The 1,000,000th Chevy was produced on this day. Chevrolet began when William Durant hired Louis Chevrolet, a Swiss race-car driver and star of the Buick Racing Team, to design a new car. Durant hoped to challenge the success of the Ford Model T with an affordable, reliable car. Chevrolet wanted to design a finer sort of automobile, however. Their product, the Classic Six, was an elegant car with a large price tag. But Durant built two more models, sturdier and cheaper, and Chevy was on its way. Durant eventually made over a million dollars in profits on his Chevrolet marque, money that allowed him to reacquire a majority interest in General Motors (GM) stock. Durant eventually merged the two companies and created GM's current configuration. Louis Chevrolet left the company before the merger, leaving only his name to benefit from the company's success.
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February 22, 923
It's difficult to talk about NASCAR without talking about the Daytona 500, and it's difficult to talk about the Daytona 500 without mentioning the Petty family. On this day in 1959, Lee Petty won the first Daytona 500 at the brand-new Daytona International Speedway, driving a new hardtop Olds 88 to a photo finish with Johnny Beauchamp. The Petty family would switch to Plymouths midway through the season that year. Richard and Lee Petty drove Plymouths, Chryslers, and Dodges for most of their remaining careers. Together the father and son team combined for 254 wins, including eight Daytona 500s. The Daytona 500 would become the premier event in NASCAR racing.
February 22, 923
Stylish Austrian race-car driver Niki Lauda was born in Vienna, Austria, on this day. Lauda is also the founder of Air Lauda, a continental European airline that features flight attendants in denim jeans and Team Lauda baseball caps.
February 22, 1819
The United States of America buys Florida from Spain.
February 22, 1819
Spanish minister Do Luis de Onis and U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams sign the Florida Purchase Treaty, in which Spain agrees to cede the remainder of its old province of Florida to the United States.
Spanish colonization of the Florida peninsula began at St. Augustine in 1565. The Spanish colonists enjoyed a brief period of relative stability before Florida came under attack from resentful Native Americans and ambitious English colonists to the north in the 17th century. Spain's last-minute entry into the French and Indian War on the side of France cost it Florida, which the British acquired through the first Treaty of Paris in 1763. After 20 years of British rule, however, Florida was returned to Spain as part of the second Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolution in 1783.
Spain's hold on Florida was tenuous in the years after American independence, and numerous boundary disputes developed with the United States. In 1819, after years of negotiations, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams achieved a diplomatic coup with the signing of the Florida Purchase Treaty, which officially put Florida into U.S. hands at no cost beyond the U.S. assumption of some $5 million of claims by U.S. citizens against Spain. Formal U.S. occupation began in 1821, and General Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of 1812, was appointed military governor. Florida was organized as a U.S. territory in 1822 and was admitted into the Union as a slave state in 1845.
February 22, 1819
During the Mexican-American War, Mexican General Santa Anna surrounds the outnumbered forces of U.S. General Zachary Taylor at the Angostura Pass in Mexico and demands an immediate surrender. Taylor refused, allegedly replying, "Tell him to go to hell," and early the next morning Santa Anna dispatched some 15,000 troops to move against the 5,000 Americans. The superior U.S. artillery was able to halt one of the two advancing Mexican divisions, while Jefferson Davis' Mississippi riflemen led the defense of the extreme left flank against the other Mexican advance. By five o'clock in the afternoon, the Mexicans begin to withdraw.
The Mexican-American War began with a dispute over the U.S. government's 1845 annexation of Texas. In January 1846, President James K. Polk, a strong advocate of westward expansion, ordered General Taylor to occupy disputed territory between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers. Mexican troops attacked Taylor's forces, and in May 1846 Congress approved a declaration of war against Mexico.
At Buena Vista in February 1847, and at Monterrey in September, Taylor proved a brilliant military commander, earning the nickname "Old Rough and Ready" while emerging from the war a national hero. He won the Whig presidential nomination in 1848 and defeated the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, in November. The other hero of the Battle of Buena Vista, Jefferson Davis, became secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce in 1853 and president of the Confederate States of America in 1861.
February 22, 1819
On February 22, 1967, Indonesian President Sukarno surrenders all executive authority to military dictator General Suharto, remaining president in title only.
