Previously on this day

The “Goddess of Democracy” was a ten meter high statue created during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The statue was constructed in only four days out of Styrofoam and paper-Mache over a metal armature by students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The students made the statue as large as possible so that the government would be unable to dismantle it, forcing them to either destroy it or leave it standing.

The students began building the statue on May 27 at their university. It was built in the hopes that it would be invigorate the movement which was perceived to be losing some of its momentum. The students were influenced by the work of Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina, associated with the school of revolutionary realism.

When the State Security Bureau heard that the students planned to transport pieces of the statue to the Square, they declared that any truck drivers helping them would lose their licenses. The students hired six Beijing carts and leaked false information to throw off the authorities. It worked and at dusk on May 29, with fewer than 10,000 protesters remaining in the Square, the students began assembling the statue. By the early morning of May 30, the statue was fully assembled in Tiananmen Square and unveiled to as many as 300,000 spectators.

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Sir Edmund Hillary was born on July 20, 1919. He was a New Zealand mountaineer and explorer. On May 29, 1953 at the age of 33, he and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt.

The route to Everest was closed by Chinese-controlled Tibet and Nepal only let one expedition in a year. A Swiss expedition had attempted to reach the summit in 1952 but was turned back by bad weather at 80 feet. Hillary almost pulled out of the 1953 expedition was convinced to stay on. Hunt named two teams for the assault with Hillary and Tenzing as one of them.

The expedition totaled over 400 people, including 362 porters, 20 Sherpa guides, and 10,000 lbs of baggage. Hillary forged a route through the dangerous Khumbu Icefall. The first team failed when their oxygen system failed. It took Hillary and Tenzing three days to reach the summit and they spent 15 minutes there before going back down.

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Ian Fleming was British author, journalist, and World War II Navy Commander. He is best known for creating the character of secret agent James Bond and chronicling his adventures in 12 novels and 9 short stories.

Fleming was born in Mayfair, London on May 28, 1908 to Valentine Fleming, a Member of Parliament, and his wife Evelyn St. Croix Fleming. Fleming was educated at Sunningdale School in Berkshire, Eton College, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. After graduating from school, he worked as a journalist for the Reuters news service and later as a stockbroker with Rowe and Pitman. In 1952, he married Anne Charteris in Jamaica, witnessed by his friend and playwright Noel Coward.

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, Fleming was recruited by the Director of Naval Intelligence of the Royal Navy and his work for them during the war provided the background for his spy novels. He published his first novel, Casino Royale, in 1953 and introduced secret agent James Bond, also famously known by his code number, 007. Initially, the Bond novels were not bestsellers in the United States, but when President John F. Kennedy included From Russia with Love on his list of favorite books, sales increased dramatically. Fleming wrote 14 books in all with The Living Daylights being the last in 1966.

The financial success of these books allowed Fleming to retire to his estate in Jamaica and he died of a heart attack on August 12, 1964 in Kent, England.

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CHUM AM is a Canadian radio station licensed to Toronto, Ontario. Broadcasting at 1050 on the AM dial, it was a legendary Top 40 powerhouse between the late 1950s and 1970s. It currently airs an oldies format.

CHUM was launched as a dawn to dusk radio station on October 28, 1945 by Jack Q’Part, an entrepreneur in the business of patent medicines. The station was taken over in December 1954 by Allan Waters, a salesman from the patent medicine business. On May 27, 1957, he switched to a Top 40 format that had proven itself popular in some United States cities. Elvis Presley’s “All Shook Up” was the first song played.

The station pioneered rock ‘n’ roll radio in Toronto and hosted the 1957 Elvis Presley and the 1964, 1965, and 1966 Beatles concerts. By the mid-1980s, CHUM was losing ratings to Top 40 competitor CFTR AM and FM-based music stations. In 1986, CHUM dropped its Top 40 format for an adult contemporary format. By 1989, it adopted an oldies format. In 1999, CHUM obtained the radio broadcast rights to Toronto Blue Jays baseball games marking a shift towards sports programming.

In 2001, CHUM went completely sports-oriented but this did not prove successful because of strong competition from long-time sports station CJCL. In 2002, the station returned back to an oldies format.

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Alse Young of Windsor, Connecticut was the first person in the records to be executed for witchcraft in the United States. Very little is known about Young and her existence is only known through her reputation as a witch. It is believed that she was the wife of John Young, who bought a small parcel of land in Windsor in 1641. Alse had a daughter, Alice Young Beamon, who would be accused of witchcraft.

There is no further record of Young’s trial or the specifics of the charge. However, early historical records hint at the possibility of some sort of epidemic in Windsor in early 1647. Alse Young was hanged at the Meeting House Square in Hartford, Connecticut. Her execution anticipated the 1642 Salem witch trials by some 45 years.

In 1642, witchcraft became punishable by death in the Connecticut Colony. This capital offense was backed by reference to the King James version of the Bible. In Connecticut, witchcraft was last listed as a capital crime in 1715 and disappeared from the list when the laws were next issued in 1750.

