TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Saturday, May 11, the 132nd day of 2024. There are 234 days left in the year. On this date in:

1934: A dust storm that began two days earlier in the plains carried dust as far as the East Coast, depositing it in cities from Boston to Washington, D.C.

1981: Reggae star Bob Marley died of cancer at age 36. He was first diagnosed in 1977, but the cancer spread through his body in 1980.

1981: More than a year before its appearance on Broadway in New York, the musical “Cats” premiered in London’s West End at the New London Theatre and ran through May 11, 2002.

1987: In an operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Clinton House became the first live heart donor in the United States. House needed new lungs, and as it was deemed safer to perform a lung-and-heart transplant than transplant just the lungs, House received a new heart and lungs from an accident victim. His healthy heart was transplanted to John Couch.

1990: The first wide-release film about AIDS, “Longtime Companion,” opens in New York. The film had had showings at festivals for several months before opening to the wider public.

1996: ValuJet Flight 592, a DC-9 aircraft, crashed in Florida’s Everglades, killing all 110 people onboard.

1997: In a rematch after an upgrade, IBM computer Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. It was the first time a world champion had lost a match with standard time controls to a computer. In their 1996 match, Kasparov prevailed four games to two. In the rematch, Deep Blue won two games, Kasparov one, and three games were draws.