This day in history
Today is Wednesday, Oct. 11, the 284th day of 2023. There are 81 days left in the year.
► Birthdays: Former US Defense Secretary William Perry is 96. Actor Amitabh Bachchan is 81. Country singer Gene Watson is 80. Singer Daryl Hall (Hall and Oates) is 77. Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, is 73. Actor-director Catlin Adams is 73. Country singer Paulette Carlson is 72. Original MTV VJ Mark Goodman is 71. Actor David Morse is 70. Actor Stephen Spinella is 67. Actorwriter-comedian Dawn French is 66. Pro and College Football Hall of Famer Steve Young is 62. Actor Joan Cusack is 61. Rock musician Scott Johnson (Gin Blossoms) is 61. Comedy writer and TV host Michael J. Nelson is 59. Actor Sean Patrick Flanery is 58. Actor Lennie James is 58. College Football Hall of Famer and former NFL player Chris Spielman is 58. Country singer-songwriter Todd Snider is 57. Actorcomedian Artie Lange is 56. Actor Jane Krakowski is 55. Actor Andrea Navedo is 54. Actor Constance Zimmer is 53. Rapper MC Lyte is 53. Bluegrass musician Leigh Gibson (the Gibson Brothers) is 52. Figure skater Kyoko Ina is 51. Actor Matt Bomer is 46. Actor Michelle Trachtenberg is 38. Golfer Michelle Wie is 34. Rapper Cardi B is 31.
►In 1614, the New Netherland Co. was formed by a group of merchants from Amsterdam and Hoorn to set up fur trading in North America.
►In 1809, just over three years after the famous Lewis and Clark expedition ended, Meriwether Lewis was found dead in a Tennessee inn, an apparent suicide; he was 35.
►In 1884, future first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City.
►In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered the city’s Asian students segregated into their own school. (The order was later rescinded at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt, who promised to curb future Japanese immigration to the United States.)
►In 1968, Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, was launched with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Fulton Eisele, and R. Walter Cunningham aboard.
►In 1984, Challenger astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space as she and fellow Mission Specialist David C. Leestma spent 3 1/2 hours outside the shuttle.
►In 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev opened two days of talks in Reykjavik, Iceland, concerning arms control and human rights.
►In 1991, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her; Thomas reappeared before the panel to denounce the proceedings as a “high-tech lynching.”
►In 2002, former President Jimmy Carter was named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
►In 2005, the US Army Corps of Engineers said it had finished pumping out the New Orleans metropolitan area, which was flooded by Hurricane Katrina six weeks earlier and then was swamped again by Hurricane Rita.
►In 2006, the charge of treason was used for the first time in the US war on terrorism, filed against Adam Yehiye Gadahn, also known as “Azzam the American,” who’d appeared in propaganda videos for al-Qaeda.
►In 2014, customs and health officials began taking the temperatures of passengers arriving at New York’s Kennedy International Airport from three West African countries in a steppedup screening effort meant to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus.
►In 2017, the Boy Scouts of America announced that it would admit girls into the Cub Scouts starting in 2018 and establish a new program for older girls based on the Boy Scout curriculum, allowing them to aspire to the Eagle Scout rank.
►In 2020, LeBron James and the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Miami Heat to win the NBA finals in six games as the NBA wrapped up a season that sent players to a “bubble” at Walt Disney World in Florida for three months because of the pandemic.
►In 2021, Jon Gruden resigned as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders following reports about messages he wrote years earlier that used offensive terms to refer to Blacks, gays and women.
►Last year, NASA announced that a spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, a test aimed at fending off any more dangerous asteroids in the future.