DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Tuesday, April 13, the 103rd day of 2021. There are 262 days left in the year.
On this date:
1613: Pocahontas, daughter of Chief Powhatan, was captured by English Capt. Samuel Argall in the Virginia Colony. (During a yearlong captivity, Pocahontas converted to Christianity and ultimately opted to stay with the English.)
1742: “Messiah,” the oratorio by George Frideric Handel featuring the “Hallelujah” chorus, had its first public performance in Dublin, Ireland.
1743: The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, was born in Shadwell in the Virginia Colony.
1861: At the start of the Civil War, Fort Sumter in South Carolina fell to Confederate forces.
1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in
Washington, D.C. on the 200th anniversary of the third American president’s birth.
1964: Sidney Poitier became the first Black performer in a leading role to win an Academy Award for his performance in “Lilies of the Field.”
1970: Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. (The astronauts managed to return safely.)
1992: The Great Chicago Flood took place as the city’s century-old tunnel system and adjacent basements filled with water from the Chicago River. “The Bridges of Madison County,” a romance novel by Robert James Waller, was published by Warner Books.
1997: Tiger Woods became the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament and the first player of partly African heritage to claim a major golf title.
1999: Right-to-die advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Michigan, to 10 to 25 years in prison for second-degree murder in the lethal injection of a Lou Gehrig’s disease patient. (Kevorkian ended up serving eight years.)
2005: A defiant Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks in back-to-back court appearances in Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta.
2015: A federal judge in Washington sentenced former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison and three others to 30-year terms for their roles in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square that killed 14 Iraqi civilians and wounded 17 others.
Composer Bill Conti (“Rocky” film theme) is 79. Musician Jack Casady of Jefferson Airplane is 77. Actor Tony Dow (“Leave It to Beaver”) is 76. Musician Al Green is 75. Actor Ron Perlman
is 71. Singer Peabo Bryson is 70. Drummer Max Weinberg of the E Street Band and “Late Night With Conan O’brien” is 70. Keyboardist Jimmy Destri of Blondie is 67. Comedian Gary Kroeger
(“Saturday Night Live”) is 64. Actor-comedian Caroline Rhea
(“Sabrina the Teenage Witch”) is 57. Guitarist Marc Ford of Black Crowes is 55. Actor Ricky Schroder is 51. Singer Lou Bega is 46. Rapper Ty Dolla $ign is 39. Actor Allison Williams (“Girls”) is 33. Actor Hannah Marks (“Necessary Roughness”) is 28.