January 22 –Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer commits suicide by shooting himself during a press conference. The incident was captured by news cameras and later broadcast on television.
January 28 – The U.S. State Department invalidates US passports for travel to or through Lebanon due to security concerns. The ban was lifted in 1997.[2]
January 31 – The last Ohrbach's department store closes in New York City after 64 years of operation.
February
February 9 –Brownsville, Texas, receives 7 inches (177.80mm) of rain in just two hours; flooding in some parts of the city is worse than that caused by Hurricane Beulah in 1967.
February 11 – The United States military detonates an atomic weapon at the Nevada Test Site.
February 20 – A second Unabomber bomb explodes at a computer store in Salt Lake City, injuring the owner.
April 23 –L'Ambiance Plaza collapse: 28 construction workers are killed at a residential project under construction in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was one of the worst disasters in Connecticut history.
May 8 – U.S. Senator Gary Hart drops out of the running for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, amid allegations of an extramarital affair with Donna Rice.
May 17 – The USS Stark is hit by two Iraqi owned Exocet AM39 air-to-surface missiles, killing 37 sailors.
May 21 –Andrew Wyeth, with his "Helga Pictures," becomes the first living American painter to have a one-man show of his work in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
May 24
Approximately 800,000 people gather for a walk to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California.
Five days before his 48th birthday, Al Unser became the oldest winner of the Indianapolis 500 and only the second driver to win the event four times.
June 16 –Bernhard Goetz is exonerated on 12 of 13 counts by a jury in the case against him stemming from the 1984 shootings of four youths in a New York subway car.
June 19
Teddy Seymour is officially designated the first black man to sail around the world, when he completes his solo sailing circumnavigation in Frederiksted, St. Croix, of the United States Virgin Islands.
August 19 –ABC News chief Middle East correspondent Charles Glass escapes his Hezbollah kidnappers in Beirut, Lebanon, after 62 days in captivity.
August 31 – Michael Jackson releases Bad, his first studio album since Thriller, the best-selling album of all time. The album would produce five number one singles in the US, a record which has not been broken.
September
September 17 – Televangelist Pat Robertson announces his candidacy for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination.
September 25 –Varroa destructor, an invasive parasite, is found for the first time in the U.S.[4]
October
October – The unemployment rate drops below 6% for the first time since 1979.
November 6 –Floridarapist Tommy Lee Andrews is the first person to be convicted as a result of DNA fingerprinting: he is sentenced to 22 years in prison.
November 18 –Iran–Contra affair: U.S. Senate and House panels release reports charging President Ronald Reagan with 'ultimate responsibility' for the affair.
December 10 – A squirrel closes down the Nasdaq Stock Exchange when it burrows through a telephone line.[5]
December 22–28 –Ronald Gene Simmons goes on a 6-day killing spree in Russellville, Arkansas, killing his wife, children, and grandchildren as they arrived to celebrate the holidays at his home. On the 28th he went on a shooting spree, killing an additional woman and wounding 5 others before surrendering to police. The final death toll was 16. He was tried and eventually executed.
December 29 –Prozac makes its debut in the United States.
January 14 –James Belfer, producer, founder and CEO of Cartuna, founder and CEO of Dogfish Pictures, and founder and managing director of Dogfish Accelerator
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
