Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Jan. 7, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Front page flashback: Jan. 8, 1946
Six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was strangled by an intruder who used a ladder to climb into a window of her Edgewater home. The killer left a note demanding $20,000, but her body was found dismembered and disposed of in city sewers.
William Heirens, then a 17-year-old University of Chicago student, was caught and confessed to killing Degnan and two women later that year. He became known as the “Lipstick Killer” after scrawling a message in lipstick at a crime scene: “For heaven’s sake, catch me before I kill more.”
Heirens was in prison for 65 years, becoming one of the longest-serving inmates in Illinois history, before he died in 2012.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 65 degrees (2008)
- Low temperature: Minus 16 degrees (1912)
- Precipitation: 0.65 inches (1907)
- Snowfall: 3.9 inches (2010)
1927: The Harlem Globetrotters played their first road game in Hinckley, Ill. So goes the story, anyway.
“Pretty much the entire official version of how the Globetrotters started is baloney,” said Ben Green, author of “Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters.”
Green said the team went through so many hands and changes, there’s really no way to determine when a “first game” occurred.
1966: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told reporters in Chicago that he was working on a three-phase plan to mobilize the city’s roughly 1 million Blacks.
King selected a “typical ghetto apartment on the West Side” at 1550 S. Hamlin Ave. to serve as his base for the following year.
1973: Security checkpoints went into operation at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Everyone entering the terminal submitted to electronic scanning devices, which checked for metal objects including guns, knives and bombs, because of new federal anti-skyjacking regulations.
In operation were 25 electronic screening devices for passengers, 11 X-ray units for carry-on luggage and several hand-held metal-detecting devices.
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