On This Date In History

On Jan. 24, 1989, confessed serial killer Theodore Bundy was executed in Florida State Prison’s electric chair and pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m.
Ted Bundy’s death and execution were famously a national event for onlookers outside the prison gates and millions of viewers watching from home. “Burn, Bundy, burn!” adorned protest signs and comprised the chants of hundreds, The whole world was watching, eager to bear witness to Ted Bundy’s death. For a man who brutally killed at least 30 human beings in the 1970s. one of them 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, the desire was certainly understandable, in some respects.
It was Bundy’s time in Florida that arguably put the final nail in the proverbial coffin. There was only one other victim after the Florida State University murders at the Chi Omega sorority house on Jan. 15, 1978.
About three weeks after terrorizing the Tallahassee campus, Bundy kidnapped 12-year-old Kimberly Leach from her school in Lake City, Florida. He killed the girl and dumped her body in Suwannee River State Park.
In February 1978, he was finally caught by a Pensacola police officer who found Bundy’s car slightly too suspicious to dismiss. Not only did the car have stolen plates, but Bundy provided the officer with a stolen driver’s license. After years of killing, Ted Bundy was finally caught.
On July 24, 1979, Bundy was convicted and sentenced to death for the murders of Bowman and Levy, as well as the attempted murders of Chandler, Kleiner, and Thomas.
In Jan. 1980, Bundy stood trial in Orlando, where he was convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Kimberly Leach. The evidence presented in court included eyewitness testimony, fibers, and hotel receipts from Lake City.
Like many death row inmates across the United States, Ted Bundy spent years in prison before his inevitable execution. After nine years in Florida State Prison, on Jan. 24, 1989, Ted Bundy was put to death by the state.

 

 

On January 24, 1972, after 28 years of hiding in the jungles of Guam, local farmers discover Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese sergeant who fought in World War II.
Guam, a 200-square-mile island in the western Pacific, became a U.S. possession in 1898 after the Spanish-American War. In 1941, the Japanese attacked and captured it, and in 1944, after three years of Japanese occupation, U.S. forces retook Guam. It was at this time that Yokoi, left behind by the retreating Japanese forces, went into hiding rather than surrender to the Americans. In the jungles of Guam, he carved survival tools and for the next three decades waited for the return of the Japanese and his next orders. After he was discovered in 1972, he was finally discharged and sent home to Japan, where he was hailed as a national hero. He subsequently married and returned to Guam for his honeymoon. His handcrafted survival tools and threadbare uniform are on display in the Guam Museum in Agana.

 

 

 

 
On January 24, 1935, canned beer makes its debut. In partnership with the American Can Company, the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Virginia. Ninety-one percent of the drinkers approved of the canned beer, driving Krueger to give the green light to further production.
By the late 19th century, cans were instrumental in the mass distribution of foodstuffs, but it wasn’t until 1909 that the American Can Company made its first attempt to can beer. This was unsuccessful, and the American Can Company would have to wait for the end of Prohibition in the United States before it tried again. Finally in 1933, after two years of research, American Can developed a can that was pressurized and had a special coating to prevent the fizzy beer from chemically reacting with the tin.
The concept of canned beer proved to be a hard sell, but Krueger’s overcame its initial reservations and became the first brewer to sell canned beer in the United States. The response was overwhelming. Within three months, over 80 percent of distributors were handling Krueger’s canned beer, and Krueger’s was eating into the market share of the “big three” national brewers, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst and Schlitz. Competitors soon followed suit, and by the end of 1935, over 200 million cans had been produced and sold.
The purchase of cans, unlike bottles, did not require the consumer to pay a deposit. Cans were also easier to stack, more durable and took less time to chill. As a result, their popularity continued to grow throughout the 1930s, and then exploded during World War II, when U.S. brewers shipped millions of cans of beer to soldiers overseas. After the war, national brewing companies began to take advantage of the mass distribution that cans made possible, and were able to consolidate their power over the once-dominant local breweries, which could not control costs and operations as efficiently as their national counterparts.
Today, canned beer accounts for approximately half of the $20 billion U.S. beer industry. Not all of this comes from the big national brewers: Recently, there has been renewed interest in canning from microbrewers and high-end beer sellers, who are realizing that cans guarantee purity and taste by preventing light damage and oxidation.

  

Gottfried Krueger