DP Features

MOMENTS IN TIME

December 6, 2009

MOMENTS IN TIME

The History Channel

• On Dec. 10, 1901, the first Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, on the fifth anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other high explosives. Although Nobel offered no reason for his creation of the prizes, it is believed he did so out of moral regret over the increasingly lethal uses of his inventions in war.

• On Dec. 12, 1917, in Omaha, Neb., Father Edward J. Flanagan, a 31-year-old Irish priest, opens the doors to a home for troubled and neglected children. Today “Boys and Girls Town” includes a grade school, a high school and a career vocational center on a farm 10 miles west of Omaha.

• On Dec. 7, 1925, future Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller sets the world record for the 150-yard freestyle swim. Already a gold medalist from the 1924 Olympics, Weissmuller competed again in 1928, taking five gold medals in all. In 1931, MGM cast Weissmuller to play the title role in “Tarzan the Ape Man.”

• On Dec. 11, 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, the United Nations votes to establish the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), an organization to help provide relief and support to children living in countries devastated by the war.

• On Dec. 13, 1950, an unknown actor named James Dean appears in a Pepsi commercial. Dean would later personify the angry, restless youth culture in the film “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955). He died in a car crash in 1955 at age 24.

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