- 104th Day of 2015 261 Remaining
- Summer Begins in 68 Days
- Sunrise:6:34
- Sunset:7:44
- 13 Hours 10 Minutes
- Moon Rise:3:53am
- Moon Set:3:22pm
- Phase:22%
- Full Moon May 3 @ 8:44pm
- Full Flower Moon In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name of this Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
- Tides
- High:7:34am/8:49pm
- Low:1:46am/2:02pm
- Holidays
- National Pecan Day
- Children With Alopecia Day
- Ex Spouse Day
- Look Up At The Sky Day
- National Be Kind To Lawyers Day
- National Dolphin Day
- National Library Workers Day
- Pathologists Assistants Day
- Reach As High As You Can Day
- Equal Pay Day
- National Fast And Prayer Day-Liberia
- Youth Day-Angola
- Orange Day-Japan
- On This Day
- 1775 --- The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first American society dedicated to the cause of abolition, is founded in Philadelphia. The society changes its name to the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage in 1784.
- 1828 --- Noah Webster, a Yale-educated lawyer with an avid interest in language and education, publishes his American Dictionary of the English Language. Webster’s dictionary was one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. The dictionary, which took him more than two decades to complete, introduced more than 10,000 “Americanisms.” The introduction of a standard American dictionary helped standardize English spelling, a process that had started as early as 1473, when printer William Caxton published the first book printed in English. The rapid proliferation of printing and the development of dictionaries resulted in increasingly standardized spellings by the mid-17th century.
- 1865 --- John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shoots President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.
- 1894 --- First public showing of Thomas Edison's kinetoscope took place.
- 1902 --- James Cash (J.C.) Penney opened his first retail store in Kemmerer,WY. It was called the Golden Rule Store.
- 1912 --- The Atlantic passenger liner Titanic, on its maiden voyage hit an iceberg and began to sink. Because of a shortage of lifeboats and the lack of satisfactory emergency procedures, more than 1,500 people went down in the sinking ship or froze to death in the icy North Atlantic waters. Most of the approximately 700 survivors were women and children. A number of notable American and British citizens died in the tragedy, including the noted British journalist William Thomas Stead and heirs to the Straus, Astor, and Guggenheim fortunes. The announcement of details of the disaster led to outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. The sinking of the Titanic did have some positive effects, however, as more stringent safety regulations were adopted on public ships, and regular patrols were initiated to trace the locations of deadly Atlantic icebergs.
- 1925 --- WGN became the first radio station to broadcast a regular season major league baseball game. The Cubs beat the Pirates 8-2.
- 1927 --- Clarence Birdseye of Massachusetts received a U.K. patent for frozen fish fingers.
- 1935 --- Black Sunday. A huge dust storm or 'black blizzard' blew through areas of New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas. One of the worst dust storms in U.S. history, it displaced an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil.
- 1939 --- The John Steinbeck novel "The Grapes of Wrath" was first published.
- 1944 --- The cargo ship Fort Stikine explodes in a berth in the docks of Bombay, India, killing 1,300 people and injuring another 3,000. As it occurred during World War II, some initially claimed that the massive explosion was caused by Japanese sabotage; in fact, it was a tragic accident.
- 1956 --- Ampex Corporation of Redwood City, CA, demonstrated the first commercial magnetic tape recorder for sound and picture.
- 1960 --- The Montreal Canadiens defeat the Toronto Maple Leafs to win the Stanley Cup for a record fifth year in a row. The Canadiens reached the Stanley Cup Finals after sweeping the Chicago Blackhawks in four games, while the Maple Leafs defeated the Detroit Red Wings, four games to two.
- 1965 --- The Joint Chiefs of Staff order the deployment of the 173rd Airborne Brigade from Okinawa to South Vietnam. The 173rd arrived in Vietnam in May 1965 and was the first major U.S. Army ground combat unit committed to the war.
- 1975 --- The American airlift of Vietnamese orphans to the United States ends after 2,600 children are transported to America. The operation began disastrously on April 4 when an Air Force cargo jet crashed shortly after take-off from Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon. More than 138 of the passengers, mostly children, were killed. Operation Baby Lift was initiated to bring South Vietnamese orphans to the United States for adoption by American parents. Baby Lift lasted 10 days and was carried out during the final, desperate phase of the war, as North Vietnamese forces were closing in on Saigon. Although the first flight ended in tragedy, all other flights took place without incident, and Baby Lift aircraft ferried orphans across the Pacific until the mission concluded on April 14, only 16 days before the fall of Saigon and the end of the war.
- 1984 --- The Texas Board of Education began requiring that the state's public school textbooks describe the evolution of human beings as "theory rather than fact".
- 1985 --- "Pravda" called U.S. President Reagan's planned visit to Bitburg to visit the Nazi cemetery an "act of blasphemy".
- 1988 --- In New York, real estate tycoons Harry and Leona Helmsley were indicted for income tax evasion.
- 2002 --- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to office two days after being arrested by his country's military.
- 2010 --- Eastern Australia is hit by a locust plague. The insects infested some 190,000 square miles, ravaging farmland, gardens and grazing areas.
- Birthdays
- Loretta Lynn
- Anne Sullivan
- Christiaan Huygens
- John Gielgud
- Rod Steiger
- Julie Christie
- Pete Rose
- Sarah Michelle Gellar
- Shorty Rogers
Tuesday April 14, 2015
