A Blast From The Past

Today is Dec. 1.

Remember the photos of Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin sitting together after talking about how they were going to gang up on Hitler? It was on this date in 1943 that their "Big Three" meeting in Tehran, Iran, ended with the leaders pledging a concerted effort to defeat Nazi Germany.

Another historic meeting took place on this date in 1989. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Pope John Paul II met at the Vatican and announced agreement to establish diplomatic ties. Gorbachev also renounced more than 70 years of oppression of religion in the U.S.S.R.

The Soviet Union itself had only a couple more years to live when that happened. Voters in the Soviet republic of Ukraine overwhelmingly voted for independence on this date in 1991. Ukraine became the second biggest post-Soviet republic, after Russia itself.

This is the anniversary of the first big milestone in the modern civil rights movement. On this date in 1955, a black seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus. The event triggered a yearlong boycott of the city bus system and led to the end of racial segregation on municipal buses throughout the South.

It was on this date in 1992 that "Long Island Lolita" Amy Fisher was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in a New York prison for shooting the wife of her alleged lover, Joey Buttafuoco. The wife survived the attack and later would campaign to have Fisher released from prison.

Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town near Omaha, Neb., on this date in 1917. Spencer Tracy would later play the priest in a movie about his life. By the way, Boys Town -- a place for orphaned, abandoned or otherwise wayward children through age 18 -- now takes in girls, and is known as Boys and Girls Town. There are several such "towns" across the United States.

The first Playboy magazine was published on this date in 1953 by Chicagoan Hugh Hefner. On the cover: a rising young actress named Marilyn Monroe.

And it was on this date in 1903 that the world's first drive-in gasoline station opened for business in Pittsburgh. The restrooms haven't been cleaned since.

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