March 29
1929
President Herbert Hoover had a phone installed at his desk in the Oval Office of the White House. It took a while to get the line to Hoover’s desk working correctly and the president complained to aides when his son was unable to get through on the Oval Office phone from an outside line. Previously, Hoover had used a phone located in the foyer just outside the office. Telephones and a telephone switchboard had been in use at the White House since 1878, when President Rutherford B. Hayes had the first one installed, but no phone had ever been installed at the president’s desk until Hoover’s administration.
1975
Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops left South Vietnam as Hanoi freed the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. In reality, the agreement was little more than a face-saving gesture by the U.S. government. Even before the last American troops departed, the communists violated the cease-fire and by full-scale war had resumed by early 1974. However, America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in U.S. history and cost 58,000 American lives. As many as two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed.
1982
19-year-old North Carolina freshman Michael Jordan made a 16-foot jump shot with 15 seconds left to give the Tar Heels a 63-62 win over Georgetown for the NCAA Tournament championship. "To tell the truth," Jordan told reporters in New Orleans afterward, "I didn't see it go in. I didn't want to look." The winning shot cemented Jordan in the national consciousness. After going 0-6 in the Final Four, the championship was the first for Dean Smith and North Carolina's first since it won its only previous title, in 1957.
March 30
1867
U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward signed a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska for $7 million. Despite the bargain price of roughly two cents an acre, the Alaskan purchase was ridiculed in Congress and in the press as “Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s icebox,” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.” Six months later, Alaska was formally handed over from Russia to the United States. Despite a slow start in U.S. settlement, the discovery of gold in 1898 brought a rapid influx of people to the territory, and Alaska, rich in natural resources, has contributed to American prosperity ever since.
1870
Following its ratification by the requisite three-fourths of the states, the 15th Amendment, granting African American men the right to vote, was formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution. Passed by Congress the year before, the amendment reads, “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” One day after it was adopted, Thomas Peterson-Mundy of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, became the first African American to vote under the authority of the 15th Amendment.
1981
President Ronald Reagan was shot outside a Washington, D.C. hotel by a deranged drifter named John Hinckley Jr. The president was shot in the left lung, and the .22 caliber bullet just missed his heart. White House Press Secretary James Brady, who nearly died after being shot in the eye, suffered permanent brain damage. He later became an advocate of gun control, and in 1993 Congress passed the “Brady Bill,” which established a five-day waiting period and background checks for prospective gun buyers. John Hinckley was immediately booked on federal charges of attempting to assassinate the president, but eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity.
March 31
1931
Brilliant Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne (43) and seven others were killed when the wings of their plane broke apart while en route from Kansas City to Los Angeles. During 13 years as head coach, Rockne led Notre Dame to 105 victories, 12 losses, five ties and three consensus national championships. His win percentage of .881 remains the best ever to this day. Considered America's most renowned college football coach, the national outpouring of grief was comparable to the deaths of presidents. Public outrage over the disaster led to a safety revolution that ultimately transformed airline travel worldwide from one of the most dangerous forms of travel to one of the safest.
1943
Oklahoma! began its history-making run on Broadway. The first musical written by the legendary duo Rodgers and Hammerstein, it told the story of farm girl Laurey Williams and her courtship by two rival suitors, cowboy Curly McLain and the sinister and frightening farmhand Jud Fry. It was considered a financial risk due to having no big stars and it was an ambitious experiment in integrating music and dance in service of storytelling rather than spectacle. However, Oklahoma! hit a nerve from the very first moment on opening night. The musical would go on to set a Broadway record of 2,212 performances before finally closing 5 years later.
1985
Wrestlemania I, the inaugural professional wrestling pay-per-view event, was held at Madison Square Garden. Produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE), Hulk Hogan and Mr. T defeated Paul Orndorff and Roddy Piper in the main event. Celebrity guests included former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali as referee, baseball player/manager Billy Martin as ring announcer, and musician-actor Liberace as timekeeper.
April 1
1945
Under the command of Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr., 50,000 US combat troops land on the island of Okinawa. They battled nearly 120,000 Japanese army, militia and labor troops under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima. While Americans landed without loss of men, they would suffer 12,000 deaths as the Japanese staged a desperate defense of the island that included waves of kamikaze (“divine wind”) air attacks. The Japanese finally surrendered after running out of planes and suffering some 117,000 casualties. Lieutenant General Buckner was killed just three days before the Japanese surrender while Japanese General Ushijima committed ritual suicide upon defeat of his forces.
1970
President Richard Nixon signed the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned cigarette ads from airing on television and radio. Nixon, who was an avid pipe smoker, indulging in as many as eight bowls a day, supported the legislation at the increasing insistence of public health advocates. Initially, the tobacco lobby, buoyed by legislators from tobacco-growing areas, succeeded in blocking congressional action for years. However, Big Tobacco came to recognize that an on-air ban would free funds for advertising in alternate media. After the imposition of the television ban, cigarette advertising continued to appear in magazines, newspapers and on billboards.
