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This Week in Boomer History: G.I. Joe ... People Magazine ... Rodney King
By Steve Mencher, March 2, 2014 02:00 AM
Notable events from our shared experience
Speeding on March 3, 1991, leads to a high-speed Los Angeles police chase for Rodney King and ends with a severe beating that is videotaped. When three of the officers are acquitted of charges a year later, riots break out in South Los Angeles.
Mia Farrow appears as The Great Gatsby's Daisy Buchanan on the cover of People Magazine's premier issue, dated March 4, 1974. Other notables in the issue: Marina Oswald, Gloria Vanderbilt and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
G.I. Joe, a foot-tall action figure that can "throw a grenade or crouch in a foxhole," according to promotions, debuts at the American International Toy Fair on March 9, 1964.
John Belushi - original cast member of Saturday Night Live, star degenerate of the Animal House movie, and one-half of the Blues Brothers - dies March 5, 1982, after overdosing in Hollywood. He is 33. 
Who says, "We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity"? Yes, it's Beatle John Lennon in an interview with the London Evening Standard newspaper published on March 4, 1966.
On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights protesters head out of Selma, Ala., for a 54-mile march to Montgomery. After just six blocks, lawmen attack them and drive them back into town. Marchers try again two days later and are turned back. A third march is successfully completed March 25.
In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan criticizes the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" - his first recorded use of the phrase that escalates the Cold War.
Let us read This Week in Boomer History to you:
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Credits: Rodney King poster: Mark Mathosian/Flickr; John Belushi: Ron Galella/WireImage/Getty Images; Ronald Reagan: White House Press Office via WikiMedia
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