TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Tuesday, June 2.

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

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 Frances Folsom, 21, in the Blue Room of the White House. (To date, Cleveland is the only president to marry in the executive 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 1953, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II took place in London’s Westminster Abbey, 16 months after the death of her father, King George VI.

In 1962, Soviet forces opened fire on striking workers in the Russian city of Novocherkassk; 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 Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles (bohlz) was mortally wounded by a bomb planted underneath his car; he died 11 days later. (Prosecutors believed Bolles was targeted because he had written stories that upset 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 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that killed

168 people. (McVeigh was executed in June 2001.)

In 2009, Scott Roeder, an antiabortion activist, was charged with first-degree murder in the shooting death of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in Wichita, Kansas. (Roeder was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 50 years.)

Ten years ago: Amid the Deepwater Horizon oil spill crisis, BP chief executive Tony Hayward apologized for having told reporters,“I’d like my life back,” calling the remark hurtful and thoughtless in a statement posted on Facebook.

Five years ago: President Barack Obama signed the

USA Freedom Act, extending three expiring surveillance provisions of the 9/11-era USA Patriot Act.

One year ago: An out-ofcontrol cruise ship rammed into a dock and a tourist riverboat on a busy Venice canal, injuring five people and renewing demands that cruise ships be kept out of the Italian city’s lagoon.

THOUGHT FOR TODAY

“We are minor in everything but our passions.” — Elizabeth Bowen, Irish author (1899-1973).

— ASSOCIATED PRESS