The Weekly Almanac with Tiki Jane September 13, 2026

On this day in 2015, American basketball player Moses Malone—who was a dominating center and the NBA’s premier offensive rebounder during the 1980s, leading the Philadelphia 76ers to a championship in 1983—passed away at age 60. On this day in 1990, The law-enforcement series Law & Order debuted on the NBC television network; the show became one of the longest-running prime-time TV dramas in the United States. American singer, songwriter, and mandolin player Bill Monroe, considered the father of bluegrass music, was born on this day in 1911. On this day in 1857, Milton Snavely Hershey, founder of the Hershey Chocolate Company, was born in Pennsylvania. On this day in 1848, American railroad foreman Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury when an iron rod shot through his skull and obliterated the greater part of the left frontal lobe of his brain; he survived with apparently no lasting physical damage, though some claimed that his personality had changed.