Tuesday, April 19

This Day In History

• 1775   The American Revolutionary War began with the battles of Lexington and Concord.
• 1892   The prototype of the first commercially successful American automobile was completed in Springfield, Mass., by Charles E. Duryea and his brother Frank.
• 1897   The first Boston Marathon was run.
• 1933   The United States went off the gold standard.
• 1943   Tens of thousands of Jews living in the Warsaw Ghetto began an uprising against Nazi forces.
• 1951   Gen. Douglas MacArthur, relieved of his command by President Harry S. Truman, bid farewell to Congress, quoting a line from a ballad: ''Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.''
• 1951   Shigeki Tanaka, who survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima, Japan in World War II, won the Boston Marathon.
• 1989   A gun turret exploded aboard the USS Iowa, killing 47 sailors.
• 1989   A white female jogger in New York's Central Park was brutally beaten and raped. Five black and Hispanic teenagers were convicted and sent to prison. But the convictions were overturned in 2003 after a serial rapist confessed and DNA evidence tied him to the crime.
• 1993   A 51-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, ended when fire destroyed the structure after federal agents smashed their way in. Dozens of people, including sect leader David Koresh, were killed.
• 1993   South Dakota Gov. George S. Mickelson died in a plane crash in Iowa.
• 1994   A Los Angeles jury awarded $3.8 million to beaten motorist Rodney King.
• 1995 A truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and injuring 500. Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the bombing and sentenced to death.
• 1997   Flooding from the Red River forced more than 50,000 residents to abandon Grand Forks, N.D.
• 1998   Mexican poet-philosopher Octavio Paz died at age 84.
• 1999   The German parliament inaugurated its new home in the restored Reichstag in Berlin, its prewar capital.
• 2001   The Mel Brooks' musical ''The Producers'' opened on Broadway.

Happy Birthday To

Birthdays   April 19
• 1933   Jayne Mansfield (Vera Jane Palmer) (actress: Pete Kelly?s Blues, It Takes a Thief, The Girl Can?t Help It; killed in car crash near New Orleans LA June 29, 1967)
• 1933   Dick Sargent (Richard Cox) (actor: Bewitched, That Touch of Mink, Body Count, Fantasy Island; died July 8, 1994)
• 1935   Dudley Moore (actor: Arthur, Arthur 2, 10, Crazy People, Parallel Lives, Bedazzled, The Hound of the Baskervilles; died Mar 27, 2002)