The people and events that shaped this week in history.

September 3rd
1895 – The first professional football game was played in Latrobe, PA. The Latrobe YMCA defeated the Jeannette Athletic Club 12-0.
1954 – “The Lone Ranger” was heard on radio for the final time after 2,956 episodes over a period of 21 years.
2013 – Hunters in Mississippi caught a 727-pound alligator.

September 4th
1967 – “Gilligan’s Island” aired for the last time on CBS-TV. It ran for 98 episodes.
1998 – Google was incorporated as a privately held company.
2003 – Keegan Reilly, 22, became the first parapalegic climber to reach the peak of Japan’s Mount Fuji.

September 5th
1836 – Sam Houston was elected as the first president of the Republic of Texas.
1901 – The National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues was formed in Chicago, IL. It was the first organized baseball league.
1960 – Cassius Clay of Louisville, KY, won the gold medal in light heavyweight boxing at the Olympic Games in Rome, Italy. Clay later changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

September 6th
1620 – The Pilgrims left on the Mayflower from Plymouth, England to settle in the New World.
1941 – Jews in German-occupied areas were ordered to wear the Star of David with the word “Jew” inscribed. The order only applied to Jews over the age of 6.
1992 – A 35-year old man died ten weeks after receiving a transplanted baboon liver.

September 7th
1813 – The nickname “Uncle Sam” was first used as a symbolic reference to the United States. The reference appeared in an editorial in the New York’s Troy Post.
1915 – Johnny Gruelle received a patent for his Raggedy Ann doll (U.S. Patent D47789).
1966 – The final episode of the original “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was aired on CBS-TV.

September 8th
1866 – The first recorded birth of sextuplets took place in Chicago, IL. The parents were James and Jennie Bushnell.
1900 – A Category 4 hurricane rips through Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people. A 15-foot storm surge flooded the city, then situated at less than nine feet above sea level, and numerous homes and buildings were destroyed. The hurricane remains the worst weather-related disaster in U.S. history in terms of loss of life.
1986 – The Oprah Winfrey Show is broadcast nationally for the first time. A huge success, her daytime television talk show turns Winfrey into one of the most powerful, wealthy people in show business and, arguably, the most influential woman in America.

September 9th
490 B.C. – The Battle of Marathon took place between the invading Persian Army and the Athenian Army. The marathon race was derived from the events that occurred surrounding this battle.
1776 – The Continental Congress formally declares the name of the new nation to be the “United States” of America. This replaced the term “United Colonies,” which had been in general use.
1971 – Prisoners riot and seize control of the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, New York. Later that day, state police retook most of the prison, but 1,281 convicts occupied an exercise field called D Yard, where they held 39 prison guards and employees hostage for four days. After negotiations stalled, state police and prison officers launched a disastrous raid on September 13, in which 10 hostages and 29 inmates were killed in an indiscriminate hail of gunfire. 89 others were seriously injured.

TRUMP THE FUTURE DEMOCRAT

Making Sense by Michael Reagan

President Trump keeps making me look good.

Last week we repeated the sound advice we’ve frequently given him but which he regularly refuses to take – know when to shut up and listen to your staff.

This week he sabotaged himself yet again.

He totally wasted about 95 percent of the generally favorable media coverage and bipartisan huzzahs he got for his Afghanistan policy speech on Monday night.

He could have basked in the Afghan afterglow all week long and hit a few hundred balls on the practice range.

But instead by Tuesday night he was in Phoenix and up to his old dumb tricks, bashing Arizona’s Republican senators John McCain and Jeff Flake, rehashing what he said about Charlottesville and throwing old and new spitballs at the fake media.

It’s hopeless.

He just can’t stop himself.

He can’t let anything go.

He can’t quit campaigning for the job he’s already won.

And he can’t keep from bashing the Republicans in Congress he so desperately needs.

It seems he’s doing everything he can to get his base to vote Republicans out of power in 2018.

He wants to get rid of Flake. He certainly doesn’t like McCain.

He’s rough on Republican Congressional leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan – even though 70 pieces of legislation, some with bipartisan support and some especially pleasing to conservatives, have become law in the last seven months.

Like the media he hates, President Trump says virtually nothing about those many legislative accomplishments and almost nothing positive about the Republicans who got them passed.

But if he really wants to fix the tax system, get immigration reform or replace Obamacare some day, he’s going to need those Senate Republicans he’s been picking on.

The best way to get them to be a part of his team is not to hold a personal pro-Trump rally and use them as punching bags and punch lines.

Maybe the president is just trying to be a nice guy and doesn’t want to pick on the leaderless, rudderless, just-say-no-to-Trump Democrats when they’re so hapless, pathetic and confused.

Maybe he has a long-term secret plan to blow up the two-party system, or prove that Republicans and Democrats in Washington are so much alike ideologically that it doesn’t matter what party you join.

But if he keeps it up much longer,President Trump will have a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2018 and then we Republicans are going to be asking him not to sign legislation to help us, but to help us by vetoing it.

Meanwhile, if the president stumbles any farther down this road to Republican Party ruin we might see him change his party affiliation.

He has no ideology, no party principles to uphold. What’s it matter to him if he converts to a registered Democrat? It’s what he was most of his life anyway.

You never know with Trump. But even if he switched parties in 2020, it probably wouldn’t matter much.

The same forgotten Flyover Country people that put Hillary out to pasture and Donald into the White House would storm his huge rallies, cheer their Nascar hats off and later pull the Democrat lever for Trump with delight.

He’d easily win the Democrat nomination because they have no one to run against him. The Hate Trump media couldn’t stop him.

And he’d easily get reelected president in 2020 as a Democrat because he’d have spent four years destroying the Republican Party.

EDITOR’S FOOTNOTE:  Any comments posted in this column do not represent the views or opinions of the City County Observer or our advertisers.