April 15

The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun. 

Psalm 74:16

 April is:

• Fresh Florida Tomato Month - They are versatile, nutritious, and delicious. Celebrate Florida tomatoes. Sponsor: Florida Tomato Committee
  
  
• Holy Humor Month - Lighthearted Christians can give parties and playshops to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus.
  
  
• Home Improvement Time - From April 1st to September 30th, encourage people to make their homes more livable and valuable. Sponsor: Home Improvement 'Time..

Today is:

• Get That Stain Out Day - Celebrate the birthday of Heloise, provider of helpful hints, by getting out the stains in your clothes, carpets, sinks, and bathtubs. Heloise was born in 1951 in Waco, Texas. Sponsor: Heloise Syndicated Column, 
  
  
• Ivory Soap Birthday - In 1878, Harley Procter of Procter & Gamble developed the floating soap, which became known as Ivory Soap. 
  
  
• Leonardo da Vinci's Birthday - One of the Renaissance's greatest artists and thinkers, Leonardo da Vinci was born in Florence, Italy in 1452. In addition to painting the Moss Lisa and the last Supper he designed the first parachute.
  
  
• McDonald's Birthday - The first McDonald's restaurant opened in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955.
  
  
• National Hostility Day - Paying taxes will bring out the worst even in a saint.
  
  
• San Francisco's Birthday - San Francisco was incorporated as a city in 1850. Contact; San Francisco Visitors Bureau
  
  
• Sinking of the Titanic - The luxury liner Titanic sank just past midnight in 1912; 1,500 people died in the tragedy. 
  
  
• Rubber Eraser Day - In 1770, Joseph Priestley discovered that a piece of rubber could erase pencil marks; he coined the term eraser.

Born on this Day

• 1452: Italian painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci
  

• 1469: Nanak, 1st guru of the Sikhs
  

• 1646: Christian V, King of Denmark and Norway
  

• 1707: Mathematician Leonhard Euler
  

• 1843: Author Henry James
  

• 1889: Painter Thomas Hart Benton
  

• 1890: Jacques Ibert was born. Ibert's tuneful music, French with Spanish accents, is contemporary with Ravel and "Les Six," and is still performed in Europe and Latin America.
  

• 1922: Actor Michael Ansara
  

• 1933: Country singer Roy Clark
  

• 1933: Actress Elizabeth Montgomery
  

• 1936: Bluesman Frank Frost
  

• 1937: Country singer Bob Luman
  

• 1939: Actress Claudia Cardinale
  

• 1942: Actress Julie Sommars
  

• 1944: Rock singer-guitarist Dave Edmunds (Rockpile)
  

• 1948: TV producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason
  

• 1950: Actress Amy Wright
  

• 1950: Actor Michael Tucci
  

• 1951: Newspaper columnist Heloise Cruse Evans (Hints from Heloise)
  

• 1952: Rock singer Phil Mogg (UFO)
  

• 1957: Olympic gold medal track athlete Evelyn Ashford
  

• 1959: Actress-screenwriter Emma Thompson (some sources list April 14)
  

• 1966: Singer Samantha Fox
  

• 1966: Rock musician Graeme Clark (Wet Wet Wet)
  

• 1968: Rock musician Ed O'Brien (Radiohead)
  

• 1970: Actor Flex  
     

Events in History on this day
  

• 0074: Suicide of the Defenders of Masada. (Evidence today indicates that a mass suicide may not have actually occured).
  

• 0911: Death of Pope Sergius III
  

• 1053: Death of Godwine, Earl of the West Saxons of England
  

• 1205: Capture of Baldwin I of Rumainia by the Bulgarians at Adrianople
  

• 1257: Aybak, Sultan of Egypt, murdered by order of his wife
  

• 1285: A Ghost dances at the wedding of Alexander III, King of Scots, and Joleteta, daughter of the Count de Dreux, at Jedburgh
  

• 1446: Filippo Brunelleschi, Italian architect, dies at about 69
  

• 1532: The Submission of the Clergy is made to Henry VIII
  

• 1651: Thomas Hobbes dedicates "Leviathan" to Francis Godolphin
  

• 1770: English chemist Joseph Priestley coined the term ``eraser'' when he found that a small cube of latex could be used to rub out pencil marks.
  

• 1755: Dr. Samuel Johnson, the English poet, journalist and lexicographer, had his famous dictionary published.
  

• 1817: The first American school for the deaf opened in Hartford, Connecticut.
  

• 1850: The city of San Francisco was incorporated.
  

• 1861: Three days after the attack on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln declared a state of insurrection and called out Union troops.
  

• 1861: President Lincoln sent Congress a message recognizing a state of war with the Southern states and calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers.
  

• 1865: President Lincoln died, several hours after he was shot at Ford's Theater in Washington by John Wilkes Booth (7:22 a.m.). Andrew Johnson became the nation's 17th president.
  

• 1892: General Electric Co., formed by the merger of the Edison Electric Light Co. and other firms, was incorporated in New York state.
  

• 1912: The British luxury liner "Titanic" sank at 2:20 AM in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland, less than three hours after striking an iceberg.
  

• 1915: Manuel de Falla's "El Amor Brujo," from which we get the famous showpiece "Ritual Fire Dance," was premiered in Madrid.
  

• 1923: Insulin becomes generally available for diabetics.
  

• 1923: Dr. Lee DeForest's Phonofilm, the first sound-on-sound film motion picture was demonstrated for a by-invitation-only audience at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City. The guest saw "The Gavotte."
  

• 1934: Dagwood and Blondie Bumstead welcomed a baby boy, Alexander, to the comic strip "Blondie." The child would be nicknamed "Baby Dumpling."
  

