April 20
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April 20
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April is:
Today is:
No State Mottoes Day - In 1977, the U. S, Supreme Court ruled that car owners did not have to display state mottos (such as New Hampshire's ''Live Free or Die'') on their license plates.
Securities Fraud Day - In 1990, junk bond financier Michael Milken pled guilty to 6 felonies and paid $600 million in penalties to settle the largest securities fraud case in history.
Born on this Day
0121: Marcus Arelius
1492: Italian poet Pietro Aretino
1808: French Emperor Napoleon III1889: Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler
1881: Nikolai Miaskovsky was born in the town of Novogeorgievsk in
Russian Poland. Miaskovsky would become a prolific symphonist and an active figure in the
Soviet cultural life. In the West his music was seldom performed until emigres like
Mstislav Rostropovich began to program it from time to time.
1882: Holland Smith, the father of amphibious warfare. Holling
"Howling Mad" Smith developed techniques for amphibious assaults that involved
coordination of land, sea and air forces.
1889: Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau, Austria.
1893: Silent film comedian Harold Lloyd
1893: Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miro. Miro's works are filled with
fanciful shapes and intense colors.
1913: Jazz musician Lionel Hampto
1920: Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens
1923: Bandleader Tito Puente
1924: Actress Nina Foch
1939: Singer Johnny Tillotson
1940: Actor George Takei
1941: Actor Ryan O'Neal
1948: Rock musician Craig Frost (Grand Funk; Bob Seger's Silver Bullet
Band)
1949: Actress Jessica Lange
1951: Singer Luther Vandross
1958: Actor Denis Leary
1959: Actor Clint Howard
1959: Actress Catherine Mary Stewart
1961: Baseball player Don Mattingly
1969: Country singer Wade Hayes
1972: MTV host Carmen Electra
1976: Actor Joey Lawrence
0735 B.C.: According to the Roman historian Varro, Romulus
founded the city of Rome
1314: Death of Pope Clement V
1534: Execution of Elizabeth Barton, the "Nun of
Kent"
1534: Jacques Cartier left France on his first voyage of
Canadian exploration
1545: Massacre of the Waldensians in Provence, France
1559: Elizabeth I declared "Supreme Governor" of
the Church of England
1627: Spanish fleet burned by the English at Santa Cruz
1632: Nicolas Antione, a convert to Judaism, burned at the
stake in Geneva
1648: The future King James II of England escapes the
Parliamentarians by sailing to Holland
1653: Oliver Cromwell dissolves the "Rump"
Parliament
1657: Asser Levy & Jacob Barsimson become 1st Jews
granted full American citizenship (New Amsterdam)
1792: France declared war on Austria, marking the start of
the French Revolutionary Wars.
1812: The fourth vice president of the United States,
George Clinton, died in Washington at age 73, becoming the first vice president to die
while in office.
1832: Hot Springs National Park, the first national park
in the U.S., was established by an act of Congress. It had been a reservation prior to
becoming a national park.
1836: The Territory of Wisconsin was established by
Congress.
1894: Some 136,000 coal miners went on strike in Columbus,
Ohio.
1902: Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie isolated the
radioactive element radium.
1932: Child actress Shirley Temple, then 3 ½-years-old,
made her film debut with the release of "Stand Up and Cheer."
1935: "Your Hit Parade," starring Kay Thompson,
Charles Carlyle, Gogo DeLys and Johnny Hanser was first broadcast on radio. The show would
remain on radio for 24 years.
1940: RCA publicly demonstrated its new and powerful
electron microscope.
1945: During World War Two, allied forces took control of
the German cities of Nuremberg and Stuttgart.
1948: United Auto Workers president Walter P. Reuther was
shot and wounded at his home in Detroit.
1949: Willie Shoemaker won his first race as a jockey
aboard Shafter V at Golden Gate Fields in Albany, California.
1959: 13-year-old Dolly Parton released her first single,
"Puppy Love," on the Gold Band label.
1961: The Federal Communications Commission gave approval
for FM stations to begin "Stereo" broadcasting.
1968: Pierre Elliott Trudeau was sworn in as prime
minister of Canada.
1971: The US Supreme Court upheld the use of busing to
achieve racial desegregation in schools.
1972: The manned lunar module from Apollo 16 landed on the
moon with astronauts John Young and Charles Duke aboard. Thomas Mattingly remained in
orbit around the moon aboard the command module This was the third landing.
