Today is Thursday, Oct. 29, the 303rd day of 2020. There are 63 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
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- On Oct. 29, 1929, “Black Tuesday” descended upon the New York Stock Exchange. Prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as America’s “Great Depression” began.
On this date:
- In 1901, President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was electrocuted.
- In 1940, a blindfolded Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson drew the first number — 158 — from a glass bowl in America’s first peacetime military draft.
- In 1956, during the Suez Canal crisis, Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” premiered as NBC’s nightly television newscast.
- In 1960, a chartered plane carrying the California Polytechnic State University football team crashed on takeoff from Toledo, Ohio, killing 22 of the 48 people on board.
- In 1967, Expo 67 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, closed after six months.
- In 1987, following the confirmation defeat of Robert H. Bork to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, President Ronald Reagan announced his choice of Douglas H. Ginsburg, a nomination that fell apart over revelations of Ginsburg’s previous marijuana use. Jazz great Woody Herman died in Los Angeles at age 74.
- In 1994, gunman Francisco Martin Duran fired more than two dozen shots from a semiautomatic rifle at the White House. (Duran was later convicted of trying to assassinate President Bill Clinton and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.)
- In 1998, Sen. John Glenn, at age 77, roared back into space aboard the shuttle Discovery, retracing the trail he’d blazed for America’s astronauts 36 years earlier.
- In 2004, four days before Election Day in the U.S., Osama bin Laden, in a videotaped statement, directly admitted for the first time that he’d ordered the September 11 attacks and told Americans “the best way to avoid another Manhattan” was to stop threatening Muslims' security.
- In 2012, Superstorm Sandy slammed ashore in New Jersey and slowly marched inland, devastating coastal communities and causing widespread power outages; the storm and its aftermath were blamed for at least 182 deaths in the U.S.
- In 2017, all but 10 members of the Houston Texans took a knee during the national anthem, reacting to a remark from team owner Bob McNair to other NFL owners that “we can’t have the inmates running the prison.”
- In 2018, a new-generation Boeing jet operated by the Indonesian budget airline Lion Air crashed in the Java Sea minutes after takeoff from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board; it was the first of two deadly crashes involving the 737 Max, causing the plane to be grounded around the world as Boeing worked on software changes to a flight-control system.
Today’s Birthdays:
Actor Richard Dreyfuss is 73. Actor Kate Jackson is 72. Country musician Steve Kellough (Wild Horses) is 64. Actor Dan Castellaneta (TV: “The Simpsons”) is 63. Comic strip artist Tom Wilson (“Ziggy”) is 63. Actor Finola Hughes is 61. Singer Randy Jackson is 59. Rock musician Peter Timmins (Cowboy Junkies) is 55. Actor Joely Fisher is 53. Rapper Paris is 53. Actor Rufus Sewell is 53. Actor Grayson McCouch is 52. Rock singer SA Martinez (311) is 51. Actor Winona Ryder is 49. Actor Tracee Ellis Ross is 48. Actor Gabrielle Union is 48. Actor Trevor Lissauer is 47. Olympic gold medal bobsledder Vonetta Flowers is 47. Actor Milena Govich is 44. Actor Jon Abrahams is 43. Actor Brendan Fehr is 43. Actor Ben Foster is 40. Rock musician Chris Baio (Vampire Weekend) is 36. Actor Janet Montgomery is 35. Actor India Eisley is 27.