In 1521 the trial of Martin Luther begins in Worms. In 1861 the state of Virginia voted to become the 8th state to secede from the Union. In 1907 the Ellis Island immigration center processes 11,747 people, more than on any other day. And in 1970 the ill-fated Apollo 13 spacecraft returns safely to Earth. All that happened on this date in history.
Stepping onto the world’s stage today were two actors – Sean Bean (1958) of short-lived characters in Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, and seemingly many others – and Rooney Mara (1985) who took on the tortured titular role in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – and sequels. We also welcomed in the American financier J.P.Morgan (1837), American novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder (1897), and the earliest target of a US House impeachment Supreme Court associate justice Salmon Chase (1741) who was ultimately acquitted by the Senate and retained his seat on the court.
We bid farewell to one of our Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin (1790), the inventor of the flush toilet – George Jennings (1882), Civil Rights Leader and minister Ralph Abernathy (1990), and photographer, activist and musician Linda McCartney (1998) wife of Beatle Paul.
We also lost on the same day a Presidential wife and mother Barbara Bush (2018), and NPR voice talent Carl Kassell- who delighted us every Saturday morning on the program “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”. And in 2014 the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian journalist and author Gabriel Garcia Marquez laid Mdown his pen for the last time.
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