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Local

April 16, 1970: Albert Lea artist Lloyd Herfindahl was invited to show one of his paintings at the Joan Miro Foundation exhibit in Barcelona, Spain.

The Albert Lea Fire Department was dispatched to the Lea College Albert House student center after a davenport started on fire. Fire Capt. Glen Doty and firefighter John Eisterhold were shown in the Evening Tribune inspecting the recreation room.

The Albert Lea National Guard unit’s team won the National Guard state small bore rifle match in Minneapolis for the fourth time in five years.

 

National

April 15, 2013: Two bombs made from pressure cookers exploded at the Boston Marathon finish line, killing two women and an 8-year-old boy and injuring more than 260. Suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev died in a shootout with police; his brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was tried, convicted and sentenced to death.

1999: Right-to-die advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Michigan, to 10 to 25 years in prison for second-degree murder in the lethal injection of a Lou Gehrig’s disease patient. (Kevorkian ended up serving eight years.)

1992: The Great Chicago Flood took place as the city’s century-old tunnel system and adjacent basements filled with water from the Chicago River.

1972: Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon with astronauts John W. Young, Charles M. Duke Jr. and Ken Mattingly on board.

1970: Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. (The astronauts managed to return safely.)

April 16, 1963: Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which the civil rights activist responded to a group of local clergymen who had criticized him for leading street protests; King defended his tactics, writing, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

April 17, 1961: Some 1,500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in an attempt to topple Fidel Castro, whose forces crushed the incursion by the third day.

1960: Shortly before midnight, rock ‘n’ roll performer and Albert Lea native Eddie Cochran, 21, was fatally injured in a taxi crash in Chippenham, Wiltshire, England (he died the next day).

1947: Jackie Robinson, baseball’s first black major league player, made his official debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on opening day at Ebbets Field. (The Dodgers defeated the Boston Braves, 5-3.)

1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. on the 200th anniversary of the third American president’s birth.

1912: The British liner RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time and began sinking. (The ship went under two hours and 40 minutes later with the loss of 1,514 lives.)

April 14, 1865: President Abraham Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth during a performance of “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theater in Washington. He would die nine hours later on April 15, 1965.