In 1965, Suharto, a senior army officer, narrowly saved Sukarno from a communist coup. In the aftermath, he moved to replace Sukarno and launched a purge of Indonesian communists that resulted in thousands of deaths. In 1967, he assumed full power and in 1968 was elected president. Reelected every five years until his resignation in 1998, Suharto stabilized his nation and oversaw significant economic progress. However, he was criticized for his repressive rule and for Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor, which left an estimated 100,000 Timorese dead from famine, disease, and warfare.
February 22, 1879
American businessman F W Woolworth opens his first store in New York. After a near financial disaster, he moves to Pennsylvania.
February 22, 1879
On this day in 1879, Frank Winfield Woolworth kicked off a retail revolution by opening the Great 5 Cents Store in Utica, New York. Pledging to sell "nothing" that cost more than a nickel, Woolworth packed his store with a smorgasbord of goods, ranging from items for the kitchen to beauty products. Though the Utica store ultimately failed, Woolworth hit pay dirt that same year when he opened another discount variety store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The shop, which was expanded to include items that cost up to a dime, proved to be a fast success with Pennsylvanians and emboldened Woolworth to establish an empire of discount stores. The dawn of 1890s saw Woolworth's "five and ten" stores dot America's East Coast; by 1904 he had opened some 120 stores in twenty-one states, including chunks of the West and the District of Columbia. In 1911, he cemented his dominance of the burgeoning variety store field by merging with four rival companies. The move armed Woolworth with a fleet of 596 stores and, in 1912, he christened the shops with the now familiar name, F.W. Woolworth. Though Woolworthýs stores continued to flourish during the first half of the century, the years following World War II were not so kind to the company. The sprawl of suburbs, and the attendant spread of malls, coupled with the recent rise of super-sized discount rivals like Target and Wal-Mart, ultimately spelled the end for Woolworth's. In 1997, the granddaddy of five-and-tens threw in the towel and closed its last 400 shops.
February 22, 1886
British daily newspaper 'The Times' is the first to introduce a 'classified personal' column.
February 22, 1892
On this day, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay is born in Rockland, Maine.
One of three daughters of a divorced nurse, Millay learned independence and self-reliance early, and transmitted those qualities to her poetry. She began publishing poetry in high school. In 1912, the year she turned 20, her poem "Renascence" appeared in a literary review and drew the attention of a benefactor who made it possible for Millay to attend Vassar. The year she graduated, in 1917, her first volume of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, appeared.
Millay moved to New York City, where she lived a hectic, glamorous life as a writer and actress in Greenwich Village. One of the first women to write openly and without shame about her lovers, Millay had numerous affairs. In 1920, her famous poem "First Fig" set the tone for the 1920s, with its resounding lines, "My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night."
Millay's fast-paced life took a toll. Exhausted, she traveled to Europe for a long rest in 1921. There she met and married Dutch importer Jan Boissevan, who gave up his business to devote himself to Millay. In 1923, the couple moved to a farm in upstate New York, where Millay continued to write verse and plays. That year, she published The Harp Weaver and Other Poems, for which she became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize.
A passionate proponent of civil liberty, she was arrested and jailed for supporting Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists condemned to death for robbery and murder. In the 1930s, she wrote anti-totalitarian poetry for newspapers, as well as radio plays and speeches. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1944 and endured two years of writer's block afterward. She broke down again after her husband's death in 1949, and she died of a heart attack a year later.
February 22, 1942
On this day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt orders Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines, as the American defense of the islands collapses.
The Philippines had been part of the American commonwealth since it was ceded by Spain at the close of the Spanish-American War. When the Japanese invaded China in 1937 and signed the Tripartite Pact with fascist nations Germany and Italy in 1940, the United States responded by, among other things, strengthening the defense of the Philippines. General MacArthur was called out of retirement to command 10,000 American Army troops, 12,000 Filipino enlisted men who fought as part of the U.S. Army, and 100,000 Filipino army soldiers, who were poorly trained and ill prepared. MacArthur radically overestimated his troops' strength and underestimated Japan's determination. The Rainbow War Plan, a defensive strategy for U.S. interests in the Pacific that was drawn up in the late 1930s and later refined by the War Department, required that MacArthur withdraw his troops into the mountains of the Bataan Peninsula and await better-trained and -equipped American reinforcements. Instead, M!
acArthur decided to take the Japanese head on--and he never recovered.
