantle’s right shoe caught the rubber cover of a sprinkler head. “There was a sound like a tire blowing out, and my right knee collapsed,” Mantle remembered in his memoir, All My Octobers. Mantle returned the next season, but by then his blazing speed had begun to deteriorate, and he ran the bases with a limp for the rest of his career.

Still, Mantle dominated the American League for more than a decade. In 1956, he won the Triple Crown, leading his league in batting average, home runs and runs batted in. His output was so great that he led both leagues in 1956, hitting .353 with 52 home runs and 130 runs batted in. He was also voted American League MVP that year, and again in 1957 and 1962. After years of brilliance, Mantle’s career began to decline by 1967, and he was forced to move to first base. The next season would be his last. Mantle was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1974 in his first year of eligibility.

Mantle’s father and son both died in their 30s, the result of Hodgkin’s disease. Mantle was sure the same fate would befall him, and joked he would have taken better care of himself if he knew he would live. In 1994, after years of alcoholism, Mantle was diagnosed with liver cancer, and urged his fans to take care of their health, saying “Don’t be like me.” Although he received a liver transplant, by then the cancer had spread to his lungs, and he died at just after 2 a.m. on August 13, 1995, at the Baylor University Cancer Center in Dallas.

At the time of his death Mantle held many of the records for World Series play, including most home runs (18), most RBIs (40) and most runs (42).

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“Fast Times at Ridgemont High” debuts

Year
1982
Month Day
August 13

On August 13, 1982, the teenage coming-of-age comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High opens in theaters around the United States. Written by Cameron Crowe and directed by Amy Heckerling, the film follows a year in the life of high school students Stacy (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Linda (Phoebe Cates), Mark (Brian Backer) and Mike (Robert Romanus) and their assorted classmates and teachers. The ensemble cast also featured the (then relatively unknown) future A-list actors Sean Penn, Nicolas Cage and Forest Whitaker, as well as Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Ray Walston and Anthony Edwards.

One of the film’s most memorable characters was the surfer-stoner Jeff Spicoli (whose lines included his greeting of Walston’s teacher character with the salutation “Aloha, Mr. Hand”), played by Sean Penn. The actor, who was born in 1960, made his feature-film debut in 1981’s Taps. Following Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Penn went on to a lengthy list of critically acclaimed performances in such movies as Bad Boys (1983), At Close Range (1986), Casualties of War (1989), Dead Man Walking (1995), for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, and The Thin Red Line (1998). He earned another Oscar nomination for his starring turn as a jazz musician in Sweet and Lowdown (1999) and a third for playing a mentally disabled man in I Am Sam (2001). He finally took home the Oscar for Best Actor for 2003’s suspenseful drama Mystic River. Penn is also an accomplished filmmaker who wrote and directed 2007’s Oscar-nominated Into the Wild.

Following his minor role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Nicolas Cage, who was born in 1964, eventually went on to star in a long string of movies, including 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won a Best Actor Academy Award, and 2002’s Adaptation, which earned him a Best Actor Oscar nomination. Forrest Whitaker, who was born in 1961 and also had a small part in Fast Times, won a Best Actor Oscar for his performance as the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 2006’s The Last King of Scotland.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High marked Cameron Crowe’s feature-film debut as a writer and was based on a 1981 book of the same name that he penned after going undercover to research it at a San Diego high school. Crowe, who was born in 1957, went on to write and direct another classic teen movie, Say Anything (1989), starring John Cusack, as well as Singles (1992); Jerry Maguire (1996), which starred Tom Cruise and was nominated for five Oscars (Cuba Gooding Jr. won for Best Supporting Actor); and Almost Famous (2000), which was based on Crowe’s real-life experience as a teenage journalist for Rolling Stone magazine. Almost Famous was nominated for four Oscars (Crowe won for Best Original Screenplay). His other movie credits include Vanilla Sky (2001), Elizabethtown (2005), We Bought a Zoo (2011) and Aloha (2015). After Fast Times at Ridgemont High, the director Amy Heckerling was best known for the comedy Look Who’s Talking (1989) and Clueless (19995), a sharply written update of Jane Austen’s classic novel Emma set in a Southern California high school.

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First victim of Memphis yellow fever epidemic dies

Year
1878
Month Day
August 13

On August 13, 1878, Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner, dies of yellow fever in Memphis, Tennessee, after a man who had escaped a quarantined steamboat visited her restaurant. The disease spread rapidly and the resulting epidemic emptied the city.

Yellow fever, which is carried by mosquitoes, originally came from West Africa and was brought to the United States on slave ships. The disease requires warm weather to survive and thrives in wet and hot summers when mosquitoes can breed prodigiously. After a three-to-six-day incubation period, an afflicted person feels flu-like symptoms such as fever and aches. After a very short remission, a more intense stage often follows, during which the victim vomits blood and suffers liver and renal failure. Jaundice is also a typical symptom, which is how yellow fever got its name. If a victim dies, it usually happens within two weeks. Survivors can feel the effects for months.

READ MORE: When the Yellow Fever Outbreak of 1793 Sent the Wealthy Fleeing Philadelphia

In the 19th century, it was not known that mosquitoes carried yellow fever. New York City, Philadelphia and New Orleans all experienced serious epidemics that spread rapidly and killed thousands. Memphis, a city of 50,000, had outbreaks in 1855, 1867 and 1873, with each outbreak getting progressively worse. Those who came down with yellow fever were quarantined in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading. Often, they were made to wear yellow jackets as a means of identification.

