DAILY ALMANAC
Today is Friday, May 6, the 126th day of 2022. There are 239 days left in the year. On this date in:
1882: President Chester Alan Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from the U.S. for 10 years (Arthur had opposed an earlier version with a 20-year ban).
1910: Britain’s Edwardian era ended with the death of King Edward VII.
1935: The Works Progress Administration began operating under an executive order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1937: The hydrogen-filled German airship Hindenburg caught fire and crashed while attempting to dock at Lakehurst, New Jersey; 35 of the 97 people on board were killed along with a crewman on the ground.
1941: Josef Stalin assumed the Soviet premiership, replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov. Comedian Bob Hope did his first USO show before an audience of servicemen as he broadcast his radio program from March Field in Riverside, California.
1942: During World War II, some 15,000 American and Filipino troops on Corregidor island surrendered to Japanese forces.
1954: Medical student Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile during a track meet in Oxford, England, in 3:59.4.
1994: Former Arkansas state worker Paula Jones filed suit against President Bill Clinton, alleging he’d sexually harassed her in 1991. (Jones reached a settlement with Clinton in November 1998.)
2004: President George W. Bush apologized for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, calling it “a stain on our country’s honor”; he rejected calls for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation.
2006: Lillian Gertrud Asplund, the last American survivor of the sinking of the Titanic, died in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, at age 99.
2010: A computerized sell order triggered a “flash crash” on Wall Street, sending the Dow Jones industrials to a loss of nearly 1,000 points in less than half an hour.
2013: Kidnap-rape victims Amanda Berry, Gina Dejesus and Michelle Knight, who went missing separately about a decade earlier while in their teens or early 20s, were rescued from a house just south of downtown Cleveland. (Their captor, Ariel Castro, hanged himself in prison in September 2013 at the beginning of a life sentence plus 1,000 years.)
Singer Bob Seger is 77. Singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore is 77. Singer and comedian Lulu Roman (“Hee Haw”) is 76. Actor Alan Dale (“Lost,” “Ugly Betty”) is 75. Actor Ben Masters (“Passions”) is 75. Actor Richard Cox
(“Alpha House,” “American Tragedy”) is 74. Host
Tom Bergeron (“Dancing with the Stars,” new “Hollywood Squares”) is 67. Singer John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants is 62. Actor Julianne Phillips is 62. Actor Roma Downey (“Touched by an Angel”) is 62. Actor
George Clooney is 61. Child actor turned rodeo star Clay O’brien (“The Apple Dumpling Gang”) is 61. Singer-bassist Tony Scalzo of Fastball is 58. Actor Leslie Hope (“24”) is 57. Actor Geneva Carr
(“Bull”) is 56.