Moments in Time – April 8, 2020

#Middlebury

• On April 23, 1564, the great English dramatist and poet William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-upon-Avon, the son of a leather trader and the town bailiff. At age 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years his senior.”
• On April 21, 1918, in the skies over France, Manfred von Richthofen, the notorious German flying ace known as “The Red Baron,” is killed by Allied fire. Richthofen was the top ace on both sides of the Western front, downing 80 enemy aircraft.
• On April 24, 1945, President Harry Truman learns the full details of the Manhattan Project, in which scientists are attempting to create the first atomic bomb. The project was so secret that the former vice president only learned of it after President Franklin Roosevelt’s death.
• On April 26, 1954, the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin in McLean, Virginia. A year later, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective, and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America.
• On April 22, 1970, Earth Day, an event to increase public awareness of the world’s environmental problems, is first celebrated in the U.S. Millions of Americans, including students from thousands of universities, participated in rallies, marches and educational programs.
• On April 20, 1980, the Castro regime announces that all Cubans wishing to emigrate to the U.S. are 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 in about 1,700 boats, overwhelming the U.S. Coast Guard.
• On April 25, 1990, the crew of the U.S. space shuttle Discovery places the Hubble Space Telescope, a space-based observatory about the size of a bus, into a low orbit around Earth. The solar-powered telescope remains in operation to this day.

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