April 19, 1927: Mae West is sentenced to 10 days in prison and given a $500 fine, charged with “obscenity and corrupting the morals of youth” for writing, directing, and performing in the play “Sex.” While in prison at Welfare Island, West dines with the warden and his wife, and is released early due to good behavior, something she remarks to reporters afterwards as “…the first time I ever got anything for good behavior.”
April 20, 1979: President Jimmy Carter is attacked by a swamp rabbit which swam up to his fishing boat in Plains, Georgia. The rabbit that was being chased by hounds jumps into the water near Carter and swims aggressively towards his boat. The President shooes it off with a paddle and the rabbit swims away. Columnist Dave Barry will refer to it as the single most memorable event of Carter’s presidency.
April 21, 1992: The first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced by astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail. They discovered two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. In 2003 Maciej Konacki and Wolszczan determined the orbital inclinations of the two pulsar planets, showing that the masses were approximately 3.9 and 4.3 Earth masses respectively.
April 22, 1945: Prisoners at the Jasenovac concentration camp revolt. 516 are killed and 84 escape. Before abandoning the camp shortly after the prisoner revolt, the Ustaše kill the remaining prisoners and torch the buildings, guardhouses, torture rooms, the “Picilli Furnace”, and all the other structures in the camp. Upon entering the camp in May, the Partisans will come across only ruins, soot, smoke, and the skeletal remains of hundreds of victims.
April 23, 1879: The Main Building and several others are destroyed by a fire at the University of Notre Dame. The cause is believed to be related to construction work being done on the roof.
April 23, 1985: Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, even hostile, and the original formula will be back on the market in less than three months, rebranded as “Coca-Cola Classic”. This leads to speculation by some that the introduction of the New Coke formula was just a marketing ploy to stimulate sales of original Coke. Pepsi-Cola takes advantage of the situation, running ads in which a first-time Pepsi drinker exclaims, “Now I know why Coke did it!”
April 23, 1981: IBM PC is introduced
April 24, 1967: Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov dies in Soyuz 1 when its parachute fails to open. After many, many mechanical problems (Komarov insists before the flight that his funeral be open-casket so that the Soviet leadership could see what they had done.), he successfully re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere on his 19th orbit, but the module’s drogue and main braking parachute fails to deploy correctly. The module crashes into the ground, killing Komarov. He screams until he hits the Earth. He is the first human to die during a space mission.
April 25, 1901: New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates. At first, only the owner’s initials must be clearly visible on the back of the vehicle. Then, in 1903, plates with black numerals on a white background will be required. At first, plates are not issued by the state, and motorists are obliged to make their own.
The earliest plates are made of porcelain baked onto iron or ceramic with no backing, which make them fragile and impractical. Few of these early plates survive. Later experimental materials will include cardboard, leather, plastic, and, during wartime shortages, copper and pressed soybeans.
April 26, 1989: The Daulatpur-Saturia tornado in Bangladesh kills over 1300. This is the deadliest single tornado in recorded history.
April 26, 1986: A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Practically all of the radioactive material goes on to fallout/precipitate onto much of the surface of the western USSR and Europe. Models predict that by 2065 about 16,000 cases of thyroid cancer and 25,000 cases of other cancers may be expected due to radiation from the accident.
April 27, 1667: John Milton, blind and impoverished, sells the publication rights for Paradise Lost to publisher Samuel Simmons for £5 (equivalent to approximately £770 in 2015 purchasing power), with a further £5 to be paid if and when each print run of 1,300-1,500 copies sells out.
April 28, 1967: Muhammad Ali refuses his induction into the United States Army, citing his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. He is arrested, found guilty of draft evasion, and stripped of his boxing titles. He will appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, which will overturn his conviction in 1971. But he will not have fought for nearly four years, and will lose a period of peak performance as an athlete.
His actions as a conscientious objector to the war will make him an icon for the larger counterculture generation, and he will be a high-profile figure of racial pride for African Americans during the civil rights movement.
April 29, 1945: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Anna Paula Braun in his Berlin bunker, as Red Army troops fight their way into the neighborhood. He is 56 and she is 33. The event is witnessed by Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann. Thereafter, Hitler hosts a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife. When Braun marries Hitler, her legal name changes to Eva Hitler. When she signs her marriage certificate she writes the letter B for her family name, then crosses this out and replaces it with Hitler.
After less than 40 hours of marital bliss, Hitler and Braun will both commit suicide, she by biting into a capsule of cyanide, and he by a gunshot to the head. The corpses will be carried up the stairs and through the bunker’s emergency exit to the garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they’ll be burned. The charred remains will be found by the Soviets, who will secretly bury them in East Germany. In 1970, a Soviet KGB team will thoroughly burn and crush the remains, and dump the ashes into the Biederitz river.
