Moments in Time – December 18, 2024

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• On Dec. 30, 1988, President Ronald Reagan and President-elect George Bush were subpoenaed to testify at the trial of Oliver North, a former White House aide implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, in which arms were secretly sold to Iran while profits from the sale were diverted to guerrillas attempting to topple the Nicaraguan government.
• On Dec. 31, 1781, America’s first bank, the Bank of North America, received its charter from the Confederation Congress. It opened in Philadelphia on Jan. 7, 1782.
• On Jan. 1, 2008, Sidney Crosby of the Pittsburgh Penguins won the NHL’s inaugural Winter Classic, the first regular-season game played outdoors in the U.S. in the league’s history, at New York’s Ralph Wilson Stadium.
• On Jan. 2, 2004, the NASA spacecraft Stardust collected dust grains from the Wild 2 comet, whose material was later revealed to contain glycine, an amino acid that is an essential building block of life.
• On Jan. 3, 1973, Congressman James Abourezk became the first Arab American to serve in the U.S. Senate, representing his home state of South Dakota.
• On Jan. 4, 1964, Mary Sullivan was raped and strangled to death in her Boston apartment, after which her killer, Albert DeSalvo (aka the Boston Strangler) left a card reading “Happy New Year’s” against her foot. Sullivan would turn out to be the final victim of DeSalvo’s notorious crime spree, in which he assaulted and murdered a total of 13 women between 1962 and 1964. Under a deal with prosecutors, he wasn’t charged with or convicted of those crimes, but received a life sentence for a series of other assaults, and was stabbed to death by an unidentified fellow inmate in 1973.
• On Jan. 5, 1643, Anne Clarke, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was granted a divorce from her husband, Denis Clarke, by Boston’s Quarter Court. Denis confessed to abandoning Anne and their two children for another woman, by whom he also had two children, and refusing to return to Anne. It was the first record of a legal divorce in the American colonies.

© 2024 King Features Synd., Inc.