(Author’s note: Jason’s Chart Attack! from last week is the inspiration for this post. While we were listening to all that stuff, all this stuff was happening.)

May 21, 1985, was a Tuesday. By presidential proclamation, it is National Maritime Day, honoring the American merchant marine. It is also National Medical Transcriptionist Week. At the White House, Ronald Reagan meets with the president of Honduras. The Associated Press reports that the gross national product is expanding at the slowest rate since the 1981-82 recession. Hundreds of members of the Church of Scientology, including John Travolta, picket the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, to protest a $39 million fraud judgment against the church. In Orange, California, Patti Frustaci gives birth to the first set of septuplets ever born in the United States. (One is stillborn; three more will die.) Also born: future Florida Marlins pitcher Andrew Miller and Mutya Buena, future member of the Sugababes and collaborator with Amy Winehouse. Also dying: 10 people in Newton Falls, Ohio, killed by a tornado.

Ford Motor Company issues a recall on the 1985 Mercury Grand Marquis, the 1985 Mercury Capri, and the 1982 Ford Escort. The World Series of Poker wraps up in Las Vegas; Bill Smith wins $700,000 at the final table. A European patent is granted for an annular clamping member, which is used to attach a gear or pulley to a shaft, and the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals throws out a Georgia law making sodomy a crime. On TV tonight, there’s the sitcom Hail to the Chief, about the first female president, played by Patty Duke. The made-for-TV movie Do You Remember Love? stars Joanne Woodward as a woman with Alzheimer’s disease, and an episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline looks at the challenges facing America’s growing senior-citizen population. The top-grossing theatrical movie of the week is Code of Silence starring Chuck Norris. Also in theaters: Beverly Hills Cop, Mask, Desperately Seeking Susan, Witness, Amadeus, The Care Bears Movie, and The Killing Fields.

The Eagles’ 1974 album On the Border is released on CD for the first time. Madonna plays St. Paul with the Beastie Boys opening. Three Dog Night plays Kansas City. Eric Clapton plays Toronto. Stephen Stills plays Davis, California. Phil Collins plays Hampton, Virginia. The Cash Box magazine chart for the week features a lot of music by new artists beyond the Top 10, including “You Give Good Love” by Whitney Houston, “Voices Carry” by ‘Til Tuesday, and “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Paul Rodgers of Bad Company have teamed up in a band they call the Firm. Their first hit, “Radioactive,” is slipping down the chart, but a new one, “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” is on the way up. Its video provides employment for a bevy of model wannabes and other actors, all of whom look sweaty. The band, oddly enough, does not.

In a small college town in Illinois, which is emptying out as the students leave for the summer, the young program director of the local Top 40 station is hearing almost all of these records several times a day, but he doesn’t mind. For the first time since graduating from college, he’s got the kind of job he really wants, and it feels like the sky’s the limit.

(Find a bonus edition of One Day in Your Life for this date here.)

April 16, 1981, was a Thursday. The nation’s front pages detail the story of Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke, who admitted yesterday that her Pulitzer Prize-winning series featuring an eight-year-old heroin addict was fiction. President Reagan pardons two FBI officials who had been convicted of illegally breaking into the homes of suspected anti-Vietnam radicals. (One of them, Mark Felt, will be revealed years hence as having been the Watergate informant Deep Throat.) In Canada, controversy over Quebec’s status as a province continues to rage as eight other provinces sign an agreement stating that Quebec does not have any special veto power over a proposed new constitution.

The final episode of the revived game show To Tell the Truth is taped. The final episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century airs after two seasons on NBC. Other shows on TV include Magnum P.I., Taxi, and the made-for-TV movie Midnight Lace. A life-size statue of Charlie Chaplin is unveiled in London’s Leicester Square on what would have been Chaplin’s 92nd birthday. The Oakland A’s (8-and-0) and Los Angeles Dodgers (6-and-0) are off to hot starts in the new baseball season; the Dodgers are led by rooking pitching sensation Fernando Valenzuela. Effa Manley, the last surviving owner of a franchise in the old Negro baseball leagues, dies at age 81. Future NFL offensive tackle Jake Scott is born. (more…)