- 142nd Day of 2013 / 223 Remaining
- 30 Days Until The First Day of Summer
- Sunrise:5:53
- Sunset:8:19
- 14 Hours 26 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:5:49pm
- Moon Set:3:59am
- Moon’s Phase:92 %
- The Next Full Moon
- May 24 @ 9:27pm
- 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:10:57am/10:22pm
- Low:4:18am/3:53pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- This Year:16.32
- Last Year:15.64
- Normal To Date:23.46
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- KALW Day
- National Vanilla Pudding Day
- National Maritime Day
- International World Turtle Day
- Linnaeus Day-Sweden
- National Day-Morocco
- Victoria Day-Canada
- Declaration of the Bab-Baha'i
- National Sovereignty Day-Haiti
- National Unity Day-Yemen
- On This Day In …
- 1455 --- In the opening battle of England's War of the Roses, the Yorkists defeat King Henry VI's Lancastrian forces at St. Albans, 20 miles northwest of London. Many Lancastrian nobles perished, including Edmund Beaufort, the duke of Somerset, and the king was forced to submit to the rule of his cousin, Richard of York. The dynastic struggle between the House of York, whose badge was a white rose, and the House of Lancaster, later associated with a red rose, would stretch on for 30 years.
- 1843 --- A massive wagon train, made up of 1,000 settlers and 1,000 head of cattle, sets off down the Oregon Trail from Independence, Missouri. Known as the "Great Emigration," the expedition came two years after the first modest party of settlers made the long, overland journey to Oregon. After leaving Independence, the giant wagon train followed the Sante Fe Trail for some 40 miles and then turned northwest to the Platte River, which it followed along its northern route to Fort Laramie, Wyoming. From there, it traveled on to the Rocky Mountains, which it passed through by way of the broad, level South Pass that led to the basin of the Colorado River. The travelers then went southwest to Fort Bridger, northwest across a divide to Fort Hall on the Snake River, and on to Fort Boise, where they gained supplies for the difficult journey over the Blue Mountains and into Oregon. The Great Emigration finally arrived in October, completing the 2,000-mile journey from Independence in five months.
- 1849 --- Abraham Lincoln received a patent for the floating dry dock.
- 1868 --- The Great Train Robbery took place near Marshfield, Ind., as seven members of the Reno gang made off with $96,000 in cash, gold and bonds.
- 1946 --- The Culinary Institute of America is founded.
- 1947 --- The Truman Doctrine was enacted as Congress appropriated military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey.
- 1955 --- Jack Benny signed off his last live network radio broadcast after a run of 23 years. Mr. Benny was devoting his time fully to TV. His program brought many of his old cronies to TV as well: announcer Don Wilson; bandleader Phil Harris; Eddie ‘Rochester’ Anderson; singer Dennis Day; and Benny’s wife, Mary Livingstone.
- 1958 --- The arrival in the United Kingdom of one of the biggest figures in rock and roll was looked forward to with great anticipation in May of 1958. Nowhere in the world were the teenage fans of the raucous music coming out of America more enthusiastic than they were in England, and the coming tour of the great Jerry Lee Lewis promised to be a rousing success. "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and "Great Balls Of Fire" had both been massive hits in the UK, and early demand for tickets was great enough that 27 appearances were booked in what promised to be the biggest tour yet by an American rock-and-roll star. There was just one problem: Unbeknownst to the British public and the organizers of the coming tour, Jerry Lee Lewis would be traveling to England as a newly married man, with his pretty young wife in tow. Just how young that wife really was would be revealed, when Jerry Lee "The Killer" Lewis arrived at Heathrow Airport with his new "child bride." Reporter Paul Tanfield unwittingly broke the scandal when he inquired as to the identity of an especially young woman he'd spotted in the Killer's entourage. "I'm Myra, Jerry's wife," said Myra Gail Lewis. Tanfield followed up with a question for the Killer himself: "And how old is Myra?" It was at this point that Jerry Lee must have cottoned to the fact that the rest of the world might take a somewhat skeptical view of his third marriage, because the answer he gave was a lie: "Fifteen." Myra Gail Lewis was actually only 13 years old, a fact that would soon come out along with certain other details, such as the fact that she was Jerry Lee's first cousin (once removed) and that the pair had married five months before his divorce from his second wife was made official. Jerry Lee tried to set minds at ease on this last point—the second marriage was null and void, he explained, because it had taken place before his divorce from his first wife—but even the most skilled public-relations expert would have had a hard time spinning the unfolding story in Jerry Lee's favor. As the press hounded Jerry Lee and Myra Gail Lewis over the coming week, the Killer tried to go on with business as usual, but his first three shows drew meager audiences, and those that did buy tickets showered him with boos and catcalls. When the Rank chain of theaters cancelled the rest of his dates and his fashionable Mayfair hotel encouraged him to seek lodgings elsewhere, Jerry Lee Lewis left the UK, less than a week after his dramatic arrival on this day in 1958. Back home, he would face a blacklisting from which his career would never fully recover.
- 1960 --- A magnitude 9.5 earthquake, the strongest ever recorded, struck southern Chile, claiming 1,655 lives.
- 1967 --- What was to become the Public Broadcasting System’s longest-running children’s program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, debuted on this day.
- 1972 --- President Richard Nixon arrives in Moscow for a summit with Soviet leaders. Although it was Nixon's first visit to the Soviet Union as president, he had visited Moscow once before--as U.S. vice president. As Eisenhower's vice president, Nixon made frequent official trips abroad, including a 1959 trip to Moscow to tour the Soviet capital and to attend the U.S. Trade and Cultural Fair in Sokolniki Park. Soon after Vice President Nixon arrived in July 1959, he opened an informal debate with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev about the merits and disadvantages of their governments' political and economic systems. Known as the "Kitchen Debate" because of a particularly heated exchange between Khrushchev and Nixon that occurred in the kitchen of a model U.S. home at the American fair, the dialogue was a defining moment in the Cold War. Nixon's second visit to Moscow in May 1972, this time as president, was for a more conciliatory purpose. During a week of summit meetings with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet officials, the United States and the USSR reached a number of agreements, including one that laid the groundwork for a joint space flight in 1975. On May 26, Nixon and Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), the most significant of the agreements reached during the summit. The treaty limited the United States and the USSR to 200 antiballistic missiles each, which were to be divided between two defensive systems. President Nixon returned to the United States on May 30.
- 1977 --- President Jimmy Carter, in a speech delivered at Notre Dame University, reaffirms his commitment to human rights as a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy and disparages the "inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear." Carter's speech marked a new direction for U.S. Cold War policy, one that led to both accolades and controversy.
- 1990 --- After 150 years apart, Marxist South Yemen and conservative North Yemen are unified as the Republic of Yemen. Ali Abdullah, president of North Yemen, became the new country's president, and Ali Salem Al-Baidh, leader of the South Yemeni Socialist Party, vice president. The first free elections were held in 1993.
- 1992 --- Johnny Carson hosted NBC's "Tonight Show" for the last time after nearly 30 years in the job.
- 1998 --- Voters in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland cast ballots giving resounding approval to a Northern Ireland peace accord.
- 2003 --- The final manuscript of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which was annotated by the composer, sold at an auction for $3.47 million.
- Birthdays
- Mary Cassatt
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Richard Wagner
- Laurence Olivier
- T Boone Pickens
- Apolo Anton Ohno
- Richard Benjamin
- Bernard Shaw
- Bernie Taupin
- Morrissey
- Ann Cusack
- Naomi Campbell
- Sun Ra
- Judith Crist
- Susan Strasberg
- Jerry Dammers