Self-described “hometown girl” Jacolyn Baker Bucksbaum, who was location manager for “Home Alone,” knows Chicagoans expect authenticity when their city is portrayed on the big screen.
On Dec. 5, 2013, Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid leader who became South Africa’s first Black president, died at age 95.
By the 1920s, Lake County was well known for recreation. Sitting between two major cities, it also became a prime spot for illegal activity during Prohibition, and the area gained a reputation for drinking and gambling.
On Dec. 4, 1991, after being abducted and held for nearly seven years as a hostage by Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson was released from captivity.
On Dec. 14, 2012, a gunman with a semiautomatic rifle killed 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, then took his own life as police arrived; the 20-year-old had also fatally shot his mother at their home before carrying out the attack on the school.
Illinois is known for many things: Abraham Lincoln, the third largest city in the country, sprawling farmland, political corruption and die-hard sports fans.
1982 — Tommy Hearns wins the WBC welterweight title with a 15-round decision over Wilfred Benitez in New Orleans.
On Dec. 3, 1947, the Tennessee Williams play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened on Broadway.
On Dec. 2, 1982, in the first operation of its kind, doctors at the University of Utah Medical Center implanted a permanent artificial heart in the chest of retired dentist Dr. Barney Clark, who lived 112 days with the device.
On Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a Black seamstress, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus; the incident sparked a yearlong boycott of the buses and helped fuel the U.S. civil rights movement.