Moments in Time – April 24, 2019

#Middlebury

• On May 10, 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes has the White House’s first telephone installed, although he rarely received phone calls. In fact, the Treasury Department possessed the only other direct phone line to the White House at that time. The White House phone number was “1.”
• On May 9, 1926, according to their claims, American polar explorer Richard E. Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett fly over the North Pole in a triple-engine Fokker monoplane. However, the discovery in 1996 of Byrd’s diary suggests they may have turned back short of the pole because of an oil leak.
• On May 12, 1949, an early crisis of the Cold War comes to an end when the Soviet Union lifts its 11-month blockade of West Berlin. The blockade had been broken by a massive U.S.-British airlift of supplies to West Berlin’s 2 million citizens.
• On May 6, 1954, in Oxford, England, 25-year-old medical student Roger Bannister cracks track and field’s most notorious barrier: the four-minute mile. Bannister won the mile race with a time of 3:59.4.
• On May 8, 1973, in South Dakota, armed members of the American Indian Movement surrender to federal authorities, ending their 71-day siege of Wounded Knee, site of the infamous massacre of 300 Sioux by the U.S. 7th Cavalry in 1890.
• On May 11, 1988, Kim Philby, a former British intelligence officer and double agent for the Soviet Union, dies in Moscow. Philby was perhaps the most famous of a group of British government officials who spied for Russia from the 1930s to the 1950s.
• On May 7, 1994, Norway’s most famous painting, “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, is recovered almost three months after it was stolen from a museum in Oslo. It was recovered undamaged from a hotel about 40 miles away.

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