“Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.”—Nikita Khrushchev, February 25, 1956

After ten days of meetings, the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union came to a conclusion on February 24, 1956, when party officials were informed that at midnight on February 25, an unannounced “closed” session would begin. Only those with special invitations could attend. Sixty years ago tonight, at midnight, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev (pictured above) began speaking. For the next four hours, he read from a prepared text titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” in which he denounced his late predecessor, Joseph Stalin, and outlined his many crimes against the Soviet people and the Communist Party. The speech itself was not made public until 1989, but its existence was a widely discussed rumor within months of Krushchev’s reading of it. As rumored speeches go, it was effective: the Stalinist Era was over.
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The first interstate airmail-delivery-by-rocket-powered-airplane-flight took place 80 years ago today from Greenwood Lake, NY, into New Jersey. Two unmanned, single-wing planes were launched straight up into the air and crashed soon after and not many yards away. Five years ago, a writer for NorthJersey.com described the experiment as “quite possibly the most spectacularly unsuccessful delivery in the history of post.”

The United States was lagging in rocket development, and other countries were investing time and effort in sussing out what needs in society rockets could meet. Austria had flung mail from one city to another by rocket in 1931 and rumors of efforts in other countries followed.

An article in Popular Mechanics (the photo above is the cover) described the Greenwood Lake experiment as being “as significant as that first historic flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.”
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A note about The Gad About Town web site: A very sad thing happened in my girlfriend’s family this week, and while she has been attending to matters related to this, I have been striving to attend to her. My intent with the “This Day in History” feature is for it to be just that, a feature, but I have not had the time to finish my backlog of posts. Thank you all for your notes of encouragement about this feature. And, look, here it is now:

Operation Detachment, more famously known as the Battle of Iwo Jima, began 71 years ago today. The battle for control of the island, whose value as either a resource or a staging area for future operations was questioned by civilian and military authorities alike even as the invasion commenced, raged for five weeks.
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