Moments in Time – January 6, 2021

#Middlebury

• On Jan. 19, 1809, poet, author and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston. In 1836 Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, and completed his first full-length work of fiction, “Arthur Gordon Pym.”
• On Jan. 23, 1941, Charles Lindbergh, a national hero since his nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic, testifies before Congress and suggests that the U.S. negotiate a neutrality pact with Hitler. He publicly denounced “the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration.”
• On Jan. 21, 1950, former State Department official Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury in testimony about his alleged involvement in a Soviet spy ring before and during World War II.
• On Jan. 20, 1961, 87-year-old Robert Frost recited his poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Although Frost had written a new poem for the occasion, faint ink in his typewriter made the words difficult to read, so he recited “The Gift Outright” from memory.
• On Jan. 24, 1972, after 28 years of hiding in the jungles of Guam, farmers discover Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese sergeant who was unaware that World War II had ended. Yokoi went into hiding in 1944 rather than surrender.
• On Jan. 22, 1984, during Super Bowl XVIII, audiences first see a commercial now widely agreed to be one of the most powerful and effective of all time. Apple’s “1984” spot featured a young woman throwing a sledgehammer through a screen on which a Big Brother-like figure preached about “the unification of thought.”
• On Jan. 18, 1990, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry is arrested and charged with drug possession and use of crack cocaine. Barry was caught on camera at a downtown hotel smoking crack with Rahsheeda Moore, who had agreed to set up Barry in exchange for a reduced sentence on a drug conviction.

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