Almanac for March 8th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for March 8th: https://ko-fi.com/post/March-8-International-Womens-Day-I2I5JBRLZ

Today's Observance: International Women's Day

Bummer March 8th

March 8, 1941: American author Sherwood Anderson dies of peritonitis in Colón, Panama. He and his wife Eleanor, who were frequent travelers, had been taking a cruise to South America when Anderson began having abdominal discomfort. An autopsy revealed internal injuries caused by swallowing a toothpick.

March 8, 1944: Swedish tenor Aroldo Lindi dies during a performance of Pagliacci at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House, during the aria “Vesti la Giubba.”

March 8, 1989: Iran breaks diplomatic ties with the U.K. since the U.K. will not denounce Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses.

In an unrelated incident on the same day, in Columbia, South Carolina, death row inmate Michael Godwin, age 28, accidentally electrocutes himself while sitting on his prison cell’s metal toilet. He bites into the wiring of a pair of earphones, which shock him until he dies. Had his death sentence been carried out, he would have been executed by electrocution.

March 8, 1994: Radio dj Jack Spector suffers a heart attack and collapses while on the air. His co-workers notice a long silence after the song “I’m In the Mood for Love” by Louis Prima ends, rush into the dj booth, and find Spector unresponsive. He is pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

March 8, 2004: Character actor Robert Pastorelli, age 49, is found dead in his Hollywood home of a morphine overdose. It’s unclear whether the manner of death was accident or suicide. Pastorelli had recently learned he could be criminally charged related to the death of his girlfriend Charemon Jonovich, who died of a gunshot wound at the actor’s home in 1999.

On the same day, in Patchogue, New York, members of Freemason unofficial subgroup Fellowcrafts Club accidentally shoot and kill initiate William James during a hazing ritual. They sat James in a chair and lined up cans on his head. One man was supposed to shoot blanks out of a gun while another man knocked the cans off James’s head, tricking him into thinking they were shooting the cans. Somehow, the shooter confuses the gun with blanks for a gun with real bullets in it.