This Day in History

On June 2, 1941, baseball’s “Iron Horse,” Lou Gehrig, died in New York of a degenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; he was 37.

On this date:

In 1886, President Grover Cleveland, 49, married Fran- ces Folsom, 21, in the Blue Room of the White House. (To date, Cleveland is the only president to marry in the exec- utive mansion.)

In 1897, Mark Twain was quoted by the New York Journal as saying from London that “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” (Twain was responding to a report in the New York Herald that he was “grievously ill” and “possibly dying.”)

In 1924, Congress passed, and President Calvin Coolidge signed, a measure guaranteeing full American citizenship for all Native Americans born within U.S. territorial limits.

In 1953, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place in London’s Westminster Ab- bey, 16 months after the death of her father, King George VI.

In 1962, Soviet forces opened fire on striking work- ers in the Russian city of No- vocherkassk; a retired general in 1989 put the death toll at 22 to 24.

In 1966, U.S. space probe Surveyor 1 landed on the moon and began transmitting detailed photographs of the lunar surface.

In 1976, Arizona Repub- lic investigative reporter Don Bolles was mortally wound- ed by a bomb planted under- neath his car; he died 11 days later. (Prosecutors believed Bolles was targeted because he had written stories that up- set a liquor wholesaler; three men were convicted of the killing.)

In 1979, Pope John Paul II arrived in his native Poland on the first visit by a pope to a Communist country.

In 1981, the Japanese video arcade game “Donkey Kong” was released by Nintendo.

In 1995, a U.S. Air Force F-16C was shot down by a Bosnian Serb surface-to-air missile while on a NATO air patrol in northern Bosnia; the pilot, Capt. Scott F. O’Grady, was rescued by U.S. Marines six days later.

In 1997, Timothy McVeigh was convicted of murder and conspiracy in the 1995 bomb- ing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. (McVeigh was executed in June 2001.)