A Blast From The Past

Today is Nov. 28.

It was on this date in 1963 that Cape Canaveral, the space center in Florida, was renamed Cape Kennedy in honor of President John F. Kennedy, who had been assassinated in Dallas six days earlier. The name change was initiated by President Johnson. Area residents later voted to revert to the original name, but the NASA spaceport remained the John F. Kennedy Space Center.

41 years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia ended on this date in 1989, when Czechoslovak Premier Adamec agreed to a coalition government. The next day, the Czechoslovak Parliament revoked the Communist Party's monopoly. The vote followed a wave of demonstrations sparked by the beating of protesters earlier in the month.

Czechoslovakia would later split up into two nations: the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Tragedy struck a Boston nightclub on this date in 1942. A fire swept the Cocoanut Grove, killing 491 people. Most of the victims suffocated or were trampled to death.

On this date in 1520, Ferdinand Magellan sailed around the tip of South America and entered the Pacific Ocean on his way around the world. He was the first European to sail the Pacific from the east.

The British Parliament got its first female member when Virginia-born Lady Nancy Astor took her seat on this date in 1919.

And it was on this date in 1994 that serial killer/cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer got what the families of many of his victims probably thought he deserved. Dahmer and a second inmate at the Columbia Correctional Center in Portage, Wis., were beaten to death by another inmate who thought he was Jesus Christ.

Dahmer, a Milwaukee chocolate factory worker, had pleaded guilty to killing 15 young men and teenage boys and was sentenced to life in prison. When police finally caught up with him, they had found bodies, parts of bodies, and bones stashed in his apartment. Dahmer also admitted to having sex with his dead victims, and eating their flesh.

We now return you to the present, already in progress.