MOMENTS IN TIME - Dec. 17, 2009

The History Channel

• On Dec. 28, 1869, the Knights of Labor, a labor union of tailors in Philadelphia, hold the first Labor Day ceremonies in American history. The Knights of Labor was established as a secret society of Pennsylvanian tailors earlier in the year.

• On Dec. 29, 1878, the first game is played between two teams of the first professional baseball league in Cuba. Baseball had first been introduced in Cuba around 1864, when some students returned home from studying in the United States and introduced their fellow islanders to the bat and ball.

• On Jan. 3, 1892, legendary author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. In 1925, he became a professor at Oxford. As the legend goes, Tolkien found a blank page in a student’s examination book while grading papers one day and wrote on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” This idea grew into the eminently successful children’s book “The Hobbit.”

• On Dec. 30, 1905, French driver Victor Hemery, driving a gasoline-powered Darracq automobile, sets a new land-speed record in Arles-Salon, France. He reached a speed of 109 mph.

• On Jan. 2, 1941, the Andrews Sisters record “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” on Decca Records. The song became a classic World War II hit. The Andrews Sisters were the most popular “girl group” of their time, selling millions of records and setting the stage for the “girl group era” of the mid-1960s.

• On Jan. 1, 1951, the Zenith Radio Corp. of Chicago demonstrates the first pay television system. The company sent movies over the airway via scrambled signals, and the 300 families who participated in the test could send telephone signals to decode the movies for $1 each.

• On Dec. 31, 1978, flags at both the American embassy in Taipei and the Taiwanese embassy in the United States are lowered for the last time as U.S. relations with Taiwan officially come to an end. On Jan. 1, 1979, the United States officially recognized the government of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

(c) 2009 King Features Synd., Inc.