1979: Meeting in Geneva, OPEC declares that its members will raise the price of crude oil 9% in a single leap, from $13.34 to $14.55, igniting another round of global inflation.

1954: Modern health care takes a giant step forward when cardiac surgeon C. Walton Lillehei conducts the first successful open-heart surgery, repairing a patient's ventricular septal defect in an operation at the Univ. of Minnesota medical center. (St. Jude Medical, Inc., and Medtronic, Inc., two major medical-devices companies, later grow out of his research.)