Moments in Time – March 31, 2024

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• On April 8, 1930, baseball legend Babe Ruth signed a two-year contract for a then enormous sum of $160,000 with the New York Yankees, prompting the team’s general manager, Ed Barrow, to predict (with, of course, now laughable inaccuracy) that “No one will ever be paid more than Ruth.”
• On April 9, 1860, French inventor Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville used his phonautograph, the earliest known sound recording device, to capture himself singing the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.”
• On April 10, 2001, mercy killings became legal in the Netherlands following the Dutch senate’s controversial approval of a bill legalizing euthanasia for patients with unbearable terminal illness.
• On April 11, 1951, President Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur as commander of the United Nations and U.S. forces in the Far East after he made public statements calling for an attack on mainland China if Communist forces failed to lay down their arms in Korea.
• On April 12, 1877, with a well-justified fear of ricocheting foul balls (not to mention being hit by a bat), Harvard’s Alexander Tyng wore a converted fencer’s mask for a baseball game in Lynn, MA, becoming the first-known player to don a catcher’s mask. While the new gear initially drew taunts from fans, designer Fred Thayer’s patent for the device was approved the following January.
• On April 13, 1964, Sidney Poitier became the first Black actor to win the coveted Best Actor Oscar for his role as laborer Homer Smith, who assists a group of poor East German nuns with building a church, in “Lilies of the Field.” Three years later, he was Hollywood’s top box office draw.
• On April 14, 2010, Neil Armstrong criticized the Barack Obama administration’s stripped-down space plans in an open letter co-signed by Apollo commanders James Lovell and Eugene Cernan, describing the president’s proposals as “devastating.” Supporters, however, insisted that the accelerated rocket program would set new goals for American efforts in outer space.

© 2024 King Features Synd., Inc.