Wednesday, October 26

This Day In History

• 1774   The First Continental Congress adjourned in Philadelphia.
  
• 1785   The first Spanish jacks imported to the United States arrived in Boston this day. They were a gift from King Charles III of Spain. George Washington bred them resulting in the first donkeys to be born in America.
  
• 1825   The Erie Canal opened, connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River in upstate New York.
  
• 1881   The gunfight at the OK Corral took place in Tombstone, Ariz., as Wyatt Earp, his two brothers and ''Doc'' Holliday confronted Ike Clanton's gang. Three members of Clanton's gang were killed; Earp's brothers were wounded.
  
• 1958   Pan American Airways flew its first Boeing 707 jetliner from New York to Paris; the trip took eight hours and 41 minutes.
  
• 1962   In one of the most dramatic verbal confrontations of the Cold War, American U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson asked his Soviet counterpart during a Security Council debate whether the USSR had placed missiles in Cuba.
  
• 1967   The Shah of Iran crowned himself and his queen after 26 years on the Peacock Throne.
  
• 1972   National security adviser Henry Kissinger declared ''peace is at hand'' in Vietnam.
  
• 1975   Anwar Sadat became the first Egyptian president to pay an official visit to the United States.
  
• 1977   The experimental space shuttle Enterprise glided to a bumpy but successful landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
  
• 1979   South Korean President Park Chung-hee was shot to death by the head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, Kim Jae-kyu.
  
• 1984   A newborn with a severe heart defect was given the heart of a baboon in an experimental transplant in Loma Linda, Calif.
  
• 1996   Federal prosecutors cleared Richard Jewell as a suspect in the Olympic park bombing.
  
• 2000   The New York Yankees became the first team in more than a quarter century to win three straight World Series championships, beating the New York Mets 4-2 in Game 5 of the ''Subway Series.''
  
• 2001   The Supreme Court building was closed for anthrax testing, and traces of anthrax were found in the State Department and CIA headquarters.
  
• 2002   A hostage siege by Chechen rebels at a Moscow theater ended with 129 of the 800-plus captives dead, most from a knockout gas used by Russian special forces who stormed the theater.
  

Happy Birthday To

• 1854   C.W. (Charles William) Post (cereal mogul; founder of Post cereals and products: Grape Nuts, Post Toasties, Postum; died May 9, 1914)
  
• 1874   Abby (Greene Aldrich) Rockefeller (philanthropist: cofounder of NY Museum of Modern Art; died Apr 5, 1948)
  
• 1911   Mahalia Jackson (singer)
  
• 1914   Jackie Coogan (John Leslie Coogan, Jr.) (actor: The Kid: 1st full-length movie to star a child; Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, College Swing, Outlaw Women, The Shakiest Gun in the West, The Escape Artist, The Addams Family, McKeever & The Colonel; TV panelist: Pantomime Quiz; cause of the Coogan Act requiring parent’s of child actors to put their earnings in trust; died Mar 1, 1984)
  
• 1916   Francois Mitterand (President of France [1981-1995]; died Jan 8, 1996)
  
• 1946   Pat Sajak (TV host: Wheel of Fortune, The Pat Sajak Show)
  
• 1947   Hillary Rodham Clinton (attorney; First Lady: wife of 42nd U.S. President William J. Clinton)
  
• 1947   Jaclyn Smith (actress: Charlie’s Angels, Christine Cromwell, The Bourne Identity, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Goodbye Columbus; commercials: Breck girl)