- 95th Day of 2016 271 Remaining
- Summer Begins in 77 Days
- Sunrise: 6:48
- Sunset: 7:36
- 12 Hours 48 Minutes
- Moon Rise: 5:05am
- Moon Set: 4:41pm
- Phase: 11% 27 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: 8:59am/9:57pm
- Low: 3:03am/3:21pm
- Holidays
- National Sweet Potato Day
- Hug A Newsperson Day
- National Cordon Bleu Day
- National Fun Day
- National Tell A Lie Day
- Square Root Day
- Vitamin C Day
- Walk Around Things Day
- Drug Abuse Resistance and Education (D.A.R.E.) Day
- International Carrot Day
- World Rat Day
- Basque National Day-Spain
- Children’s Day-Taiwan
- Heroes Day-Lesotho
- Independence Day-Senegal
- Tomb Sweeping Day-Taiwan
- On This Day
- 1818 --- A plan was passed by the U.S. Congress that the U.S. flag would have 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars and that a new star would be added for the each new state.
- 1841 --- President William Henry Harrison dies after serving only 32 days in office on this day in 1841. Harrison holds the unfortunate presidential record of shortest term in office. Ironically, the man with the shortest White House tenure delivered the longest inaugural address in history, which may have been his undoing. This first presidential speech, delivered on a bitterly cold March morning, clocked in at one hour and 45 minutes. Harrison went to bed at the end of inauguration day with a bad cold that soon developed into a fatal case of pneumonia.
- 1850 --- The city of Los Angeles was incorporated.
- 1865 --- President Abraham Lincoln visits the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, a day after Union forces capture it. Lincoln had been in the area for nearly two weeks. He left Washington, D.C., at the invitation of general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant to visit Grant’s headquarters at City Point, near the lines at Petersburg south of Richmond. The trip was exhilarating for the exhausted president. Worn out by four years of war and stifled by the pressures of Washington, Lincoln enjoyed himself immensely. He conferred with Grant and General William T. Sherman, who took a break from his campaign in North Carolina. He visited soldiers, and even picked up an ax to chop logs in front of the troops. According to the recollection of one of his friends, Ward Hill Lamon, President Abraham Lincoln dreams on this night in 1865 of “the subdued sobs of mourners” and a corpse lying on a catafalque in the White House East Room. In the dream, Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard “Who is dead in the White House?” to which the soldier replied, “the President.he was killed by an assassin.” Lincoln woke up at that point. On April 11, he told Lamon that the dream had “strangely annoyed” him ever since. Ten days after having the dream, Lincoln was shot dead by an assassin while attending the theater.
- 1871 --- Mary Florence Potts of Ottumwa, Iowa patented the 'Mrs. Potts' pressing iron. It had a detachable handle so several iron bodies could be heated and used in turn as one cooled down.
- 1933 --- A dirigible crashes in New Jersey, killing 73 people in one of the first air disasters in history. The Akron was the largest airship built in the United States when it took its first flight in August 1931. In its short life of less than two years, it was involved in two fatal accidents.
- 1949 --- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is established by 12 Western nations: the United States, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Iceland, Canada, and Portugal. The military alliance, which provided for a collective self-defense against Soviet aggression, greatly increased American influence in Europe. Greece, Turkey, and West Germany later joined NATO, but in 1966 France withdrew, citing American violations of the 1949 treaty. In 1955, the Warsaw Pact, a Soviet-led Eastern European alliance, was established to counter NATO. In 1994, three years after the end of the Cold War, NATO engaged in its first military action as part of an international effort to end two years of fighting in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, which all left the Warsaw Pact upon its dissolution in 1991, joined NATO in 1999. Today, there are twenty-six member states in total.
- 1960 --- Clocking in at three hours and 32 minutes, William Wyler’s Technicolor epic Ben-Hur is the behemoth entry at the 32nd annual Academy Awards ceremony, held at the RKO Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Setting an Oscar record, the film swept 11 of the 12 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Charlton Heston). Wyler’s 1959 film was the latest dramatic adaptation of the mega-bestselling novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 by Lew Wallace. Wallace, a former general in the American Civil War, wrote his most successful novel after experiencing a new awakening of his Christian faith. The book told the story of a young Jewish aristocrat, Judah Ben Hur, who chafes against the repressive Roman rule in Judea, loses his fortune and his family, but eventually triumphs over obstacles, thanks partially to the intervention of Jesus Christ.
- 1964 --- The Beatles made music history by holding the top five places in the singles charts with: "Can't Buy Me Love," "Twist and Shout," "She Loves You," "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Please Please Me."
- 1968 --- Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.
- 1973 --- In New York, the original World Trade Center twin towers opened. At the time they were the tallest building in the world.
- 1974 --- Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves tied Babe Ruth's career home run record by hitting his 714th round-tripper in Cincinnati.
- 1975 --- At a time when most Americans use typewriters, childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen found Microsoft, a company that makes computer software. Originally based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Microsoft relocated to Washington State in 1979 and eventually grew into a major multinational technology corporation. In 1987, the year after Microsoft went public, 31-year-old Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire.
- 1975 --- A major U.S. airlift of South Vietnamese orphans begins with disaster when an Air Force cargo jet crashes shortly after departing from Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon. More than 138 passengers, mostly children, were killed. Operation Baby Lift was designed to bring 2,000 South Vietnamese orphans to the United States for adoption by American parents. Baby Lift lasted for 10 days and was carried out during the final, desperate phase of the war, as North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon. Although this first flight ended in tragedy, all subsequent flights were completed safely, and Baby Lift aircraft brought orphans across the Pacific until the mission’s conclusion on April 14, only 16 days before the fall of Saigon and the end of the war.
- 1981 --- Henry Cisneros became the first Mexican-American elected mayor of a major U.S. city, which was San Antonio, TX.
- 2006 --- The Iraq tribunal charged Saddam Hussein and six others, accusing them of genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from a 1980s crackdown against Kurds.
- Birthdays
- Maya Angelou
- Hugh Masekela
- Kitty Kelley
- Caroline McWIlliams
- Muddy Waters
- Tris Speaker
- Dorothea Dix
- Arthur Murray
- Anthony Perkins
- Ray Fosse
- Berry Oakley
- Frank Black
- Robert Downey Jr
- David Blaine
- Heath Ledger
- Jamie Lynn Spears
National Sweet Potato Day-KALW Almanac-4/4/2016
