Moments in Time – March 26, 2025

#MiddleburyCT

  • On April 7, 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent a letter to Congress endorsing America’s participation in an international campaign to preserve ancient temples and historic monuments in Egypt’s Nile Valley. The campaign was initiated by UNESCO with the aim of saving sites threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.
  • On April 8, 1994, the body of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain was discovered at his home in Seattle by a workman. The heroin-addicted, troubled artist had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, leaving behind fellow rocker Courtney Love, his wife, who had reported him missing, and toddler daughter Frances Bean Cobain.On April 9, 1859, 23-year-old writer
  • Samuel Langhorne Clemens received his steamboat pilot’s license. He navigated his own boats for two years until the Civil War put a halt to steamboat traffic, and in 1861 penned a humorous travel letter signed “Mark Twain,” a pseudonym he would continue to use as a popular author for nearly five decades.
  • On April 10, 1975, 41-year-old Lee Elder became the first Black golfer to play in the Masters, considered the sport’s most prestigious event. The Professional Golfers’ Association, organizer of the main professional tours played by men in North America, hadn’t approved participation by African Americans in events it cosponsored until 1952.
  • On April 11, 1979, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin fled the capital of Kampala as Tanzanian troops and forces of the Uganda National Liberation Front began to close in. Two days later, Kampala fell and a coalition government of former exiles took power. Amin, who was notorious for his brutality, escaped to Libya and eventually settled in Saudi Arabia, where he died in August 2003.
  • On April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
  • On April 13, 1360, a hailstorm killed an estimated 1,000 English soldiers in Chartres, France. One survivor described it as “a foul day, full of mist and hale, so that men died on horseback.”

© 2025 King Features Synd., Inc.

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