Skip to content

TODAY IN KENTUCKY HISTORY

Kentucky Trivia ● Kentucky Tweets

January 10, 1810, Kentucky appointed Henry Clay, a Democratic-Republican, as the 3rd Class II U.S. Senator for Kentucky, Buckner Thurston, also a Democratic-Republican, resigned to become a U.S. Circuit Court Judge.  This was Clay’s 2nd senate term, his 1st term ended in 1807.  “The Great Pacificator” served one year, one month and twenty-four days and then became Speaker of the House.

January 10, 1881, Shelbyville native Thomas Theodore Crittenden became the 24th Missouri governor.  He is credited with bringing the Jesse James Gang to justice.

January 10, 1908, Lexington Y.M.C.A. defeated the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky (U.K.) 29-19.  The Friday night game at the Y.M.C.A. gym started the 1908 basketball season.  UK played 11 games against five different teams.

January 10, 1914, State University, Lexington opened its basketball season by defeating Ashland Y.M.C.A. 28-15 in the Buell Armory Gymnasium.  “The lighting of the gymnasium was bad and the baskets were somewhat shaky, which made goal shooting difficult, especially for the visitors, and many trials were missed,” from the Lexington-Herald.  They played 14 games against ten different teams during this season.

January 10, 1921, Deputy Sheriff Walter Deal, Pike County Sheriff’s Office, died after arresting a man for disorderly conduct.  After taking the man’s revolver, Deputy Deal told the man to go home.  The man took a few steps, then turned and shot the sheriff.

January 10, 1921, Mr. Duffy of Cynthiana, via a letter, introduced to the General Assembly the idea of toll gates on all Kentucky public highways.  He and other legislators felt tolls were the best ways to raise money for safe roads.

January 10, 1946, Policeman Albert Horn and Policeman Orbin B. Moore, Prestonsburg Police Department, died after arresting a man for being drunk in public near the Middle Creek Bridge.  They had placed the man in the rear seat of their patrol car but failed to locate a small handgun he had hid on himself.

January 10, 1951, Army CPL Bernard J. Stone from Kenton County died in the Korean War.

On January 10, 1970, Kentucky teachers addressed their shock and anger at Governor Louie B. Nunn’s budget he submitted to the 1970 General Assembly.  The governor did not include a teacher raise, which they heavily anticipated.

On January 10, 1970, the Kentucky Crime Commission indicted most of the state’s local jails as substandard institutions that can’t hold prisoners.  The report claimed the jails did more harm than good when they kept prisoners, and it costs more than the facilities were worth.  The 46-page document studied 170 local jails.

On January 10, 1977, Kentucky Utilities asked customers to cut back on electricity for one day.  The utility’s coal at the Brown Power Plant at Dix Dam iced and caused problems.  The wind chill in Central Kentucky had reached -32 degrees.

January 10, 1984, for the 2nd time in less than a year, Kentucky told Greyhound Bus Lines they could not discontinue two Kentucky routes even though they were losing money.

January 10, 1986, Barry Bingham Sr. announced his family sold The Courier-Journal and Louisville Times Company.  The family had operated the paper since 1918.  Also for sale were WHAS, Standard Gravure Corporation, and subsidies of all the companies.

January 10, 1988, the two-day dispersal sale ended for Nelson Bunker Hunt.  He sold 580 horses for a record $46,912,800.

January 10, 1989, Officer Frank W. Pysher, Jr., Jefferson County Police Department, died from a gunshot with high powered rifle while he still sat in his cruiser.

On January 10, 1992, Governor B. Jones criticized outgoing Governor W. Wilkinson for lavish spending on a European trip.  In October 1991, Governor Wilkinson, who later became a conman, took a party of 12 on an 11-day trip for a four-day coal conference in Berlin, where they also visited Hamburg and London.

January 10, 1996, David Cheak, a 19-year employee of the Revenue Cabinet, pleaded not guilty to stealing $3.8 million from Kentucky.  The prosecutor stated he could have continued siphoning away money if he hadn’t tried to grab too much in December of 1995.  In two years, he took $1.4 million; in December ’95, he took $2.4 million.

On January 10, 1996, Doug Flynn lost his state drug-fighting job when newly elected Governor P. Patton replaced him with Larry Carrico.  Mr. Carrico, the husband of Kentucky Education Association President Janet Carrico, donated to Patton’s campaign.  Flynn stated his deep disappointment with the decision.

January 10, 2000, Time Warner and American On-Line made a $165 billion merger, the largest in U.S. history at the time.  On the same day, Microsoft settled an antitrust lawsuit with one of its competitors for $155 million.

January 10, 2000, the tobacco industry won a significant legal victory when the Supreme Court refused to let Union health funds sue cigarette makers to recover the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses.

January 10, 2001, the Dallas Museum of Art received Henry Clay’s bed.  Clay was so confident he would win the presidency that he commissioned an ornate Gothic bed to be the centerpiece for the White House presidential suite, now known as the Lincoln Bedroom.  The 13 feet-high, 7.5 feet wide and 9-foot long bed made a dramatic addition to the museum.

Henry Clay’s Commissioned Ornate Gothic Bed

January 10, 2008, Deputy Sheriff Anthony “Sean” Pursifull, Bell County Sheriff’s Department, died when his parked patrol car was intentionally rammed by a suspect fleeing a Kentucky State Police trooper.  The two juveniles had just stolen gas from a service station in Baxter and fled down U.S. 119.

January 10, 2008, Kentucky again earned an “F” from the American Lung Association for its low cigarette tax and efforts to prevent smoking.  The habit cost Kentucky an estimated $3 billion a year, not counting the emotional toll of cancer, respiratory disease, heart attacks, and strokes.

January 10, 2010, Julia Strange, a senior from duPont Manual High School in Louisville, announced she had been the only Kentuckian to participate in the 2010 Young Arts Week in Miami, Florida.  She was one of 143 chosen nationwide from 4,000 applicants.

January 10, 2015, in his 1st local interview Greg Creed, the newly appointed CEO of Yum! Brands, the world’s largest restaurant company, stated the headquarters would remain in Louisville aftercompany officials publicly discussed moving.  Mr. Creed retired at the end of 2019.

January 10, 2015, a Keeneland graduate superfecta won Santa Anita’s GII 201,500 San Pasqual Stakes for four-year-olds and upward.

January 10, 2020, the filing deadline to run for political office in Kentucky came weeks earlier than normal, but that didn’t stop 300 Kentuckians from filing for state and federal offices.  Seventeen people wanted to take down Alabama native Mitch McConnell.

January 10, 2021, Kentucky, in four weeks, administered 107,779 vaccines out of the 239,550 doses the federal government paid for.  In a sign of our violent times, four persons died, and several received injuries after a string of shootings in and around Louisville.  Meanwhile, in Frankfort, the Assembly forwarded a bill that would stop crooked lobbyists from doing business in the Commonwealth for five years after their conviction.  They aimed the new law at one particular firm and lobbyist (CCMSI / James Sullivan); however, it is good to see the state start somewhere.

On January 10, 2022, the CEO of Pfizer, a veterinarian, stated, “Two doses of the vaccine offer very limited protection, if any, for omicron.”  However, he said, “the third shots provided good protection against death and decent protection against hospitalization.”

January 10, 2022, a federal judge in Texas ruled that the FDA must, by the end of January 2022, make public 12,000 pages of the data it used to make decisions about approvals for Pfizer/BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine.  Pfizer requested 75 years to release the data.