DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Friday, Oct. 23, the 297th day of 2020. There are 69 days left in the year.
On this date in:
1864: Forces led by Union Maj. Gen. Samuel R. Curtis repelled Confederate Maj. Gen. Sterling Price’s army in the Civil War Battle of Westport in Missouri.
1910: Blanche S. Scott became the first woman to make a public solo airplane flight, reaching an altitude of 12 feet at a park in Fort Wayne, Ind.
1915: Tens of thousands of women paraded up Fifth Avenue in New York City, demanding the right to vote.
1941: The Walt Disney animated feature “Dumbo,” about a young circus elephant who learns how to fly, premiered in New York.
1944: The World War II Battle of Leyte (Lay’-tee) Gulf began, resulting in a major Allied victory against Japanese forces.
1956: A student-sparked revolt against Hungary’s Communist rule began; as the revolution spread, Soviet forces started entering the country, and the uprising was put down within weeks.
1973: President Richard Nixon agreed to turn over White House tape recordings subpoenaed by the Watergate special prosecutor to Judge John J. Sirica.
1983: 241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines, were killed in a suicide truck-bombing at Beirut International Airport in Lebanon; a near-simultaneous attack on French forces killed 58 paratroopers.
1987: The U.S. Senate rejected, 5842, the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork.
1995: A jury in Houston convicted Yolanda Saldivar of murdering Tejano singing star Selena. (Saldivar is serving a life prison sentence.)
2001: The nation’s anthrax scare hit the White House with the discovery of a small concentration of spores at an offsite mail processing center.
2009: President Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency, giving his health chief the power to let hospitals move emergency rooms offsite to speed treatment and protect non-infected patients.
2014: Officials announced that an emergency room doctor who’d recently returned to New York City after treating Ebola patients in West Africa tested positive for the virus, becoming the first case in the city and the fourth in the nation. (Dr. Craig Spencer later recovered.)
Singer Barbara Ann Hawkins of The Dixie Cups is 77. Director Ang Lee is 66. Jazz singer Dianne Reeves is 64. Country singer Dwight Yoakam is 64. Director-actor Sam Raimi (“Spider-man” films) is 61. Singer
“Weird Al” Yankovic is 61. Actor John Huertas
(“Castle”) is 51. Actor
Ryan Reynolds is 44. Actor Saycon Sengbloh
(TV’S “In The Dark”) is 43. Singer Matthew Shultz of Cage The Elephant is 37. Actor Masiela Lusha (“George Lopez”) is 35. Singer Miguel is 35. Actor Emilia Clarke (“Game of Thrones”) is 34. Actor Inbar Lavi (“Imposters,” “Prison Break”) is 34. Trumpeter Allen Branstetter of St. Paul and the Broken Bones is 30. Actor Amandla Stenberg (“The Hunger Games”) is 22.