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World Guide Dog Day-KALW Almanac-4/27/2016

  • 118th Day of 2016 248 Remaining
  • Summer Begins in 54 Days
  • Sunrise: 6:16
  • Sunset: 7:57
  • 13 Hours 42 Minutes
  • Moon Rise: 12:02am
  • Moon Set: 10:24am
  • Phase: 75% 20 Days
  • Next Full Moon May 21 @ 2:16pm
  • In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time. Thus, the name Full Flower Moon. Other names include the Full Corn Planting Moon, or the Milk Moon.
  • Tides
  • High: 2:07am/4:22pm
  • Low: 9:06am/9:13pm
  • Holidays
  • National Tell A Story Day
  • National Prime Rib Day
  • Morse Code Day
  • Denim Day
  • Babe Ruth Day
  • Administrative Professional’s Day
  •  
  • International Guide Dog Day
  • International Noise Awareness Day
  • Freedom Day-South Africa
  • World Stationery Day
  • Independence Day-Togo / Sierra Leone
  • Day Of Resistance-Slovenia
  • Horse Day-Turkmenistan
  • Dan We Zo, alias St Louis Clemente-Haiti
  • On This Day
  • 1521 --- After traveling three-quarters of the way around the globe, Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan is killed during a tribal skirmish on Mactan Island in the Philippines. Earlier in the month, his ships had dropped anchor at the Philippine island of Cebu, and Magellan met with the local chief, who after converting to Christianity persuaded the Europeans to assist him in conquering a rival tribe on the neighboring island of Mactan. In the subsequent fighting, Magellan was hit by a poisoned arrow and left to die by his retreating comrades.
  • 1865 --- Cornell University was chartered. Cornell is an agricultural land grant university endowed by Ezra Cornell, one of the founders of Western Union Telegraph Co. Today, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, offers many programs, including Agricultural and Life Sciences, Hotel Administration, and Nutritional Sciences.
  • 1865 --- The steamboat Sultana explodes on the Mississippi River near Memphis, killing 1,700 passengers including many discharged Union soldiers. The Sultana was launched from Cincinnati in 1863. The boat was 260 feet long and had an authorized capacity of 376 passengers and crew. It was soon employed to carry troops and supplies along the lower Mississippi River. On April 25, 1865, the Sultana left New Orleans with 100 passengers. It stopped at Vicksburg, Mississippi, for repair of a leaky boiler. R. G. Taylor, the boilermaker on the ship, advised Captain J. Cass Mason that two sheets on the boiler had to be replaced, but Mason ordered Taylor to simply patch the plates until the ship reached St. Louis. Mason was part owner of the riverboat, and he and the other owners were anxious to pick up discharged Union prisoners at Vicksburg. The federal government promised to pay $5 for each enlisted man and $10 for each officer delivered to the North. Such a contract could pay huge dividends, and Mason convinced local military authorities to pick up the entire contingent despite the presence of two other steamboats at Vicksburg. When the Sultana left Vicksburg, it carried 2,100 troops and 200 civilians, more than six times its capacity. On the evening of April 26, the ship stopped at Memphis before cruising across the river to pick up coal in Arkansas. As it steamed up the river above Memphis, a thunderous explosion tore through the boat. Metal and steam from the boilers killed hundreds, and hundreds more were thrown from the boat into the chilly waters of the river. The Mississippi was already at flood stage, and the Sultana had only one lifeboat and a few life preservers. Only 600 people survived the explosion. A board of inquiry later determined the cause to be insufficient water in the boiler–overcrowding was not listed as a cause. The Sultana accident is still the largest maritime disaster in U.S. history.
  • 1941 --- German army enters the Greek capital, signaling the end of Greek resistance. All mainland Greece and all the Greek Aegean islands except Crete are under German occupation by May 11. In fending off the Axis invaders, the Greeks suffer the loss of 15,700 men. Greece will not be liberated until 1944, by British troops from the Mediterranean theater.
