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April Fools Day-KALW Almanac-4/1/2016

  • 92nd Day of 2016 274 Remaining
  • Summer Begins in 80 Days
  • Sunrise: 6:52
  • Sunset: 7:33
  • 12 Hours 41 Minutes
  • Moon Rise: 2:54am
  • Moon Set: 1:27pm
  • Phase: 39% 24 Days
  • Next Full Moon April 21 @ 10:25pm
  • Full Pink Moon, this name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
  • Tides
  • High: 5:44am/8:01pm
  • Low: 12:09am/12:48pm
  • Holidays
  • April Fools Day
  • St Stupids Day
  • Boomer Bonus Day
  • Edible Books Day
  • Fossil Fools Day
  • Hospital Admitting Clerks Day
  • Lupus Alert Day
  • National Atheists Day
  • National Love For Our Children Day
  • National One Cent Day
  • National Sourdough Bread Bay
  • National Walk to Work Day
  • Poetry And Creative Mind Day
  • Reading Is Fun Day
  • Student Government Day
  • US Air Force Academy Day
  •  
  • International Fun At Work Day
  • International Tuba Day
  • International Tatting Day
  • Republic Day-Iran
  • Youth Day-Benin
  • On This Day
  • 1582 --- France adopted the new Gregorian calendar.  Prior to that, the new year was celebrated on April 1.  (The new year actually started on March 25, which fell during Holy Week - so the celebrations were delayed until the first day of April).  One explanation of the origin of ‘April Fools Day’ is that those who failed to accept the new start of the year on January 1 became the object of practical jokes. 
  • 1700 --- English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery. Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes. These included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as “poisson d’avril” (April fish), said to symbolize a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.
  • 1789 --- The first U.S. House of Representatives, meeting in New York City, reaches quorum and elects Pennsylvania Representative Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg as its first speaker. Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister and the former president of the Pennsylvania convention to ratify the U.S. Constitution, was the son of Henry Augustus Muhlenberg and grandson of Johann Conrad Weiser, two of the leading Germans in colonial Pennsylvania. His brother, Major General John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg, also served in the first House of Representatives.
  • 1853 --- Cincinnati, Ohio, became the first U.S. city to pay its firefighters a regular salary.
  • 1891 --- Wrigley Co. is founded in Chicago, Illinois by William Wrigley, Jr., selling soap and giving away baking powder as a premium. The baking powder was more popular, so he switched to selling baking powder, giving chewing gum as a premium with each can. The gum became more popular than the baking powder so he went into the chewing gum business.
  • 1924 --- Adolf Hitler is sentenced for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 8, 1923. The attempted coup in Munich by right-wing members of the army and the Nazi Party was foiled by the government, and Hitler was charged with high treason. Despite his conviction, Hitler was out of jail before the end of the year, with his political position stronger than ever. Germany was in the midst of a national crisis in the early 1920s. After World War I, its economy was in shambles, and hyperinflation caused widespread discontent. Hitler and the Nazis stepped into this breach with often-racist demagoguery that attracted a significant following throughout the nation.
  • 1929 --- Louie Marx introduced the Yo-Yo.
  • 1938 --- The Baseball Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown, NY.
  • 1945 --- After suffering the loss of 116 planes and damage to three aircraft carriers, 50,000 U.S. combat troops of the 10th Army, under the command of Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr., land on the southwest coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa, 350 miles south of Kyushu, the southern main island of Japan. Determined to seize Okinawa as a base of operations for the army ground and air forces for a later assault on mainland Japan, more than 1,300 ships converged on the island, finally putting ashore 50,000 combat troops on April 1. The Americans quickly seized two airfields and advanced inland to cut the island’s waist. They battled nearly 120,000 Japanese army, militia, and labor troops under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima.
  • 1946 --- An undersea earthquake off the Alaskan coast triggers a massive tsunami that kills 159 people in Hawaii. In the middle of the night, 13,000 feet beneath the ocean surface, a 7.4-magnitude tremor was recorded in the North Pacific. (The nearest land was Unimak Island, part of the Aleutian chain.) The quake triggered devastating tidal waves throughout the Pacific, particularly in Hawaii. Unimak Island was hit by the tsunami shortly after the quake. An enormous wave estimated at nearly 100 feet high crashed onto the shore. A lighthouse located 30 feet above sea level, where five people lived, was smashed to pieces by the wave; all five were killed instantly. Meanwhile, the wave was heading toward the southern Pacific at 500 miles per hour. In Hawaii, 2,400 miles south of the quake’s epicenter, Captain Wickland of the United States Navy was the first to spot the coming wave at about 7 a.m., four-and-a-half hours after the quake. His position on the bridge of a ship, 46 feet above sea level, put him at eye level with a “monster wave” that he described as two miles long.
  • 1957 --- The BBC aired a spoof TV documentary about spaghetti crops in Switzerland, showing women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry. Many viewers called in asking where they could purchase their own spaghetti trees.
  • 1970 --- President Richard Nixon signs legislation officially banning cigarette ads on television and radio. Nixon, who was an avid pipe smoker, indulging in as many as eight bowls a day, supported the legislation at the increasing insistence of public health advocates. Alarming health studies emerged as early as 1939 that linked cigarette smoking to higher incidences of cancer and heart disease and, by the end of the 1950s, all states had laws prohibiting the sale of cigarettes to minors. In 1964, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) agreed that advertisers had a responsibility to warn the public of the health hazards of cigarette smoking.
  • 1984 --- At the peak of his career, Marvin Gaye was the Prince of Motown—the soulful voice behind hits as wide-ranging as “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Like his label-mate Stevie Wonder, Gaye both epitomized and outgrew the crowd-pleasing sound that made Motown famous. Over the course of his roughly 25-year recording career, he moved successfully from upbeat pop to “message” music to satin-sheet soul, combining elements of Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan and Barry White into one complicated and sometimes contradictory package. But as the critic Michael Eric Dyson put it, the man who “chased away the demons of millions…with his heavenly sound and divine art” was chased by demons of his own throughout his life. That life came to a tragic end on this day 1984, when Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his own father one day short of his 45th birthday.Gaye's father received probation after he pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter. 
  • 1985 --- In one of the greatest upsets in college basketball history, the Villanova Wildcats beat the Georgetown Hoyas, 66-64, to win the NCAA Men’s Division I tournament. The victory was Villanova’s first-ever national championship. Over 23,000 college basketball fans gathered at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky, for the match-up between the Hoyas, who took home the NCAA championship in 1984, and the Wildcats, who finished the ’85 regular season tied for third place in the Big East conference.
  • 2003 --- American troops rescued Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Nasiriyah, Iraq, where she had been held prisoner since her unit was ambushed nine days earlier.
  • Birthdays
  • Debbie Reynolds
  • Ali McGraw
  • Rudolph Isley
  • Rusty Staub
  • Gil-Scott Heron
  • Justice Sam Alito
  • Rachel Maddow
  • Sergei Rachmaninoff
  • Lon Chaney
  • Florence Blachfield
  • Otto Van Bismark
  • Wallace Beery
  • Toshiro Mifune