Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on May 10, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 90 degrees (2011)
- Low temperature: 28 degrees (1983)
- Precipitation: 2.84 inches (1951)
- Snowfall: Trace (1990)
1876: The first National League baseball game ever played in Chicago took place at 23rd and State streets. The White Stockings (forerunners of the Chicago Cubs) shut out the Cincinnati Red Stockings 6-0.
The MVP, according to the Tribune, was the fans: “The Tribune believes that so well-behaved, good-humored, and impartial an audience can be found nowhere else in the country. Yesterday, for instance, they applauded good plays by both sides with a judgment and fairness that deserves much credit.”
1990: The American Airlines terminal was dedicated at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. Project cost: $345 million.
1995: For the first time since his first retirement, Michael Jordan put No. 23 back on for the Chicago Bulls during Game 2 of a playoff series against the Orlando Magic. Jordan scored 38 points in a 104-94 win.
“After his third or fourth foul, I was looking for 45 up on the scoreboard and couldn’t see it,” Orlando Magic coach Brian Hill said. “Then I noticed 23 up there and I looked at his shirt and said, ‘Oh (expletive), he’s wearing 23 tonight.’”
The Bulls were fined $25,000 by the NBA for allowing Jordan to wear his old number.
2007: Juan Luna, who previously worked at the restaurant, was found guilty in the deaths of seven people at a Brown’s Chicken in Palatine after it had closed for the night on Jan. 8, 1993. The victims included the two restaurant owners and five workers, two of whom were Palatine High School students.
The case went unsolved for nearly a decade until police arrested Luna and James Degorski in 2002.
Luna was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Degorski also was convicted of murder in 2009 and sentenced to life without parole.
Also in 2007: Former Chicago Ald. Edward Vrdolyak was indicted on bribery and fraud charges.
One of Chicago’s most infamous aldermen, Vrdolyak became a national figure by leading a mostly white bloc of 29 City Council members to oppose the efforts of the city’s first Black mayor, Harold Washington. Nicknamed “Fast Eddie,” Vrdolyak was alderman of the Southeast Side’s 10th Ward from 1971 to 1987, the year he, appearing on the Illinois Solidarity Party ticket, ran for mayor against Washington and lost.
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Years later, Vrdolyak was charged and pleaded guilty on two separate occasions. In 2009, he was sentenced to 10 months in prison after pleading guilty the previous year to conspiring to commit mail fraud in a scheme to collect a $1.5 million fee when Rosalind Franklin University went to sell a Gold Coast property. He served about five months of an 18-month sentence for a 2019 guilty plea to a tax charge alleging he obstructed an IRS investigation into payments to and from a friend and associate related to the state’s $9.2 billion settlement with tobacco companies in the late 1990s.
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