October 13: The First Stone, the First Series, the Unsolved Case Three October 13ths defined by foundations — of a nation's home, of America's pastime, and of a case that has never found one Foundations are the things we build on — the cornerstones, the first games, the opening arguments of cases that go on for years. October 13 has laid three of them. In 1792, workers positioned the first stone block of what would become the most recognizable address in the world. In 1903, two baseball leagues settled their rivalry in a best-of-nine series and invented a tradition that has outlasted every era it has passed through. And in 1999, a Colorado grand jury declined to indict anyone for a murder that had transfixed the nation for three years — a non-decision that became, in its own way, a foundation for a case that has never been closed. 1600   On October 13, 1792, in the new federal city rising from the Maryland and Virginia banks of the Potomac River, workers laid the cornerstone of the President's House — the building that would eventually be known as the White House. George Washington presided over the ceremony, though he would never live in the mansion himself; it would not be ready for occupancy until John Adams moved in during the final months of his presidency in 1800. The building was designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban, who won a competition with a design inspired by Leinster House in Dublin, and its construction proceeded slowly over the following eight years, relying on a workforce that included both free laborers and enslaved people hired out by their owners — a fact that the building's history long obscured and has more recently begun to acknowledge. The President's House that Adams first occupied bore little resemblance to the building Americans know today. It was unfinished, drafty, and surrounded by mud and construction debris. Abigail Adams hung laundry in the East Room. The building was burned by British forces in 1814 and rebuilt, expanded repeatedly over the following two centuries, and has housed every American president since Adams — through wars, assassinations, triumphs, and scandals that have tested the institution it represents. The cornerstone laid on October 13, 1792 has never been definitively located. Renovations have searched for it without success. The first stone of the most famous house in the world remains, appropriately enough for a building that has always held more secrets than it reveals, somewhere beneath the surface.   The White House — a building whose cornerstone was laid on October 13, 1792, and whose first stone has never been definitively found in the two centuries since. The First Fall Classic On October 13, 1903, the Boston Americans defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates 3-0 in Game 8 of the inaugural modern World Series, completing a five-games-to-three victory and claiming the first championship between the American and National Leagues. The series had been proposed as a way of settling the bitter rivalry between the two leagues, which had spent several years in open warfare over player contracts and territorial rights, and it succeeded beyond anyone's reasonable expectations — drawing enormous crowds in both cities and generating the kind of press coverage that signaled something new was happening in American sport. Boston's Cy Young, already one of the most celebrated pitchers in the game, won two games in the series. Pittsburgh's Honus Wagner, considered by many the greatest player of his era, struggled throughout, hitting just .222 against Boston's pitching. The 1903 World Series established a template that has endured, with interruptions and modifications, for more than a century. The postseason format has changed — expanded, contracted, restructured — and the game itself has been transformed by integration, free agency, performance-enhancing drugs, and analytics. But the fundamental proposition of the World Series remains what it was in 1903: the best team in the American League against the best in the National, winner take all, played in October when the leaves are turning and the baseball season has distilled itself to its most essential. The Boston Americans were eventually renamed the Red Sox. The tradition they helped inaugurate in Pittsburgh and Boston in the autumn of 1903 has never stopped. An early 20th-century baseball stadium in October — the setting for the inaugural World Series, which established a tradition the sport has honored every autumn since. ❦ No True Bill   On October 13, 1999, a Boulder County grand jury announced that it would not indict anyone in connection with the murder of JonBenét Ramsey, the six-year-old Colorado girl whose death on December 26, 1996 had become one of the most scrutinized criminal cases in American history. JonBenét had been found strangled and beaten in the basement of her family's home in Boulder hours after she was reported missing. The investigation that followed was marked by missteps from the beginning — the crime scene was compromised, evidence was mishandled, and the Boulder Police Department's focus on the Ramsey family, while the city's district attorney pointed elsewhere, created a public and institutional conflict that undermined the case for years. The grand jury's failure to indict after thirteen months of proceedings was not an exoneration of anyone. It was a statement that the evidence, as assembled, was not sufficient to charge. The case has never been closed. In 2008, advances in DNA testing cleared JonBenét's parents, John and Patsy Ramsey — Patsy had died of cancer in 2006 — of involvement, with the Boulder District Attorney's office issuing a formal apology to the family for years of public suspicion. The DNA evidence pointed to an unknown male, but no match has ever been identified. JonBenét Ramsey's murder remains officially unsolved, one of the most extensively investigated and publicly consumed cold cases in American history. The grand jury's decision on October 13, 1999 did not end the story. It simply formalized what investigators already knew: that the answer, if it exists at all, had not yet been found.   Boulder, Colorado — a quiet university town where a December night in 1996 began a case that grand juries, DNA evidence, and decades of investigation have not yet been able to close.