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Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (originally known as Star Wars) is a 1977 space opera film, produced, written, and directed by George Lucas. It was the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga with two subsequent films continuing the story set with three others acting as prequels. Star Wars was considered ground-breaking in its use of special effects and became one of the most successful films of all time.

Set in a “galaxy far, far away,” the film tells the story of a young man (Mark Hamill) who becomes involved in an intergalactic civil war when he helps rescue rebel leader Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) from the oppressive Galactic Empire. Star Wars was inspired by the Flash Gordon serials and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa as well as the critical work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Lucas began work in 1974 with a budget of $11 million and in 1975 he founded the visual effects company Industrial Lights and Magic after he discovered that the studio’s effects department had been disbanded.

Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977 and earned $460 million in the United States and $337 million overseas. The film received numerous awards including 10 Academy Award nominations, winning seven of them.

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The Mercury-Atlas 7 was a Mercury program American manned space mission launched on May 24, 1962. The Mercury capsule was named Aurora 7 and made three Earth orbits and was piloted by astronaut Scott Carpenter. A targeting mishap during reentry took the spacecraft 250 miles off course which delayed the recovery of Carpenter and the craft.

The original prime crew for Mercury-Atlas 7 was to have been Deke Slayton with Walter Schirra as his back-up. Slayton was removed from all flight crew availability after the discovery of cardiac arrhythmia during a training run. The Mercury spacecraft was delivered to Cape Canaveral on March 16, 1962.

The focus of Carpenter’s five-hour Aurora 7 mission was on science. The full flight plan included the first study of liquids in weightlessness, Earth photography, and an unsuccessful attempt to observe a flare fired from the ground. Carpenter circled the Earth three times and all primary mission objectives were achieved. Because he had been distracted watching ice particles shake loose from the capsule’s exterior and his busy schedule, and a malfunction of the automatic alignment system, Carpenter overshot the planned reentry mark and splashed down off target.

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Born on March 26, 1916, Sterling Hayden was an American actor who specialized in westerns and film noirs, most notably Johnny Guitar, The Asphalt Jungle, and The Killing. Later in his career, he became known as a idiosyncratic character actor with memorable roles in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, The Godfather, and The Long Goodbye.

At age 17, he ran away to sea and served, for a time, as a sailor and a fireman. He joined the Marines and served in World War II, winning the Silver Star for his actions. Despite his prolific acting career, Hayden claimed to dislike the profession and did it mainly to pay for his sailing ships and voyages around the world. He was a successful leading man during the 1940s and 1950s, working with such notable directors as John Huston, Nicholas Ray, and Stanley Kubrick. In later years, he moved into character actor roles and was even cast as Quint in Jaws but was unable to play the role due to tax problems.

Hayden was married three times and remarried twice with six children in total. He died on May 23, 1986 in Sausalito, California from prostate cancer.

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American television host Johnny Carson, best known as the iconic host of The Tonight Show, retired from show business on this day in 1992. His last show was a major media event that spanned several nights. It was an emotional time for Carson, his colleagues and the audience, specifically his farewell monologue on his final show. NBC gave the host spot for The Tonight Show to the program’s then-current permanent guest host Jay Leno.

Carson was born on October 23, 1925 in Corning, Iowa. He learned to perform magic tricks at 14 years of age. He got his start in radio working as a news anchorman and sports broadcaster. Carson later took a job at a Los Angeles-based TV station in 1954 and was chosen by legendary comic Red Skelton to join his show as a writer. Carson hosted several TV shows before his run on The Tonight Show, including Who Do You Trust? where he met long-time sidekick Ed McMahon.

Carson became the host of The Tonight Show in October 1962 after Jack Paar quit with McMahon acting as his announcer and sidekick. For millions, watching Carson at the end of the evening became a ritual. After his last show, he went into full retirement, rarely giving interviews and only making the occasional cameo appearance. Carson died on January 23, 2005 in L.A. of respiratory arrest from emphysema.

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Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb, more commonly known as Leopold and Loeb, were two wealthy University of Chicago students who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in 1924 and were sentenced to life in prison. The duo claimed that their motivation to murder the boy was a desire to commit a perfect crime. When they went on trial, Leopold and Loeb retained Clarence Darrow as counsel for the defense.

At the time of the murder, Leopold and Loeb believed themselves to be Nietzschean supermen who could commit the perfect crime. They were both very intelligent: Leopold was a college graduate and spoke 15 languages while Loeb was the youngest graduate in the history of the University of Michigan. They met at the University of Chicago as teenagers and began committing petty theft, a series of more serious crimes, and finally the kidnapping and murder of Franks.

On May 21, 1924, Leopold and Loeb put their plot into action, kidnapping, killing, and then disposing of Franks’ body before calling his mother to tell her that her son had been kidnapped. The body was found along with evidence linking Leopold to the crime. During police questioning, their alibis broke down. Darrow defended them in court where the pleaded guilty and were both sentenced to life in prison and 99 years each. Loeb was killed in prison in 1936 and Leopold was paroled in 1958 and died in 1971.

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