On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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A dispatch and an accompanying table yesterday on a poll surveying the views of Roman Catholics in America misstated one finding. The percentage of all Roman Catholics favoring the current status of legal abortion was 26, not 36.
Executives of the National Gypsum Company offered yesterday to buy the big supplier of building products for about $1.1 billion in cash and securities and then make it a private company. The leveraged buyout proposal, which was submitted to directors, calls for the investor group to pay $40.50 in cash plus $17 in debentures for each of Gypsum's 22.8 million shares. Traders, pointing out that the debentures paid no interest for the first five years, valued them at only about $9.50, which would make the offer worth about $50 a share. At that price, Gypsum's 22.8 million shares would be worth $1.1 billion.
A former communications specialist for the National Security Agency was arrested this morning after admitting that he sold American intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union for more than five years, the authorities said. Federal officials said the suspect, Ronald W. Pelton, 44 years old, was identified as a spy by Vitaly Yurchenko, the turnabout Soviet defector who fled to the West last summer but returned to Moscow early this month. In Mr. Pelton's case, an official said, evidence was found to support Mr. Yurchenko's allegations. Mr. Pelton told the Federal Bureau of Investigation in an interview Sunday that he met with a Soviet intelligence officer several times from January 1980 through January 1983, according to a bureau affidavit filed in Federal District Court today. It said the spying went on until September of this year.
IN a major catastrophe like the Mexican earthquake and the mud slides in Colombia, experts say, the psychological world collapses just as resoundingly as the physical one. The most prominent psychological casualty is the sense of invulnerability with which most people manage to face the risks of daily life. Also shattered, psychologists are finding, are a person's sense that his or her world is comprehensible and has meaning, and for many years after the trauma a person's very sense of worth may be damaged. ''The common belief that people recover after a few weeks from disaster is based on mistaking denial for recovery,'' said Dr. Mardi Horowitz, a psychiatrist at the University of California medical school at San Francisco. Delayed Psychological Reactions Dr. Horowitz's research has shown that many psychological symptoms do not appear until long after the victim seems to have fully recovered from the disaster, and when the problems do arise - such as difficulty concentrating, depression or sleeplessness - their causes may go unrecognized.
The Sperry Corporation said yesterday that it had negotiated several agreements with Hitachi Ltd. to evaluate ''technology exchanges'' between the two companies, leading industry experts to speculate that the Japanese electronics giant will soon be manufacturing key components of Sperry's mainframe computer systems. The move appears to be another in Sperry's transformation away from manufacturing much of its own hardware, primarily because of heavy price competition from the International Business Machines Corporation and Japanese manufacturers. Already, another Japanese company, Mitsubishi, manufactures Sperry's personal computers.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of November 20, 1985, covering November 26, 1985.
Soundtrack
John Mellencamp
Dire Straits
Heart
Stevie Wonder
1985Matt Carpenter, American baseball player[†]
Matthew Martin Lee Carpenter is an American former professional baseball infielder. He played 14 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) for the St. Louis Cardinals, New York Yankees, and San Diego Padres. A left-handed batter and right-handed thrower, Carpenter stands 6 feet 3 inches (1.91 m) and weighs 205 pounds (93 kg).
1985Vivien Thomas, American surgeon and academic (born 1910)[†]
Vivien Theodore Thomas was an American laboratory supervisor who, in the 1940s, played a major role in developing a procedure now called the Blalock–Thomas–Taussig shunt used to treat blue baby syndrome along with surgeon Alfred Blalock and cardiologist Helen B. Taussig. He was the assistant to Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and later at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Thomas was unique in that he did not have any professional education or experience in a research laboratory; however, he served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. In 1976, Johns Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate and named him an Instructor of Surgery for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Without any education past high school, Thomas rose above poverty and racism to become a cardiac surgery pioneer and a teacher of operative techniques to many of the country's most prominent surgeons.
In 1985, the world population was approximately 4,868,943,465 people[†]