October 04 Archives - PopHistory.org

Englishman wins the first US Open golf tournament

On October 4, 1895, 21-year-old Englishman Horace Rawlins wins the first U.S. Open golf tournament, edging Willie Dunn and others with a 36-hole total of 173 at the Newport (Rhode Island) Golf Club, an oceanside course.

Rawlins worked at the Newport Golf Club as an assistant to his instructor, William Davis. As the Chicago Chronicle put it, Rawlins’ win “was a surprise to everybody, as he was not expected to make a showing with such men as Davis, Dunn and [Willie] Campbell, but he played superb golf.”

But the New York Times was less charitable: “Rawlins’ game was well-balanced, strong in all it elements, yet brilliant in none.”

The U.S. Open was completed in a day, with 18 holes played in the morning and 18 in the afternoon. The modern tournament consists of four 18-hole rounds over four days.

Rawlins trailed after 18 holes, shooting a 45 followed by a 46. He was clutch down the stretch, however, shooting consecutive nine-hole totals of 41 to finish the tournament two strokes ahead of Dunn, who finished with a 175. Rawlins finished five strokes ahead of his instructor, Davis, who finished with back-to-back rounds of 42. Of the 11 golfers who entered the event, only eight finished.

Organizers reportedly deducted $50 from Rawlins’ $200 prize to offset the cost of the gold medal he was given.

Though he played in the U.S. Open 13 more times, Rawlins was unable to replicate the magic he had in the 1895 tournament. He did, however, have an impressive runner-up finish to James Foulis in 1896 in a field that had expanded from 11 to 35 golfers.

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Man who served 25 years for murder exonerated by DNA

Year: 2011

Month Day: October 04

On October 4, 2011, Michael Morton, who spent 25 years in prison for his wife’s murder, is released after DNA evidence implicates another man in the crime. The prosecutor in the case later was accused of withholding evidence indicating that Morton was innocent.

On the afternoon of August 13, 1986, a neighbor found 31-year-old Christine Morton beaten to death in her bed in the Williamson County, Texas, home (near Austin) she shared with Michael, a grocery store manager, and their 3-year-old son. Six weeks later, Morton, who had no criminal record or history of violence, was arrested for Christine’s murder. At trial, the prosecution contended Morton had slain his wife of seven years after she refused to have sex with him on the night of August 12, his 32nd birthday. Morton maintained he had nothing to do with his wife’s death and said an intruder must have killed her after he left for work early on the morning of August 13. No witnesses or physical evidence linked Morton to the crime; nevertheless, he was convicted on February 17, 1987, and sentenced to life behind bars.

In 2005, Morton’s defense team asked the state to test DNA on a variety of items, including a blood-stained bandanna found by police the day after the murder at an abandoned construction site close to the Morton home. The Williamson County district attorney successfully blocked all requests for testing until 2010, when a Texas appeals court ordered that testing on the bandana take place. In the summer of 2011, the test results revealed the bandana contained Christine Morton’s blood and hair, along with the DNA of another man, Mark Alan Norwood, a felon with a long criminal record who worked in the Austin area as a carpet layer at the time of the murder.

Michael Morton was released from prison on October 4, 2011, and officially exonerated in December of that year. A month after Morton was freed, Norwood, 57, was arrested for Christine Morton’s killing. In March 2013, he was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to life in prison. Based on DNA evidence, Norwood also was indicted for killing a second woman, Debra Baker, whose 1988 murder in Austin had remained unsolved. Like Morton, Baker was bludgeoned to death in her bed. She lived just blocks from Norwood at the time of her murder.

In October 2012, after a nearly yearlong investigation, the State Bar of Texas filed a disciplinary petition against Ken Anderson, the prosecutor in the Morton case (who became a Texas district judge in 2002), alleging he withheld various pieces of evidence from Morton’s attorneys, including a transcript of an August 1986 taped interview between the case’s lead investigator and Morton’s mother-in-law, in which she stated that Morton’s 3-year-old son had told her in detail about witnessing his mother’s murder and said his father was not home at the time. In a November 2013 deal to settle the charges against him, Anderson agreed to serve 10 days in jail, perform 500 hours of community service, give up his law license and pay a $500 fine.