On October 13, 2010, the Last of 33 Trapped Chilean Miners Emerged After 69 Days Underground A rescue capsule named Fénix carried men from half a mile below the Atacama Desert into a waiting world that had refused to give up on them. For 69 days, the world had watched a hole in the Chilean desert with something between dread and hope. On October 13, 2010, that hope was vindicated: one by one, 33 miners trapped nearly 2,300 feet underground since an August cave-in at the San José mine were pulled to the surface in a narrow steel capsule, ending one of the most closely followed rescue operations in modern history. The Fénix Rises   The men had survived on rationed tuna and milk for the first 17 days before rescuers even confirmed they were alive, sending down a narrow probe that returned with a note reading, in Spanish, that all 33 were well in the shelter. What followed was a scramble of engineering improvisation: NASA consultants, drilling teams from at least three countries, and a purpose-built capsule barely wider than a man's shoulders, christened Fénix after the mythical bird. Chilean President Sebastián Piñera stood at the mine site for the extraction, greeting each miner as he stepped out blinking into sunlight he hadn't seen in over two months. Shift foreman Luis Urzúa, credited with organizing the men's survival underground, was the last to ascend, closing out an ordeal that had become a fixture of nightly news broadcasts worldwide. An estimated one billion people watched the rescue unfold live, drawn by a story that offered something increasingly rare on television: an outcome nobody had to spin. The operation, dubbed Plan B by rescuers, used a drill borrowed from oil-field technology to bore the escape shaft in just over a month, far faster than initial estimates of Christmas. Each miner wore sunglasses to protect eyes unaccustomed to daylight and had lost an average of 20 pounds. The men later became briefly famous, visiting Piñera's palace, meeting Manchester United players, and touring as minor celebrities, though several would spend years afterward navigating the psychological weight of having been declared dead by their own government before anyone knew otherwise.  

