This day in history
Today is Sunday, April 16, the 106th day of 2023. There are 259 days left in the year. ºBirthdays: Singer Bobby Vinton is 88. Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II is 83. Basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is
76. Former Massachusetts first lady Ann Romney is 74. NFL coach Bill Belichick is 71. Rock singer (Midnight Oil) and former politician Peter Garrett is
70. Actor Ellen Barkin is 69. Actor Michel Gill is 63. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is 61. Rock musician Jason Scheff (Chicago) is 61. Singer Jimmy Osmond is
60. Rock singer David Pirner (Soul Asylum) is 59. Actor-comedian Martin Lawrence is 58. Actor Jon Cryer is 58. Actor Peter Billingsley is 52. Actor Claire Foy (TV: “The Crown”) is 39.
ºIn 1789, President-elect George Washington left Mount Vernon, Va., for his inauguration in New York.
ºIn 1945, in his first speech to Congress, President Truman pledged to carry out the war and peace policies of his late predecessor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. A Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea torpedoed and sank the MV Goya, which Germany was using to transport civilian refugees and wounded soldiers; it’s estimated that up to 7,000 people died.
ºIn 1947, the cargo ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate, blew up in the harbor in Texas City, Texas; a nearby ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying ammonium nitrate and sulfur, caught fire and exploded the following day; the blasts and fires killed nearly 600 people. ºIn 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which the civil rights activist responded to a group of local clergymen who had criticized him for leading street protests; King defended his tactics, writing, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
ºIn 1972, Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon with astronauts John W. Young, Charles M. Duke Jr., and Ken Mattingly on board.
ºIn 2007, in one of America’s worst school attacks, a college senior killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech before taking his own life.