March 18 Birthday
On March 18, 1925, the deadliest tornado in American history traveled 219 miles across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana at sixty-eight miles per hour. The Tri-State Tornado killed 695 people and injured 2,027. It was on the ground for three and a half hours — an unusually long time for a tornado, which typically dissipates within minutes. The tornado was later classified as an F5, with winds exceeding 260 mph. It destroyed entire towns — Gorham, Murphysboro, and DeSoto were nearly wiped off the map. Ninety percent of DeSoto was destroyed. Sixty-nine children died when the DeSoto school collapsed. The tornado was so wide that witnesses described it as a "rolling wall of black" rather than a funnel. Weather forecasting was primitive in 1925, and warnings were nonexistent — the US Weather Bureau did not even use the word "tornado" in its forecasts, fearing it would cause panic. Alexei Leonov conducted the first spacewalk on March 18, 1965, stepping from the Voskhod 2 capsule into the vacuum of space for twelve minutes. His spacesuit expanded in the vacuum, and he could not fit back through the airlock. He vented pressure from the suit, risking decompression sickness, and managed to squeeze in. The capsule's hatch would not seal properly, and the two cosmonauts had to land manually. They touched down in a forest 1,200 miles from the intended landing site and spent two nights in the freezing woods surrounded by wolves before being rescued. Leonov later walked on the Moon as part of the Soviet lunar program — which was canceled after the Americans got there first. He was also the Soviet commander of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint US-Soviet space mission, in 1975. Parliament repealed the Stamp Act on March 18, 1766, after widespread colonial resistance — boycotts, riots, the hanging of tax collectors in effigy. The act had required that printed materials in the colonies carry a revenue stamp, and it was the first direct tax Parliament had levied on the colonies. The repeal was celebrated in America, but Parliament simultaneously passed the Declaratory Act, which asserted its "full power and authority to make laws and statutes... to bind the colonies and people of America... in all cases whatsoever." The repeal was not a surrender; it was a reassertion of authority. The colonists who celebrated the repeal did not read the fine print. The Declaratory Act was the legal basis for every subsequent tax — the Townshend Acts, the Tea Act, the Intolerable Acts — that would lead to revolution. Grover Cleveland, born this day in 1837, is the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms — the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president. He was the first Democrat elected after the Civil War. He underwent secret surgery for oral cancer aboard a friend's yacht, anchored in the East River, to avoid revealing his condition. He survived. John Updike, also born this day, published a novel every two years for forty years. His Rabbit series tracked the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom from 1960 to 1990, a decade per book. People born on March 18 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 18 include 1766: British Parliament repeals the Stamp Act, 1925: Tri-State Tornado kills 695 across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana (deadliest in US history), 1965: Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov performs first spacewalk. Famous people born on March 18 include Grover Cleveland (1837), John Updike (1932), Brad Dourif (1950).