Charlie Pompey (1903 - 1985)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Charlie's lifetime.

In 1903, in the year that Charlie Pompey was born, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated in June after Henry Ford left another car company he founded in 1901 (which became the Cadillac Motor Company). He began Ford Motor Company with $28,000 in cash from twelve investors, two of whom (the Dodge brothers) later began their own car company. Henry Ford improved on assembly line techniques and has been so successful that his family still controls a very popular Ford line of cars and trucks.

In 1918, by the time he was only 15 years old, federal spending was $12.68 billion, unemployment was 1.4% and the cost of a first-class stamp was 3 cents.

In 1942, Charlie was 39 years old when on February 19th, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This authorized the Secretary of War to "prescribe certain areas as military zones." On March 21st, he signed Public Law 503 which was approved after an hour discussion in the Senate and 30 minutes in the House. The Law provided for enforcement of his Executive Order. This cleared the way for approximately 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese ancestry to be evicted from the West Coast and to be held in concentration camps and other confinement sites across the country. In Hawaii, a few thousand were detained. German and Italian Americans in the U.S. were also confined.

In 1972, he was 69 years old when on September 5th, the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, with the assistance of German neo-nazis, kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich. The attackers crept into the Olympic Village and abducted the athletes while they were sleeping. A German policeman was also killed.

In 1985, in the year of Charlie Pompey's passing, in May, a paper published in Nature by three British scientists reported that a huge hole was discovered in the ozone layer over the Antarctic. It was much larger than expected and is due to the use of manmade chemicals.