Walter Pershall (1900 - 1968)

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

In 1900, in the year that Walter Pershall was born, the U.S. helped put down Boxer Rebellion. The Boxer Rebellion took place in China, where the presence of "outsiders" (foreigners) was resented. The United States, along with Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, and Russia, had business interests in China and these countries all sent troops to put down the Rebellion and keep China open to their presence and to Christian missionaries.

In 1920, he was 20 years old when Italian born factory worker Nicola Sacco and fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti were picked up by police on May 5th in connection with the April 15th murder and robbery of a guard and a paymaster at the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Mass. Although in later years they were thought to be innocent, they were anarchists and were convicted of the crime and put to death.

In 1939, Walter was 39 years old when in May, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length animated film, reached a total international gross of $6.5 million which made it (to then) the most successful sound film of all time. First released in December 1937, it was originally dubbed "Disney's Folly" but the premiere received a standing ovation from the audience. At the 11th Academy Awards in February 1939, Walt Disney won an Academy Honorary Award - a full-size Oscar statuette and seven miniature ones - for Snow White.

In 1943, at the age of 43 years old, Walter was alive when on June 20th through June 22nd, the Detroit Race Riot erupted at Belle Isle Park. The rioting spread throughout the city (made worse by false rumors of attacks on blacks and whites) and resulted in the deployment of 6,000 Federal troops. 34 people were killed, (25 of them black) - mostly by white police or National Guardsmen, 433 were wounded (75 percent of them black) and an estimated $2 million of property was destroyed. The same summer, there were riots in Beaumont, Texas and Harlem, New York.

In 1968, in the year of Walter Pershall's passing, on April 4th, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader, was shot and killed by an assassin in Memphis. James Earl Ray was apprehended and plead guilty to shooting Dr. King. Ray died in jail in 1998.