American chronicles

100 YEARS AGO, JAN. 29,1900, professional baseball's "junior league" was born. it was soon to be named the "American League." In the same month, New York City began running bus lines down Fifth Avenue (January 2); Frederick Weyerhauser incorporated his new lumber business (January 20); and Theodore Roosevelt told a friend, "Speak softly and carry a big stick, and you will go far" (January 26).

75 YEARS AGO, JAN. 5, 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross, 45, became the first woman governor, of Wyoming, taldng office when her husband died. She later became the first woman director of the U.S. Mint.

50 YEARS AGO, JAN. 21, 1950, Alger Hiss, one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's advisers at Yalta (1945), was convicted on two counts of perjury for denying under oath that he had,know then-Communist Whittaker Chambers, and was sentenced to two concurrent five-year prison terms. On Jan. 31, 1950, development of the hydrogen bomb was approved by President Harry S. Truman. The United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb in 1952 at an atoll in the Pacific Ocean.

25 YEARS AGO, JAN. 1, 1975, a jury convicted four of the highest-ranking Watergate defendants, on all counts against them: John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, H.R.

Haldeman and Robert C. Mardian were sentenced to prison terms ranging h, from 5 to 25 years. All four appealed. Soon afterward, on January 6, Judge John Sirica ordered the immediate release of John Dean, Herbert Kalmbach and Jeb Stuart Magruder, reducing their sentences to time served. It pays to turn state's evidence.

10 YEARS AGO, JAN. 4, 1990, Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama was charged with drug-trafficking, and on January 19, Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry was secretly videotaped smoking a crack pipe in a Washington hotel, and arrested as soon as he lit up.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Jan 14, 2000
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