Moments in Time – March 5, 2025

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• On March 17, 1905, future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt married Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin once removed, in New York. Former President Theodore Roosevelt gave away the bride.
• On March 18, 1911, composer Irving Berlin obtained the copyright for “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a multimillion-selling hit that helped turn American popular music into a major international phenomenon.
• On March 19, 1957, Elvis Presley arranged to purchase the Colonial mansion on the outskirts of Memphis called Graceland for $102,500, with a cash deposit of $1,000. It is still preserved exactly as Elvis left it when he died in 1977 and is one of America’s most popular tourist attractions – the second-most-visited house in the nation after the White House.
• On March 20, 1345, according to scholars at the University of Paris, the Black Death, aka the Plague, was created from “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius,” though it was actually carried by fleas that typically traveled on rats. It cut a swath across Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the 14th century, leaving an estimated 25 million dead in its wake, and popped up periodically until the 1700s, but never again reached epidemic proportions.
• On March 21, 1980, President Jimmy Carter announced that the U.S. would boycott the Olympic Games scheduled to take place in Moscow that summer, after the Soviet Union failed to comply with his Feb. 20, 1980, deadline to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Four years later, in retaliation, the Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympic Games held in Los Angeles.
• On March 22, 1983, the Pentagon awarded a production contract worth more than $1 billion to AM General Corp. for the development of 55,000 high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles. Nicknamed the Humvee and designed to transport troops and cargo, the vehicles were used by the American military during the 1989 invasion of Panama and the Persian Gulf War in the early 1990s.
• On March 23, 1839, the initials “O.K.” were first published in The Boston Morning Post. An abbreviation for “oll korrect,” a popular slang misspelling of “all correct” at the time, OK steadily made its way into the American vernacular.

© 2025 King Features Synd., Inc.