On April 20…

“For Eric, Columbine was a performance. He wanted to maximize the terror. He didn’t want kids to fear isolated events like a sporting event or a dance; he wanted them to fear their daily lives. It worked. Parents across the country were afraid to send their kids to school. Eric didn’t have the political agenda of a terrorist, but he had adopted terrorist tactics.”
~Dave Cullen
Author of ‘Columbine’

1898 – President William McKinley signed the Joint Resolution for war with Spain and the ultimatum was forwarded to Spain.
Spanish Minister to the United States Luís Polo de Bernabé demanded his passport and, along with the personnel of the Legation, left Washington for Canada.
Within 24 hours… The Spanish Government considered the U.S. Joint Resolution of April 20 a declaration of war. U.S. Minister in Madrid General Steward L. Woodford was given his passport told to leave the country.
A state of war now existed between Spain and the United States and all diplomatic relations were suspended.
U.S. President William McKinley ordered a blockade of Cuba, while Spanish forces in Santiago de Cuba mined Guantánamo Bay.
The story continues for several more months but I promise I will wrap it up on May 1.

1912 – Bram Stoker died after suffering a series of strokes. He was 64.
He was the author of The Lady of The Shroud, The Mystery Of The Sea, and The Shoulder Of Shasta, but is best known for his gothic novel Dracula.

1914 – One of the bloodiest episodes in the history of American industrial enterprise occurred in Colorado.
Labor activists were striking at the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, a large mining operation owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr.
On this date, the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel and Iron Company guards attacked a tent colony of over 1,000 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, with the National Guard using machine guns to fire into the colony. Approximately twenty-one people, including miners’ wives and children, were killed.
In retaliation for the massacre at Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of anti-union establishments over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front.

1918 – Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, shot down his 79th and 80th victims.
The story continues tomorrow.

1939– Boston Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams made his major league debut against the New York Yankees.
The future Hall of Fame player would finish his first season hitting .327 with 31 home runs and 145 RBI.

1945 – Adolf Hitler made his final trip to the surface, climbing the stairs from his Führerbunker on his 56th (and final) birthday to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
Meanwhile … Allied bombers in Italy “celebrated” Hitler’s birthday by beginning a three-day attack on the bridges over the Adige and Brenta rivers, cutting off German lines of retreat on the peninsula.

1959 – Thirteen-year-old Dolly Parton released her first single.
The song, written by Dolly at age 11 (along with her Uncle Bill Owens), was recorded two years later, after taking a 30-hour bus ride with her grandmother, Rena Owens, to Goldband Records studio in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

1962 – NASA civilian pilot Neil Armstrong, while testing the MH-96 control system on the X-15, an experimental rocket-powered aircraft, flew to a height of over 207,000 feet.
Seven years later, Armstrong reached a much higher elevation when he and co-pilot Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the Moon.

1968 – The Rolling Stones completed the recording of Jumpin’ Jack Flash.
Released as a single in May 1968, the reached the top of the UK Singles Chart and peaked at #3 in the United States.

1970 – Elvis Presley released a live version of The Wonder of You.
The single, recorded in February 1970 at the International Hotel in Las Vegas, reached #1 in the UK and peaked at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100, and #37 on the Billboard Country Singles chart.
Rock Factoid: The song was originally recorded by Ray Peterson in 1959 and reached #25 in the U.S.

1979 – While on a solo fishing expedition in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, President Jimmy Carter was “attacked” by a swamp rabbit.
According to Carter, the rabbit was being chased by hounds and “jumped in the water and swam toward my boat. When he got almost there, I splashed some water with a paddle.”
When Carter returned to his office, his staff did not believe his story, insisting that rabbits could not swim, or that they would never approach a person threateningly.
However, the incident was captured by a White House photographer.

1979 – George Harrison released Love Comes To Everyone.
The song was written and recorded during a period of domestic contentment for Harrison, who married his second wife, Olivia Arias, and saw the birth of his only child, son Dhani.
The single did not chart on the Billboard Hot 100 when issued as a single in April 1979, but it did reach #38 on Billboard’s Adult Contemporary Chart, prompting Harrison to joke, “I’ve gone from screaming teenagers to music for the old folks.”

1980 – The Castro regime announced that all Cubans wishing to emigrate to the U.S. were free to board boats at the port of Mariel west of Havana, launching the Mariel Boatlift.
The first of 125,000 Cuban refugees from Mariel reached Florida the next day.

1991 – Steve Marriott died from smoke inhalation in a house fire at the age of 44.
The lead guitarist and lead singer with The Small Faces (Itchycoo Park) and co-founder of Humble Pie with Peter Frampton (30 Days In The Hole) had fallen on hard times and was drinking heavily.
Marriott and his wife had spent the evening at a friend’s house and decided to stay overnight, since it was late. His wife fell asleep but later woke to discover that Marriott had taken a taxi to their home.
At about 6:30 a.m., a passing motorist saw the roof of Marriott’s cottage ablaze and called the fire department. His body was found lying on the floor between the bed and wall.
Investigators concluded that Marriott had lit a cigarette while in bed and almost immediately fallen asleep, then tried unsuccessfully to escape after being awakened by the blaze.

1992 – Comedian Alfred Hawthorne “Benny” Hill died from a blood clot inside his heart. He was 68.
He is best known for his long-running internationally popular television program The Benny Hill Show,

1992 – The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert for AIDS Awareness was held at Wembley Stadium in London as a tribute to Queen’s lead vocalist, Freddie Mercury, who had died of AIDS on November 24, 1991.
The concert – featuring some of the biggest names in rock playing with the surviving members of Queen – was broadcast live on television and radio to 76 countries around the world, with an audience estimated at one billion.

1999 – Two teenage gunmen killed 13 people in a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.
At about 11:20 a.m., Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris began shooting students outside the school before moving inside to continue their rampage.
A teacher, William “Dave” Sanders, ran to the cafeteria to warn students about the shooting. He was able to safely evacuate everyone in the room 30 minutes before the shooters entered the cafeteria, even though he was later shot and killed.
By the time SWAT team officers finally entered the school at about 3:00 p.m., Klebold and Harris had killed 12 fellow students and Sanders, and had wounded another 23 people.
Around noon, they turned their guns on themselves and committed suicide.

2010 – An explosion and fire aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico, approximately 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, killed 11 people and triggered the largest offshore oil spill in American history.
The rig had been in the final phases of drilling an exploratory well for BP, the British oil giant. By the time the well was capped three months later, an estimated 4.9 million barrels (or around 206 million gallons) of crude oil had poured into the Gulf.

Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2020 RayLemire.com. / Streamingoldies.com. All Rights Reserved.