On this day in 1748, Martha Wayles, future wife of Thomas Jefferson, is born.
Martha “Patty” Wayles Skelton Jefferson is a bit of a mystery! We don’t even have a portrait of her, although the attached silhouette is believed to be hers. Jefferson burned all of their correspondence after her death. By all accounts, though, the two were deeply in love.
Patty was a young and wealthy widow when the two married on New Year’s Day in 1772. Their first child was born 8 months and 26 days after their wedding. They named her Martha, and they called her “Patsy.” Mrs. Jefferson would have six total children over the course of her ten year marriage to Jefferson. Only two would live to adulthood.
The story continues here: http://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-martha-jefferson
On this day in 1960, a plane carrying the Cal Poly football team crashes in Ohio. The tragedy was the first airline crash involving a United States sports team.
Amazingly, 26 people survived.
The Cal Poly team had been in Ohio to play a football game, of course. That game against Bowling Green hadn’t gone very well. Afterwards, the players just wanted to get home. Surely no one was happy about the dense fog that descended upon the area. Would Cal Poly’s chartered plane be able to take off?
The pilot entrusted with the decision, it was later discovered, was flying with a suspended license.
The story continues here: http://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-cal-poly-1960
On this day in 1944, a hero engages in an action that would earn him the Medal of Honor. SSgt. Lucian Adams didn’t plan to serve in the military. He’d expected to be a professional baseball player.
“About the last thing I was planning on,” he later laughed, “was becoming a soldier and certainly it never occurred to me to be a hero. I was drafted, and once I got in the Army, I decided it was a job and I would do the best I could.”
Either way, his strong throwing arm would prove useful in France during World War II, as a local Texas journalist later observed, because Adams could forcefully hurl grenades at enemy machine gun nests.
The story continues here: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-lucian-adams-moh
On this day in 1962, the United States Navy spots a Russian submarine near Bermuda. What followed was “not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War,” historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. concludes. “It wasC
Russia and America had been teetering on the brink of war for weeks, ever since Soviet missile sites were discovered in Cuba. The United States responded with a naval blockade, and the Soviets sent submarines.
Americans couldn’t then know it, but four of these submarines were carrying nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Worse, the Soviet captains were authorized to use them.
FULL STORY: https://www.taraross.com/post/tdih-vasili-arkhipov
