Oct. 29 Marks 86 Years Since First US Peacetime Draft Number Was Drawn
On this date in 1940, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson drew number 158 from a glass bowl, kicking off the country's first peacetime military draft.
By Kavya Robinson ·
The date carries more history than most.
On October 29, 1940, a blindfolded Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson reached into a glass bowl and pulled out number 158, launching America's first peacetime military draft. That same calendar day, across the century, saw the premiere of Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni" in Prague in 1787 and the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX off Jakarta in 2018 that killed all 189 people aboard.
Other events tied to October 29 include the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh in London in 1618 on charges of conspiring against King James I; Benito Mussolini's appointment as Italian prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1922; and the New York Stock Exchange's "Black Tuesday" in 1929, when $14 billion in value was wiped out by panicked selling, sending the United States into the Great Depression.
The date also marks the start of the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Israel invaded Egypt to seize the Suez Canal with backing from France and Britain after Egyptian nationalization; the withdrawal followed after President Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration refused to support the operation and threatened sanctions. In 1960, a chartered plane carrying the California Polytechnic State University football team crashed on takeoff from Toledo, Ohio, killing 22 of the 48 people on board.
More recent October 29 entries include Senator John Glenn returning to space at age 77 aboard shuttle Discovery in 1998, 36 years after orbiting Earth in 1962; Superstorm Sandy making landfall in New Jersey in 2012, with at least 182 deaths in the United States blamed on the storm and its aftermath; and in 2022, a crowd crush on a narrow Seoul street during Halloween festivities that killed more than 150 people in South Korea.
In 2024, Hezbollah announced cleric Naim Kassem as its leader following the killing of longtime head Hassan Nasrallah in an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut suburb in late September.
October 29, 2026, is the 302nd day of the year, with 63 days remaining.
Liberia's former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf turns 88 today.
Source: The Oakland Press
