On This Day: May 31, 1985 — The Only F5 to Hit PA
The May 31, 1985 tornado outbreak dropped 44 twisters, killed 90 people, and produced the only F5 ever recorded in Pennsylvania.
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On This Day: May 30, 1993 — Fittipaldi Drinks the OJ
On May 30, 1993, Emerson Fittipaldi won the Indy 500 and skipped the milk for orange juice. Fans booed, dairy farmers revolted, and a tradition got more sacred.
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On This Day: May 29, 1985 — Heysel Stadium Disaster
The Heysel Stadium disaster happened on May 29, 1985, an hour before the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus in Brussels, when a charge by Liverpool fans pushed Italian supporters against a crumbling concrete wall that buckled and collapsed, killing 39 people. Thirty-two of the dead were Italian. The youngest was 11 years old….
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On This Day: May 28, 1987 — Mathias Rust Lands in Red Square
At 6:43 p.m. on May 28, 1987, an 18-year-old West German kid named Mathias Rust set the wheels of a rented Cessna 172 down on a bridge fifty feet from St. Basil’s Cathedral. He had just flown 750 miles through the most heavily defended airspace on the planet. Soviet radar had tracked him. A MiG-23…
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On This Day: May 27, 1995 — Christopher Reeve’s Fall in Culpeper
At 3:01 p.m. on May 27, 1995, Christopher Reeve was thrown from his horse at a low-stakes event in Culpeper, Virginia. What happened next reshaped spinal cord research for a decade.
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On This Day: May 26, 1990 — The Week Women Owned the Entire Billboard Top 5
On the morning of May 26, 1990, radio DJs across America were spinning a chart that had never existed before. Five songs sat at numbers one through five on the Billboard Hot 100. Five songs. All by women. It sounds like a footnote, but in the pop landscape of 1990 — an industry still largely…
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On This Day: May 25, 1983 — Return of the Jedi Premieres
On May 25, 1983, Return of the Jedi opened in 1,002 theaters and broke every box-office record on the books. Inside the secret production, the Ewok backlash, and how George Lucas closed the original Star Wars trilogy.
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Hudson Hawk: 7 Wild Facts From May 24, 1991’s Bomb
Hudson Hawk hit theaters on May 24, 1991 and became Bruce Willis’s most notorious flop. 7 wild facts about the $65M cult classic that almost broke a career.
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On This Day: May 23, 1980 — The Shining Premieres
On May 23, 1980, Warner Bros. dropped The Shining into U.S. theaters and quietly rewired horror cinema for the next four decades. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining 1980 release wasn’t an obvious blockbuster on opening weekend — critics shrugged, Stephen King fumed, and the Razzies even nominated it for Worst Director. Forty-five years later, it’s preserved…
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Van Gogh’s $82.5M Painting: 7 Wild Facts From May 15, 1990
The Van Gogh Portrait of Dr. Gachet auction on May 15, 1990 detonated the art market in under three minutes. Christie’s New York chairman Christopher Burge opened the bidding at $20 million and slammed his gavel down at a final hammer price of $75 million — $82.5 million with the buyer’s premium — making it…
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Soviet Exit from Afghanistan: 7 Shocking Cold War Facts From May 15, 1988
On May 15, 1988, Soviet tanks began rolling out of Afghanistan. After 9 years and 15,000 lives lost, Gorbachev called it a bleeding wound and pulled the plug. Here are 7 wild facts from the day Russia’s Vietnam finally ended.
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Seinfeld Finale: 7 Wild Facts From 1998’s TV Goodbye
The Seinfeld finale aired on May 14, 1998, and roughly 76 million Americans dropped what they were doing to watch four New Yorkers go to jail for being terrible people. Twenty-eight years later, it’s still one of the most-watched television finales in U.S. history, and it remains the most argued-about goodbye in sitcom history. This…
