A page from the past - March

ImageMarch 1, 1985

Milwaukee businessman and future U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl purchases the Milwaukee Bucks for $18 million. By 1999, the team was worth an estimated $100 million.

Source: Wisconsin Historical Society

ImageMarch 3, 1931

President Herbert Hoover signs a congressional act making "The Star-Spangled Banner" the official national anthem of the United States.

Source: www.historychannel.com

March 3, 1936

A new state code sets minimum wages for construction workers in Janesville higher than other Wisconsin cities. Masons get $1 an hour, cement finishers get 80 cents, carpenters get 85 cents, and laborers get 55 cents. Accounting, office and clerical workers in construction trades also were guaranteed $14 a week.

Source: Wisconsin Historical Society

ImageMarch 10, 1876

Alexander Graham Bell conducts the first successful experiment with the telephone.

Source: Library of Congress Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

March 12, 1901

Andrew Carnegie, one of the world's foremost industrialists, offers the city of New York $5.2 million for the construction of 65 branch libraries. The Scottish immigrant's fortune eventually would establish many more libraries and charitable foundations.

Source: Library of Congress

ImageMarch 18, 2005

The State Building Commission approves in its capital budget the $380 million Wisconsin Institute of Discovery on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. The 450,000-square-foot facility is expected to serve as a hub for stem cell research.

March 20, 1854

Free Soilers and Whigs meet in Ripon to consider forming a new political party. The meeting's organizer, Alvan E. Bovay, proposed the name Republican, which was suggested by New York editor Horace Greeley. Though other places claimed themselves as the birthplace of the Republican Party, this was the earliest meeting held for the purpose and the first to use the term Republican.

Source: Wisconsin Historical Society

ImageMarch 24, 1874

Magician Harry Houdini is born in Budapest, though he later claims to have been born on April 6, 1874, in Appleton. At the age of 13 he left Appleton, where his family had emigrated, for New York City and began his career as an escape artist and magician.

Source: Wisconsin Historical Society

ImageMarch 30, 1981

President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest by John Hinckley Jr. outside the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Reagan had just finished addressing a labor meeting and was walking with his entourage to his limousine when Hinckley, standing among a group of reporters, fired six shots at the president, hitting Reagan and three of his attendants.

Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division