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Sputnik launched

Year: 1957

Month Day: October 04

The Soviet Union inaugurates the “Space Age” with its launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for “satellite,” was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic.

Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles. Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik’s orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.

Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system. However, many Americans feared more sinister uses of the Soviets’ new rocket and satellite technology, which was apparently strides ahead of the U.S. space effort. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets heralded the beginning of the “space race.”

The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late ’60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969.

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Pope calls for end to the Vietnam War

Year: 1966

Month Day: October 04

Pope Paul VI addresses 150,000 people in St. Peter’s Square in Rome and calls for an end to the war in Vietnam through negotiations. Although the Pope’s address had no impact on the Johnson administration and its policies in Southeast Asia, his comments were indicative of the mounting antiwar sentiment that was growing both at home and overseas.

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Brooklyn Dodgers win their first World Series

Year: 1955

Month Day: October 04

On October 4, 1955, the Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series at last, beating the New York Yankees 2-0. They’d lost the championship seven times already, and they’d lost five times just to the Yanks—in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953. But in 1955, thanks to nine brilliant innings in the seventh game from 23-year-old lefty pitcher Johnny Podres, they finally managed to beat the Bombers for the first (and last) time.

The Dodgers had lost the first two games of the series at Yankee Stadium–it was the first time in history, in fact, that a team came back to win a seven-game World Series after losing the first two–and then won three in a row at home. The Yanks came back in the sixth, forcing a tiebreaking Game 7 in front of 62,465 fans in the Bronx.

In the fourth inning of the last game, Brooklyn got its first run when catcher Roy Campanella hit a double and Gil Hodges sent him home with a well-placed single. In the sixth, a Yankee error helped the Dodgers load the bases. Even though veteran pitcher Tommy Byrne had only given up three hits, manager Casey Stengel pulled him and sent in right-handed reliever Bob Grim—but that didn’t stop Hodges from knocking a long sacrifice fly to center field. Pee Wee Reese made it safely home, and the Dodgers were winning by 2.

And then, the game’s defining moment. At the bottom of the sixth, Podres walked Billy Martin and Gil McDougald outran a bunt to first, putting two on with nobody out. Then Yogi Berra sliced an outside pitch hard down the left-field foul line–a game-tying double, for sure, until backup outfielder Sandy Amoros came running out of nowhere, stuck out his glove and snagged the ball as he careened toward the stands. He wheeled and threw to shortstop Reese, who tossed it to Hodges at first, who caught McDougald off the bag by inches. The Yanks’ sure thing had soured into a game-killing double play.

The final triumphant out came on an Elston Howard grounder to Reese, the 38-year-old team captain who’d been around for all five of the Dodgers’ losses to their cross-town rivals. Reese scooped up the ball and fired low and wide to first, but somehow–as John Drebinger wrote in the Times the next day, “Gil would have stretched halfway across the Bronx for that one”–Hodges grabbed it in time to send Howard back to the dugout and end the game.

The 1955 series turned out to be the only one the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever win. They lost to the Yanks again the next year. The year after that, the team’s owner decided he’d rather play in a swank stadium in a nicer neighborhood, so he moved the team to California. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won the championship five times.

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Work begins on Mount Rushmore

Year: 1927

Month Day: October 04

On October 4, 1927, sculpting begins on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. It would take another 12 years for the granite images of four of America’s most revered presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt—to be completed.

The monument was the brainchild of a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson, who was looking for a way to attract more tourists to his state. He hired a sculptor named Gutzon Borglum to carve the faces into the mountain. The Lakota Sioux people, who consider the Black Hills to be sacred ground, strongly opposed the project. The mountain was previously part of the Great Sioux Reservation before being taken away from them by the U.S. government.

According to the National Park Service, the first face to be chiseled was George Washington’s; Borglum first sculpted the head as an egg shape, his features added later. Thomas Jefferson’s image was originally fashioned in the space to the right of Washington, but, within two years, the face was badly cracked. Workers had to blast the sculpture off the mountain using dynamite. Borglum then started over with Jefferson situated on the left side of Washington.

