This Week 100 Years Ago: Headlines from 05 16, 2025

This Week 100 Years Ago

We’re rolling the calendar back to mid-May 1925—an era of cloche hats, Model T Fords, and radio sets glowing in family parlors. Two very different milestones unfolded within a 48-hour window, one in a quiet Nashville hospital, the other on a raucous Cleveland ballfield. Let’s step into the time machine.

1. A Star Is Born Under the Tennessee Sky — Nancy Grace Roman Arrives (16 May 1925)

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In the predawn calm of a small Nashville hospital, Georgia and Irwin Roman welcomed a daughter they named Nancy Grace. No newspaper trumpeted the news—why would it? Yet that seven-pound newborn would grow into the first Chief of Astronomy at NASA and earn the nickname “Mother of Hubble.”

Nancy’s childhood notebooks teemed with hand-drawn constellations at a time when girls were steered toward the piano, not the observatory. By the Space Age of the 1960s, she was steering billion-dollar satellite programs and lobbying Congress for a space telescope that would one day become Hubble, transforming our view of the cosmos.

2025 Lens

• A century on, the James Webb Telescope is beaming infrared portraits of exoplanets—work that stands directly on Roman’s early advocacy.
• NASA’s newly christened Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, slated for launch in 2027, is proof that a baby born in a segregated Southern hospital could rewrite humankind’s place in the universe.

2. Crack of the Bat Heard ’Round the League — Tris Speaker Reaches 3,000 Hits (17 May 1925)

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A sticky Sunday afternoon at Cleveland’s League Park: fans in straw boaters fanned themselves while the Cleveland Indians faced the Washington Senators. In the bottom of the first, center-fielder Tris Speaker laced a single to right—his 3,000th career hit. Only two men before him, Cap Anson and Honus Wagner, had ever done it.

Baseball in 1925 was a game of wool uniforms, train-car travel, and segregated stands. Speaker’s milestone headlined sports pages nationwide, cementing him as a living legend with a .345 lifetime average and a glove so reliable sportswriters called it “the place where triples go to die.”

2025 Lens

• As of this week in 2025, just 33 players have joined the 3,000-hit club—a reminder of how daunting the feat remains despite longer seasons and chartered jets.
• Today’s Statcast-era analytics dissect launch angle and exit velocity; Speaker relied on pure hand-eye skill and a cigar-box full of mental notes about every outfield wall in the league.

Final Reflection

Mid-May 1925 offered no ticker-tape parades or seismic political upheavals, yet in a single weekend humanity inched forward—toward the stars through Nancy Grace Roman and into the record books through Tris Speaker. Their legacies remind us that history’s bigger picture is painted one quiet birth, one well-timed swing at a time.