On this date In 1912, Vice President James S. Sherman, running for a second term of office with Republican President William Howard Taft, died six days before Election Day. (Taft was defeated by Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the election). In 1938, the radio play “The War of the Worlds,” starring Orson Welles, aired on the CBS Radio Network. The broadcast panicked some listeners in its portrayal of an invasion by Martians. In 1961, the Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb, the “Tsar Bomba,” with a force estimated at about 50 megatons (over 3,500 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima). It remains the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. In 1972, an Illinois Central Gulf commuter train was struck by another train on Chicago’s South Side, killing 45 people and injuring about

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