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Tuesday April 24, 2012

Laurens Hammond (highlighted story below)
Laurens Hammond (highlighted story below)
  • 115th Day of 2012 / 251 Remaining
  • 57 Days Until Summer Begins
  • Sunrise:6:22
  • Sunset:7:55
  • 13 Hr 33 Min
  • Moon Rise:8:25am
  • Moon Set:11:17pm
  • Moon’s Phase: 11 %
  • The Next Full Moon
  • May 5 @ 8:36pm
  • Full Flower Moon
  • Full Corn Planting Moon
  • Full Milk 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:12:32am/2:36pm
  • Low:7:30am/7:23
  • Rainfall
  • This Year:15.33
  • Last Year:25.07
  • Normal To Date:22.73
  • Annual Seasonal Average: 23.80
  • Holidays
  • Library of Congress Day
  • Mother, Father Deaf Day
  • National Pet Parent's Day
  • National Pigs-in-a-Blanket Day
  • Spring Cat Cleaning Day
  • National Teach Children to Save Day
  • National Concord Day-Niger
  • Martyrs Day in Armenia
  • On This Day In …
  • 1184BC --- The Greeks captured Troy after hiding inside a giant wooden gift horse.
  • 1792 --- The French national anthem, "La Marseillaise," was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
  • 1800 --- President John Adams approves legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress," thus establishing the Library of Congress. The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the library's first home. The first library catalog, dated April 1802, listed 964 volumes and nine maps. Twelve years later, the British army invaded the city of Washington and burned the Capitol, including the then 3,000-volume Library of Congress. Former president Thomas Jefferson, who advocated the expansion of the library during his two terms in office, responded to the loss by selling his personal library, the largest and finest in the country, to Congress to "recommence" the library. The purchase of Jefferson's 6,487 volumes was approved in the next year, and a professional librarian, George Watterston, was hired to replace the House clerks in the administration of the library. In 1851, a second major fire at the library destroyed about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of the Thomas Jefferson library. Congress responded quickly and generously to the disaster, and within a few years a majority of the lost books were replaced.
  • 1877 --- Federal troops were ordered out of New Orleans, ending the North's post-Civil War rule in the South.
  • 1901 --- Four games were scheduled to open the brand new American League baseball season. Three of them, however, were rained out. The Chicago White Stockings beat the Cleveland Blues 8-2 before a paid crowd of over 10,000 fans in the only game played. The new league, nicknamed the junior circuit, was made up of teams in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Buffalo, Indianapolis and, initially, Minneapolis, fell out of the league, with new teams in Boston, New York, Baltimore, Washington D.C. and, later, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, Ft. Worth and Toronto joining the American League.
  • 1915 --- The Ottoman Empire rounded up Armenian political and cultural leaders in Constantinople at the start of what many scholars regard as the first genocide of the 20th century, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died.
  • 1916 --- Around noon on Easter Monday of 1916, some 1,600 Irish nationalists--members of the Irish Volunteers--launch the so-called Easter Rising in Dublin, seizing a number of official buildings and calling on all Irish patriots to resist the bonds of British control.  Since the outbreak of World War I, the leading Irish nationalist, Sir Roger Casement, had pressed the German government to see the potential benefit of an Irish rebellion against British rule. Consequently, on April 2, the German merchant ship Aud was sent to the Atlantic coast of Ireland, loaded with some 20,000 rifles and 1 million rounds of ammunition bound for the hands of the Easter rebels. Before the Aud reached its destination, however, a British ship intercepted it, and the crew members of the Aud scuttled the ship with all its cargo. When Casement himself traveled from Germany to Tralee Bay, also on the Atlantic coast, three weeks later, he was put ashore by the Germans on an inflatable raft. He was subsequently arrested, tried and executed for treason by the British authorities. Meanwhile, plans for the Easter Rising had gone ahead without Casement or German help. Due to last-minute uncertainty, however, one of its leaders canceled the orders for mobilization on the Saturday before the planned uprising—because of this only 1,600 of an expected 5,000 participants gathered at Liberty Hall on April 24 to march towards the center of Dublin. There, they seized the post office, several court buildings, St. Stephen's Green and several other locations. From the steps of the post office, the rebels declared Ireland an independent republic, stating that We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. Despite the rebels' hopes, the public did not rise to support them, and they were quickly crushed by the police and government forces sent against them, among them some newly recruited troops bound for service in World War I. Sixty-four rebels were killed during the struggle, along with 134 troops and policeman, and at least 200 civilians were injured in the crossfire. Fifteen of the uprising's leaders were eventually executed; a sixteenth, Eamon de Valera, was saved from a death sentence because he was an American citizen. Even in its failure, the Easter Rising and the continued volatility of the so-called Irish question demonstrated the thwarted desires for self-determination that still bubbled beneath the surface in Great Britain, as in many countries in Europe, even as the larger matter of international warfare superseded them for the moment.
  • 1934 --- Laurens Hammond announced news that would be favored by many churches across the United States. The news was the development of the pipeless organ -- and a granting of a U.S. patent for same. Hammond, a decades-old name in keyboard organs in churches, theaters, auditoriums and homes, is the same Hammond who fostered many of the developments that would make electronic keyboards so popular in modern music. The Hammond B-3 and B-5 organs, for example, became mainstays for many recording artists, while inventions in Hammond organ loud speaker development (the Hammond Leslie Tremelo speaker) produced still other important milestones that allowed small organs to emulate the big concert theater console organs. Later, solid-state circuitry and computers allowed keyboards the flexibility to sound like other instruments, permitting the organist to play many instruments from the organ’s multiple keyboards.
  • 1961 --- Bob Dylan made his first recording, playing harmonica on Harry Belefonte’s "Midnight Special." He earned $50 for the session.
  • 1961 --- Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers struck out 18 batters becoming the first major-league pitcher to do so on two different occasions.
  • 1962 --- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology achieved the first satellite relay of a television signal.
  • 1980 --- An ill-fated military operation to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran ends with eight U.S. servicemen dead and no hostages rescued.With the Iran Hostage Crisis stretching into its sixth month and all diplomatic appeals to the Iranian government ending in failure, President Jimmy Carter ordered the military mission as a last ditch attempt to save the hostages. During the operation, three of eight helicopters failed, crippling the crucial airborne plans. The mission was then canceled at the staging area in Iran, but during the withdrawal one of the retreating helicopters collided with one of six C-130 transport planes, killing eight soldiers and injuring five. The next day, a somber Jimmy Carter gave a press conference in which he took full responsibility for the tragedy. The hostages were not released for another 270 days.
  • 1981 --- The IBM Personal Computer was introduced.
  • 1990 --- The space shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral, FL. It was carrying the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope.
  • 1990 --- Michael Milken pled guilty to six felonies and agreed to pay a $600 million penalty. He was later sentenced to ten years in prison. Milken had sold junk-bond in the 1980s.
  • Birthdays
  • Barbra Streisand
  • Justin Wilson
  • Shirley MacLaine
  • Cedric the Entertainer
  • Robert Penn Warren (1st U.S. poet laureate)
  • Richard M. Daley
  • Eric Bogosian
  • Doug Clifford
  • Omar Vizquel
  • Willem de Kooning
  • Jill Ireland
  • Michael O’Keefe
  • Sue Grafton
  • Robert Bailey Thomas