April 19
It’s National Garlic Day
ON THIS DAY…
1587 English admiral Sir Francis Drake enters Cadiz harbor and sinks the Spanish fleet, an action he refers to as “singeing the king of Spains beard”
1764 The English Parliament banned the American colonies from printing paper money
1775 British and American soldiers exchanged fire (“the shot heard ’round the world”) in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord; the royal governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, commanded by King George III to suppress the rebellious Americans, had ordered 700 British soldiers, under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith and Marine Major John Pitcairn, to seize the colonists’ military stores
1782 John Adams secured the Dutch Republic’s recognition of the United States as an independent government and the house that he purchased in The Hague, Netherlands
became the first American embassy
1839 The Treaty of London establishes Belgium as a kingdom
1852 The California Historical Society was founded
1892 The Duryea gasoline buggy was introduced in the US by Charles and Frank Duryea
1897 The first annual Boston Marathon, the first of its type in the US, was run; John J. McDermott of New York City won
1927 In China, Hankow communists declared war on Chaing Kai-shek
1927 Mae West is sentenced to 10 days in jail for obscenity for her play Sex
1933 FDR announces that the US will leave the gold standard
1934 Stand Up and Cheer starring Shirley Temple is released in the US
1938 General Francisco Franco declared victory in the Spanish Civil War
1939 Connecticut finally approves Bill of Rights after 148 years
1943 Albert Hofmann chose to deliberately ingest 250 micrograms of the Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) he had synthesized at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland; although he had first made it five years before, as a drug intended to relieve respiratory ailments, it was only on this day that he found the drug was a hallucinogen and the striking experience was one he chose to repeat
1943 The Warsaw Ghetto uprising against Nazi rule began; the Jews were able to fight off the Germans for 28 days
1945 The Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel opened at the Majestic Theatre in New York City
1951 Shigeki Tanaka won the Boston Marathon; he had survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, Japan during World War II
1951 General Douglas MacArthur spoke before Congress; the highlight of this memorable retirement address was MacArthur stating, Old soldiers never die, they just fade away”
1958 Actress Grace Kelly became Princess Grace of Monaco when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco; the civil ceremony took place on April 18
1960 Baseball uniforms began displaying player’s names on their backs
1961 Dr. Glenn C. Franklin becomes the 25-millionth Disneyland guest
1970 The “Broom Hilda” comic strip debuted in newspapers
1971 Charles Manson was found guilty in the Tate-LaBianca murders and sentenced to death; California would abolish the death penalty in 1972 and he is therefore serving a life sentence
1975 India announced it had launched its first satellite
1982 NASA named Sally Ride to be first American woman astronaut
1988 Sonny Bono was inaugurated as the Mayor of Palm Springs, CA
1989 Forty-seven crewmen die in an explosion on the American battleship USS Iowa during Atlantic maneuvers
1991 Drop Dead Fred starring Rik Mayall and Phoebe Cates is released in the US
1993 US Federal Agents storm the compound of a Branch Davidian group in Waco, Texas, after a 51-day stand-off; more than 80 members of the group die in the fire that follows
1994 A Los Angeles jury awarded $3.8 million to Rodney King for violation of his civil rights
1995 168 people, including 19 children, die and 500 are injured in the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City
1996 Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie is released in US theaters
1997 The first ship to sail directly to Taiwan from mainland China in 48 years steams into Kaohsiung port
2001 Mel Brooks’ 1968 film The Producers morphed into a Broadway phenomenon, as the musical comedy premiered starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick
2002 The USS Cole was relaunched; in Yemen, 17 sailors were killed when the ship was attacked by terrorists on October 12, 2000
2002 The Scorpion King, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Murder by Numbers were all released to US theaters
2005 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger elected Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of the Papal conclave
BORN:
1897 Constance Talmadge, silent film actress (The Matrimaniac, Intolerance, Vénus)
1899 George O’Brien, actor (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Riders of the Purple Sage)
1903 Eliot Ness, Prohibition agent, famous for his efforts to enforce Prohibition in Chicago, Illinois, as the leader of a legendary team of law enforcement agents nicknamed The Untouchables
1930 Dick Sargent, actor (Bewitched, Operation Petticoat, Captain Newman, M.D., Parts: The Clonus Horror)
1933 Jayne Mansfield, actress (The Girl Can’t Help It, Too Hot to Handle, It Happened in Athens)
1935 Dudley Moore, comedian, actor, composer, conductor, musician (The Bed Sitting Room, Bedazzled, Foul Play, Arthur, 10)
1941 Alan Price, musician (The Animals) and film composer (Oh Lucky Man!, Alfie Darling, Britannia Hospital, The Whales of August)
1946 Tim Curry, actor/singer (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Annie, Legend, The Hunt for Red October, It, Muppets Treasure Island)
1968 Ashley Judd, actress (Kiss the Girls, Double Jeopardy, De-Lovely)
1979 Kate Hudson, actress (200 Cigarettes, Almost Famous, Alex & Emma)
1981 Hayden Christensen, “actor” (Star Wars, Life as a House, Jumper)
DIED:
1824 Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in Romanticism; his best-known works are the narrative poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, dies at 36
1881 Benjamin Disraeli, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1868, 1874-1880), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1852, 1858-1859, 1866-1868), dies at 76
1882 Charles Darwin, naturalist, eminent as a collector and geologist, who proposed and provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors through the process he called natural selection, dies at 73
1906 Pierre Curie, French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics with his wife, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel, dies at 46 as a result of a carriage accident in a snow storm while crossing the Rue Dauphine in Paris
1989 Daphne du Maurier, playwright and short story writer; many of her works were adapted into films, such as one of her most famous books, Rebecca, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1940 for director Alfred Hitchcock, who would later bring her short story, The Birds, onto the big screen, dies at 81
1992 Frankie Howerd, distinctive English comedian and comic actor whose career spanned six decades (Up Pompeii, The Ladykillers, The Mouse on the Moon), dies at 75
2005 George P. Cosmatos, director (Rambo: First Blood Part II, Cobra, Leviathan), dies at 64
2005 Ruth Hussey, actress (The Women, Another Thin Man, Northwest Passage, The Philadelphia Story), dies at 93