I Don't Like Mondays

On January 29, 1979, 16 year old Brenda Spencer opened fire on the Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego killing two (the principal and a student) and injuring nine.  The school was located across the street from her home. Wielding a .22 semi-automatic rifle she'd just gotten for Christmas, she got off thirty rounds from a window before barricading herself in the house, and after a seven hour standoff she surrendered to the police.  When asked why, she replied, "I just did it for the fun of it. I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day."

This was hardly the first school shooting... that tragic history goes back to the 1700s.  But prior to this, most of these events were typically focused on specific people, usually adult-on-adult violence.  This was one of the first instances of a student randomly shooting at a school with multuple rounds. It has been called by some the "First Columbine" and was the first assault of this nature to be committed by a woman.  Tried as an adult, Spencer was convicted and sentenced to 25 years to life.  She's eligible again for parole in 2019.

Spencer's crime was immortialized by Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats later that year in the song "I Don't Like Mondays", which became a #1 hit in the UK.

Hello/Goodbye: January

Born, January 1979

Jan 1st - Brody Dalle, Australian singer (The Distillers)


Jan 8th - Sarah Polley, actress (Sweet Hereafter)


Jan 14th - Karen Elson, British singer and model


Jan 15th - Drew Brees, American football player


Jan 16th - Aaliyah, American singer (d. 2001)


Jan 18th - Jay Chou, Taiwanese actor, singer and producer


Jan 18th - Brian Gionta, American ice hockey player


Jan 20th - Rob Bourdon, American musician (Linkin Park)


Jan 23rd - Larry Hughes, American basketball player


Jan 23rd - Juan Rincón, Venezuelan baseball player


Jan 24th - Tatyana Ali, actress

Jan 27th - Rosamund Pike, British actress


Jan 30th - Diva Zappa, daughter of Frank

Died, January 1979

Jan 3rd - Conrad Hilton, US founder of Hilton Hotels, 91

Jan 5th - Charles Mingus, US jazz bassist/composer/orchestra leader, 56


Jan 9th - Sara Carter, vocalist/guitarist (Carter Family),  80


Jan 11th - Jack Soo, actor (Nick Yemana on Barney Miller), 63


Jan 13th - Donny Hathaway, singer, commits suicide at 33


Jan 16th - Ted Cassidy, actor (Lurch-Addams Family),  46


Jan 26th - Nelson Rockefeller dies at 70 
under dubious circumstances

Saturday Flashback: Look Sharp!

Joe Jackson goes all fashion forward on us in the title track from his early 1979 release "Look Sharp!" Yeah, this video is lame, but it does remind us that these were still records, after all.  We'll hear later how new technologies from this year would replace the LP as the media standard, but for now let's put the needle down and let Joe tell us to make it work.  Enjoy!

Iran: The Shah

Thirty-three years ago today, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, abdicated the Peacock Throne.  Gravely ill from the cancer that would kill him eighteen months later, his flight from Tehran set off a chain of events that continues to this day.  It had been building up for some time of course, but this was a day that would alter the Middle East forever.

Fun Factors:

• His father, Reza Shah, had been installed by the British in 1925 only to be deposed in an Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941 for perceived pro-Nazi sentiments, after which the son was placed on the throne in 1945
• The election of Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister in 1951 largely based on his opposition to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which we know today as British Petroleum or BP
• Mosaddegh nationalized the company resulting in his overthrow by a CIA-led coup d'etat in 1953
• In the 60s, the Shah began an aggressive program of industrial development paid for with oil revenues, which ramped up considerably after the 1973 oil embargo, in an effort to become not only a regional power but a global one as well
• One effect of this development was to limit the commercial participation of the lower economic classes of Iran, a country in which the majority of the population was still agrarian 
• He also oversaw a huge military buildup courtesy of the US looking to take advantage of Iran's strategically advantageous border with the USSR as well Iran serving as a de facto cop in the region
• This also led to Iran being part of a US proxy with Israel, especially relative to their mutual enemy,Iraq
• The $300 million celebration thrown in 1971 in honor of the 2500th anniversary of the Achmaenid dynasty as well as the implementation of the Persian calendar over traditional use of the Islam calendar fostered the perception that the shah was antagonistic to the concerns of most Iranians
• And in the fifteen months leading up to the abdication...
• The murder of Khomeini's son Mustafa, widely thought to be the work of SAVAK, the shah's brutal security service in October 1977
• Riots in Qom in January 1978 after the publication of a government sanctioned article attacking Khomeini, resulting in the deaths of 70 protesters
• Black Friday, September 8, 1978:  Confusion over a curfew after a protest that saw over a million people in the streets of Tehran led to a follow-up demonstration at which over a thousand protesters were killed

The shah attempted some moderate efforts to quell the growing anger of the citizens of Iran, including the appointment of Shahpour Bakhtiar, who had previously been seen to oppose the shah, to prime minister.  But the damage had been done.  He would bounce around the world for the rest of his life, from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas, Mexico, the US and finally back to Egypt where he died on July 27, 1980.  His stay in the US for medical treatment in October of 1979 is thought by some to have had a hand in causing the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran a few weeks later.

Khomeini would return from his exile in Paris a few weeks later and by April, the revolution would be complete.

(Note:  this post, as will be the case with subsequent posts on the Middle East, is indebted to David Lesch's excellent 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East.)

Saturday Flashback: The Records

Technically, this song was released in the UK on 12/27/78, but it didn't come out in the States until '79.  Peaking at #56 on the Billboard Top 100 here in October, "Starry Eyes" is a perfect little blast of Power Pop, which was taking off on the coattails of New Wave and Punk.  Enjoy!

Mister Bill

On this date in 1979, Bill Clinton became the Governor of Arkansas at 32 years of age, making him the youngest governor in the country.  He'd held office previously as Arkansas' Attorney General, after losing a congressional race in 1974, but this was his first executive office.  He focused on educational reform and, in a prelude to his first term in the White House, partnered with Hillary on urban health care reform. However, he got himself in trouble with the voters over a motor vehicle tax as well as issues arising from rioting at Fort Chafee by Cuban refugees being detained after the Mariel Boatlift, which cost him his governorship after just one term.  But the kid came back and won re-election in 1982, serving until he was elected president in 1992.

Saturday Flashback

'79 was the year that the new music brewing in garages and dingy clubs for the previous few years began to break through. New Wave and Punk sprang up to spit in the eye of the corporate rock and disco that dominated popular music in the mid 70s and finally started to be heard on the radio that year.  I'll be sharing some of my favorites as we go, but this video does a decent job of laying it all out, for a 20/20 segment.  And there's good Northeast Ohio representation, too, featuring Devo.  It's even hosted by Akron's own Hugh Downs...

And so it begins...

Two of the most influential and destructive politicians of our time began their elective careers on this day in 1979:  Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney.  Cheney had already been in DC for a decade at this point, serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, most notably as Ford's Chief of Staff after a palace coup that elbowed Henry Kissinger out of the way.  Gingrich had been a professor at West Georgia College.  But it was in 1979 that they first became elected officials as freshman congressmen.  We're still paying for their sins today.

Happy New Year

We start off with a bang...  on January 1, 1979 the US and China agreed to formally recognize each other and to establish diplomatic relations.  This was certainly a big deal at the time, the ramifications of which continue to this day.  Outside of developments in the Middle East, perhaps no other event of 1979 has had--  and will continue to have-- as much impact on US policy as this did, not to mention the financial implications.