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19811776 Club

The air traffic controllers' union is formally dissolved; PATCO no longer exists in the eyes of the law

Eleven weeks after the walkout, the Federal Labor Relations Authority strips PATCO of its right to bargain for anyone.

By October, flights moved again, but PATCO's legal fight had not ended. The Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization had struck on August 3, defied a court injunction, and watched President Reagan fire 11,345 of its members who refused to return to work. On October 22, 1981, the Federal Labor Relations Authority voted to decertify PATCO outright, erasing its legal standing as the controllers' bargaining representative. The union that had endorsed Reagan a year earlier no longer existed…

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More from October 22
1777

Six hundred defenders at Fort Mercer turn back 1,200 Hessians

Colonel von Donop promised his men he would take the fort or die there. By nightfall he was shot through the thigh and left for dead.
1962

Kennedy goes on television: Soviet missiles sit in Cuba, and the Navy will stop every ship

The president calls it a quarantine, not a blockade, so Moscow cannot call it an act of war.
1879

Edison's thread-filament bulb glows for thirteen and a half hours before it dies

A length of carbonized cotton thread, sealed in glass, outlasts every filament Edison had tried before it.
18841776 Club
San Domingo alone votes no; France and Brazil abstain.
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More from Cold War America
1968

Apollo 7 lifts off from Cape Kennedy; America flies astronauts again

Twenty-one months after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts on the pad, a Saturn IB carries three more into orbit.
1984

Sullivan steps outside Challenger; first American woman to walk in space

Over the next three and a half hours she and David Leestma pumped hydrazine into a mock satellite to prove orbiting spacecraft could be refueled.
1976

A thread-like shape appears under the electron microscope in Atlanta

CDC virologists Fred Murphy and Alyne Harrison get the first clear image of the virus killing hundreds in Sudan and Zaire.
1962

A U-2 camera finds Soviet missiles ninety miles from Florida

The film still has to be developed and read before Washington even knows what it has.
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