On April 26…

“In the week after the accident, while refusing to admit to the world that anything really serious had gone wrong, the Soviets poured thousands of men into the breach. The machines they brought broke down because of the radiation. The humans wouldn’t break down until weeks or months later, at which point they’d die horribly.”
~Svetlana Aleksievich
Voices from Chernobyl

1607 – After a voyage of 144 days, an expedition of English colonists went ashore in Virginia at Cape Henry. The granite cross memorial shown above marks the site where the settlers first set foot on American soil.
Captain Christopher Newport, with his three ships, Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery, and a group of 104 men and boys, subsequently explored the area and established Jamestown (originally James Forte, James Towne and James Cittie) on an island which became the first permanent English settlement in North America.

1777 – Two years after Paul Revere’s midnight ride in Massachusetts, Sybil Ludington took an even longer ride, from New York to Connecticut.
The 16-year old daughter of Colonel Henry Ludington made a journey over twice as long as Revere’s (she rode 40 miles) to warn the militia of an attack in Danbury, CT.

Sybil was familiar with the terrain and the young girl set out from the family home in the Fredericksburg (now known as Ludingtonville) section of Kent, NY at 9pm.
She rode through the night in Putnam County, New York to warn approximately 400 militiamen under the control of her father that British troops were burning Danbury, where the Continental Army had a supply depot.
By the time she returned home at dawn, soaked with rain and exhausted, the 400 members of the militia she had alerted had assembled at her father’s home and were ready to march.
They arrived too late to save Danbury, but at the start of the Battle of Ridgefield, they were able to drive the British back to Long Island Sound.
For her heroic acts, Sybil received personal thanks from General George Washington of the Continental Army and General Rochambeau, the French commander fighting alongside the patriots.
In 1975, Sybil Ludington was honored with a postage stamp in the “Contributors to the Cause” United States Bicentennial series.
Personal Opinion: Ludington’s ride should receive more notice in American history.
Paul Revere rode 16 miles on a clear night, had two companions and was captured.
Sybil Ludington, meanwhile, rode alone for 40 miles on a rainy night, and alerted the militia and … and made it back home.

1865 – Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered his army to General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina.
But it wasn’t quite as simple as it sounds.
The two generals had signed a surrender agreement eight days earlier but the terms had been rejected by the presidential cabinet in Washington because they exceeded the terms that General Ulysses Grant had given General Robert E. Lee at Appomattox on April 9.
The initial agreement between Sherman and Johnston called for resolutions of political issues, including the reestablishment of state governments, return of some weapons to state arsenals and civil rights after the war. Those were all overruled by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and the cabinet.
The revised agreement signed on this date disbanded all active Confederate forces in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, totaling 89,270 soldiers, as the largest group to surrender during the Civil War.

1865 – John Wilkes Booth was killed when Union soldiers tracked him down to a Virginia farm 12 days after he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
After shooting the president, Booth and his accomplice, David Herold, made their way across the Anacostia River and headed toward southern Maryland.
The pair stopped at Dr. Samuel Mudd’s home, where Mudd treated Booth’s injured leg. Booth then found refuge for several days at the home of Thomas A. Jones, a Confederate agent, before securing a boat to row across the Potomac to Virginia.
After receiving aid from several Confederate sympathizers, Booth’s luck finally ran out. The countryside was swarming with military units looking for Booth, although few shared information since there was a $20,000 reward.
While staying at the farm of Richard Garrett, Federal troops arrived on their search but soon rode on. The unsuspecting Garrett allowed his suspicious guests to sleep in his barn, but he instructed his son to lock the barn from the outside to prevent the strangers from stealing his horses.
A tip led the Union soldiers back to the Garrett farm, where they discovered Booth and Herold in the barn. Herold came out, but Booth refused. The building was set on fire to flush Booth out into the open, but he was shot by Union soldier Thomas P. “Boston” Corbett while still inside.
Booth, fatally wounded in the neck, was dragged from the barn to the porch of Garrett’s farmhouse, where he died three hours later. The bullet had pierced three vertebrae, and partially severed his spinal cord, paralyzing him.
Asking that his hands be raised to his face so he could see them, Booth uttered his last words, “Useless, useless,” and died as dawn was breaking.

