22nd March: Today In History

Today is Wednesday, March 22nd, the 81st day of 2017. There are 284 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

Events:

1765:  The British Parliament passed the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies, which fiercely resisted the tax. (The Stamp Act was repealed a year later.)

1638:  Religious dissident Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for defying Puritan orthodoxy.

1894:  Hockey’s first Stanley Cup championship game was played; home team Montreal defeated Ottawa, 3-1.

1929:  A U.S. Coast Guard vessel sank a Canadian-registered schooner, the I’m Alone, which was suspected of carrying bootleg liquor, in the Gulf of Mexico.

1933:  During Prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure to make wine and beer containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol legal.

1941:  The Grand Coulee hydroelectric dam in Washington state officially went into operation.

1958:  Movie producer Mike Todd, the husband of actress Elizabeth Taylor, and three other people, were killed in the crash of Todd’s private plane near Grants, New Mexico.

1968:  President Lyndon B. Johnson named Gen. William C. Westmoreland to be the U.S. Army’s new Chief of Staff.

1978:  Karl Wallenda, the 73-year-old patriarch of “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act, fell to his death while attempting to walk a cable strung between two hotel towers in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

1987:  A garbage barge, carrying 3,200 tons of refuse, left Islip, New York, on a six-month journey in search of a place to unload. (The barge was turned away by several states and three other countries until space was found back in Islip.)

1991:  High school instructor Pamela Smart, accused of recruiting her teenage lover and his friends to kill her husband, Gregory, was convicted in Exeter, New Hampshire, of murder-conspiracy and being an accomplice to murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

1992:  27 people were killed when a USAir Fokker F-28 jetliner bound for Cleveland crashed on takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport; 24 people survived.

1997:  Tara Lipinski, at age 14 years and 10 months, became the youngest ladies’ world figure skating champion in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Birthdays:

Composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim is 87.

Evangelist broadcaster Pat Robertson is 87.

Actor William Shatner is 86.

Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is 83.

Actor M. Emmet Walsh is 82.

Actor-singer Jeremy Clyde is 76.

Singer-guitarist George Benson is 74.

Writer James Patterson is 70.

CNN newscaster Wolf Blitzer is 69.

Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is 69.

Actress Fanny Ardant is 68.

Sportscaster Bob Costas is 65