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19271776 Club

Maitland and Hegenberger land in Hawaii; the Pacific is crossed for the first time

Their modified Fokker tri-motor, the Bird of Paradise, touches down at Wheeler Field after 25 hours and 50 minutes over open ocean, where three and a half degrees of drift would have meant vanishing without a trace.

A month after Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the Air Corps set its sights on the Pacific — a crossing twice as long, with no European coastline to aim for, only a scatter of islands in 2,500 miles of open ocean. On June 29, 1927, 1st Lt. Lester J. Maitland and 1st Lt. Albert F. Hegenberger touched down at Wheeler Field on Oahu after 25 hours and 50 minutes aloft in a modified Fokker tri-motor called the Bird of Paradise. Had they drifted three and a half degrees off course, the official Air Force history later noted, they would have missed Kauai entirely and vanished into the Pacific…

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More from June 29
1950

Gaetjens heads it in; the US beats England, 1–0, in Belo Horizonte

Borghi shuts out the sport's reigning aristocracy; the American squad includes a hearse driver, a schoolteacher, and men who trained together exactly once.
1956

Eisenhower signs the highway act; 41,000 miles of interstate and $25 billion set in motion

The president who crossed the country on rutted Army roads in 1919 authorizes the largest public works project the nation has yet attempted.
2007

Apple's iPhone goes on sale; thousands who camped for days outside stores are first in line

Jobs unveiled the 3.5-inch touchscreen device in January as "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator" in one, and today the wait ends at Apple and AT&T stores nationwide.
19131776 Club
Wilson walks through a row of Boy Scouts to address the men in a tent pitched on the same ground where fifty thousand fell; most, it seems, have made their peace.
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More from The World Wars
1942

Japanese submarine shells Fort Stevens; Doney orders blackout, holds his guns

Commander Tagami surfaces I-25 at the Columbia River mouth after dark, fires seventeen rounds, and slips away undamaged, leaving cut telephone lines on the Oregon coast.
1942

Congress makes the Pledge of Allegiance official, fifty years after a magazine wrote it

The wording, unchanged from Bellamy's 1892 Columbus Day campaign, is now federal law, with the United States seven months into war.
1944

Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act; veterans to get mortgages, tuition, and a year's pay

Congress voted unanimously, sixteen days after D-Day, with the WWI bonus debacle and the 1932 Bonus Army march still fresh in every lawmaker's memory.
1945

Flag rises on Okinawa; Ushijima and his chief of staff are dead by their own hand

Eighty-two days of cave fighting, monsoon rain, and kamikaze attacks end with organized Japanese resistance broken and ninety miles of runway in Allied hands.
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