DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Thursday, April 7, the 97th day of 2022. There are 268 days left in the year. On this date in:
1915: Jazz singer-songwriter Billie Holiday, also known as “Lady Day,” was born in Philadelphia.
1922: The Teapot Dome scandal had its beginnings as Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall signed a secret deal to lease U.S. Navy petroleum reserves in Wyoming and California to his friends, oilmen Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny, in exchange for cash gifts.
1945: During World War II, American planes intercepted and effectively destroyed a Japanese fleet, which included the battleship Yamato, that was headed to Okinawa on a suicide mission.
1949: The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “South Pacific” opened on Broadway.
1954: President Dwight D. Eisenhower held a news conference in which he spoke of the importance of containing the spread of communism in Indochina, saying, “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” (This became known as the “domino theory,” although Eisenhower did not use that term.)
1957: Shortly after midnight, the last of New York’s electric trolleys completed its final run from Queens to Manhattan.
1959: A referendum in Oklahoma repealed the state’s ban on alcoholic beverages.
1962: Nearly 1,200 Cuban exiles tried by Cuba for their roles in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion were convicted of treason.
1966: The U.S. Navy recovered a hydrogen bomb that the U.S. Air Force had lost in the Mediterranean Sea off Spain following a B-52 crash.
1984: The Census Bureau reported Los Angeles had overtaken Chicago as the nation’s “second city” in terms of population.
1994: Civil war erupted in Rwanda, a day after a mysterious plane crash claimed the lives of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi; in the months that followed, hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates were slaughtered by Hutu extremists.
2020: Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly resigned after lambasting the officer he’d fired as the captain of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which had been stricken by a coronavirus outbreak; James Mcpherson was appointed as acting Navy secretary.
Country singer Bobby Bare is 87. Singer Charlie Thomas of The Drifters is 85. Movie director Francis Ford Coppola is 84. Actor Roberta Shore (“The Virginian”) is 79. Singer Patricia Bennett of The Chiffons is 75. Singer-guitarist John Oates of Hall and Oates is 74. Drummer John Dittrich of Restless Heart is 71. Singer Janis Ian is 71. Actor Jackie Chan is 68. Actor Russell Crowe is 58. Singer Mark Kibble of Take 6 is 58. Actor Bill Bellamy (“Last Comic Standing,” “Fastlane”) is 57. Drummer Charlie Hall of The War on Drugs is 48. Singer-bassist John Cooper of Skillet is 47. Actor Heather Burns (“Miss Congeniality”) is 47. Actor Kevin Alejandro (“Lucifer,” “Southland”) is 46.