N&O staff photo by Karen Tam

It was 38 years ago today that NASA launched Skylab 1, its first manned space station.  It orbited for six years, was visited three times and was host to numerous experiments, but in the end, the space station was more famous for coming down than it was for going up.

In July 1979, the world was watching as Skylab began its descent back toward Earth. Although officials predicted that two-thirds of the 77-ton space craft would burn up on re-entry and most of the rest would fall into the ocean, there was still a 600 billion to one chance of being hit by space debris. In the Triangle, that was a good excuse to party.

N&O staff writer Susan Spence Moe reported on the precautions and preparations here for Skylab's fall:

When Skylab drops out of the sky, probably between 2 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, even Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. will greet the re-entry of the 78-1/2 ton beast without a helmet.

"He will be unprotected," press secretary Gary Pearce said Monday. "He will face Skylab without fear."

[...]

Hard hats will be in vogue Wednesday night when Skylab goes disco at the Holiday Inn North. The hotel, which as declared itself the official Skylab crash site (complete with painted target), is co-hosting a public poolside party.

While a huge search light spans the sky hunting falling bits of Skylab, party goers will be treated to free beer, "space snacks" and science fiction films including clips from old "Star Trek" adventures.

[...]

Another Skylab party is slated for Friday afternoon at N.C. State University's Sigma Pi fraternity. Party-goers are encouraged to bring their own umbrellas and catcher's mitts.

For the few who took the threat more seriously, Lloyd's of London was offering special Skylab insurance.

Most North Carolina homeowners' insurance policies probably would consider Skylab "peril number 12" should it smash through their roof, according to Jackie K. Darden of the state Department of Insurance.

Skylab would be considered a "falling object" under the most common types of state homeowner insurance, she said. -- The News & Observer, 7/10/1979

In the end, hundreds of pieces of Skylab fell into remote areas of southwestern Australia with no immediate injuries.

Brad Rudolph, a Denver representative for the Seat-of-the-Pants Management Company sold more than 4,000 of these poster-board helmets, complete with an "early warning spike" claiming to provide .00193 nanoseconds of warning before Skylab hits its wearer. (AP photo)

Photo Courtesy of the North Carolina State Archives

The nation was introduced to the William David Marlow family on May 7, 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson visited their Rocky Mount home as part of his Appalachian tour to kick off America's War on Poverty.

It is unclear how an Appalachian tour brought the president to Rocky Mount. Perhaps the trip planners were confused by the mountain-sounding name of the town. The other requirements, however, were met with precision detail: a rural family with lots of children, low income, at least one high school dropout and a father who was partially disabled and, preferably, a war veteran. And since Johnson planned to visit a black family in Georgia, the North Carolina family had to be white.

The Marlow household included seven children and a mother-in-law. Mr. Marlow, a WWII veteran had suffered a back injury in 1960. Their six-room house had no toilets or running water. The family earned about $1,500 a year as tenant farmers.

The brief 15-minute visit and photo op was followed by a trip into town, the president's mile-long motorcade traveling about five miles of crowd-lined highway.

That's when things got bad for the Marlows. Being singled out by the president of the United States as an example of poverty was humiliating. Mrs. Marlow said in a 1973 interview, "How would you like to be picked out as the most poverty-stricken family in the most poverty-stricken state? All it did was degrade us."

Iconic photos from the visit now show up for sale by online poster and home decorating retailers . The original photo traveled with the family to their subsequent homes and was passed down to their daughter Bonnie.

Nearly thirty years later, then N&O staff writer Charles Salter met with Bonnie to learn what had become of North Carolina family that was the face of poverty. Click below to read his story.

Bonnie Marlow Johnson returns to the house the President made famous.

In today's N&O, staff writer Josh Shaffer introduced us to Cancetto Farmica, nicknamed "Spaghetti" by the Scotland County community where he spent more than 60 years as a mummy.

In 1972, Spaghetti was buried, but that wasn't the last we heard of him. Two years later, a Milwaukee mail-order firm offered him for sale. Lawrence K. Mooney of Fairfax County VA just happened to be in the market for a mummy when he saw one advertised.

The asking price was $6,500. Mooney said he sent the firm, "Freak Enterprises," a down-payment of $1,000.

What Mooney didn't realize was that the firm did not own the mummy. The photograph Mooney saw showed the remains of a mummified carnival worker that had been in the possession of a Laurinburg, N.C., funeral home for 65 years. The body was buried in 1972 under 10 inches of concrete.
Mooney was out both the mummy and his money.  --The Raleigh Times, 9/25/1978

People have continued to be interested in the tale of Spaghetti. His grave has been included on several lists of roadside attractions, and his story shows up in many collections of the weird and wonderful. In 2000, CBS correspondent Steve Hartman "found" the story for his Everybody's Got a Story segment.