• 1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died April 12, was buried at the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park, New York.
  

• 1945: During World War Two, British and Canadian troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. The troops discovered 28,000 women, 12,000 men and another 13,000 unburied bodies.
  

• 1947: Jackie Robinson, modern baseball's first black major league player, made his official debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on opening day.
  

• 1948: "Musique Concrete". Pierre Schaeffer, a radio technician in Paris, generally gets the credit for mixing sound effects and other natural recordings to make music of a sort.
  

• 1955: Ray Kroc opened the first McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois. Kroc began his career selling milkshake machines. On his first day of business, sales of 15-cent hamburgers and 10-cent french fries totaled $366.12.
  

• 1956: The world's first, all-color, TV station was dedicated in Chicago, Illinois. It was named WNBQ-TV and is now WMAQ-TV.
  

• 1956: General Motors announced that the first, free piston, automobile had been developed.
  

• 1959: Cuban leader Fidel Castro arrived in Washington to begin a goodwill tour of the United States.
  

• 1971: Actor George C. Scott won Best Actor at the Academy Awards but refused the Oscar for his role in "Patton." He had said previously that "It is degrading to have actors in competition with each other."
  

• 1980: Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre died in Paris at age 74.
  

• 1983: Roy L. Williams agreed to resign as president of the Teamsters union as part of a bargain with federal prosecutors. (Williams was succeeded by Jackie Presser.)
  

• 1984: Six Ku Klux Klansmen and three Nazi Party members were acquitted of civil rights violations in the killings of five Communist Workers Party members in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1979.
  

• 1985: South Africa said it would repeal laws prohibiting sex and marriage between whites and non-whites.
  

• 1985: U.S. officials in Seattle indicted 23 members of a Neo-Nazi group, the "Order," for robbery and murder.
  

• 1986: The United States launched an air raid against Libya in response to the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin on April fifth; Libya says 37 people, mostly civilians, were killed.
  

• 1986: French dramatist Jean Genet died in Paris at age 75.
  

• 1987: A jury in Northampton, Massachusetts, found Amy Carter, Abbie Hoffman and 13 other protesters innocent of charges stemming from a demonstration against CIA recruiters at the University of Massachusetts.
  

• 1988: Former White House spokesman Larry Speakes resigned from Merrill Lynch and Co. less than a week after disclosing that he had, on two occasions, fabricated quotations attributed to President Reagan.
  

• 1989: Students in Beijing launched a series of pro-democracy protests after former Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang died; the protests culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre.
  

• 1989: Ninety-five people died in a crush of soccer fans at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England.
  

• 1990: Actress Greta Garbo died in New York at age 84.
  

• 1991: Turkey began moving thousands if Iraqi Kurds from a border settlement to camps farther inside Turkey, in a major policy shift of President Turgut Ozal's government. Refugees were previously kept in the mountains.
  

• 1992: Russia's deeply divided Congress of People's Deputies formally endorsed President Boris Yeltsin's economic reforms.
  

• 1992: Countries barred Libyan jets from their airspace and ordered diplomats to go home because of Libya's refusal to turn over suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.
  

• 1992: Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley began serving a prison sentence for tax evasion (she was released from prison after 18 months).
  

• 1993: The Group of Seven nations unveiled a $28.4 billion aid package for Russia after an emergency meeting in Tokyo.
  

• 1994: Ministers from 109 countries signed a 26,000-page world trade agreement known as the "Uruguay Round" accords in Marrakesh, Morocco.
  

• 1995: In his weekly radio address, President Clinton asked Congress to protect a short list of key legislation, saying he was giving the highest priority to welfare reform, targeted tax cuts and a crime bill preserving assult weapons ban.
  

• 1996: President Clinton began a weeklong, round-the-world trip, heading for a three-day visit to Japan after a brief stopover in Cheju, South Korea.
  

• 1996: Funeral services were held in Pescadero, California, for Jessica Dubroff, the seven-year-old girl who died trying to become the youngest person to fly across America.
  

• 1996: South Africa's "truth commission," looking into abuses during the apartheid era, began its public hearings.
  

• 1996: Japan and the U.S. announced the closure of six more U.S. military facilities on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, reducing the amount of land occupied by American forces there by a fifth.
  

• 1997: The Justice Department inspector general reported that FBI crime lab agents produced flawed scientific work or inaccurate testimony in major cases such as the Oklahoma City bombing.
  

• 1997: In Saudi Arabia, fire destroyed a tent city outside Mecca, killing at least 343 Muslim pilgrims.
  

• 1997: Jackie Robinson's number 42 was retired 50 years after he became the first black player in major league baseball.
  

• 1998: Pol Pot, the notorious leader of the Khmer Rouge, died at age 73, evading prosecution for the deaths of two million Cambodians.
  

• 1999: A gunman opened fire at the Mormon Family History Library in Salt Lake City, killing two people and wounding four others before being shot to death by police.
  

• 2000: Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles became the 24th player to reach three-thousand hits when he lined a clean single to center off Twins reliever Hector Carrasco. (The Orioles won the game, 6-to-4.) 
  

• 2000: The world's leading financial officials, meeting in Washington, pledged cooperation to promote global prosperity. Meanwhile, anti-globalization protesters swarmed through the heart of the nation's capital. 
  

• 2001: Two years following its restoration, a 30-meter stretch of the ancient Aurelian wall ringing Rome collapses into a pile of brick fragments dating to the 3rd century. The collapse was suspected due to heavy rains.
  
  
  

Today's Daily Miscellany

Send Mail to pbower@neo.rr.com

Looking for more quotations?
Past quotes from the Daily Miscellany can be found here!