Black Friday, Saturday, and Sunday Quiz

Answer: Sunday, July 17, 1955

You wouldn't think that the opening day of Disneyland would be called Black Sunday, but things didn't go according to plan. The date was actually an invitation-only, pre-screening of Disneyland, but counterfeit tickets were printed nearly doubling the intended crowd of 15,000.

The excessive amount of people backed up the freeway and also caused all of the food and beverages to be gone within a few hours. The weather didn't cooperate; it was over 100 F, and due to a plumbers' strike, many of the drinking fountains weren't working, leaving a lot of thirsty visitors. Construction on the park wasn't complete in time so several rides weren't operational, and several of the ones that were working broke down. And for a final coup, the Mark Twain Riverboat went off its track and sank into the mud, and a fire broke out in Sleeping Beauty's castle. Things got better over time, but employees referred to that opening day as Black Sunday.

Answer: Friday, February 9, 1945

The largest air battle over Norway during WWII was a raid on German ships sheltered in Forde fjord. The thirty-two Beaufighters were flown by British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand pilots and were originally tasked with targeting German merchant vessels, but plans changed once a pair of reconnaissance planes spotted a German destroyer Z33 and escort ships in the fjord. The squadrons came under heavy anti-aircraft fire while trying to reach the ships, and the battle became known as Black Friday due to the number of Allied casualties - fourteen men killed, four taken prisoner, and ten planes destroyed. Many of the surviving planes were also damaged but made it back to base.

As an FT guest player pointed out, this was also a significant day under Norwegian waters. The British HMS Venture sank the German U-864 in the first confirmed sinking of a submerged submarine by another submerged submarine.

Answer: Saturday, August 4, 1621

The Five Articles of Perth were Church of England practices that were forced on the Scottish church by King James I of England. Proposed in 1618 and accepted by Parliament in 1621, the rules affected procedures for baptism, communion, confirmation, and holy day observations which the Scottish church found to "Popish practices".

The day that the articles were confirmed by the Parliament in Edinburgh was a particularly dark and dreary day, and according to legend, at the moment the acts were ratified with a touch of a royal scepter, there was massive lightning and thunder and a deluge of hailstones fell upon the city.

The locals interpreted it as Divine displeasure over the enactment of the rules, and the day was hence known as Black Saturday.

Answer: Saturday, February 7, 2009

To be fair, Australia has a lot of bushfires, and a few of them have had "black" monikers. There were the Black Tuesday bushfires in Tasmania in 1967, the Black Thursday bushfires in 1851, the massive Black Friday bushfires in 1939, and the Black Sunday bushfires in 1955, for example.

But the Black Saturday bushfires of February and March 2009 were the deadliest to that date with 180 people dead and over 1,100,000 acres burned. The area was experiencing an extreme heatwave and drought, and a few of fires broke out prior to February 7th, but on that date the wind picked up and as many as 400 fires broke out, some due to natural causes and others due to arson and downed power lines.

The fires weren't fully extinguished until mid March.

Answer: Saturday, December 28, 1929

The Mau movement (not to be confused with the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya) was an independence movement in Samoa in the early twentieth century. It began when the country was under German control and continued when New Zealand took over colonial control during WWI.

The Mau movement was committed to a non-violent resistance against colonial control, but things changed on the day in question. A parade was held to welcome home a couple of exiled leaders, and when the New Zealand police tried to arrest one of the Mau leaders, a struggle ensued. One of the police officers was clubbed to death, and when a policeman fired a machine gun over the heads of the crowd to disperse them, other policemen began shooting into the crowd. Eleven Samoans were killed and around fifty were wounded in the Black Saturday tragedy, for which New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologized in 2002.

Answer: Friday, May 9, 1873

The Panic of 1873 led to a massive economic depression across Europe and North America which dragged on until the mid 1890s and was known as the Long Depression. There were several underlying causes to the depression, including inflation, real estate bubbles, overvalued railroad stocks, and property losses due to natural disasters, but one of the main sparks was the crash of the Vienna Stock Exchange leading to the failures of several Austrian banks. Occurring on a Friday, the crash earned the moniker "Black Friday" for its subsequent effects.

Incidentally, there was another stock market Black Friday that occurred a few years earlier in the U.S. markets; a crash took place on September 24, 1869 when the price of gold plummeted.

Answer: Sunday, April 13, 1975

Tensions leading to the fifteen year Lebanese Civil War had been building for years, but things reached a head on this Black Sunday. In the morning, an altercation broke out outside of a Christian church where a baptism was taking place, resulting in the shooting death of a Palestinian driver.

After the service, a drive-by shooting took place as the ceremony was ending, killing four members of the Christian Phalangist party. This led to roadblocks being set up around Beirut, with Christians targeting Muslim vehicles, and Muslims targeting Christian vehicles.

In the afternoon, a bus carrying Muslims to a refugee camp passed through a Christian-blockaded area, and the Christians opened fire on the bus, reportedly killing over 20 and wounding 19 of the passengers (numbers vary depending on the source).

Another Black Sunday occurred in Lebanon in January 2008 when Lebanese troops fired on demonstrators who were protesting power cuts and the cost of bread.

Answer: Sunday, April 14, 1935

The Dust Bowl refers to a period of severe dust storms that hit central Canada and the Great Plains of the U.S. during the 1930s, but the name was created after one particularly bad day of storms. A combination of drought and poor farming practices helped create the dust that would lift off the ground with the slightest breeze. On the day in question, the winds died down and the skies were blue in the morning, but in a few hours, the temperature dropped thirty degrees and the winds picked up, creating a line of dust that was hundreds of miles wide. Woody Guthrie, who was living in Texas at the time, wrote the song "So Long, It's been Good to Know Yuh" about the event.

The storm raged for hours and reportedly displaced 300,000 tons of topsoil. An Associated Press reporter, Robert Geiger, was caught in the storm in Oklahoma, and the article he wrote about it was the first to use the term "dust bowl".

The name Black Sunday literally referred to the blackness of the sky when the sun was completely blotted out.

Answer: Friday, September 8, 1978

The Black Friday Massacre in Tehran occurred when thousands of pro-Ayatollah Khomeini protesters had gathered in Jaleh Square for a demonstration after the Shah had declared martial law. Soldiers opened fire on the crowd; the number of casualties varied widely, as government officials provided 86 as the number of dead with 205 injured, while a French journalist at the scene put the estimate of the dead in the thousands, and a BBC journalist estimated the number to be in the hundreds.

The Shah deported Khomeini but was unable to quell the dissent, and by January, he had left the country.

Answer: Saturday, August 8, 1903

National League Park opened in 1895 and was called the first modern ballpark because it was constructed of mostly steel and brick and was considered fireproof. There was however a wooden balcony which rang alongside the outer wall and was intended to be used as a walkway for patrons who were entering or leaving the bleachers. On the date in question, the Phillies were in the second half of a doubleheader with the Boston Beaneaters when an incident outside the park caught the attention of fans in the bleachers.

A drunken man grabbed a teenage girl who had been teasing him, and when she screamed for help, a crowd gathered on the walkway, and it collapsed, sending about 300 people on a thirty foot drop to the street below. Twelve people were killed and 232 were injured on that day that earned the Black Saturday appellation.