1937 – The German military tested its powerful new air force – the Luftwaffe – on the Basque town of Guernica in northern Spain.
Although the independence-minded Basque region opposed General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, Guernica itself was a small rural city of only 5,000 inhabitants that declared neutrality in the conflict.
With Franco’s approval, the cutting-edge German aircraft began their unprovoked attack at 4:30 p.m., the busiest hour of the market day in Guernica. For three hours, the German planes poured down a continuous and unopposed rain of bombs and gunfire on the town and surrounding countryside. One-third of Guernica’s 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded, and fires engulfed the city and burned for days.

1973 – Actress Irene Ryan, best known for her portrayal of Daisy May “Granny” Moses on the long-running TV series The Beverly Hillbillies, died from a malignant brain tumor and heart disease at the age of 70.
Name Factoid: Her character on the comedy was in honor of artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses – better known as Grandma Moses – who had died the year before the program premiered.

1976 – The Starland Vocal Band released Afternoon Delight.
The title came from the happy hour menu at Clyde’s Restaurant in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. where songwriter Bill Danoff was eating.
Danoff downplayed the somewhat controversial lyrics, saying, “I didn’t want to write an all-out sex song … I just wanted to write something that was fun and hinted at sex.”
The “fun” song reached #1 in the U.S., and in 2010, it was named “the 20th sexiest song of all time” by Billboard Magazine.
By The Way… In case you’re wondering what the #1 sexiest song of all time was, Billboard chose Physical by Olivia Newton-John.

1981 – Actor Jim Davis, a longtime character actor in several movie and television westerns, but best known for his role as family patriarch Jock Ewing in the CBS television series Dallas, died of cancer at the age of 71.

1986 – Academy Award winning actor Broderick Crawford died at the age of 74 following a series of strokes.
Crawford reached the pinnacle of his acting career when he was cast as Willie Stark, a character inspired by and closely patterned after the life of Louisiana politician Huey Long, in All the King’s Men.
Crawford’s performance as the bullying, blustering Governor Stark won him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
He later starred in the role of Chief Dan Mathews in the television series Highway Patrol from 1955-59.

1986 – The world’s worst nuclear accident to date occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear plant near Kiev in Ukraine. The full toll from this disaster is still being tallied, but experts believe that thousands of people died and as many as 70,000 suffered severe poisoning.
Some reports estimate that as many as 4,000 clean-up workers died from radiation poisoning. Birth defects among people living in the area have increased dramatically. Thyroid cancer has increased tenfold in Ukraine since the accident.
In addition, a large area of land may not be livable for as much as 20,000 years. The 19-mile radius around Chernobyl was home to almost 335,000 people who had to be permanently relocated.

1989 – Actress Lucille Ball died following an aortic rupture. She was 77.
While Ball’s movie career was not particularly noteworthy, she found everlasting fame in television as the star of I Love Lucy, The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour, The Lucy Show, Here’s Lucy, and Life With Lucy.

2009 – Sound familiar? The United States declared a public health emergency as cases of swine flu surfaced from Canada to New Zealand.
Between April 2009 and April 2010, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated swine flu caused 270,000 hospitalizations and 12,500 deaths in the U.S.

2013 – Country music superstar George Jones died of Hypoxic Respiratory Failure. He was 81.
Country Music Factoid: Jones placed more records on the Billboard Country singles chart than any other artist, with 143 making the Top 40, and 13 of those making it all the way to #1.
Listing all of his songs would take hours but if you start with just these few – He Stopped Loving Her Today, White Lightning, The Race Is On, and She Thinks I Still Care – you’ll get the idea.

2017 – Director Jonathan Demme died from esophageal cancer and heart disease at the age of 73.
He directed iconic films such as Philadelphia and Melvin and Howard, but is best known for directing the psychological horror film The Silence of the Lambs, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director.

2018 – Comedian Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault, a decision that punctuated one of the most thundering falls from grace in American cultural history.
Once one of the nation’s most admired men, a pioneering African-American beloved for his role as Dr. Cliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show, the actor was recast in a suburban Philadelphia courtroom as a merciless predator and sexual deviant.
A 7-man, 5-woman jury took less than two days to convict Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a Temple University women’s basketball operations director more than three decades his junior whom the comedian lured into his home with promises of mentorship.
The conviction came in a retrial of a 2017 case in which a mistrial was declared.
Cosby was subsequently sentenced to a term of three to 10 years in state prison.

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