Castro’s opportunity came amid the “baseball war” (1901-1903), when the upstart American League challenged the National League, poaching players and jockeying for control of major city markets. The Athletics had lured Lajoie away from the Philadelphia Phillies, triggering legal action; when the injunction arrived mid-game, Castro took over late. He appeared in 42 games that season—his only year in the majors.

Born in Medellín, Castro was sent to New York as a child in 1885 and learned the game in the United States. A standout at Manhattan College High School, a Catholic school in Harlem, he was recognized by Sporting Life magazine in 1898 before playing semi-pro ball across the Northeast. Manager Connie Mack recruited him as a utility player for the Athletics, but unimpressed with his fielding, released him after one season.

Castro spent years in the minors and later managed teams in the South. Known for his humor and showmanship, he entertained crowds with pranks and occasional costumed antics. He also obscured his own background—at times claiming different birthplaces and even a link to Venezuelan strongman Cipriano Castro.

After baseball, his fortunes declined. He managed a motorcycle racetrack and saloon in Atlanta before unsuccessfully trying to buy a Double-A minor league baseball club in 1922. By the 1930s, he was living in New York, struggling financially during the Depression. He died in 1941 at Manhattan State Hospital, a psychiatric facility on Wards Island, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Queens.

In 2021, on Colombia’s Independence Day, a headstone was finally installed with support from Major League Baseball and New York officials.

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“The Big Mac resulted from our need for a larger sandwich to compete against Burger King and a variety of specialty shop concoctions,” noted McDonald's mastermind Ray Kroc in his 1977 autobiography Grinding It Out. “The idea...was originated by Jim Delligatti in Pittsburgh.”

Kroc would make a fortune from it, but first he stood in its way. Beginning in 1965, Delligatti had lobbied the company for a bigger burger and was repeatedly rebuffed. McDonald’s did allow him to experiment, but on one condition: Use only ingredients already on hand. He bent the rules anyway by ordering a three-part bun to better hold it all together.

The gamble worked. McDonald's took the Big Mac national in 1968.

By 1974, its build was immortalized in an advertising jingle many can still recite: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame-seed bun.”

By 1986, the Big Mac was so ubiquitous that The Economist introduced the Big Mac Index, using its price to compare currencies worldwide.

When Delligatti died at 98, obituaries celebrated the burger he created—and noted he reportedly ate at least one a week for decades.

All but lost to history, however, was another Delligatti invention recalled by Kroc: the Farkelberry Snickerdoodle, a cookie that never caught on. Maybe it just needed a better jingle.

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“Directly beneath me, in this hotel’s rubble-strewn basement, a massive concrete chamber has been discovered,” Rivera told viewers. “And there is evidence to suggest that this vault once belonged to Al Capone—the richest, most powerful gangster of his time.”

With cameras rolling, Rivera used explosives to breach the vault, hoping to uncover Prohibition-era secrets—cash, weapons or even human remains. (A medical examiner stood by.) Instead, the team found nothing but an empty whiskey bottle.

The broadcast quickly became a punchline, and “Al Capone’s Vault” soon became shorthand for an overhyped event.

CBS reporter John Drummond, who witnessed the blast, had earlier likened the dig to the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. Afterward, the letdown was unmistakable.

The special’s producer, John Joslyn, took it in stride. “Disappointment, of course, John,” he told Drummond. “But it’s been a terrific adventure. I wouldn’t have passed it up for anything.”

Rivera went on to host his talk show until 1998. He also hosted Rivera Live on CNBC starting in 1994 before joining Fox News in 2001. In 2024, he became a correspondent-at-large for NewsNation.

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Celtics general manager and longtime coach Red Auerbach had announced before the 1966 NBA Finals that he would step down at season’s end, handing the job to Russell, then the team’s star center. Boston went on to win that year’s championship—its eighth straight and ninth overall—capping Auerbach’s coaching career.

Russell continued as player-coach for three seasons, leading the Celtics to two more titles in 1968 and 1969. His success made him the first Black head coach to win a championship in a major North American professional league. And his tenure remains the only time in North American sports history that an organization has ever had a player serve as both starting player and head coach on a title-winning team.

“Bill Russell was a pioneer—as a player, as a champion, as the NBA’s first Black head coach and as an activist,” said NBA great Michael Jordan in 2022, after Russell died. “He paved the way and set an example for every Black player who came into the league after him, including me. ”

By the time he took over as coach, Russell was already one of the game’s most dominant figures. His speed, court savvy and defensive prowess revolutionized the center position, proving that big men could be agile, strategic and transformative on both ends of the court.

Winning had defined Russell’s career even before he made it to the pros. At the University of San Francisco, he led his team to back-to-back NCAA championships in 1955 and 1956. In the latter year, he won a gold medal as captain of the U.S. Olympic team. With the Celtics, he anchored an unprecedented run of eight consecutive NBA titles from 1959 to 1966—the longest championship streak in North American professional sports.

Russell’s appointment marked a turning point in sports history—one that expanded opportunities for Black leadership and left a lasting imprint on the NBA and beyond. Today, the NBA Finals Most Valuable Player Award (an honor Russell, himself, won 5 times) is named after him.

Off the court, Russell became an outspoken civil rights advocate. He attended the 1963 March on Washington, supported boxer Muhammad Ali’s refusal of the draft and helped run an integrated basketball camp in Mississippi following the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

For his work on and off the court Russell was inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame and given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor.

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A recent Harvard Ph.D., Drake was working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, where he was assigned to design a project for the observatory’s new, 85-foot diameter radio telescope. He chose to use the enormous dish to search for evidence of alien civilizations.

Drake pointed the telescope—dubbed “the cosmic ear” by The New York Times—at Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, two sunlike stars about 11 light-years away that he thought might host habitable planets. He tuned the telescope’s to 1420 MHz, the frequency emitted by neutral hydrogen, reasoning that any advanced civilization would recognize it as a universal standard and might use it as a “hailing frequency.”

Over 150 hours of observation between April and July 1960, Drake detected no extraterrestrial messages. The only signal came from a passing aircraft—possibly a secret high-altitude U-2 spy plane. Still, “it was a paradigm-shifting endeavor, successful for its audacity, if not its discoveries,” wrote SETI researcher H. Paul Shuch in his 2011 book Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The experiment, which Drake named after L. Frank Baum’s 1917 book The Lost Princess of Oz, only cost about $2,000 for equipment.

At the time, SETI was considered fringe science. Yet Project Ozma proved influential. In 1961, Drake convened a a small, secret meeting of scientists—including Carl Sagan—to discuss the “extraterrestrial question.” At this meeting, the Ozma astronomer introduced the Drake Equation, a framework for estimating “the number of detectable, intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.”

Although Ozma found no evidence of extraterrestrial life, it launched a new field of scientific inquiry. NASA funded SETI-related experiments from the 1960s through the late 20th century before Congress ended support in 1992, concerned about wasteful “Martian hunting.” The nonprofit SETI Institute, founded in 1984, continues the search today, backed in part by private donors. Drake admitted that, when he first began his work, he had “hoped that, in fact, there were radio-transmitting civilizations around almost every star.” Despite decades of silence, the search he began continues.

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