This week In National Press Club history

January 18, 1967: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Arthur Krock tells a National Press Club audience that “the National Press Club has never been merely a spectator but always an active element in the progress of American journalism at what has become its focal point. It has noticeably exerted its influence on this progress and expansion and by it has been influenced.”

January 19, 2007: Bindi Irwin, the eight-year-old daughter of world-famous naturalist “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin, killed accidentally by a sting ray barb a few months earlier, becomes the youngest person to address a Club luncheon. She says that she wants to become a wildlife warrior just like her father.

January 23, 1932: President Herbert Hoover reluctantly accepts an invitation to the inauguration of Club president Bascom Timmons, but stays on when a Club member who knows Hoover tells a worried Secret Service agent, “The president for once is having a good time…you fellows get out of sight and stay out of sight.”

January 23, 1954: Vice President Richard M. Nixon swears in the Club’s forty-seventh president, Ernest “Tony” Vaccaro, reporter for the Associated Press. John Hughes, of Bloomberg News, will be inaugurated the Club’s one-hundred and eighth president on January 24.

January 23, 1996: B. B. King, legendary blues guitarist and singer, address a luncheon crowds on the resurgence of interest in the blues.

This Week In National Press Club History is brought to you by the History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the Club’s history through lobby displays, events, panel discussions, and an oral history project.

For information on the Committee and its activities, or to join it, contact Chair Gilbert Klein at gilbert.klein @yahoo.com.