  • 1956 --- World heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano retires from boxing at age 31, saying he wants to spend more time with his family. Marciano ended his career as the only heavyweight champion with a perfect record–49 wins in 49 professional bouts, with 43 knockouts. 
  • 1963 --- Margaret Annemarie Battavio’s very first single, “I Will Follow Him,” reached #1 on the U.S. pop charts. With her 15th birthday only six weeks behind her, and three more years of high school ahead of her, the singer better known as Little Peggy March became the youngest female performer ever to top the Billboard Hot 100, but she’d never crack the top 10 again. Financial exploitation by an unscrupulous manager and a string of disappointing singles thwarted Peggy’s efforts to capitalize on her early success. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8-6o_ultLg
  • 1964 --- John Lennon's "In His Own Write", a collection of funny poems and drawings, was published in the U.S. 
  • 1968 --- Vice-President Hubert Humphrey announces his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. In an interview, he said he supported the current U.S. policy of sending troops “where required by our own national security.” On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson, frustrated with his inability to reach a solution in Vietnam, announced that he would neither seek nor accept the nomination of his party for re-election. This set up a contest for the Democratic nomination. Humphrey’s main competition was Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-Minnesota), who had come within a few hundred votes of beating Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary.
  • 1978 --- Afghanistan President Sardar Mohammed Daoud is overthrown and murdered in a coup led by procommunist rebels. The brutal action marked the beginning of political upheaval in Afghanistan that resulted in intervention by Soviet troops less than two years later. Daoud had ruled Afghanistan since coming to power in a coup in 1973. His relations with the neighboring Soviet Union had grown progressively worse since that time as he pursued a campaign against Afghan communists. The murder of a leading Afghan Communist Party leader in early April 1978 may have encouraged the communists to launch their successful campaign against the Daoud regime later that month.
  • 1983 --- Nolan Ryan (Houston Astros) broke a 55-year-old major league baseball record when he struck out his 3,509th batter of his career. 
  • 1987 --- The Justice Department barred Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from entering the United States, saying he had aided in the deportation and execution of thousands of Jews and others as a German Army officer during World War II.
  • 1994 --- More than 22 million South Africans turn out to cast ballots in the country’s first multiracial parliamentary elections. An overwhelming majority chose anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela to head a new coalition government that included his African National Congress Party, former President F.W. de Klerk’s National Party, and Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s Inkatha Freedom Party. In May, Mandela was inaugurated as president, becoming South Africa’s first black head of state.
  • 2006 --- In Fiji, Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones was admitted to a hospital after he reportedly suffered a head injury when he fell out of a palm tree.
  • 2009 --- General Motors (GM) says it plans to discontinue production of its more than 80-year-old Pontiac brand. Pontiac’s origins date back to the Oakland Motor Car, which was founded in 1907 in Pontiac, Michigan, by Edward Murphy, a horse-drawn carriage manufacturer. In 1909, Oakland became part of General Motors, a conglomerate formed the previous year by another former buggy company executive, William Durant. The first Pontiac model made its debut as part of the Oakland line in the 1920s. The car, which featured a six-cylinder engine, proved so popular that the Oakland name was eventually dropped and Pontiac became its own GM division by the early 1930s.
  • 2011 --- More than 120 tornadoes raked the South and Midwest, resulting in 316 deaths across parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia.
  • 2011 --- President Barack Obama produced a detailed Hawaii birth certificate in an extraordinary attempt to bury the issue of where he was born.
  • Birthdays
  • Kate Pierson
  • Ulysses S Grant (18th President)
  • Rogers Hornsby
  • Samuel Morse
  • Walter Lantz
  • Jack Klugman
  • Casey Kasem
  • Maxine Brown
  • Judy Carne
  • Cuba Gooding
  • Ann Peebles
  • Paul “Ace” Frehley
  • Sheena Easton