A little history is always a good thing.  Especially when one of the “today in history” was the infamous Dan Quayle’s “potato” versus “potatoe”!

• 1836: Arkansas became the 25th state.
• 1934: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an act making the National Guard part of the U.S. Army in the event of war or national emergency.
• 1955: The United States and Britain signed a cooperation agreement concerning atomic information for “mutual defense purposes.”
• 1967: The war film “The Dirty Dozen” was released by MGM.
• 1977: Spain held its first free elections in four decades; the Union of the Democratic Center won the highest number of seats in the Congress of Deputies.
• 1985: The Shiite Muslim hijackers of a TWA Boeing 727 beat and shot one of their hostages, U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, 23, throwing him out of the plane to die on the tarmac at Beirut airport.
• 1992: During a visit to an elementary school in Trenton, New Jersey, Vice President Dan Quayle, relying on a faulty flash card, erroneously instructed sixth-grader William Figueroa to write “potato” as “potatoe” on a blackboard during a spelling quiz.