1976: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that federal courts
could order low-cost housing for minorities in a city's white suburbs to ease racial
segregation.
1977: The US Supreme Court said car owners could refuse to
display state mottoes on license plates, such as New Hampshire's "Live Free or
Die."
1978: A Korean Air Lines Boeing 707 crash-landed in
northwestern Russia after being fired on by a Soviet interceptor after entering Soviet
airspace. Two passengers were killed.
1980: The first Cubans sailing to the United States as
part of the massive Mariel boatlift reached Florida.
1983: President Reagan signed a $165 billion Social
Security rescue plan designed to prevent bankruptcy of the trust fund for the elderly.
1984: State Department officials disclosed that six
Eastern European countries had been told to stop supporting "international
terrorists" and halt espionage operations if they wanted to improve relations with
the U.S.
1985: In his Saturday radio address, President Reagan
called for more U.S. aid to the Nicaraguan rebels, saying that "Russian military
personnel" were in battle zones.
1986: Following an absence of six decades, Russian-born
pianist Vladimir Horowitz performed in the Soviet Union to a packed audience at the Grand
Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.
1986: Some 200 people died when a double-decker ferry sank
in rough weather in Bangladesh.
1987: Karl Linnas, sentenced to death by the Soviets in
1962 for running a World War II concentration camp, became the first Nazi war criminal
returned by the United States to the Soviet Union against his will. (Linnas, who
maintained his innocence, died of heart disease in Leningrad the following July.
1988: Gunmen who'd hijacked a Kuwait Airways jumbo jet
were allowed safe passage out of Algeria under an agreement that freed the remaining 31
hostages and ended a 15-day siege in which two passengers were slain.
1989: Ramon Salcido, a California winery worker later
convicted of killing six relatives and a co-worker, was deported from Mexico to the U.S.
1989: The Oliver North case went to the jury in his
Iran-Contra trial.
1990: Former junk bond financier Michael Milken agreed to
plead guilty to six felonies and pay $600 million in penalties to settle the largest
securities fraud case in history.
1990: Pete Rose, already banished from baseball for
gambling, pleaded guilty to two felony counts alleging he concealed nearly $300, 000
in income from the Internal Revenue Service.
1991: U.S. Marines landed in northern Iraq to begin
building the first center for Kurdish refugees on Iraqi territory. Gen. H. Norman
Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander of Operation Desert Storm, left Saudi Arabia for home.
1992: The Russian congress adopted a resolution affirming
Russia's membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States in a victory for President
Boris Yeltsin.
1992: Defending champion Ibrahim Hussein of Kenya became
the sixth three-time winner of the Boston Marathon, while Russia's Olga Markova won the
women's division.
1992: Madonna signed a multi-million-dollar deal with Time
Warner to form an entertainment company that would make her the highest paid female
pop star in the world.
1993: President Clinton told a news conference he accepted
responsibility for the decision to try to end the 51-day siege at the Branch Davidian
compound in Texas, but said David Koresh bore "ultimate responsibility" for the
deaths that resulted.
1993: Mexican comedian Cantinflas died in Mexico City at
age 81.
1994: Barbara Streisand launched her first concert tour in
27 years at London's Wembley Arena. Tickets ranged from $50 to $350.
1994: Israeli and PLO negotiators wrapped up an agreement
transferring civilian government powers to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
1995: In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, the
FBI announced it was looking for two men suspected of renting the truck used to carry the
explosive.
1996: Russia and the leaders of the world's seven richest
democracies agreed in Moscow to end nuclear tests by the fall and pledged new steps to
keep nuclear materials out of the wrong hands.
1997: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu escaped
indictment in an influence-peddling scandal, with prosecutors saying they lacked evidence.
1997: Hwang Jang Yop, the highest-ranking North Korean to
defect, arrived in South Korea, ending a 67-day odyssey that began in China.
1998: In an unusual ue of a racketeering law designed to
fight the mob, a federal jury in Chicago ruled that anti-abortion protest organizers had
used threats and violence to shut down clinics. The federal jury in Chicago awarded more
than $85,000 in damages to two women's health clinics. The clinics, along with the
National Organization for Women, had filed a class-action lawsuit, asserting that abortion
opponents were using threats and extortion to try to shut them down.
1998: A Boeing 727 leased to Air France crashed in Bogota,
Colombia, killing all 53 people aboard.
1999: Students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot and
killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives at Columbine High
School in Littleton, Colorado.
2000: Littleton, Colo., paused to remember the victims on the first anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.
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