In July 1878, an outbreak of yellow fever was reported in Vicksburg, just south of Memphis. Memphis officials reacted by stopping travel to the city from the south. However, William Warren, a steamboat worker, somehow slipped away and into Kate Bionda’s restaurant on the shore of the Mississippi on August 1. The next day he needed hospitalization and was sent to President’s Island for quarantine, where he died. Kate Bionda, the first Memphis resident to get yellow fever, died on August 13. After that, yellow-fever infections spread quickly throughout Memphis.

Most of the residents who were able to fled the city. Twenty-five thousand people picked up and left within a week. For the most part, it was the African American residents who remained in town, although they died at a much lower rate than the white residents who contracted the disease. An average of 200 people died every day through September. There were corpses everywhere and near continual ringing of funeral bells. Half of the city’s doctors died.

The epidemic ended with the first frost in October, but by that time, 20,000 people in the Southeast had died and another 80,000 had survived infection. In the aftermath, open sewers and privies were cleaned up, destroying the breeding grounds for mosquitoes and preventing further epidemics.

Today, yellow-fever outbreaks still occur in Africa and South America.

Read all our pandemic coverage here

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Yosemite killer Cary Stayner born

Year
1961
Month Day
August 13

Cary Stayner, the serial killer convicted in the grisly murders of four women near Yosemite National Park, is born on August 13, 1961. In 1972, Stayner’s childhood took a tragic turn when his younger brother Steven, then seven, was kidnapped while walking home from school in the family’s hometown of Merced, California. Steven’s abductor, convicted child molester Kenneth Parnell, held him captive for seven years before he managed to escape and return home. Compounding the tragedy, Steven was killed in a 1989 motorcycle accident.

In 1997, Cary Stayner began working as a handyman at the Cedar Lodge in the town of El Portal, near Yosemite. On February 15, 1999, three tourists at the motel, 42-year-old Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter Juli and their 16-year-old family friend Silvina Pelosso, went missing. In March, the charred remains of Carol Sund and Pelosso were discovered in the trunk of their burned-out rental car in a remote area several hours from the Cedar Lodge. Juli Sund’s decomposed body was discovered on March 25 in an isolated location less than an hour away from the rental car. Investigators initially interviewed Stayner in the case, but didn’t believe the clean-cut handyman, who had no history of violence, was involved. Instead, the investigation focused on other employees at the Cedar Lodge and on suspicious persons in the town of Modesto, where Carol Sund’s wallet was found in the street several days after her disappearance. Then, on July 22, 1999, the decapitated body of Joie Armstrong, a 26-year-old Yosemite naturalist, was found near her cabin.

Investigators, who believed she had been murdered the previous day, questioned Stayner and searched his truck, but let him go. Wanting to talk to him further, authorities then tracked him down at the Laguna Del Sol nudist camp in Wilton, California, on July 24, 1999. Later that day, in a surprising confession to FBI agent Jeff Rinek, Stayner admitted to killing all four women. Stayner later stated he had fantasized about killing women since he was a child and during trial, his lawyers argued he suffered the effects of mental illness, childhood sexual abuse and the trauma of his brother’s kidnapping. Stayner was convicted in all four murders and given the death penalty.

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Record day for the Berlin Airlift

Year
1948
Month Day
August 13

Responding to increasing Soviet pressure on western Berlin, U.S. and British planes airlift a record amount of supplies into sections of the city under American and British control. The massive resupply effort, carried out in weather so bad that some pilots referred to it as “Black Friday,” signaled that the British and Americans would not give in to the Soviet blockade of western Berlin.

READ MORE: Why the Berlin Airlift Was the First Major Battle of the Cold War

Berlin, like all of Germany, was divided into zones of occupation following World War II. The Russians, Americans, and British all received a zone, with the thought being that the occupation would be only temporary and that Germany would eventually be reunited. By 1948, however, Cold War animosities between the Soviets and the Americans and British had increased to such a degree that it became obvious that German reunification was unlikely. In an effort to push the British and Americans out of their zones of occupation in western Berlin, the Soviets began to interfere with road and rail traffic into those parts of the city in April 1948. (Though divided into zones of occupation, the city of Berlin was geographically located entirely within the Russian occupation area in Germany.) 

In June 1948, the Russians halted all ground and water travel into western Berlin. The Americans and British responded with a massive airlift to supply the people in their Berlin zones of occupation with food, medicine, and other necessities. It was a daunting logistical effort, and meant nearly round-the-clock flights in and out of western Berlin. August 13, 1948, was a particularly nasty day, with terrible weather compounding the crowded airspace and exhaustion of the pilots and crews. Nevertheless, over 700 British and American planes landed in western Berlin, bringing in nearly 5,000 tons of supplies.

The joint British-American effort on what came to known as “Black Friday” was an important victory for two reasons. First and foremost, it reassured the people of western Berlin that the two nations were not backing down from their promise to defend the city from the Soviets. Second, it was another signal that the Soviet blockade was not only unsuccessful but was also backfiring into a propaganda nightmare. While the Soviets looked like bullies and heartless despots for their efforts to starve western Berlin into submission, the British and Americans—flaunting their technological superiority—were portrayed as heroes by the worldwide audience.

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