DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Wednesday, May 24, the 144th day of 2023. There are 221 days left in the year. On this date in:
1844: Samuel F.B. Morse transmitted the message “What hath God wrought” from Washington to Baltimore as he formally opened America’s first telegraph line.
1935: The first major league baseball game to be played at night took place at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field as the Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1.
1937: In a set of rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security Act of 1935.
1941: The German battleship Bismarck sank the British battle cruiser HMS Hood in the North Atlantic, killing all but three of the 1,418 men on board.
1961: A group of Freedom Riders was arrested after arriving at a bus terminal in Jackson, Mississippi, charged with breaching the peace for entering whitedesignated areas. (They ended up serving 60 days in jail.)
1962: Astronaut Scott Carpenter became the second American to orbit the Earth as he flew aboard Aurora 7.
1974: American jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington, 75, died in New York.
1976: Britain and France opened trans-atlantic Concorde supersonic transport service to Washington.
1980: Iran rejected a call by the World Court in The Hague to release the American hostages.
1994: Four Islamic fundamentalists convicted of bombing New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 were each sentenced to 240 years in prison.
1995: Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson died in London at age 79.
2006: “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary about former Vice President Al Gore’s campaign against global warming, went into limited release.
2011: Oprah Winfrey taped the final episode of her long-running talk show.
2022: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reached the three-month mark, with Moscow bogged down in what increasingly appeared to be a war of attrition, with no end in sight and few successes on the battlefield.
Jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp is 86. Musician John Madden of The Serendipity Singers is 86. Comedian Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong is 85.
Musician Bob Dylan is 82. Actor Gary Burghoff (“M*A*S*H”) is 80. Singer Patti Labelle is 79. Actor Priscilla Presley
is 78. Country singer-songwriter Mike Reid is 76. Actor Jim Broadbent (“Moulin Rouge,” “Iris”) is 74. Actor Alfred Molina is 70. Singer Rosanne Cash
is 68. Actor Cliff Parisi
(“Call the Midwife”) is 63. Actor Kristin Scott Thomas is 63. Actor John C. Reilly (“Chicago,” “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”) is 58. Actor Dana Ashbrook
(“Twin Peaks”) is 56. Actor Eric Close
(“Nashville,” “Without A Trace”) is 56. Actor Carl Payne (“Martin,” “The Cosby Show”) is 54. Guitarist Rich Robinson
of The Black Crowes is 54.