1997

Some of 1997’s news headlines seemed to come straight from science-fiction novels. Scottish scientists produced the first clone of an animal, a sheep; a robotic vehicle, the Sojourner, toured the surface of Mars, sending back close-up pictures; and comet Hale-Bopp, a brilliant three-tailed visitor from space glowed in the night sky.

Americans mourned two much-loved world figures in 1997. Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a Paris car crash on August 31. Widely admired for her warmth and her charitable work, the former wife of Prince Charles of Britain was just 36 when she was killed. Then, on September 5, news came of the death of 87-year-old Mother Teresa, a Roman Catholic nun who had devoted her life to helping the poor and sick in India and elsewhere in the world.

U.S.  President Bill Clinton started his second term amid a controversy over campaign financing, and investigations continued through the year. In April, Minnesota and the Dakotas were hit with devastating floods after a severe winter. And in June, a jury found Timothy McVeigh guilty in the 1995 bombing of a federal office building in Oklahoma City – the worst terrorist act in U.S. history.

Tara Lipinski, 14, became the youngest-ever world figure-skating champion in 1997; and Tiger Woods, 21, became the youngest pro to win the prestigious Masters golf tournament.

Hurricane Andrew

Every year between May and November, people in the eastern U.S. watch for hurricanes. These vast tropical storms in the Carribean Sea travel northwest, striking at the Caribbean islands and sometimes at the mainland of North America. One of the most terrible of these storms was Hurricane Andrew, which struck in August of 1992.

Andrew first hit the islands of the Bahamas and then moved northwest toward Florida. Modern weather prediction gave people a day or two to prepare. But there was no way to prepare for a storm as large as Andrew.

The center of the storm struck south of Miami on August 24. With wind gusts up to 165 miles an hour, Andrew leveled whole communities in a few hours. The winds uprooted trees, threw trucks on top of buildings, and reduced mobile homes to splinters. Driving rains flooded low-lying areas an swelled rivers to torrents.

The storm lost force as it crossed Florida, but when it reached the Gulf of Mexico it regained strength. On the evening of August 25, it slammed into the coast of southwestern Louisiana, causing still more destruction.

Andrew killed 14 people and left 250,000 homeless. Damage was estimated at $30 billion, making it the most destructive storm in U.S. history.

Andrew was the first storm of 1992.

The O.J. Simpson Trial

On the morning of June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found stabbed to death outside her apartment in a Los Angeles suburb. Within days, police identified O.J. Simpson, Nicole’s former husband, as the main suspect. Simpson was one of the most familiar people in America, a former pro-football star who often appeared in television commericals and movies. When Simpson was charged with the murders, the stage was set for one of the most talked-about trials in history.


Los Angeles prosecutors believed they had a strong case against Simpson. They offered a scientific evidence that he had been at the murder scene. Witnesses also testified that he abused Nicole in the past. But Simpson’s defense team argued that the police were prejudiced against Simpson because he was African-American. His lawyers showed that at least one detective was racist and suggested that he may have planted false evidence. They also showed that police work on the case was often sloppy, and they claimed that the evidence could not be trusted. After long months of testimony, the case was given to the jury. In less than four hours, the 12-member jury brought back its verdict: “Not guilty.” Many believed that Simpson had committed the murderes. Others said that there were too many doubts about the case to convict him. The truth may never be known…


Simpson paid an estimated $10 million in legal fees to the lawyers who defended him during the trial.