1. 1984: The Baltimore Colts Move to Indianapolis
PHOTO: HoosierHistoryLive
Robert Irsay ( left)
PHOTO: HouseofPolitics
An interesting series of of events led up to Baltimore Colts Owner, Bob Irsay, hiring a moving company to come to the Colts Head offices in the middle of the night and pack everything up and move it to Indianapolis while the City of Baltimore slept. Irsay had taken over the Colts in 1972 and he quickly developed a reputation that he was extremely difficult to work with and would constantly lash out at employees and even players. Apparently he had sat down to negotiations with the City of Baltimore for improvements to the Memorial Stadium, where the Colts played each week, but they didn’t go very well. Things went so badly that there was a law passed that would allow the city of Baltimore to seize control of the Colts. So in order to keep his team Irsay made a deal with the City if Indianapolis that if they built a new stadium he would bring the team to Indy.
2. 1979: Nuclear Plant Dissaster on Three Mile Island
PHOTO: Wiki
PHOTO: BusinessInsider
Located about 10 miles downstream from the Capitol City of Pennsylvania sits a sandbar known as Three Mile Island where two nuclear energy plants were built. The first was completed in 1974 and then just 4 years later the second was built. Less than a year later, on this day, the pressure valve on the Unit-2 reactor fails to close causing the core to drastically overheat. There are safety measures in place for this type of thing where water is pumped into the core to keep it from reaching a meltdown status and on this day those pumps were working perfectly, and had they been left on this disaster may not have happened. But apparently due to some confusing data being sent to the control room the human operators manually shut off the emergency water pumps causing the reactor to reach dangerous temperature and radiation levels. Luckily engineers were able to figure out that the emergency pumps needed be turned back on just in time to prevent a full nuclear meltdown.
3. 1941: Ford breaks ground on its Willow Run Plant
PHOTO: Wiki
PHOTO: AutoNews
On this day in 1941 Ford starts to break ground on its huge Willow Run Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, about 30 miles west of Detroit. The Plant will take up hundreds of ares of land and the reason for it being so large was that the Government planned on using Fords mass production assembly line style of manufacturing to build B-24 Bomber planes to be used in WWI. At its peak the Willow Run Plant employees almost 42,000 people and ran so efficiently that they were able to produce a new plane every hour with more than 8,600 being built by 1945. in 1953 the plant was purchased by General Motors where they used it to build transmissions. In 2003 Gm spent upwards of $600 million to renovate the facility to make a new 6 speed transmission that had been developed. Later in 2009 GM was forced to file for chapter 11 and closed the doors on the Willow Run Plant.