January 22, 1981 (Thursday)
- East German soccer football stars Gerd Weber, Matthias Müller and Peter Kotte were arrested by the Stasi at the Dresden airport, just as they were preparing to travel with the national team to a match in Argentina, and charged with plotting to defect to West Germany. All three were banned from the game, and Weber, himself a Stasi employee, was jailed until 1989.
- Annie Leibovitz's iconic photograph of a nude John Lennon kissing a fully clothed Yoko Ono was first published. The photo appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine's tribute issue to Lennon.
- Born: Willa Ford, American singer/actor, in Ruskin, FL; Beverley Mitchell, American singer/actor, in Arcadia, CA; and Ben Moody, American singer/actor (formerly of Evanescence), in Little Rock
- Died: Fanny Thomas, 113, supercentenarian listed at the time in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest woman in the world and the oldest living American, at San Gabriel, California. Miss Thomas had been born on April 24, 1867 in Denver, Illinois.
Read more about this topic: January 1981
Famous quotes containing the word january:
“and you undid the reins
and I undid the buttons,
the bones, the confusions,
The New England postcards,
the January ten o’clock night,
and we rose up like wheat....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)