April 12
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April is:
Today is:
1777: Henry Clay, the "Great Compromiser", American politician
and statesman who ran unsuccessfully for president three times.
1791: Francis Preston Blair, Washington Globe newspaper editor
1838: John Shaw Billings, American librarian, army
1895: Actress and singer Lily (Alice) Pons (I Dream Too Much, That Girl
from Paris)
1903: Dancer (Helen Beck) Sally Rand
1908: Bandleader Lionel Hampton (On the Sunny Side of the Street, Hey!
Hot Mallets, Ba-Ba-Re-Bop, Rag Mop) A few sources list 1913
1923: Actress-dancer (Lucy Ann Collier) Ann Miller (Easter Parade, Sugar
Babies, You Can't Take It with You, Hit the Deck, Kiss Me Kate, On the Town, Room Service,
Lovely to Look At)
1925: Country singer Ned Miller
1926: Actress Jane Withers
1931: Musician Billy (Richard) Vaughn (Melody of Love, The Shifting,
Whispering Sands, Sail along Silver Moon)
1931: Ukulele playing, falsetto singer (Herbert Khaury) Tiny Tim (Tiptoe
Through The Tulips)
1933: Opera singer Montserrat Caballe
1936: Actor Charles Napier
1940: Jazz musician Herbie Hancock
1942: Actor Frank Bank ("Leave It to Beaver")
1944: Rock singer John Kay (Steppenwolf)
1946: Actor Ed O'Neill
1947: Actor Dan Lauria
1947: Talk show host David Letterman
1949: Author Scott Turow (Presumed Innocent, The Burden of Proof)
1950: Singer David Cassidy
1950: Chip (James Earl) Carter (son of 39th U.S. President Jimmy Carter
and First Lady, Roslyn Carter)
1956: Actor Andy Garcia
1957: Country singer Vince Gill
1957: Actress Suzzanne Douglas
1958: Rock musician Will Sergeant (Echo & the Bunnymen)
1962: Rock singer Art Alexakis (Everclear)
1964: Country singer Deryl Dodd
1964: Folk-pop singer Amy Ray (Indigo Girls)
1965: Figure skater Elaine Zayak
1970: Rock singer Nicholas Hexum (311)
1971: Actress Shannen Doherty
1979: Actress Claire Danes
1204: The Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople.
1606: England adopts the Union Jack as its flag.
1770: Parliament repeals the Townsend Acts.
1782: The British navy wins its only naval engagement
against the colonists in the American Revolution at the Battle of Saints, off Dominica.
1799: Phineas Pratt patented the comb cutting machine.
1811: The first colonists arrive at Cape Disappointment,
Washington.
1833: Charles Gaylor patented the fireproof safe in New
York City.
1847: Yung Wing, one of several Chinese students to arrive
in America this day, went on to become the first student from China to graduate from Yale
University [1854].
1861: The American Civil War began as Confederate forces
fired on Fort Sumter South Carolina.
1877: James Alexander Tyng, while playing a baseball game
in Lynn, MA, became the first ballplayer to wear a catcher's mask.
1892: Voters in Lockport, New York, became the first in
the nation to use voting machines.
1905: The Hippodrome opened in New York City with the gala
musical revue, "A Yankee Circus On Mars".
1911: Pierre Prier completes the first non-stop
London-Paris flight in three hours and 56 minutes.
1916: American cavalrymen and Mexican bandit troops clash
at Parrel, Mexico.
1927: British Cabinet comes out in favor of women voting
rights.
1934: "Tender Is the Night" by F. Scott
Fitzgerald was first published.
1939: One of the classic theme songs of the Big Band era
was recorded for Decca Records: Woody Herman's Orchestra recorded "Woodchopper's
Ball."
1944: The U.S. Twentieth Air Force is activated to begin
the strategic bombing of Japan.
1945: President FranklDelano Roosevelt died of a cerebral
hemorrhage Warm Springs, Georgia, at age 63; he was succeeded by Vice President Harry S.
Truman.
1954: Bill Haley records "Rock Around the
Clock."
1955: The Salk vaccine against polio was declared safe and
effective.
1963: Police use dogs and cattle prods on peaceful civil
rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.
1964: Arnold Palmer won his fourth Masters title and
became the first golfer to earn career golf earnings of $506,496.00.
1964: Philadelphia singer, Chubby Checker married former
Miss World, Catherina Lodders.
1966: Emmett Ashford becomes the first African-American
major league umpire.
1981: The space shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape
Canaveral on its first test flight.
1983: Chicagoans went to the polls to elect Harold
Washington the city's first black mayor.
1984: Challenger astronauts made the first satellite
repair in orbit by returning a healthy Solar Max satellite to space as an orbiting sun
watcher. The satellite had been circling the Earth for three years with all circuits dead
before repairs were made.
1985: Senator Jake Garn of Utah became the first senator
to fly space as the shuttle Discovery lifted off.
1985: Federal inspectors declared that four animals of the
Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus were not unicorns as the circus said, but
goats with horns which had been surgically implanted.
1989: Radical activist Abbie Hoffman was found dead at his
home New Hope, Pennsylvania, at age 52
1989: Former middleweight boxing champion Sugar Ray
Robinson died Culver City, California, at age 67.
1989: In its first meeting, East Germany's first
democratically elected parliament acknowledged responsibility for the Nazi Holocaust, and
asked the forgiveness of Jews and others who had suffered.
1992: Euro Disneyland opened France.
1991: Defense Secretary Dick Cheney announced plans to close 31 major US military bases, including Ford Ord in California and Fort Dix in New Jersey.
1991: Kurdish rebels reported the Iraqi army was attacking guerrillas in northern Iraq.
1994: Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell declined to
be nominated to the Supreme Court. 1994: Playwright Edward Albee won his third Pulitzer
prize for "Three Tall Women"; the Pulitzer prize for fiction went to E. Annie
Proulx for "The Shipping News"; the gold-medal award for public service
journalism went to the Akron Beacon-Journal of Ohio.
1995: In a move that stunned the business world,
billionaire Kirk Kerkorian and former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca made an unsolicited
$22.8 billion bid to buy the nation's third largest automaker; Chrysler responded that it
wasn't for sale.
1996: President Clinton named US Trade Representative Mickey Kantor to succeed the late Ron Brown as commerce secretary.
1998: Sinn Fe leader Gerry Adams appealed to IRA
supporters to accept Northern Ireland's compromise peace accord.
1998: Golfer Mark O'Meara won the Masters title Augusta,
Georgia.
1999: A jury in Little Rock, Arkansas, acquitted Susan
McDougal of obstructing Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's Whitewater inquiry and
deadlocked on two other charges, causing a mistrial.
1999: US District Judge Susan Webber Wright cited
President Clinton for contempt of court, concluding that the president had lied about his
relationship with Monica Lewinsky in a deposition in the Paula Jones case.
2000: Attorney General Janet Reno met in Miami with the US relatives of Elian Gonzalez, after which she ordered them to bring the six-year-old boy to an airport the next day so he could be taken to a reunion with his father in Washington. (Elian was seized by federal agents ten days after Reno's order to turn him over.)
2001: After urging from U.S. President
George W. Bush, China agrees to release 24 crew members of a U.S. spy plane held
by Beijing for 11 days.
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