© 2024 KALW 91.7 FM Bay Area
KALW Public Media / 91.7 FM Bay Area
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Wednesday April 22, 2015

  • 112th Day of 2015 253 Remaining
  • Summer Begins in 60 Days
  • Sunrise:6:23
  • Sunset:7:52
  • 13 Hours 29 Minutes
  •  
  • Moon Rise:9:42am
  • Moon Set:12:10am(Thursday)
  • Phase:20%
  • 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:1:30am/3:25pm
  • Low:8:23am/8:33pm
  •  
  • Rainfall:
  • This Year to Date:17.97
  • Last Year:12.32
  • Avg YTD:22.65
  • Annual Avg:23.80
  •  
  • Holidays
  • Earth Day
  • Oklahoma Day
  • “In God We Trust” Day
  • Administrative Professionals Day
  • Girl Scout Leader Day
  • National Jelly Bean Day
  •  
  • International Mother Earth Day
  • On This Day
  • 1509 --- Henry VIII became king of England following the death of his father, Henry VII.
  • 1778 --- Commander John Paul Jones leads a small detachment of two boats from his ship, the USS Ranger, to raid the shallow port at Whitehaven, England, where, by his own account, 400 British merchant ships are anchored.
  • 1878 --- The White House hosted the first Easter Monday Egg Roll. Previously, the activities had been held on the Capitol grounds. Congress passed a law banning the practice due to a limited maintenance and landscaping budget (Bah humbug!). President Rutherford B. Hayes was asked if children could hold the activities on the South Lawn of the White House and he enthusiastically agreed. The event has been held there ever since.
  • 1861 --- Robert E. Lee was named commander of Virginia forces.
  • 1864 --- The U.S. Congress passed legislation that allowed the inscription "In God We Trust" to be included on one-cent and two-cent coins. 
  • 1876 --- The first official National League baseball game took place. Boston beat Philadelphia 6-5.
  • 1886 --- Ohio passes a statute that makes seduction unlawful. Covering all men over the age of18 who worked as teachers or instructors of women, this law even prohibited men from having consensual sex with women (of any age) whom they were instructing. The penalty for disobeying this law ranged from two to 10 years in prison.
  • 1889 --- The U.S. opened Oklahoma to homesteaders and the Oklahoma land rush officially began at 12 noon.
  • 1914 --- Babe Ruth made his pitching debut with the Baltimore Orioles.
  • 1915 --- The New York Yankees wore pinstripes and the hat-in-the-ring logo for the first time.
  • 1915 --- German forces shock allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium. This was the first major gas attack by the Germans, and it devastated the Allied line.
  • 1934 --- George “Baby Face” Nelson kills Special Agent W. Carter Baum during an FBI raid in northern Wisconsin. Nelson was holed up with notorious bank robber John Dillinger’s gang at the Little Bohemia resort but didn’t follow the planned escape route. As he was stealing a car to escape, he blasted several agents with two handguns. The famed gangster was born Lester Gillis but wanted to be known as Big George Nelson. Unfortunately for him, his youthful looks caused everyone to call him “Baby Face,” although one had to be careful about using the nickname within earshot of the gangster. 
  • 1954 --- Senator Joseph McCarthy begins hearings investigating the United States Army, which he charges with being “soft” on communism. These televised hearings gave the American public their first view of McCarthy in action, and his recklessness, indignant bluster, and bullying tactics quickly resulted in his fall from prominence. The hearings were a fiasco for McCarthy. He constantly interrupted with irrelevant questions and asides; yelled “point of order” whenever testimony was not to his liking; and verbally attacked witnesses, attorneys for the Army, and his fellow senators. The climax came when McCarthy slandered an associate of the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch. Welch fixed McCarthy with a steady glare and declared evenly, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness…Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” A stunned McCarthy listened as the packed audience exploded into cheers and applause. McCarthy’s days as a political power were effectively over. A few weeks later, the Army hearings dribbled to a close with little fanfare and no charges were upheld against the Army by the committee. In December 1954, the Senate voted to censure McCarthy for his conduct.
