The Sideways Children of 1985...

The year, 1985, was the year that O. J. Simpson was inducted into the Football Hall of Fame. It was also the year they found a grave of a man named Wolfgang Gerhard in Embu, Brazil, and dug him up to find out that he was really Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer they called the 'Angel of Death.' And there was a guy with one leg who ran all the way across Canada in fourteen months. An airplane was taken over by terrorists, and the Vice President, George Bush, announced that a teacher from New Hampshire named Christa McAuliffe would become the first schoolteacher to go to space, riding in style in the Challenger shuttle. A Japanese Boeing 747 jumbo jet had crashed into a mountain in Gunma and killed 520 people, and four of them somehow managed to crawl out of the wreckage and live to tell about it. There was a cruise ship called the Achille Lauro carting rich Europeans and Americans around the Mediterranean Sea. It was taken over by Palestinian Liberationists, who ransomed it for prisoners held by Israel, and succeeded only in chucking a guy in a wheelchair overboard, into the winedark sea, before being captured. Then there was the volcano; Nevado del Ruiz, that buried the city of Armero, and socked the breath out of twenty-three thousand people. And it was the year Tipper Gore decided that there should be warning labels on albums that contained curse words. There was a guy who got life in prison for selling stealth bomber secrets to the Russians, and in New York City, two Mafia bosses, Paul Castellano and Thomas Bilotti got gunned down by their own men in the middle of having coffee. The ancient Aztecs said that it was the year in which the future savior of the world would be born. And it was the first time that “Calvin and Hobbes” hit the newsmen's press.