Washington’s face was the first to be completed in 1934. Jefferson’s was dedicated in 1936–with then-president Franklin Roosevelt in attendance–and Lincoln’s was completed a year later. In 1939, Teddy Roosevelt’s face was completed. The project, which cost $1 million, was funded primarily by the federal government.

Borglum continued to touch up his work at Mount Rushmore until he died suddenly in 1941. Borglum had originally hoped to also carve a series of inscriptions into the mountain, outlining the history of the United States.

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Janis Joplin dies of a heroin overdose

In the summer of 1966, Janis Joplin was a drifter; four years later, she was a rock-and-roll legend. She’d gone from complete unknown to generational icon on the strength of a single, blistering performance at the Monterey International Pop Festival in the summer of 1967, and she’d followed that up with three years of touring and recording that cemented her status as, in the words of one critic, “second only to Bob Dylan in importance as a creator/recorder/embodiment of her generation’s history and mythology.”

Born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1943, Janis Joplin made her way to San Francisco in 1966, where she fell in with a local group called Big Brother and the Holding Company. It was with this group that she would become famous, first through her legendary performance of “Ball And Chain” at Monterey and then with the 1968 album Cheap Thrills. She soon split off to launch a solo career, however, her personality and her voice being far too big to be contained within a group.

”I’d rather not sing than sing quiet,” she once said in comparing herself to one of her musical idols. “Billie Holliday was subtle and refined. I’m going to shove that power right into you, right through you and you can’t refuse it.” But if sheer abandon was Janis Joplin’s vocal trademark, she nevertheless always combined it with a musicality and authenticity that lent her music a great deal more soul than much of what the psychedelic era produced.

But it was never just music, or the passion she displayed in performing it, that made Janis Joplin an icon. It was the no-holds-barred gusto with which she lived every other aspect of her life as well. Far from being an empty cliché, “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” was a revolutionary philosophy to many in the late 1960s, and Janis Joplin was its leading female exponent. Her string of romantic conquests ranged from Kris Kristofferson to Dick Cavett. Her drug and alcohol consumption was prolific. And the rock and roll she produced was timeless, from “Piece Of My Heart,” “Get It While You Can” and “Mercedes Benz” to her biggest pop hit, “Me And My Bobby McGee.”

In the autumn of 1970, Janis Joplin was in Los Angeles putting the finishing touches on the album that would prove to be the biggest hit of her career, Pearl. She did not live to see the album’s release, however. On this day in 1970, she died of an accidental heroin overdose and was discovered in her Los Angeles hotel room after failing to show for a scheduled recording session. She was 27 years old.

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“Beverly Hills, 90210” debuts

Year: 1990

Month Day: October 04

On October 4, 1990, Beverly Hills, 90210, a TV drama about a group of teenagers living in upscale Beverly Hills, California, debuts on Fox; it will eventually become one of the top-rated shows on the new “fourth network,” which launched in 1986. Created by Darren Star and produced by Aaron Spelling, the show turned its relatively unknown cast of actors, including Luke Perry, Jason Priestley and Tori Spelling (Aaron’s daughter), into household names. It also tackled a number of topical issues ranging from domestic abuse to teen pregnancy to AIDS and paved the way for other popular teen dramas, including Dawson’s Creek and The O.C.

Beverly Hills, 90210 originally centered around Brenda (Shannen Dougherty) and Brandon Walsh (Priestley), middle-class high-school-age twins from Minnesota who relocate to ritzy Beverly Hills with their parents. The Walshes attend the fictional West Beverly Hills High School, along with bad boy Dylan (Perry), popular blonde Kelly (Jennie Garth), rich kid Steve (Ian Ziering), virginal Donna (Spelling) and nerdy David (Brian Austin Green). Over the course of the show’s 10 seasons, the characters became entangled in numerous love triangles, graduated from high school and moved on to college and careers.

The show was the first big hit for the screenwriter and producer Darren Star, who went on to create the 90210 spinoff Melrose Place, which originally aired from 1992 to 1999, and the popular HBO TV series Sex and the City, which originally aired from 1998 to 2004. Aaron Spelling, who died in 2006 at the age of 83, was one of the most prolific producers in the history of television. Spelling’s credits include The Mod Squad, Charlie’s Angels, Dynasty, Starsky and Hutch, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island and 7th Heaven.