[video]

But Spaghetti wasn't the only one to meet such a fate. The same year he was killed, a Western "desperado" named Elmer  McCurdy was gunned down by a sheriff's posse after he robbed a train in Oklahoma. The body, which was embalmed with arsenic, was sold to at least two carnivals, a wax museum, and finally to a funhouse amusement park in California. At some point it was covered with wax and was believed to be one of the wax dummies. In 1976 the amusement park was the location for a segment of the "Six-Million-Dollar Man." A technician was moving the "dummy" when it's arm fell off. He started to glue it back on and noticed a bone inside. The body was finally identified and buried at Boot Hill.

Lots of media today are looking back 25 years to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but we didn't know about it 25 years ago today. Nor the next day. It was April 29 before report of the accident hit the newspapers. In fact, front page news on the day of the accident was the unanimous decision by the US Atomic Safety and Licensing board to authorize the issuance of a license for Carolina Power & Light to operate the Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant.

On the plant's fifth anniversary, N&O staffer C.E. Yandle wrote of the controversies and opposition associated with its construction.

Inside the elegantly appointed dining hall of the Sir Walter Hotel in downtown Raleigh on April 30, 1971, Shearon Harris unveiled a stunner.

"The difficulty is in trying to explain to the public the basic differences in our plant and the one at Chernobyl, " says (C. Scott) Hinnant, the Harris plant's general manager. "It's like trying to explain that a McDonnell Douglas plane is still safe after a Boeing plane crashes." -- The News & Observer, 5/2/1992

Meanwhile, Chernobyl did hit the front pages as more news came to surface. April 29's headline "Soviets report nuclear leak" by the next day became a full page under "Soviets battle nuclear disaster."

As the country anticipated another famous wedding 55 years ago today, Raleigh felt a special connection to the wedding couple. The bridegroom, E. Clifton Daniel Jr., son of a Zebulon pharmacist, was marrying Margaret Truman, daughter of the former president.

Daniel, who would go on to be managing editor of The New York Times, started his reporting career in 1927 as a 14-year-old scribe for Boy Scout Troop 17. His account of a troop campout was published in the weekly Zebulon Record. He later wrote for The News & Observer from 1934 to 1937 and  joined The New York Times in 1943, where he came to be "considered by many as one of the most eligible bachelors in New York newspaperdom."

In a 1972 oral history interview for the Truman Library, Daniel described growing up in the small town of Zebulon where his family had the first telephone in town (their phone number was 1) and talked about his father's life in the community, where he was twice named mayor:

My father was the son of a tobacco farmer in North Carolina whose name was William Daniel, and he grew up in a very small town, or near a very small town, called Wakefield, in eastern North Carolina, about twenty miles east of Raleigh, the capital. He was employed -- before he was twenty, I think -- in a drugstore which was operated by a local doctor named Dr. Z. M. (Z. for Zebulon, actually), Z. M. Caviness. He subsequently completed his education by studying pharmacy in a pharmacy school in Greensboro, North Carolina, and became a registered pharmacist, and was the operator of that drugstore, which he eventually came to own himself, for more than sixty years in Wakefield, and the little community of Zebulon, which grew up two miles away because the railroad passed two miles to the south; and the town, in effect, moved down to the railroad.

It subsequently prospered and my father became, eventually, not only the head of that business, but the president of the North Carolina Pharmaceutical Association, which for him, in his profession, was quite an honor. He also was chosen Pharmacist of the Year by the Association. He received its Fifty Year Award, all of these honors that come to a man in his own profession.

The elder Mr. Daniel had quite a time at the festivities surrounding his son's wedding and reported his experiences to the press:

The building excitement for the upcoming royal wedding has many of us remembering the early-morning gatherings to view the 1981 wedding of Charles and Diana.

But that wasn't the first time we had eagerly followed the wedding of a princess. The wedding of movie star Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier of Monaco 55 years ago today was front page news for days leading up to and following the royal ceremonies.

In Raleigh, movie goers could catch Grace Kelly's latest film The Swan, which opened at the Village Theater at Cameron Village on her wedding day. The movie, which was about a prince seeking a bride had more than one familiar face: most of the exterior scenes were shot at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville.

And at least one Raleigh native was in attendance, having won a free trip to the royal wedding.

Tomorrow, Nickelodeon is beginning its celebration of the 10th anniversary of SpongeBob SquarePants -- that absorbent, yellow fellow who lives in a pineapple under the sea -- with "The Ultimate SpongeBob SpongeBash Weekend."

As part of that celebration the network has proclaimed tomorrow, July 17th, the first Global Day of Happiness.

And it seems that Durham Mayor Bill Bell is on board.

He even signed a proclamation urging Durham residents to make special note of this observance.