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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 2005, North Carolina adopted its first statewide lottery, shaking off decades of concern from both socially conservative church groups and progressives who feared legalized gambling would prey on the poor.
The NC Senate passed its lottery bill by a single vote with Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue breaking the tie and Democrats taking heat for holding the vote when two Republican opponents were out with excused absences.
Still, North Carolina had been to that date the largest state without a lottery and the only one on East Coast, meaning gamblers beat a steady path over state lines to play.
A 26-year-old man called Raleigh police to announce he had shot and killed a man who charged at him with a golf club. Minutes later, Jerry Banks Moore arrived at the police station carrying the body of his victim in the trunk of his red convertible.
Before he surrendered to police, Moore also called an attorney and asked, “Do you take capital cases? … I’ve called police. Do you think that was the right thing?”
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Moore would serve six years in prison for second-degree murder and later apply for admission to the state bar.
The American Legion held a parade along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., a spectacle that included a fitting but unusual contribution from North Carolina: a moonshine still. The whiskey-maker came courtesy of “the boys from Brevard,” according to the service club’s adjutant in Raleigh, who noted that it hadn’t exactly been welcome in the Legion’s state parade.
He noted, with some satisfaction, that the still would pass directly by the Internal Revenue Service on its route — home of the “Revenooers.”
In 1926, the Wake County jail ordered “nighties” for all of its inmates, following orders from the State Board of Health that all convicts be provided with sleeping garments.
The state’s decree required that all prisoners remove their “stripes” at bedtime and don their state-issued nightshirts.
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Jail officials, though, doubted any of the men would comply.