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A daily look at some News & Observer headlines on this date in past years.
On this day in 2017, the Triangle first heard the declassified story of a tuxedo cat named Hooch born at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, who escaped a death sentence after strutting across a stage, tail held high, while the ambassador gave a speech.
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Hooch’s audacity triggered an order that all embassy cats — morale-boosting strays who brightened up the Afghan war zone — must die as a public nuisance.
But through a secret rescue fund, a daring rescue and a harrowing journey through a Turkish airport X-ray machine, Hooch arrived stateside courtesy of Kathleen Lavin, an IT specialist in Pinehurst, who adopted him and provided digs alongside Tater Tot the rescue beagle.
“Life is good for them,” Lavin told The N&O in 2017, adding, “Did you know that kitty litter looks an awful lot like explosives in the X-ray machine?”
A North Raleigh businessman and his wife died when their twin-engine plane crashed in Umstead State Park moments after takeoff from Raleigh-Durham International Airport. William and Barbara Adams had been sweethearts since high school and had recently celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary.
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The Raleigh School Board considered the application of 14-year-old Joseph Holt Jr. to transfer from Ligon to the all-white Broughton High School, having already been rejected in 1956 at what was then called Josephus Daniels Middle School. The Holt family proceeded in this second effort despite receiving bomb threats over the telephone. Holt would be denied admission at Broughton, launching a three-year legal battle pivotal to integration in Raleigh.
in 1926, the N&O recognized Minerva Wilkins Pearson as the oldest active school teacher in the state, being 92 and unusually active for her age “except for being partially deaf.”
Pearson had taught school for 70 years, most recently in Rutherfordton, and boasted that she could remember the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and slavery.
She married at 71, outlived that husband by a decade and attributed her longevity to regular exercise, drinking fresh water and refraining from strong drink and tobacco. She read the Bible every day and believed she had lived too long.
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“Several of her students,” the N&O reported, “are dead from old age.”