November 19, 1985, is a Tuesday. Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev are in Geneva, where they will hold their first summit meeting starting today. Other headlines in the morning papers: U.S. Navy intelligence agent Jonathan Pollard was arrested yesterday for passing classified material to Israel, and in the Monday night football game, the Washington Redskins beat the New York Giants 23-21, but lost their quarterback, Joe Theismann, to a gruesomely broken leg suffered when he was tackled by Lawrence Taylor of the Giants. The injury will end the quarterback’s career. Also announced yesterday, winners of the Cy Young Award for best major league pitchers: Dwight Gooden of the New York Mets and Brett Saberhagen of the Kansas City Royals. On the comics page in 35 newspapers across the country today, readers return to a new strip that debuted yesterday: Calvin and Hobbes. Lincoln Perry, better known as Stepin Fetchit, dies at age 83, and future Pittsburgh Steeler Patrick Bailey is born.

Top movie at the box office last weekend: the vampire comedy Once Bitten, starring Lauren Hutton and an unknown named Jim Carrey in his first starring role. TV shows on the air tonight include the detective series Riptide starring Joe Penny and Perry King, The A-Team, Growing Pains, and Moonlighting. The play I’m Not Rappaport opens on Broadway. AC/DC plays Washington, DC, and Dire Straits plays Stuttgart, West Germany. The Charlie Watts band continues a six-night stand at Ronnie Scott’s Club in London. At the China Club in New York City, a birthday party for rock drummer Steve Ferrone turns into a superstar jam when David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Steve Winwood join Ferrone on stage. Needing a guitarist, Bowie makes a phone call, and 20 minutes later, Rolling Stone Ron Wood shows up to play. In Macomb, Illinois, a local radio announcer and his wife are packing to move from a one-bedroom basement apartment to a big house they’re renting. (more…)

Normally, this feature examines a single day. This time, we’ll look at several days from one extraordinary month—October 1973, when Egypt and Israel brought the world to the brink of war, Richard Nixon went nose-to-nose with the Constitution only to blink first, and Cheech and Chong had a hit single.

October 8, 1973, is a Monday. Two days after Arab forces led by Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Israel launches an unsuccessful counterattack. The Soviet Union supplies arms to Egypt and Syria. Wayne Newton co-hosts The Mike Douglas Show; primetime TV shows tonight include The Rookies and Here’s Lucy. Scandal-plagued Vice President Spiro Agnew is on the cover of Newsweek.

October 10, 1973, is a Wednesday. Agnew makes a deal: He pleads no contest to tax evasion, agrees to repayments and a fine, and resigns the vice presidency. Nixon will appoint Congressman Gerald Ford of Michigan to replace him. Tensions rise further in the Middle East after the United States pledges unlimited military aid to Israel. Israeli counterattacks recapture some of the territory lost in the war’s first hours. Future actor and TV personality Mario Lopez is born. The New York Mets win the National League pennant, defeating the Cincinnati Reds.

October 16, 1973, is a Tuesday. After a tense week in which the Soviet Union threatened to intervene in the Arab-Israeli war on behalf of Egypt and Syria and the United States continued to send aid to Israel, Egypt asks the Soviets to get the UN to order a cease-fire. OPEC cuts oil production and announces an embargo on sales to the West, especially the United States. The embargo will remain in place for five months and have a drastic effect on the American economy. Henry Kissinger wins the Nobel Peace Prize for the Vietnam peace accords. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, declines the award. Bette Midler plays Madison, Wisconsin, and the movies The Way We Were and The Paper Chase open in theaters.

(more…)

August 20, 1969, was a Wednesday.

Hurricane Camille continues to drop rain on the Eastern Seaboard; Nelson County, Virginia, records between 27 and 30 inches, causing the worst flash flooding in the state’s history. Los Angeles newspapers contain several stories on the recent murders of actress Sharon Tate and six other people by persons unknown 11 days earlier.

The East Village Other, an underground newspaper in New York, publishes an eyewitness report from the Woodstock Music and Art Fair: “a few thousand of the absolutely most together and peaceful and loving and beautiful heads in the world are gathered in a grand tribal new beginning.” Photographer Richard Avedon takes a portrait of Andy Warhol fingering a scar left after he was shot a year earlier; in 2006, the photo will be valued at approximately $100,000.

In sports, the Buffalo Bills acquire quarterback Marlin Briscoe from Denver; the Bills will convert him to a wide receiver. The Chicago Cubs lose 6-2 to the Atlanta Braves, but continue to cruise along in first place, seven games ahead of the New York Mets, who beat San Francisco 6-0. WKPT, channel 19, signs on in Kingsport, Tennessee, giving the Tri-Cities area of Kingsport, Bristol, and Johnson City its first full-time ABC affiliate.

Food scientists from the University of WIsconsin perform tests on a 105-year-old crock of cheese recently salvaged from a shipwreck in Lake Michigan. (more…)

July 16, 1971, is a Friday. Life magazine reports on the three Soviet Soyuz 11 cosmonauts who died during re-entry on June 29; consumer advocate Bess Myerson is on the cover. Preparations continue for the Apollo 15 moon mission, which will launch in 10 days. Maryann Grelinger of Kansas City, Missouri, sends President Nixon a telegram in response to the announcement yesterday that he will visit China. It says, “Have fun in Red China. Hope they keep you.” At the Western White House in San Clemente, Nixon meets with the National Security Council to discuss the Middle East and South Asia. Demographers estimate that the population of the world has passed the four billion mark. Future actor Corey Feldman is born. Radio relay operator Rick Holt of Dundalk, Maryland, writes another letter to his parents from Vietnam. (During his year in Vietnam, Holt writes his parents nearly every day, sometimes more than once.) Jeanne M. Holm, director of Women in the Air Force, is promoted to brigadier general, becoming the first woman in the U.S. military with that rank.

NBC Nightly News reports the discovery of the Tasaday, a Stone Age people living in an isolated part of the Philippines. (Years later, some anthropologists accuse the discoverers of the Tasaday of perpetrating a hoax.) A paper titled “Fiber Digestion in the Beaver” is accepted for publication by the Journal of Nutrition. New movies for the weekend include The Hunting Party starring Candice Bergen and Gene Hackman and The Devils, directed by Ken Russell and originally given an X rating before cuts were made. Top movies already out include Shaft, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

Creedence Clearwater Revival plays in Boston. Duke Ellington plays at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Top 40 fans are enjoying one of the greatest weeks in history: a harmonic convergence of great radio records and superb summer songs is pumping out of AM radios everywhere. At WLS in Chicago, Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” tops the chart for a fourth week; James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” (which King wrote, and on which she plays) holds at Number Two. (more…)