The German public is unaware of Braun’s relationship with Hitler until after their deaths. It seems the German public is unaware of a lot of things.
April 30, 1789: On the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City, the nation’s capitol, George Washington takes the oath of office to become the first elected President of the United States. As judges of the federal courts have not yet been appointed, the presidential oath of office is administered by Chancellor Robert Livingston, the highest judicial officer in the state of New York. Washington takes the oath on the building’s second floor balcony, in view of throngs of people gathered on the streets. The Bible used in the ceremony is from St. John’s Lodge No. 1, Ancient York Masons, and is opened at random to Genesis 49:13. Afterward, Livingston shouts “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!” Historian John R. Alden will indicate that Washington added the words “so help me God” to the oath prescribed by the constitution.
May 1, 1999: SpongeBob SquarePants premieres on Nickelodeon after the 1999 Kids’ Choice Awards. Many of the ideas for the series originated in an unpublished educational comic book titled The Intertidal Zone, which Stephen Hillenburg created in 1989. He began developing SpongeBob SquarePants into a television series in 1996 upon the cancellation of Rocko’s Modern Life, and turned to Tom Kenny, who had worked with him on that series, to voice the title character. SpongeBob was originally going to be named SpongeBoy, and the series was to be called SpongeBoy Ahoy!, but both of these were changed, as the name was already trademarked.
The series has won a variety of awards, including six Annie Awards, eight Golden Reel Awards, four Emmy Awards, 16 Kids’ Choice Awards, and two BAFTA Children’s Awards. Despite its widespread popularity, the series has been involved in several public controversies, including one centered on speculation over SpongeBob’s intended sexual orientation.
May 2, 1920: The first game of the Negro National League baseball is played in Indianapolis. The eight initial teams are the Chicago American Giants, Detroit Stars, Kansas City Monarchs, Indianapolis ABCs, St. Louis Giants, Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos and Chicago Giants. The new league is the first African-American baseball circuit to achieve stability and last more than one season. At first the league operates mainly in midwestern cities; in 1924 it will expand into the south, adding franchises in Birmingham and Memphis.
The NNL will survive controversies over umpiring, scheduling, and what some will perceive as league president Rube Foster’s disproportionate influence and favoritism toward his own team. It will also outlast Foster’s decline into mental illness in 1926, and its eastern rival, the ECL, which will fold in early 1928. The NNL will finally fall apart in 1931 under the economic stress of the Great Depression.
May 3, 1978: The first unsolicited bulk commercial email (which will later become known as “spam”) is sent by Gary Thuerk, a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative, to all 600 ARPANET addresses on the west coast of the United States. Mr. Thuerk is reprimanded and told not to do it again.
May 4, 1970: The Kent State Massacre of unarmed college students by members of the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, during a mass protest against the bombing of Cambodia by United States military forces. Twenty-eight guardsmen fire approximately 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others.
Two of the four students killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest. The other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, were walking from one class to the next at the time of their deaths. Schroeder was also a member of the campus ROTC battalion. One of the injured, Dean R. Kahler, suffers fractures of his vertebrae, causing permanent paralysis from the chest down. Kahler was walking from one class to another, and briefly stopped to see what the protest was about.
Some of the students who are shot had been protesting against the Cambodian Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30. Other students who are shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance.
There will be a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools will have closed throughout the United States, due to a strike of 4 million students, and the event will further affect public opinion, at an already socially contentious time, over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War.
Students from Kent State and other universities will often get a hostile reaction upon returning home. Some will be told that more students should have been killed, to teach student protesters a lesson; some students will be disowned by their families.
May 5, 1961: Alan Shepard becomes the first American to travel into outer space, on a sub-orbital flight. He has named his spacecraft Freedom 7. When reporters ask Shepard what he thinks about as he sits atop the Redstone rocket, waiting for liftoff, he replies, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder." Shepard stays on a suborbital trajectory for the 15-minute flight, which is seen live on television by millions.
One thing that is not seen by the public is Shepard’s pre-launch “emergency”. Because the entire journey was only expected to take fifteen minutes, Shepard’s suit does not have any provision for elimination of bodily wastes. After being strapped into the capsule’s seat, launch delays keep him in that suit for eight hours; Shepard’s endurance gives out before launch, and he is forced to empty his bladder into the suit, which shorts out the medical sensors attached to it to track the astronaut’s condition in flight. After Shepard’s flight, NASA will call in the space suit’s manufacturer, B. F. Goodrich, and by the time of John Glenn’s Mercury-Atlas 6 orbital flight the following year, a liquid waste collection feature will be built into the suit.