FRIDAY THE 13th
1970, Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. The astronauts managed to return safely.
1972, The Major League Baseball strike ends as owners agree to add $500,000 to the players’ pension fund.
1976, The U.S. extends the offshore fishing limit from 12 to 200 miles.
1976, The U.S. Federal Reserve begins issuing $2 bicentennial notes.
1979, The world’s longest doubles ping-pong match ends after 101 hours.
1986, Pope John Paul II visited a Rome synagogue in the first recorded papal visit of its kind.
1987, The Population Reference Bureau reports the world’s population had exceeded five billion.
1990, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev gives Lithuania a two-day ultimatum, threatening to cut off some supplies to the Baltic republic if it does not rescind laws passed since a March 11th declaration of independence.
1990, The Soviet Union accepted responsibility and apologized for the World War Two murders of thousands of imprisoned Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, a massacre the Soviets had previously blamed on the Nazis.
1992, Construction workers breach a retaining wall in the Chicago River, sending water flooding through a tunnel system connecting buildings in the downtown area.
1992, Princess Anne, daughter of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, begins divorce proceedings after a two-year separation from Capt. Mark Phillips.
1996, In the continuing drama of man versus machine, world chess champion Garry Kasparov asked for a draw in his third game against the IBM supercomputer named “Deep Blue,” leaving the six-game match in Philadelphia tied at one and a-half games each.
1996, The rock musical Rent, by Jonathan Larson, opened off-Broadway.
1997, Tiger Woods, then 21 years old, wins the Masters Tournament, becoming the youngest Masters champion and the first African-American to win any of the four major professional golf tournaments for men.
1998, President Clinton forcefully sought to persuade Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to permit U.N. inspectors to search his country for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, but said Washington could not “walk away” if he did not. Clinton told reporters, quote, “I hope and I pray that he will permit qualified, honest, nonpolitical, technically competent inspectors to have access to those sites which have been forbidden.”
1998, A 500-pound steel joint fell from the upper level of New York’s Yankee Stadium, crashing onto seats below. Fortunately, no fans were inside the park at the time.
1999, Right-to-die advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Michigan, to ten to 25 years in prison for second-degree murder in the lethal injection of a Lou Gehrig’s disease patient.
2000, President Clinton, during a question-and-answer session with newspaper editors, heatedly said “I’m not ashamed” about being impeached and “I’m not interested” in being pardoned for any alleged crimes in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and Whitewater investigation.
2000, Charles Schulz‘s final “Peanuts” strip ran in Sunday newspapers, the day after the cartoonist died in his sleep at his California home at age 77.
SATURDAY APRIL 14th
1775, the first American society for the abolition of slavery was organized in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush.
1828, The first American English dictionary was published by Noah Webster.
1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth while he and his wife watched a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. The president died the next morning.
1894, a coin-operated kinetoscope was displayed by inventor Thomas Edison. The device was a viewer that held about 13 seconds worth of film.
1912, the RMS Titanic collided late at night with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage and began sinking. There were 706 survivors, but 1,517 people went down with the ship when it sank early the next morning.
1939, John Steinbeck’s novel about the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, was first published.
1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first black actor or actress to win an Oscar, for Gone With The Wind.
1985, Geraldo Rivera opened the infamous Al Capone vault at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago on live TV. He found only broken bottles and no sign Capone ever used it.
1986, America launched an air raid on Libya (April 15 Libya time) in retaliation for a deadly bombing on April 5 at a German disco frequented by American soldiers. Among the 37 people killed was Moammer Qaddafi’s infant daughter.
1993, the NHL’s longest winning streak ended at 17 games as the Pittsburgh Penguins managed only a 6-6 tie with the New Jersey Devils.
1997, James McDougal, who’d agreed to cooperate with Whitewater prosecutors investigating President and Mrs. Clinton, drew a three-year prison sentence for 18 felony fraud and conspiracy counts.
1998, Despite international pleas for leniency, the state of Virginia executed Angel Francisco Breard, a Paraguayan convicted of murder.
1999, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr told Congress the Watergate-era law that gave him the power to probe actions of executive branch officials was flawed and should be abolished.
1999, NATO mistakenly bombed a convoy of ethnic Albanian refugees; Yugoslav officials said 75 people were killed.
2000, In Washington, protesters dumped manure on Pennsylvania Avenue, seeking to disrupt meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
2001, the 24 crew members of the U.S. spy plane who were held in China for 11 days landed at their home base, Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Washington state, where they were greeted by thousands of friends, family members and other well-wishers.
SUNDAY THE 15th
1452, Leonardo da Vinci, one of the Renaissance’s greatest artists and thinkers, was born in Florence, Italy. In addition to painting the “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper,” he designed the first parachute.
1738 The bottle opener is invented.
1770, Joseph Priestley discovered that a piece of rubber could erase pencil marks, coining the term “eraser.”
1817, The first American school for the deaf opened in Hartford, Connecticut.
1850, the city of San Francisco was incorporated.
1865 Abraham Lincoln dies of a gunshot wound.
1866 Wild West outlaw Butch Cassidy is born. He and his partner the Sundance Kid die in a shootout with Bolivian authorities in 1908.
1878, Harley Procter of Procter & Gamble developed a floating soap, which became known as Ivory Soap.
1912, the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic at 2:27 a.m., less than three hours after hitting an iceberg. Over 1,500 of the 2,224 people aboard died in the disaster.
1927, a tradition began when actors Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge left their handprints in cement in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.
1938 Cartoon ducks Huey, Dewey and Louie make their debut appearance in the film Donald’s Nephews.
1945, British and Canadian troops liberated the Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany.
1947, Jackie Robinson, the man who broke baseball’s color barrier, played in his first major league baseball game, for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
1955, Ray A. Kroc opened the first McDonald’s in Des Plaines, Illinois.
1971, George C. Scott refused the Best Actor Oscar for his role in Patton, calling the Academy Awards a “two-hour meat parade.”
1989, students in Beijing, China, began pro-democracy protests that eventually ended in the Tianenmen Square massacre.
1992, hotel magnate Leona Helmsley, the woman who once said “Only the little people pay taxes,” began serving a four-year prison sentence for tax evasion.
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 that 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.
