- 98th Day of 2016 268 Remaining
- Summer Begins in 74 Days
- Sunrise: 6:43
- Sunset: 7:05
- 12 Hours 22 Minutes
- Moon Rise:7:05am
- Moon Set: 8:15pm
- New Moon
- 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: 11:45am/11:49pm
- Low: 5:23am/5:33pm
- Holidays
- National Coffee Cake Day
- Women Entrepreneurs Day
- Metric System Day
- National Alcohol Screening Day
- National Beer Day
- National No Housework Day
- Pet Health Insurance Day
- Public Television Day
- Tell A Lie Day
- World Health Day
- International Beaver Day
- National Mourning Day-Rwanda
- Toussaint L’Ouverture Day-Haiti
- Women’s Day-Mozambique
- On This Day
- 1862 --- Two days of heavy fighting conclude near Pittsburgh Landing in western Tennessee. The Battle of Shiloh became a Union victory after the Confederate attack stalled on April 6, and fresh Yankee troops drove the Confederates from the field on April 7. Shiloh began when Union General Ulysses S. Grant brought his army down the Tennessee River to Pittsburgh Landing in an effort to move on Corinth, Mississippi, 20 miles to the southwest. Union occupation of Corinth, a major rail center, would allow the Yankees to control nearly all of western Tennessee. At Corinth, Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston did not wait for Grant to attack. He moved his army toward Grant, striking on the morning of April 6. Throughout the day, the Confederates drove the Yankees back but could not break the Union lines before darkness halted the advance.
- 1864 --- The first reported dromedary (camel) race in the U.S. was held at Agricultural Park in Sacramento, California.
- 1939 --- In an effort to mimic Hitler’s conquest of Prague, Benito Mussolini’s troops, though badly organized, invade and occupy Albania. Although the invasion of Albania was intended as but a prelude to greater conquests in the Balkans, it proved a costly enterprise for Il Duce. Albania was already dependent on Italy’s economy, so had little to offer the invaders. And future exploits in neighboring nations, in Greece in particular, proved to be disastrous for the Italians.
- 1940 --- Booker T. Washington became the first black to be pictured on a U.S. postage stamp.
- 1945 --- The Japanese battleship Yamato, ostensibly the greatest battleship in the world, is sunk in Japan’s first major counteroffensive in the struggle for Okinawa. Weighing 72,800 tons and outfitted with nine 18.1-inch guns, the battleship Yamato was Japan’s only hope of destroying the Allied fleet off the coast of Okinawa. But insufficient air cover and fuel cursed the endeavor as a suicide mission. Struck by 19 American aerial torpedoes, it was sunk, drowning 2,498 of its crew.
- 1949 --- The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "South Pacific" opened on Broadway.
- 1953 --- By a vote of 57 to 1, Dag Hammarskjold is elected secretary-general of the United Nations. The son of Hjalmar Hammarskjold, a former prime minister of Sweden, Dag joined Sweden’s foreign ministry in 1947, and in 1951 formally entered the cabinet as deputy foreign minister. The same year, he traveled to the United Nations as vice chairman of the Swedish delegation, and in 1952 was appointed acting chairman. Elected U.N. secretary-general on the recommendation of the Security Council on April 7, 1953, he led missions to China, the Middle East, and elsewhere to become better acquainted with the United Nations’ member states and to arrange peace settlements. In 1957, he was unanimously re-elected secretary-general.
- 1961 --- President John F. Kennedy sends a letter to Congress in which he recommends the U.S. participate in an international campaign to preserve ancient temples and historic monuments in the Nile Valley of Egypt. The campaign, initiated by UNESCO, was designed to save sites threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
- 1963 --- At the age of 23, Jack Nicklaus became the youngest golfer to win the Green Jacket at the Masters Tournament.
- 1970 --- John Wayne wins his first–and only–acting Academy Award, for his star turn in the director Henry Hathaway’s Western True Grit. Wayne appeared in some 150 movies over the course of his long and storied career. He established his tough, rugged, uniquely American screen persona most vividly in the many acclaimed films he made for the directors John Ford and Howard Hawks from the late 1940s into the early 1960s. He earned his first Oscar nomination, in the Best Actor category, for Sands of Iwo Jima (1949). The Alamo (1960), which Wayne produced, directed and starred in, earned a Best Picture nomination.
- 1990 --- At Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center a display of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs went on display. On the same day the center and its director were indicted on obscenity charges. The charges resulted in acquittal.
- 1994 --- Rwandan armed forces kill 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in their genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In less than three months, Hutu extremists who controlled Rwanda murdered an estimated 800,000 innocent civilian Tutsis in the worst episode of genocide since World War II. The Tutsis, a minority group that made up about 10 percent of Rwanda’s population, received no assistance from the international community, although the United Nations later conceded that a mere 5,000 soldiers deployed at the outset would have stopped the wholesale slaughter.
- 1998 --- George Michael was arrested in a public restroom in Beverly Hills for lewd conduct. He was sentenced to community service for the incident.
- Birthdays
- Billie Holiday
- Ravi Shankar
- William K Kellogg
- William Wordsworth
- John McGraw
- Allen Dulles
- Walter Winchell
- Jersey Joe Walcott
- Percy Faith
- Irene Castle
- Mongo Santamaria
- James Garner
- Freddie Hubbard
- Spencer Dryden
- David Frost
- Francis Ford Coppola
- John Oates
- Jackie Chan
- Russell Crowe
National Coffee Cake Day-KALW Almanac-4/7/2016
