Today in History: July 18

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

John Glenn (above) is 95 today. The last member of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronaut corps, he is also the oldest living former U.S. Senator, and—with his October 1998 mission as a payload specialist on Discovery mission STS-95 at age 77—he remains the oldest person to have traveled in space.

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Douglas Corrigan was supposed to fly from Brooklyn, New York, to California on July 17, 1938. However, he probably always intended to fly in the opposite direction, to Europe, taking his self-built plane on a solo transatlantic flight. (His plane had been rejected for a cross-ocean flight because it was deemed not flight-worthy for such a long trip with no place to land in case of emergency.)
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Just Drive

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

If the photo above is not of the actual car that my family owned in 1979, it is the same model Chevy Malibu station wagon that my memory has chosen to remember as the actual car that my parents drove to cart my sister and ten-year-old me around that summer and every other summer, before 1979 and after.

(My memory is not what it used to be: It is better!)

Our family road trips over about two decades included vacations in Vermont (to see family), weekends on Cape Cod and in Pennsylvania Dutch country and along the Connecticut shore. We were not a wealthy family, so our family vacations were always road trips to a destination that we could reach in one day or less of driving. My father was the only driver, so this was more than fair. The long(ish) car ride was simultaneously unendurable and somehow, maybe sometimes, the only part of the trip that was worth remembering.
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Today in History: July 17

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Boeing 747-131 carried registration N93119 and it was 15 years old. In those 15 years, it completed 16,869 flights and was in the air 93,000 hours. Twenty years ago today, it landed uneventfully at JFK Airport from Athens, Greece. That was flight 16,869.

Later that same day, as the sun was setting, it took off for its 16,870th flight. It was TWA Flight 800 to Rome, Italy, and it exploded at about 15,000 feet altitude over the Atlantic Ocean just south of Smith Point on Long Island. Everyone on board was killed, 212 passengers and 18 crew.

A sanctuary and park, the TWA Flight 800 International Memorial, was built and dedicated next to Smith Point County Park in 2004. It is depicted at top.
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