On this date

1717 — George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” was first performed by an orchestra during a boating party on the River Thames (tehmz), with the musicians on one barge, and King George I listening from another. 1821 — Spain ceded Florida to the United States. 1917 — During World War I, Britian’s King George V issued a proclamation decreeing that the royal family adopt the name “Windsor” while relinquishing “the Use of All German Titles and Dignities.” 1918 — Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks. 1936 — The Spanish Civil War began as rightwing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic. 1944 — During World War II, 320 men, twothirds of them African-Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California. 1955 — Disneyland had its opening day in Anaheim, California. 1975 — An Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind. 1981 — A pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed killing 114 people during a tea dance. 1996 — TWA Flight 800, a Europe-bound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board. 1997 — Woolworth Corp. announced it was closing its 400 remaining five-and-dime stores across the country, ending 117 years in business. 2012 — F&P Georgia announced it was expanding and adding 100 new jobs. (This was the fifth expansion for the company in 11 years.) 2014 — All 298 passengers and crew aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 were killed when the Boeing 777 was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine.

American jazz singer (born 1915, died this date in 1959) Thought for today Billie Holiday ‘Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose.’