1881, the American Red Cross was founded by Clara Barton.
1917 Actor Raymond Burr (Rear Window, Godzilla, King Of The Monsters!, Perry Mason, Ironside) is born. He dies in 1993.
1927, Charles Lindbergh landed his plane, The Spirit Of St. Louis, near Paris, completing the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean.
1924, Fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks was murdered in a “thrill killing” committed by University Of Chicago students Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb.
1932, Amelia Earhart landed in Ireland after taking off the day before from Newfoundland, Canada, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.
1972, Notorious B.I.G. (a.k.a Biggie Smalls) was born today. He died in 1997.
1979 Elton John plays the first night of an eight-night stand in Leningrad, becoming the first pop star to tour in the USSR.
1979, former San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the killings of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. At his trial, White’s defense lawyers argued in what became known as the “Twinkie defense” that their client had been irrational when he committed the murders because he ate too much junk food.
1980 The movie The Empire Strikes Back, starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Billy Dee Williams, opens.
1980, talk show host Phil Donahue and actress Marlo Thomas tied the knot.
1981, reggae star Bob Marley was buried with state honors in Jamaica.
1990, the last episode of Newhart aired, in which Bob Newhart‘s Vermont innkeeper character awakes in bed next to Emily, Newhart’s TV wife from his 1970s sitcom The Bob Newhart Show, in which he played psychologist Bob Hartley. It’s revealed that the entire Newhart series was Bob Hartley’s dream.
1998, a teen gunman opened fire inside Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon, killing two students. The suspect, Kip Kinkel, also killed his parents a day earlier.
1999, Susan Lucci, star of the ABC soap opera All My Children, won a Daytime Emmy Award for Best Actress for the first time in the 19th straight year she was nominated.