Hans Remembers- Headlines from Saturday May 17, 1969.

• The second race in the Triple Crown was held on this day with the 94th running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico in Baltimore, Maryland. There were eight horses in the race and the winner of the Kentucky Derby- Majestic Prince with jockey Bill Hartack  won the race by a neck over Arts And Letters- the same horse it beat in the Kentucky Derby, finishing 3rd was Jay Ray. The winning time was 1:55 3/5.

• A day after the Soviet Union’s Venera 5- Venera 6 began its descent into Venus’s atmosphere sending back data before being crushed by pressure.

• In a big move in the National Football League- with the merging of the NFL and AFL into one league- three teams needed to move from the NFC to the AFC beginning in 1970. Three teams agreed to the move- the Baltimore Colts and Cleveland Browns who were not original NFL teams but started playing in the All-American Football Conference in 1946 and entered the NFL in 1950 made the move but would an original NFL team agree? One did- the Pittsburgh Steelers who had nothing but failure in the NFL up to this point agreed to the move. In the 1970’s as an AFC team the Steelers would win four Super Bowls.

• In music news- from the United Kingdom came the news that for the first time ever album sales had overtaken single sales- during 1968 49,184,000 albums were produced compared to 49, 161, 000 singles.