Milestones: March 1, 2024

March 1, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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LINDBERGH BABY TRAGEDY— THE ENTIRE NATION WAS SHOCKED BY THE MARCH 1, 1932 KIDNAPPING OF CHARLES LINDBERGH JR., the 20-month-old son of aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Nearly five years earlier, Charles Lindbergh, Sr. had become famous after his successful solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The Lindberghs discovered that their son was missing and found a ransom note demanding $50,000 — as well as a possible clue: a ladder and muddy footprints. As offers of assistance poured in — including one from an imprisoned Al Capone — the Lindberghs were also sent false leads, including that the baby was aboard a boat off the Massachusetts coast. The crisis ended tragically: Baby Charles’ lifeless body was discovered near the family’s Hopewell, New Jersey home, and he had been killed the same night that he was kidnapped.

Two years later, a clue showed up: a marked bill that was traced to a German immigrant named Bruno Hauptmann, after a gas station employee, suspicious of a driver, had notated the car’s license plate number. Detectives searching Hauptmann’s home found the ransom money.

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WITCH TRIALS — THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS BEGAN ON MARCH 1, 1692 WHEN THREE WOMEN IN the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Salem Village were charged with witchcraft. Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne and Tituba, an enslaved woman from Barbados, were accused of causing inexplicable maladies and “fits” on nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece, respectively of the Reverend Samuel Parris. After the girls corroborated their doctors’ diagnosis, the community began a witch hunt crusade against a growing number of residents, including men and a four-year-old girl. As the frenzy escalated, more than 150 Salem Villagers found themselves incriminated of witchcraft and/or Satanic activities, and many were executed, simply based on the witnesses’ behavior. About 19 villagers, later determined to have been innocent, were executed.

Seven months later, in October 1692, Governor William Phipps of Massachusetts ordered the Court of Oyer and Terminer dissolved and replaced with the Superior Court of Judicature, which forbade sensational testimony. The executions were halted and the accused still awaiting trial were pardoned and released.

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YELLOWSTONE BECOMES FIRST NATIONAL PARK — PRESIDENT ULYSSES S. GRANT ON MARCH 1, 1872, SIGNED THE BILL CREATING THE NATION’S FIRST NATIONAL PARK AT YELLOWSTONE. The land designated for the park had been “officially” public, but Native American peoples had for centuries lived and hunted in this area before the arrival of white Europeans who prospected a territory that spanned three future U.S. states: Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. Before President Grant signed the national parks law into effect, a government geologist named Ferdinand Hayden, photographer William Jackson, and landscape artist Thomas Moran, explored the region and created a visual recording of their discoveries. Their pictures got Congress’ attention, and the lawmakers, not recognizing the land’s monetary value, supported the national parks idea. Thus, when it was enacted, the Yellowstone Act of 1872 designated the region as a public “pleasuring ground,” which would be preserved “from injury or spoilation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within.” As the idea of national parks grew popular, Congress designated dozens more.

Yellowstone’s Wyoming region is also the site of the geyser called “Old Faithful,” because it could be depended on to erupt about once every hour. Changing geologic conditions and earthquakes decreased the frequency of water displays from Old Faithful to about 90 minutes in between each eruption.

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PEACE CORPS FOUNDED — THE PEACE CORPS, SIGNED INTO EXISTENCE AS EXECUTIVE ORDER #10924, ON MARCH 1, 1961, just weeks after President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, made this a crowning achievement of his brief time in office. The Peace Corps. was a new government agency under the auspices of the State Department, that provided a chance for Americans to assist the people of other developing nations in building their societies.

The idea for the Peace Corps was conceived during an impromptu speech that Kennedy made in 1960 as he campaigned. Its first appointed head was his brother-in-law, R. Sargent Shriver, who had married his sister Eunice Kennedy in 1953, the same year that JFK married Jacqueline Onassis.

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FIRST BLACK WOMAN TO EARN MEDICAL DEGREE — Rebecca Lee Crumpler on March 1, 1864, became the first African American woman to earn a medical degree. Born in Delaware as Rebecca Davis, she lived with her aunt who was a widely-respected community healer. Crumpler had practiced community medicine in Boston. She applied to the New England Female Medical College in Boston, the first women’s medical school in the nation. The college admitted her in 1860, based on her nursing experience and strong recommendations from doctors familiar with her work. She graduated in 1864 as a “Doctress of Medicine.” After the Civil War she traveled south to treat thousands of formerly enslaved refugees. Crumpler wrote one of the first medical manuals by an African American doctor in the United States — and by a woman.

Her Book of Medical Discourses, published in 1883, was among the first medical guidebooks published by a Black doctor in the United States.

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‘MAD MAGAZINE’ PUBLISHER — BILL GAINES (WILLIAM MAXWELL GAINES), WHO LATER BECAME THE PUBLISHER OF EC Comics from 1947 to 1956, and the son of EC Comics founder Max Gaines, was born in Brooklyn on March 1, 1922. Considered unruly, he became an iconoclast, an atheist and took up magic. He graduated from James Madison High School, joining many notable alumni from there, including current Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Although he attended then-Polytechnic Institute in Downtown Brooklyn, majoring in chemistry, he left to join the Army.

Gaines later founded the satirical Mad Magazine, creating the now-iconic, gap-toothed cover persona Alfred E. Neumann.

See previous milestones, here.