1972
The first collective players’ strike in Major League Baseball history began. The cause of baseball’s first strike was the expiration of the league’s three-year pension agreement. The Major League Baseball Players Association had made modest requests to increase benefits. However, the owners balked at the proposals, and never took the players’ threat to strike seriously. After 86 games were cancelled, the strike ended twelve days later. Although the players were not paid for the 12 days of the strike, their effort ultimately was a success. Owners agreed to a $500,000 increase in the pension fund and to allow salary arbitration.
April 2
1917
Jeannette Pickering Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress, took her seat in the U.S. Capitol as a representative from Montana. She successfully ran for Congress in Montana on a progressive Republican platform calling for total women’s suffrage, legislation protecting children, and U.S. neutrality in the European war. Following her election as a representative, Rankin’s entrance into Congress was delayed for a month as congressmen discussed whether a woman should be admitted into the House of Representatives.
1931
Virne “Jackie” Mitchell became the first woman to play for an all-male pro baseball team. In an exhibition game against the New York Yankees, she struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. As a girl in Memphis, she’d allegedly been tutored in baseball by a neighbor and minor-league pitcher, Charles Arthur “Dazzy” Vance, who would go on to lead the National League in strikeouts for seven straight seasons. Mitchell was a multi-sport athlete and joined a baseball school affiliated with Chattanooga’s Class AA minor-league team, the Lookouts, and attracted attention with her sinking lefty curveball.
1992
A jury in New York found mobster John Gotti, nicknamed the Teflon Don for his ability to elude conviction, guilty on 13 counts, including murder and racketeering. In the wake of the conviction, the assistant director of the FBI’s New York office, James Fox, was quoted as saying, “The don is covered in Velcro, and every charge stuck.” On June 23 of that year, Gotti was sentenced to life in prison, dealing a significant blow to organized crime. The mob boss was sent to the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, where he was held in virtual solitary confinement. On June 10, 2002, Gotti died of throat cancer at age 61 at a Springfield, Missouri, medical center for federal prisoners.
April 3
1860
The first Pony Express mail debuted when relay teams, traveling by horse, simultaneously left St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. Ten days later, on April 13, the westbound rider and mail packet completed the approximately 1,800-mile journey and arrived in Sacramento, beating the eastbound packet’s arrival in St. Joseph by two days and setting a new standard for speedy mail delivery. Although ultimately short-lived and unprofitable, the Pony Express captivated America’s imagination and helped win federal aid for a more economical overland postal system. With the advent of the first transcontinental telegraph line in October 1861, the Pony Express ceased most of its operations.
1882
One of America’s most famous criminals, Jesse James, was shot to death by fellow gang member Bob Ford, who betrayed James for reward money. For 16 years, Jesse and his brother, Frank, committed robberies and murders throughout the Midwest. Detective magazines and pulp novels glamorized the James gang, turning them into mythical Robin Hoods who were driven to crime by unethical landowners and bankers. In reality, Jesse James was a ruthless killer who stole only for himself. His tombstone reads, “Jesse W. James, Died April 3, 1882, Aged 34 years, 6 months, 28 days, Murdered by a traitor and a coward whose name is not worthy to appear here.”
1996
Ronald H. Brown, the U.S. secretary of commerce, was killed along with 32 other Americans when their U.S. Air Force plane crashes into a mountain near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Brown was leading a delegation of business executives to the former Yugoslavia to explore business opportunities that might help rebuild the war-torn region. In 1993, Clinton appointed Brown to be the first African American secretary of commerce, a position he held until his death in 1996. Previously, he served as the Chairman of the Democratic Party National Committee, becoming the first African American to hold the top position in a major political party in the United States.
April 4
1841
President William Henry Harrison died after serving only 32 days in office on this day in 1841. Harrison holds the unfortunate presidential record of shortest term in office. Ironically, the man with the shortest White House tenure delivered the longest inaugural address in history, which may have been his undoing. This first presidential speech, delivered on a bitterly cold March morning, clocked in at one hour and 45 minutes. Harrison went to bed at the end of inauguration day with a bad cold that soon developed into a fatal case of pneumonia. Some historians have claimed that a case of hepatitis may also have contributed to his demise. Harrison was the last president born as an English subject before the American Revolution.
1968
Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.
1975
Childhood friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded the computer software company Microsoft. Originally based in Albuquerque, NM, Microsoft relocated to Washington State in 1979 and eventually grew into a major multinational technology corporation. In 1987, the year after Microsoft went public, 31-year-old Gates became the world’s youngest billionaire. Microsoft would soon become the world’s biggest personal-computer software company, based on sales. In 2001, Microsoft joined the video-game market with the launch of its Xbox console.