Sat, April 4 is the kind of date that doesn’t feel calm at all. It’s a scatter of major moments across decades—some headline-ready, some grim in a quieter way.
In 1989, Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, in her Porsche, reaches for her cellphone while speeding to the bank she owns, then hits and kills Oleta Hardin, a 50 year-old Arkansas cannery worker. Walton is not charged. That detail—the reaching, the speeding, the soundless way a day can still change—hangs in the air more than you’d expect, even in a dry timeline.
A few years earlier, 1984 has its own kind of momentum: Congress nixes Contra funding. Around the same time, President Reagan sells arms to the Ayatollah to make up the difference. It reads like a paperwork workaround, except it’s about real-world conflict, the kind where “make up the difference” is never really just accounting.
Going back further, 1975 starts with Operation Babylift, beginning with a C-5A flight out of Tan Son Nhut. The flight crashes into a nearby rice paddy killing 154, including 78 kids. You can feel how the sentence keeps tightening as the numbers pile up, and then—almost abruptly—it’s just gone. Then again, that’s the whole point of listing these things. They don’t linger politely.
The 1970s and late 1960s add political heat and public mourning. On the National Mall in 1970, 50,000 followers of a radio televangelist hold a “March for Victory,” protesting the Vietnamization of the Vietnam War. In 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. is murdered in Memphis, perhaps by James Earl Ray; if so, with help from others who are still unknown. And the next year of memory, 1967, shows another kind of spark—Robert Jones’ students adopt a cross-chest salute and form a movement, “The Third Wave.”
But 1967 isn’t only about new movements. Martin Luther King, Jr. denounces the Vietnam War and calls for common cause between civil rights and antiwar movements. He is then denounced by 168 major newspapers. That contrast—one voice reaching across causes, and then the backlash—feels especially sharp when you stack the entries back to back.
The earlier years keep shifting the frame from violence to policy to invention. In 1953, busy CIA head Allen Dulles OKs plans to (a) knock over Iran’s elected government, and (b) study controlling people’s minds with drugs. In 1949, NATO forms to counter the U.S.S.R.; the U.S.S.R. disbanded in 1991, but NATO is still here. And way back in 1877, a home in Somerville, Mass. gets the world’s first home telephone. So even on a day that’s otherwise heavy, there’s that strange note of possibility—technology arriving with no idea how quickly it can end up beside tragedy later.