Moments in Time – February 26, 2025

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• On March 10, 1948, the communist-controlled government of Czechoslovakia reported that noncommunist Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk had died after jumping out of a window. The story was met with suspicion in the West, but nothing to the contrary was ever definitively proved.
• On March 11, 1903, accordion-playing musician and entertainer Lawrence Welk, aka the “King of Champagne Music,” was born on a farm in rural North Dakota.
• On March 12, 2020, after New York state and city leaders placed Covid-19 restrictions on public gatherings of more than 500 people, the Broadway theater district announced it would go dark for an unprecedented 32 days, the longest shutdown of its history. The closure ended up being extended to the end of May 2021, however, costing billions of dollars in tourism losses.
• On March 13, 1865, the Confederacy reluctantly approved the use of Black troops, its last source of fresh manpower, as the main Rebel army faced long odds against much larger Union counterparts. The measure did not help to save the Confederacy, since the several thousand Black men who were enlisted could not balance out the nearly 200,000 Black soldiers fighting for the Union.
• On March 14, 1924, John “Jack” Mack, who co-founded Mack Trucks, Inc., then known as the Mack Brothers Company, with his brothers Augustus and William, was killed when his car collided with a trolley in Pennsylvania.
• On March 15, 2021, Deb Haaland was sworn in as Secretary of the Interior, becoming the first Indigenous person to serve as a cabinet secretary in American history. A few years before, she was also one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress.
• On March 16, 1881, 40-year-old Francisco “Chico” Forster met an untimely end in downtown Los Angeles, courtesy of his former lover, 18-year-old Lastania Abarta. Forster had promised to marry the girl after she performed at a party, but failed to return to their hotel with either a ring or a priest. Abarta tracked him down and tried to force him to church, but when he hopped out of his cab, she fatally shot him. After her attorneys defended her on the grounds of “female hysteria,” she was acquitted and left town.

© 2025 King Features Synd., Inc.