Moments in Time – April 2, 2025

#MiddleburyCT

• On April 14, 1932, Loretta Lynn (née Webb) entered the world in Butcher Hollow, KY. A bride at 15 and grandmother by 29, she went on to become one of country music’s most beloved and successful artists, thanks in part to the encouragement and business savvy of husband Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, and earned the Country Music Association’s first award for Female Vocalist of the Year in 1967.
• On April 15, 1997, the 50th anniversary of his first Major League Baseball game, the league retired Jackie Robinson’s number, 42. He is the only player in MLB history to have his number retired across all teams.
• On April 16, 1943, Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann accidentally consumed LSD-25, a synthetic drug he’d created in 1938 while researching the medicinal value of lysergic acid compounds. After taking the drug deliberately once more to confirm it had caused his two-hour bout of strange but “not unpleasant” hallucinations and sensations, he published a report describing his discovery.
• On April 17, 1942, French general Henri Giraud, who’d been captured by the Nazis two years before, escaped from a castle prison at Konigstein by lowering himself down its wall and leaping aboard a moving train that carried him to the French border, then made it to safety in North Africa via a British submarine.
• On April 18, 2014, 16 Nepali mountaineering guides, most of whom were ethnic Sherpas, died in an avalanche on Mt. Everest in one of the worst accidents in the Himalayan peak’s history.
• On April 19, 1989, 28-year-old investment banker Trisha Meili was beaten and sexually assaulted while jogging in New York City’s Central Park. Five teenage boys from Harlem were wrongly convicted of the crime but released in 2002 when the real attacker, who was already imprisoned, confessed.
• On April 20, 1979, while fishing in a Georgia pond, President Jimmy Carter used his johnboat paddle to deflect an aggressive swamp rabbit swimming toward him, earning him considerable teasing from the press after the story was made public by A.P. White House correspondent Brooks Jackson.

© 2025 King Features Synd., Inc.