Earl G Whipple (1909 - 1999)

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

In 1909, in the year that Earl G Whipple was born, William Howard Taft became the 27th President of the United States on March 4th. Previously Secretary of War, Judge on the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, Solicitor General of the U.S., and Governor of both the Philippines and Cuba, Taft was the only President who went on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

In 1916, he was just 7 years old when visiting nurse Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the U.S. at 46 Amboy St. in Brooklyn New York. Ten days after the clinic opened, Sanger was arrested for "violating laws against giving out birth control information" which was defined as obscenity. The clinic was not handing out birth control - just information about sex and birth control methods. (The Comstock law categorized information about abortion, family planning, and contraception as “obscene”.) The clinics and organizations that Sanger established later evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In 1921, by the time he was merely 12 years old, hugely popular Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, silent film star, was arrested for rape and manslaughter after an actress died following a party at his house. He was acquitted after three trials and the jury wrote a formal letter apologizing for the charges, but his career never recovered. His films were at first banned - the ban was lifted after a year - and he was mostly ostracized by the community. He died at 46..

In 1962, he was 53 years old when lasting from October 16th - 28th, the Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest that the United States and the Soviet Union came to nuclear war. The Soviet Union had been installing a nuclear missile base in Cuba. The United States established a blockade to stop the base from being completed. Through secret negotiations, war was averted: the Soviet Union agreed to dismantle their weapons in Cuba and the United States agreed to never invade Cuba and to dismantle weapons in Turkey and Italy.

In 1992, when he was 83 years old, on April 29th, riots began in Los Angeles after the "Rodney King" verdict was issued. Four LAPD officers had been accused of using excessive force (assault) on African-American Rodney King, who had been stopped for drunk driving. The beating had been videotaped. Their acquittal sparked a 6 day riot in Los Angeles.