TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Wednesday, April 20, the 110th day of 2022. There are 255 days left in the year. On this date in:
1812: The fourth vice president of the United States, George Clinton, died in Washington at age 72, becoming the first vice president to die while in office. 1861: Col. Robert E. Lee resigned his commission in the United States Army. (Lee went on to command the Army of Northern Virginia, and eventually became general-in-chief of the Confederate forces.)
1912: Boston’s Fenway Park hosted its first professional baseball game while Navin Field (Tiger Stadium) opened in Detroit. (The Red Sox defeated the New York Highlanders 7-6 in 11 innings; the Tigers beat the Cleveland Naps 6-5 in 11 innings.)
1916: The Chicago Cubs played their first game at Wrigley Field (then known as Weeghman Park); the Cubs defeated the Cincinnati Reds 7-6.
1971: The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the use of busing to achieve racial desegregation in schools.
1972: Apollo 16’s lunar module, carrying astronauts John W. Young and Charles M. Duke Jr., landed on the moon. 1986: Following an absence of six decades, Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz performed in the Soviet Union to a packed audience at the Grand Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.
1999: The Columbine High School massacre took place in Colorado as two students shot and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before taking their own lives.
2003: U.S. Army forces took control of Baghdad from the Marines in a changing of the guard that thinned the military presence in the capital.
2008: Pope Benedict XVI celebrated his final Mass in the United States before a full house in Yankee Stadium, blessing his enormous U.S. flock and telling Americans to use their freedoms wisely.
2010: An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, leased by BP, killed 11 workers and caused a blow-out that began spewing an estimated 200 million gallons of crude into the Gulf of Mexico. (The well was finally capped nearly three months later.)
2016: Five former New Orleans police officers pleaded guilty to lesser charges in the deadly shootings on a bridge in the days following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.