On the day of the Pearl Harbor bombing, the Japanese destroyed almost half of the American aircraft based in the Philippines. Amphibious landings of Japanese troops along the Luzon coast followed. By late December, MacArthur had to pull his forces back defensively to the Bataan Peninsula--the original strategy belatedly pursued. By January 2, 1942, the Philippine capital of Manila fell to the Japanese. President Roosevelt had to admit to himself (if not to the American people, who believed the Americans were winning the battle with the Japanese in the Philippines), that the prospects for the American forces were not good--and that he could not afford to have General MacArthur fall captive to the Japanese. A message arrived at Corregidor on February 20, ordering MacArthur to leave immediately for Mindanao, then on to Melbourne, Australia, where "You will assume command of all United States troops." MacArthur at first balked; he was fully prepared to fight alongside his men to!
the death if necessary. MacArthur finally obeyed the president's order in March.
February 22, 1946
George Kennan, the American charge d'affaires in Moscow, sends an 8,000-word telegram to the Department of State detailing his views on the Soviet Union, and U.S. policy toward the communist state. Kennan's analysis provided one of the most influential underpinnings for America's Cold War policy of containment.
Kennan was among the U.S. diplomats to help establish the first American embassy in the Soviet Union in 1933. While he often expressed respect for the Russian people, his appraisal of the communist leadership of the Soviet Union became increasingly negative and harsh. Throughout World War II he was convinced that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's spirit of friendliness and cooperation with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was completely misplaced. Less than a year after Roosevelt's death, Kennan, then serving as U.S. charge d'affaires in Moscow, released his opinions in what came to be known as the "long telegram."
The lengthy memorandum began with the assertion that the Soviet Union could not foresee "permanent peaceful coexistence" with the West. This "neurotic view of world affairs" was a manifestation of the "instinctive Russian sense of insecurity." As a result, the Soviets were deeply suspicious of all other nations and believed that their security could only be found in "patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power." Kennan was convinced that the Soviets would try to expand their sphere of influence, and he pointed to Iran and Turkey as the most likely immediate trouble areas. In addition, Kennan believed the Soviets would do all they could to "weaken power and influence of Western Powers on colonial backward, or dependent peoples." Fortunately, although the Soviet Union was "impervious to logic of reason," it was "highly sensitive to logic of force." Therefore, it would back down "when strong resistance is encountered at any point." The United States and its allies, he concluded, would have to offer that resistance.
Kennan's telegram caused a sensation in Washington. Stalin's aggressive speeches and threatening gestures toward Iran and Turkey in 1945-1946 led the Truman administration to decide to take a tougher stance and rely on the nation's military and economic muscle rather than diplomacy in dealing with the Soviets. These factors guaranteed a warm reception for Kennan's analysis. His opinion that Soviet expansionism needed to be contained through a policy of "strong resistance" provided the basis for America's Cold War diplomacy through the next two decades. Kennan's diplomatic career certainly received a boost--he was named U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1952.
February 22, 1950
Walt Disney's animated feature Cinderella opens on this day in 1950. The ethereal Cinderella, based on a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, featured enduring songs like "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" and became one of Disney's most beloved films. Walt Disney had been releasing feature-length animated movies since 1937, when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became the first animated film to run at feature length.
Born on a Missouri farm, Walt Disney sold his first sketches to neighbors when he was just seven, and he attended the Kansas City Art Institute at night while he was in high school. At age 16, during World War I, Disney went overseas with the Red Cross and drove an ambulance that he decorated with cartoon characters.
Back in Kansas City, Disney started working as an advertising cartoonist. He founded a company with his older brother Roy, Laugh-O-Gram, but the company went bankrupt, and the brothers left Kansas City for Hollywood with $40 and some art supplies. The brothers built a camera stand in their uncle's garage and started their company in the back of a Hollywood real estate office.
Walt Disney began making a series of animated short films called Alice in Cartoonland and began developing various animated characters. In 1928, he introduced Mickey Mouse in two silent movies. Mickey debuted on the big screen in Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon ever made. Walt Disney provided Mickey's squeaky voice himself. The company went on to produce a series of sound cartoons, such as the "Silly Symphony" series, which included The Three Little Pigs (1933) and introduced characters like Donald Duck and Goofy. Meanwhile, the company developed increasingly sophisticated animation technology.
When Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was released in 1937, it grossed $8 million, an incredible success during the Depression. During World War II, Disney devoted most of his company's resources to production of training and propaganda films for the military. In 1965, he designed the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), which he envisioned as an aide toward improving the quality of life in American cities. He also helped establish the California Institute of the Arts in 1961. His 43-year career earned him nearly 1,000 honors and citations from throughout the world, including 48 Academy Awards and seven Emmys. Harvard, Yale, the University of Southern California, and UCLA all bestowed him with honorary degrees. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, France's Legion of Honor and Officer d'Academie decorations, Thailand's Order of the Crown, Brazil's Order of the Southern Cross, Mexico's Order of the Aztec Eagle, and the Showman of the World Award from the National Association of Theatre Owners. In addition to his films, his legend lives on through Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and EPCOT Center, and generations of children have experienced the joy and magic of The Happiest Place on Earth. Disney died in 1966.
February 22, 1950
Variety reports that producer Hal Roach has signed a Montreal beauty pageant winner named Norma Shearer. Shearer, the daughter of a wealthy Canadian businessman, started playing leading roles in 1925 but did not become a top star until she married MGM magnate Irving Thalberg in 1927. Nominated for five Academy Awards, she won the Best Actress award in 1930 for her role in The Divorcee. Her career went downhill after Thalberg's death in 1936, and she retired in 1942.
February 22, 1950
Tina Turner, 49, wins the Grammy for Best Female Rock Vocalist. Turner started recording with husband Ike Turner in 1960 but left him in 1976, claiming he had mistreated her for years. She began her comeback in 1981, opening for the Rolling Stones, and her 1984 album, Private Dancer, sold some five million copies. She continued to have hits through the 1990s and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991 while ex-husband Ike was in prison on drug charges. Her autobiography, What's Love Got To Do With It, was made into a hit movie starring Angela Bassett.
February 22, 1965
General William Westmoreland, commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam, cables Washington, D.C., to request that two battalions of U.S. Marines be sent to protect the U.S. airbase at Da Nang.
Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, aware of Westmoreland's plan, disagreed and cabled President Lyndon B. Johnson from Saigon to warn that such a step would encourage South Vietnam to "shuck off greater responsibilities." The Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, supported Westmoreland's request and on February 26, White House officials cabled Taylor and Westmoreland that the troops would be sent, and that Taylor should "Secure GVN [Government of South Vietnam] approval." General Westmoreland later insisted that he did not regard his request as "the first step in a growing American commitment," but by 1969 there were over 540,000 American troops in South Vietnam.
February 22, 1965
Operation Junction City is launched to ease pressure on Saigon. It was an effort to smash the Viet Cong's stronghold in Tay Ninh Province and surrounding areas along the Cambodian border northwest of Saigon.
The purpose of the operation was to drive the Viet Cong away from populated areas and into the open, where superior American firepower could be more effectively used. In the largest operation of the war to date, four South Vietnamese and 22 U.S. battalions were involved--more than 25,000 troops. The first day's operation was supported by 575 aircraft sorties, a record number for a single day in South Vietnam. The operation was marked by one of the largest airmobile assaults in history when 240 troop-carrying helicopters descended on the battlefield. There were 2,728 enemy casualties by the end of the operation on March 17.
February 22, 1972
In Britain, 7 people are killed by an IRA bomb at Aldershot.
February 22, 1980
British ice skater Robin Cousins wins a gold medal for figure skating in the Lake Placid Winter Olympics.
February 22, 1980
In one of the most dramatic upsets in Olympic history, the underdog U.S. hockey team, made up of collegians and second-rate professional players, defeats the defending champion Soviet team at the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York. The Soviet squad, previously regarded as the finest in the world, fell to the youthful American team 4-3 before a frenzied crowd of 10,000 spectators. Two days later, the Americans defeated Finland 4-2 to clinch the hockey gold.
The Soviet team had captured the previous four Olympic hockey golds, going back to 1964, and had not lost an Olympic hockey game since 1968. Three days before the Lake Placid Games began, the Soviets routed the U.S. team 10-3 in an exhibition game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The Americans looked scrappy, but few blamed them for it--their average age, after all, was only 22, and their team captain, Mike Eruzione, was recruited from the obscurity of the Toledo Blades of the International League.
