Mary A White (1903 - 1988)

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

In 1903, in the year that Mary A White was born, the first World Series of American baseball was played between October 1st and 13th. The Boston Americans of the American League played the Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League. Boston came back from a three game to one deficit, winning the final four games to capture the title - such a large comeback wouldn't be repeated by a team until 1925. (A total of eight games were played.)

In 1926, by the time she was 23 years old, on November 15th, NBC was founded. It was the U.S.'s first major broadcast network. Ownership of the network was split between RCA (a majority partner at 50%), its founding corporate parent General Electric (which owned 30%), and Westinghouse (which owned the remaining 20%).

In 1933, by the time she was 30 years old, on March 4th, Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the 32nd President of the United States. He was elected four times (equaled by no other President) and guided the United States through the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War 2. His wife was his cousin Eleanor Roosevelt (Teddy Roosevelt's niece) who President Truman called "First Lady of the World". Some of the major programs that survive from his presidency are the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wagner Act (The National Labor Relations Act of 1935) , the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Social Security.

In 1961, by the time she was 58 years old, on May 5th, Navy Cmdr. Alan B. Shepard, Jr., made the first manned Project Mercury flight, MR-3, in a spacecraft he named Freedom 7. He was the second man to go into space, the first was Yuri Gagarin - a Soviet cosmonaut.

In 1988, in the year of Mary A White's passing, on December 21st, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie Scotland. The explosion killed all 259 people on board and another 11 on the ground. The flight had left Heathrow Airport in London less than an hour before, on its way to New York. After an exhaustive (and long) investigation it came to be believed that two individuals from Libya had planted the bomb.