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Each day this month, The News & Observer is looking back at some of our headlines on August dates in previous years. Here is a collection of what happened — the newsworthy, the interesting or the just plain strange.
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A daily look at some of The News & Observer headlines on this date in past years.
On this day in 2019, fans braced themselves for the first-ever beer sales at an NC State football game — a historic moment that inspired Old Tuffy, a cold can of Wolfpack-themed suds.
Long confined to the epic tailgate parties outside Carter-Finley Stadium, alcohol made its debut with a pair of safeguards keeping fans in line:
One, vendors would not be allowed to serve anyone who appeared intoxicated, and
Two, cans cost $9 apiece.
Prosecutors dropped assault charges against the wife of Rev. Billy Graham after she took a protest sign away from a man during President Gerald Ford’s visit to Charlotte. Witnesses testified they saw Ruth Bell Graham take the sign, which read “Eat the Rich,” from a young man in Freedom Park, but the judge allowed her attorneys’ motion to dismiss the case before it concluded.
On the way out of court, the evangelist’s wife offered the protester a Bible and told him, “I’ll be praying for you.” He declined the gift.
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Protesters burst into the Durham armory and heckled presidential candidate Henry Wallace, nearly forcing the Progressive Party leader from the stage. The anti-Wallace crowd lit firecrackers and threw eggs in the fracas, which left one University of North Carolina student with a slashed wrist and back.
Earlier that day, Wallace had given a speech in Richmond accusing Dixiecrats, the segregationist party of South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, of being an “invention” to divert voters’ attention away from economic issues.
In 1926, a Raleigh preacher condemned silent film star Rudolph Valentino as an inadequate actor and scolded his female fans for swooning over such an unworthy idol.
Fans nationwide mourned the smoldering performer’s untimely death, even smashing the window of a funeral parlor for a glimpse of his corpse — an act the Rev. Dr. William Davidson Parry called “evidence of low mentality.”
“No thoughtful man can contemplate the spectacle of an emotionally frenzied mob crashing through a plate-glass window to view the remains of the “sheik of the screen,” whose long and lingering kiss seems to have unbalanced the weak mentality of certain females of the species and to have made him the idol of that type of youth whose intellect is submerged by his distorted conceptions of life.”
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No record exists of whether Rev. Parry was a good kisser.