Few had high hopes for the seventh-seeded U.S. team entering the Olympic tournament, but the team soon silenced its detractors, making it through the opening round of play undefeated, with four victories and one tie, thus advancing to the four-team medal round. The Soviets, however, were seeded No. 1 and as expected went undefeated, with five victories in the first round.
On Friday afternoon, February 22, the American amateurs and the Soviet dream team met before a sold-out crowd at Lake Placid. The Soviets broke through first, with its new young star, Valery Krotov, deflecting a slap shot beyond American goalie Jim Craig's reach in the first period. Midway through the period, Buzz Schneider, the only American who had previously been an Olympian, answered the Soviet goal with a high shot over the shoulder of Vladislav Tretiak, the Soviet goalie.
The relentless Soviet attack continued as the period progressed, with Sergei Makarov giving his team a 2-1 lead. With just a few seconds left in the first period, American Ken Morrow shot the puck down the ice in desperation. Mark Johnson picked it up and sent it into the Soviet goal with one second remaining. After a brief Soviet protest, the goal was deemed good, and the game was tied.
In the second period, the irritated Soviets came out with a new goalie, Vladimir Myshkin, and turned up the attack. The Soviets dominated play in the second period, outshooting the United States 12-2, and taking a 3-2 lead with a goal by Alesandr Maltsev just over two minutes into the period. If not for several remarkable saves by Jim Craig, the Soviet lead would surely have been higher than 3-2 as the third and final 20-minute period began.
Nearly nine minutes into the period, Johnson took advantage of a Soviet penalty and knocked home a wild shot by David Silk to tie the contest again at 3-3. About a minute and a half later, Mike Eruzione, whose last name means "eruption" in Italian, picked up a loose puck in the Soviet zone and slammed it past Myshkin with a 25-foot wrist shot. For the first time in the game, the Americans had the lead, and the crowd erupted in celebration.
There were still 10 minutes of play to go, but the Americans held on, with Craig making a few more fabulous saves. With five seconds remaining, the Americans finally managed to get the puck out of their zone, and the crowd began counting down the final seconds. When the final horn sounded, the players, coaches, and team officials poured onto the ice in raucous celebration. The Soviet players, as awestruck as everyone else, waited patiently to shake their opponents' hands.
The so-called Miracle on Ice was more than just an Olympic upset; to many Americans, it was an ideological victory in the Cold War as meaningful as the Berlin Airlift or the Apollo moon landing. The upset came at an auspicious time: President Jimmy Carter had just announced that the United States was going to boycott the 1980 Summer Games i
February 22, 1994
CIA operative Aldrich Ames is arrested for selling secrets to the Soviet Union. Ames had access to the names and identities of all U.S. spies in Russia, and by becoming a double agent he was directly responsible for jeopardizing the lives of CIA agents working in the Eastern bloc. At least 10 men were killed after Ames revealed their identities, and more were sent to Russian gulags.
Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, Aldrich's wife and an ex-CIA employee herself, was also charged for her role in accepting approximately $2.7 million (the most the Soviets ever paid a foreign spy) for providing the highly confidential information to the KGB. It was the Ames' spending that finally led to their downfall, but for many years no one questioned their ability to buy expensive cars and homes (paid for with cash) on his government salary. Ames picked up the cash at secret drops in the Washington, D.C., area and in unauthorized travels to Colombia and Venezuela.
Aldrich Ames was the biggest success of the Soviet Union's reinvigorated espionage program. After the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the Russians decided that spying was their best bet for improving their strategic position vis-ý-vis the United States. Dimitri Yakushkin was put in charge of a team called Group North. Yakushkin put more emphasis and money into clandestine operations and was rewarded when they turned Ames into a double agent.
Ames, who had worked for the CIA since 1962, and whose main duties had included contacting Soviet sources, was the crown jewel for Group North. His information destroyed almost the whole American intelligence program in Russia. Later, a Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report that harshly criticized the CIA leadership for their negligence in allowing Ames to get away with his subterfuge for so long.
February 22, 1996
Fraudster Peter Clowes is freed on parole after serving just four years of a 10 year sentence for swindling 11,000 small investors out of savings totalling £16m.
February 22, 1998
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announces he has reached a deal with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to avoid another war in the Gulf.
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