  • 1956 --- Elvis Presley made his Las Vegas debut at the Frontier Hotel.
  • 1968 --- In a news conference, Defense Secretary Clark Clifford declares that the South Vietnamese have “acquired the capacity to begin to insure their own security [and] they are going to take over more and more of the fighting.” Clifford, who had succeeded Robert McNamara, had taken office with more than a little skepticism about the way the United States was conducting the war in Vietnam. This skepticism increased after the communists launched their massive offensive during the Tet (Chinese New Year) holiday earlier in 1968.
  • 1970 --- Earth Day, an event to increase public awareness of the world’s environmental problems, is celebrated in the United States for the first time. Millions of Americans, including students from thousands of colleges and universities, participated in rallies, marches, and educational programs. Earth Day was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, a staunch environmentalist who hoped to provide unity to the grassroots environmental movement and increase ecological awareness. “The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy,” Senator Nelson said, “and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda.” Earth Day indeed increased environmental awareness in America, and in July of that year the Environmental Protection Agency was established by special executive order to regulate and enforce national pollution legislation.
  • 1972 --- Antiwar demonstrations prompted by the accelerated U.S. bombing in Southeast Asia draw somewhere between 30,000 to 60,000 marchers in New York; 30,000 to 40,000 in San Francisco; 10,000 to 12,000 in Los Angeles; and smaller gatherings in Chicago and other cities throughout the country. The new bombing campaign was in response to the North Vietnam’s massive invasion of South Vietnam in March. As the demonstrations were happening, bitter fighting continued all over South Vietnam. In the Mekong Delta, for example, the fighting was the heaviest it had been in 18 months.
  • 1976 --- Barbara Walters became first female nightly network news anchor.
  • 1978 --- John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd made their first appearance as The Blues Brothers on NBC's "Saturday Night Live." 
  • 1978 --- Bob Marley and the Wailers performed at the One Love Peace Concert in Jamaica. It was Marley's first public appearance in Jamaica since being wounded in an assassination attempt a year and a half earlier.
  • 1983 --- The West German news magazine Stern announced the discovery of personal diaries purportedly written by Adolf Hitler that turned out to be a hoax.
  • 1992 --- A series of sewer explosions in Guadalajara, Mexico killed more than 250 people, injured hundreds of others and left 15,000 people homeless.  Flawed design of the sewer pipe system allowed gasoline from an adjacent pipeline to leak into the sewer pipes.
  • 1997 --- In Lima, Peru government commandos storm and capture the residence of the Japanese ambassador ending a 126-day hostage crisis. In the rescue 71 hostages were saved. Those killed: one hostage (of a heart attack), two soldiers, and all 14 rebels.
  • 2004 --- Pat Tillman, who gave up his pro football career to enlist in the U.S. Army after the terrorist attacks of September 11, is killed by friendly fire while serving in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004. The news that Tillman, age 27, was mistakenly gunned down by his fellow Rangers, rather than enemy forces, was initially covered up by the U.S. military.
  • 2005 --- Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers to kill Americans. (He was later sentenced to life in prison.)
  • 2010 --- The Deepwater Horizon oil platform, operated by BP, sank into the Gulf of Mexico two days after a massive explosion that killed 11 workers.
  • 2010 --- The Boeing X-37 began its first orbital mission. It successfully returned to Earth on December 3, 2010.
  • Birthdays
  • Immanuel Kant
  • Emily Davies
  • Dorothy Alexander
  • Yehudi Menuhin
  • Ellen Glasgow
  • Charles Mingus
  • Robert Oppenheimer
  • Vladimir (Ilyich Ulyanov) Lenin
  • Queen Isabella I (Spain)
  • Vladimir Nabokov
  • Eddie Albert
  • Bettie Page
  • Aaron Spelling
  • Charlotte Rae
  • Glen Campbell
  • Jack Nicholson
  • Ryan Stiles
  • Peter Frampton
  • Sheryl Lee