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July 27, 1980: Author Howard Rosenberg stopped in Albert Lea to visit with Russell Dann, the major character in his book, “Atomic Soldiers.” The book details Dann’s experience being subjected to two atomic bomb blasts while in the Army and his subsequent health issues. Rosenberg autographed a copy of the book for mayor O.H. Hagen.

July 24, 1980: All-Star Wrestling fans got a treat when the high-flying show came to the Albert Lea Armory. Dino Bravo won the final match over Jesse Ventura. Ventura was disqualified by referee Gadaski after he was struck by a wild punch from Minnesota’s future governor.

July 23, 1970: Shoppers packed together within a closed area of Broadway Avenue between Clark and Main Street during Crazy Days.

 

National

2007: President George W. Bush signed an executive order prohibiting cruel and inhuman treatment, including humiliation or denigration of religious beliefs, in the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

2006: Prosecutors reported that Chicago police beat, kicked, shocked or otherwise tortured scores of Black suspects from the 1970s to the early 1990s to try to extract confessions from them.

2000: Special Counsel John C. Danforth concluded “with 100 percent certainty” that the federal government was innocent of wrongdoing in the siege that killed 80 members of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993.

1999: Navy divers found and recovered the bodies of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette (bih-SEHT’), in the wreckage of Kennedy’s plane in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha’s Vineyard.

July 19, 1993: President Bill Clinton announced a policy allowing homosexuals to serve in the military under a compromise dubbed “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue.”

1992: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison near Medellin. (He was slain by security forces in December 1993.)

1991: Police in Milwaukee arrested Jeffrey Dahmer, who later confessed to murdering 17 men and boys (Dahmer ended up being beaten to death by a fellow prison inmate).

July 20, 1969: Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon after reaching the surface in their Apollo 11 lunar module.

1969: Apollo 11 and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, went into orbit around the moon.

1968: The first International Special Olympics Summer Games, organized by Eunice Kennedy Shriver, were held at Soldier Field in Chicago.

1934: Bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by federal agents outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where he had just seen the Clark Gable movie “Manhattan Melodrama.”

July 21, 1925: The so-called “Monkey Trial” ended in Dayton, Tennessee, with John T. Scopes found guilty of violating state law for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. (The conviction was later overturned on a technicality.)

July 22, 1862: President Abraham Lincoln presented to his Cabinet a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.