WETA

On this day 30 years ago, the Olympic flame spent the night at the White House.

The torch was on its way to Atlanta for the Summer Games, and when it came through Washington, President Clinton didn’t just wave it past. The flame was carried up Pennsylvania Avenue by an Army veteran recovering from landmine injuries — still in a cast, pushed in a wheelchair by his father — who passed it to Gallaudet University’s president, Dr. I. King Jordan, who carried it onto the South Lawn just before 10 p.m. Clinton and Vice President Gore lit a special cauldron that had been erected to house the flame overnight, and the crowd broke into applause as it jumped high enough to see over the White House lawn.

Earlier that day, the torch had stopped at both Gallaudet and Howard Universities on its way through the District. The Georgia State Patrol officers guarding the flame had to negotiate access to the White House grounds with the Secret Service — until agents realized that if the Georgia officers weren’t allowed in, they would have to learn how to maintain an international Olympic flame on short notice. WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.

Happy birthday to Paul McCartney, who turns 84 today. Here’s a local angle to Beatlemania you might not know.

In December 1963, Capitol Records had essentially given up on the Beatles in America — they’d put off releasing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” until after the holidays, figuring the group didn’t have much of a market. Then a ninth-grader in Silver Spring named Marsha Albert watched a CBS News report about this new British band, heard a few bars of “She Loves You,” and couldn’t get it out of her head. She wrote a letter to WWDC, the only station her “crummy little radio” could pick up, and asked if they could get hold of one of their records.

Disc jockey Carroll James tracked down a British pressing through a BOAC flight attendant. He called Marsha and invited her to come to the studio and introduce the song herself. When WWDC played “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on December 17, 1963, the switchboard lit up immediately. Capitol rushed the single to release the day after Christmas, pressing a million copies instead of the 200,000 they’d planned. By the time the Beatles landed at JFK on February 7, 1964, Beatlemania was already in motion — and their first concert stop was Washington, D.C., where John, Paul, George, and Ringo sat down with Carroll James and, learning what Marsha had done, turned to her and said: “Thank you, Marsha.”

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story at the link in the comments below.