Moments in Time – April 9, 2025

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• On April 21, 1966, a bar crawl in New York’s West Village led to what became known as the “Sip-In,” when Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell and John Timmons publicly identified as gay and demanded to be served regardless, defying an unofficial but widespread practice of banning gay customers from bars.
• On April 22, 1992, dozens of sewer explosions caused by a gas leak, the warning signs of which were ignored by both the government and the national oil company in Guadalajara, Mexico, killed more than 200 people and damaged 1,000 buildings.
• On April 23, 1937, Richard Nixon, then a soon-to-be law school graduate, applied for a position with the FBI, but was turned down for reasons that remain unclear. Later, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover would comment that “the FBI’s loss would become the country’s gain.”
• On April 24, 1863, the Union army issued General Orders No. 100, which provided a code of conduct for Federal soldiers and officers in their dealings with Confederate prisoners and civilians. The orders were developed by Prussian immigrant Francis Lieber, whose three sons served during the Civil War.
• On April 25, 1983, the German news magazine Stern announced the discovery of Adolf Hitler’s diaries. They were, however, later exposed as forgeries. Experts believe that Hitler never actually kept a diary.
• On April 26, 1986, nearly a decade after they met at a celebrity tennis tournament, television news reporter Maria Shriver and former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger were married at St. Francis Xavier Church in Hyannis, Massachusetts. They went on to have four children, but in 2011, it was revealed that Schwarzenegger had fathered another child with the family’s housekeeper, and the couple announced their separation and eventual divorce.
• On April 27, 1913, 13-year-old Mary Phagan was discovered murdered in the basement of the Atlanta, Georgia, pencil factory where she worked. Two notes next to her body attempted (unsuccessfully) to pin the crime on the night watchman, but eventually the factory owner, Leo Frank, was lynched and hanged for it despite a complete lack of implicating evidence. He was posthumously pardoned in 1986.

© 2025 King Features Synd., Inc.