This day in history
Today is Tuesday, April 18, the 108th day of 2023. There are 257 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Actor Clive Revill is 93. Actor Robert Hooks is 86. Actor Hayley Mills is 77. Actor James Woods is 76. Director Dorothy Lyman is 76. Actor Cindy Pickett is 76. Actor Rick Moranis is 70. Actor Melody Thomas Scott is 67. Actor Eric Roberts is 67. Rock musician Les Pattinson (Echo and the Bunnymen) is 65. Author-journalist Susan Faludi is 64. Actor Jane Leeves is 62. Talk show host Conan O’Brien is 60. Actor Eric McCormack is 60. Reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian is 44. Detroit Tigers DH Miguel Cabrera is 40.
► In 1775, Paul Revere began his famous ride from Charlestown to Lexington, warning colonists that British Regular troops were approaching.
► In 1906, a devastating earthquake struck San Francisco, followed by raging fires; estimates of the final death toll range between 3,000 and 6,000.
► In 1923, the first game was played at the original Yankee Stadium in New York; the Yankees defeated the Boston Red Sox 4-1.
► In 1955, physicist Albert Einstein died in Princeton, N.J., at age 76.
► In 1965, the Prudential building opened; construction began in 1960.
► In 1966, Bill Russell was named player-coach of the Boston Celtics, becoming the NBA’s first Black coach.
► In 1978, the Senate approved the Panama Canal Treaty, providing for the complete turnover of control of the waterway to Panama on the last day of 1999.
► In 1983, 63 people, including 17 Americans, were killed at the US Embassy in Beiruit by a suicide bomber.
► In 2002, police arrested actor Robert Blake in the shooting death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, nearly a year earlier (Blake was acquitted at his criminal trial but found liable in a civil trial).
► In 2013, the FBI released surveillance camera images of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and asked for the public’s help in identifying them, hours after President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama attended an interfaith service at a Roman Catholic cathedral. MIT officer Sean Collier was shot to death on the campus by the two suspects, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
► In 2015, a ship believed to be carrying more than 800 migrants from Africa sank in the Mediterranean off Libya; only about 30 people were rescued.
► In 2016, “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop stage biography of America’s first treasury secretary, won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.
► In 2019, the final report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was made public; it outlined Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election but did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government.
► Last year, Russia launched a long-feared, full-scale offensive to take control of Ukraine’s east, the country’s mostly Russianspeaking industrial heartland.