Chicago Daily Tribune

ON OCTOBER 11 ...

In 1776, the first naval battle of Lake Champlain was fought during the American Revolution. Gen. Benedict Arnold commanded American forces, which suffered heavy losses but stalled the English.

In 1779 Polish nobleman Casimir Pulaski was killed at the Battle of Savannah while fighting for American independence.

In 1884 Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City. (She later became the nation’s first lady as the wife of distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt.)

In 1890 the Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in Washington.

In 1932 the Democratic National Committee sponsored a television program from New York. It was the nation’s first political telecast.

In 1958 the lunar probe Pioneer 1 was launched. Failing to travel as far as planned, it fell back toward the Earth and burned up in the atmosphere.

In 1967 Bolivian officials said the body of slain Cuban guerrilla leader Che Guevara had been buried in a secret and remote grave. (It was not until the summer of 1997 that the body was found, dug up and ceremoniously reburied in Cuba.)

In 1968 Apollo 7, the first manned mission of the Apollo series, was launched with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham.

In 1975 “Saturday Night Live” premiered on NBC with comic George Carlin as guest host.

In 1976 reports from China said Mao Zedong’s widow, Jiang Qing, and three others had been arrested. (They would be denounced as the Gang of Four.)

In 1984 space shuttle astronaut Kathy Sullivan became the first American woman to perform a spacewalk.

In 1987 thousands of gayrights activists marched through Washington to demand protection from discrimination and urge more federal funding for AIDS research and treatment.

In 1990 Octavio Paz became the first Mexican writer to be honored by the Nobel Awards Committee when it chose him for the Nobel Prize in literature.

In 1991 comedian and actor Redd Foxx died in Los Angeles; hewas 68.

In 1996 Roman Catholic Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo and Jose Ramos-Horta of East Timor won the Nobel Peace Prize for their pro-democracy efforts in troubled East Timor.

In 1998 Pope John Paul II decreed the first Jewish-born saint of the modern era: Edith Stein, a nun who had died in a gas chamber at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.

In 2001 Trinidad-born writer V.S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in literature.

In 2002 former President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2005 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it had finished pumping out the New Orleans metropolitan area, whichwas flooded by Hurricane Katrina six weeks earlier and then was swamped again by Hurricane Rita.

In 2012 novelist Mo Yan became the first Chinese nationalist towin the Nobel Prize in literature.

In 2014 screening for the Ebola virus started at New York’s JFK International Airport. (Travel precautions started later at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, Chicago’s O’Hare, Newark Liberty in New Jersey and Washington Dulles.)

In 2016 the Chicago Cubs came from behind in the ninth inning to close out a 6-5 victory over the Giants at AT&T Park in San Francisco to win the best-of-five National League Division Series in four games.