Around Columbus
March 1
News around Columbus and the surrounding area as reported on or about this date in the pages of The Evening Republican and The Republic 10, 25 and 50 years ago.
2005
Bartholomew County Fair Board announced its plan to demolish the fairgrounds livestock building, the site of 4-H animal projects at the annual fair for more than 50 years. The center section of the barn had collapsed after a record snowfall.
1990
Negotiations continued on a 400-acre site on State Road 11 south of Columbus for a new Bartholomew County landfill site. A Wayne Township group, opposed to plans for a sanitary landfill in its neighborhood, planned a public meeting.
1965
March came to Columbus like the proverbial lamb with temperatures in the 60s melting the remnants of the blizzard a week before just in time for two or more days of rain.
Around the world
1565
The city of Rio de Janeiro was founded by Portuguese knight Estacio de Sa.
1790
President George Washington signed a measure authorizing the first U.S. Census.
1815
Napoleon, having escaped exile in Elba, arrived in Cannes, France, and headed for Paris to begin his “Hundred Days” rule.
1867
Nebraska became the 37th state.
1890
J.P. Lippincott published the first U.S. edition of the Sherlock Holmes mystery “A Study in Scarlet” by Arthur Conan Doyle.
1932
Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, New Jersey. (Remains identified as those of the child were found the following May.)
1940
“Native Son” by Richard Wright was first published by Harper & Brothers.
1945
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, back from the Yalta Conference, proclaimed the meeting a success as he addressed a joint session of Congress.
1954
Four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the spectators’ gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress. The United States detonated a dry-fuel hydrogen bomb, codenamed Castle Bravo, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
1961
President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps.
1971
A bomb went off inside a men’s room at the U.S. Capitol; the radical group Weather Underground claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn blast.
1981
Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands began a hunger strike at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland; he died 65 days later.
1995
The Internet search-engine website Yahoo! was incorporated by founders Jerry Yang and David Filo.
Ten years ago
Dennis Rader, the churchgoing family man accused of leading a double life as the BTK serial killer, was charged in Wichita, Kansas, with 10 counts of first-degree murder. (Rader later pleaded guilty and received multiple life sentences.) A closely divided Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for juvenile criminals.
Five years ago
Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, defending himself against charges of Europe’s worst genocide since the Holocaust, told judges in his slow-moving trial that he was not the barbarian depicted by U.N. prosecutors, but was protecting his people against a fundamentalist Muslim plot.
Jay Leno returned as host of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.”
One year ago
Russian troops took over Crimea as the parliament in Moscow gave President Vladimir Putin a green light to use the military to protect Russian interests in Ukraine. French filmmaker Alain Resnais, director of such art house classics as “Hiroshima Mon Amour” and “Last Year at Marienbad,” died in Paris at age 91.
