Natalie Wood Drowns……
November 29, 1981……
Actress Natalie Wood drowns at the age of 43 off the side of her yacht while it was anchored near shore. She was on board with her husband Robert Wagner, Christopher Walken, and the yacht’s captain. How she ended up in the water was not determined, but she had bruises on her body and arms and an abrasion on her left cheek. Her blood alcohol content was 0.14% and there were traces of a motion-sickness pill and a painkiller in her bloodstream, both of which increase the effects of alcohol. According to Wagner, he and Wood had been arguing earlier and Wood went to bed first. When Wagner went to join her, he noticed that both she and the yacht’s small inflatable dinghy were missing. A witness in a boat nearby said that around 11 p.m. she heard a woman calling out, “Somebody please help me, I’m drowning.” Her body was found about a mile from the yacht with the dinghy beached nearby. Her sister, Lana Wood, said Wood had a fear of water and would never have tried to enter the dinghy alone, especially only wearing a nightgown. Wood’s fear of water started as a child, when she almost drowned while filming The Green Promise (1949). She had recently starred in the TV movie The Memory of Eva Ryker (1980), in which a character she played drowned. Her death was initially ruled accidental, but the case was reopened in 2011 and the cause of death was changed to “drowning and other undetermined factors.”
Thriller……
November 30, 1982……
Michael Jackson‘s Thriller album is released. It became the world’s best-selling album (65,000,000 copies) and won a record-breaking 8 Grammy Awards. It was one of the first albums to successfully use music videos for promotion. The videos for “Thriller”, “Billie Jean”, and “Beat It” all received regular rotation on MTV.
Rosa Parks Refuses to Give Up Her Seat on the Bus…..
December 1, 1955…..
Rosa Parks had initially seated herself in the black section of the bus. However, when the whites-only section became filled, the bus driver declared the section she was sitting in was now whites-only and asked her and several other blacks to move. The other blacks moved, but Parks refused prompting her arrest. Her arrest led to a year-long city bus boycott which then led to ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional. While some claim she wouldn’t give up her seat because she was tired, Parks said, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day … No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”