The final episode of Beverly Hills, 90210 aired on May 17, 2000. A new version of the show, titled 90210, premiered on September 2, 2008. The show follows a Kansas family who moves to Beverly Hills. Of the original Beverly Hills, 90210, cast, Jennie Garth reprises her role as Kelly, now a guidance counselor at West Beverly Hills High, while Shannon Doherty has guest starred as Brenda, who has become an actress. BH90210, a reboot of the original, starring most of the same cast, premiered on Fox in August 2019.

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Plane crashes into apartment building

Year: 1992

Month Day: October 04

A cargo plane crashes into an apartment building near an airport in Amsterdam, Holland, on October 4, 1992. Four people aboard the plane and approximately 100 more in the apartment building lost their lives in the disaster.

An El-Al Boeing 747 cargo jet was scheduled to bring 114 tons of computers, machinery, textiles and various other materials from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv, Israel, on October 4. At 6:30 that Sunday evening, Captain Isaac Fuchs piloted the jet, carrying two other pilots and one passenger, out of Schipol Airport in good weather. However, only minutes after takeoff, fires broke out in the plane’s third and fourth engines and they fell right off the wing.

Fuchs decided to dump the plane’s fuel in a lake and head back to the airport, but the plane did not have enough power to make the return trip. Six miles short of the airport, Fuchs radioed, “Going down,” and the plane plunged straight into an apartment building in the Bijimermeer section of Amsterdam. A massive fireball exploded through the building. Firefighters rushed to the scene, but by the time the fire was under control, about 100 people were dead. An exact number was impossible to determine, as the explosion made body identification extremely difficult and the building housed mainly undocumented immigrants from Suriname and Aruba.

The accident was very similar to one that had taken place in Taiwan less than a year earlier, in which a China Airlines jet had crashed after losing its two right engines. An investigation into that crash had revealed the problem to be related to a fuse pin, part of the mechanism that binds the engines to the wings. Both crashes probably resulted from the fatigue and failure of this part.

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Televangelist Jim Bakker is indicted on federal charges

Year: 1988

Month Day: October 04

Televangelist Jim Bakker is indicted on federal charges of mail and wire fraud and of conspiring to defraud the public. The case against the founder of Praise the Lord (PTL) Ministries and three of his aides exploded in the press when it was revealed that Bakker had sex with former church secretary Jessica Hahn.

On December 6, 1980, Bakker and Hahn had a sexual encounter in a Florida hotel room. Although they each told different stories of what had happened, Bakker eventually paid Hahn over $350,000 to remain silent. When the arrangement became public, the scandal helped to bring down the entire PTL ministry.

Hahn, who claimed that she didn’t want to be in the spotlight, became an overnight celebrity. She posed for Playboy magazine, wrote a book about her relationship with Bakker, and even briefly lived in the Playboy mansion. Hahn, a radio announcer in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time of Bakker’s indictment, soon became a regular on Howard Stern’s radio show and appeared in rock music videos, as well.

Jim and his wife, Tammy Faye, were on top of the world before the scandal first broke. They were enormously successful at raising money for their televised religious programs, and after its 1974 debut, their cable show became the highest rated religious show in the country. The Bakkers then added talk-show elements to standard preaching, often featuring celebrities, music, and comedy. With all of the money they made from their programming, the Bakkers built a 2,200-acre resort, Heritage USA, which featured a studio large enough to seat 1,800 people. Six million people visited the park in 1986, placing it behind only Disney World and Disneyland in terms of attendance.

When the Hahn scandal was leaked, other televangelists were outraged. Jimmy Swaggart, in particular, went out of his way to condemn Bakker. Tammy Faye responded to their critics by singing “The Ballad of Jim and Tammy Faye” to the tune of “Harper Valley PTA” on their show. Still, Tammy Faye could not defend the ministry against federal charges that the funding for Heritage USA had been acquired by defrauding their viewers and donors.

Although the evidence was not particularly strong, Jim Bakker was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years in prison. The sentence was later reduced to eight years, and he was released in 1994. Tammy Faye divorced Jim while he was in prison; she died in 2007.

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