■  The Pop Edition October 13: Fresh Prince Bows, Paul Simon Turns 85 A sitcom that made Will Smith a household name turns 35, a songwriting giant turns 85, and a grunge landmark gets its due on October 13. Will Smith's fish-out-of-water sitcom and Paul Simon's songbook both trace back to an October 13. October 13 carries a sitcom that turned a rapper into a movie star, a songwriter whose catalog defines an entire era of American music, and an album that arrived with a title nobody expected from the band that just broke rock wide open. Add a scattering of smaller anniversaries and you've got a date that rewards a closer look rather than a scroll past. Here's the full accounting. Paul Simon BORN 1941 · TURNS 85 From Simon & Garfunkel's folk harmonies to the Graceland-era fusion of African rhythms with American songwriting, Simon spent six decades restlessly reinventing what a pop song could carry. He remains one of the rare songwriters whose catalog gets covered by teenagers and orchestras alike. Ashanti BORN 1980 · TURNS 46 Her self-titled 2002 debut moved fast and made her the sound of early-2000s R&B radio, stacking hits alongside Ja Rule and Murder Inc. She's since built a lane in acting and business that outlasted the singles-chart moment that made her famous. Nancy Kerrigan BORN 1969 · TURNS 57 Long before the attack that turned her into a tabloid fixture, Kerrigan was already one of the most elegant skaters of her generation. She medaled at two Olympics and became, for a brief strange stretch, one of the most photographed athletes alive. Kate Walsh BORN 1967 · TURNS 59 Walsh built a career on Grey's Anatomy before Addison Montgomery earned her a spinoff of her own in Private Practice, a rare feat for a supporting character. She's kept working steadily in television ever since, never quite leaving Shondaland behind. Marion Ross BORN 1928 · TURNS 98 As Marion Cunningham on Happy Days, Ross spent a decade as the steadying presence in a house full of leather jackets and malt shops. She turned a role that could have been thankless into one of television's most beloved sitcom moms.   PRIME TIME: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Bows The show's premise sounded like a throwaway pitch: a rapper plays a fictionalized version of himself, shipped from West Philadelphia to live with wealthy relatives in Bel-Air. NBC aired the pilot on October 13, 1990, and the culture-clash setup — old money versus street smarts, delivered with genuine warmth on both sides — turned into six seasons of appointment television. Will Smith, who'd already had a hit rap career with DJ Jazzy Jeff, was famously in real financial trouble with the IRS when producers came calling, and the show became the vehicle that launched him toward the biggest film career of the 1990s. James Avery's Uncle Phil, Alfonso Ribeiro's Carlton, and that theme song's opening verse became so ingrained in the culture that the show got a dramatic reboot, Bel-Air, three decades later — proof the premise still had gas in the tank. What held up best wasn't the jokes but the show's willingness, in the middle of a broad sitcom, to occasionally get serious — an episode about Will's absent father remains one of the most quoted dramatic beats in sitcom history, catching audiences off guard precisely because the show had spent so long being funny first.     ON THE CHARTS: Nirvana's In Utero Arrives Nirvana released In Utero on September 21, 1993, but its chart-topping run at #1 on the Billboard 200 registered on the October 13 chart week — a small but real distinction that matters when you're placing dates precisely. The album was a deliberate swerve away from Nevermind's polish, recorded with Steve Albini in a stripped-down, abrasive style that the band's label reportedly worried was commercial suicide. It debuted at #1 anyway, a validation that Nirvana's audience wanted the band on its own terms rather than a repeat of the radio-friendly sound that made them famous. Songs like Heart-Shaped Box and All Apologies became staples, but the record's harsher edges — Scentless Apprentice, tourette's — were the real statement of intent. In Utero would be the band's last studio album before Kurt Cobain's death the following spring, which reshaped how people heard it in retrospect — less a rock record than something closer to a document. At the time, though, it was simply proof that the biggest band in the world could turn hard left and still land on top of the charts.   Meanwhile… 1972A Uruguayan rugby team's plane crashes in the Andes, a survival story that would later inspire multiple films — the plane went down on this date, though the survivors weren't rescued for 72 days. 1966Lassie's Rescue Rangers debuts on Saturday morning television, part of the wave of animated spinoffs built from proven family franchises. 1994Pulp Fiction opens the London Film Festival ahead of its wider theatrical rollout, part of Quentin Tarantino's victory lap after Cannes. 2003The Rolling Stones' Forty Licks tour rolls on, a reminder the band was already marking four decades together when plenty of newer acts hadn't hit one. 1997Ted Turner pledges $1 billion to the United Nations, a headline-grabbing philanthropic moment that briefly made the media mogul as famous for giving money away as for founding CNN. 2000Kathy Bates and an ensemble cast keep Dr. T & the Women in limited release, one of the quieter entries in Robert Altman's late-career run. From Bel-Air mansions to Aberdeen grunge to a songwriter who's been reinventing himself since the Kennedy administration, October 13 covers a lot of ground. Come back tomorrow for another day's worth of pop culture worth remembering.