Ethel Kennedy is 82 today.
Joel Grey is 78.
Louise Lasser — remember Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (No? Neither do I.) Anyway, Louise is 71 today.
Columnist and author Ellen Goodman is 69.
She worked as a researcher for Newsweek magazine, when all of the writers there were men. But she got a job as a reporter in Detroit, then for The Boston Globe, where she started writing a column in 1974. It was syndicated in 1976, eventually picked up by more than 300 newspapers. She wrote about domestic life, personal relationships, gender issues, and cultural changes over the decades. She just wrote her last column at the beginning of this year.
Mark Teixeira is 30.
And Joss Stone is 23, old enough to buy shoes.
President Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his commands on this date in 1951.
The U.S. Navy acquired its first submarine 110 years ago today.
On April 11, 1900, the U.S. Navy acquired its first submarine, a 53-foot craft designed by Irish immigrant John P. Holland. Propelled by gasoline while on the surface and by electricity when submerged, the Holland served as a blueprint for modern submarine design. By the eve of World War I, Holland and Holland-inspired vessels were a part of large naval fleets throughout the world.
Designs for underwater boats date back to the 1500s. In the nineteenth century, the first truly practical submarines began to appear, with a period of intense development occurring at the end of the century as nations strived to establish their sea power. Seizing upon the latest military technology, the United States used subs in both the War of 1812 and the Civil War. It was not until World War I, however, that submarines emerged as major weapons.
On this date in 1689, William III and Mary II were crowned joint sovereigns of Britain.
And it was on this date in 1945 that American troops entered Buchenwald, second only to Auschwitz in its horrors.
Many of the soldiers who entered Buchenwald on this day had been fighting in World War II since D-Day. They had participated some of the bloodiest battles in history. But nothing they’d seen prepared them for what they saw at Buchenwald. Several of the soldiers carried Kodak cameras, and so they took photographs of the surviving prisoners and the dead, so that people would believe what they had seen. Their photographs showed human beings so emaciated that they could barely walk, and victims’ bodies were stacked around the camp like piles of wood.
Sergeant Fred Friendly, who would go on to work as a CBS producer, wrote to his mother, “I want you to never forget or let our disbelieving friends forget, that your flesh and blood saw this.”
One of the reporters who covered the liberation of Buchenwald was Edward R. Murrow. He was so disturbed by what he saw that he couldn’t write about it for days, and let a subordinate break the story.
One of the children liberated at the camp that day was a teenager named Elie Wiesel, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been forced to march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier, and his father had recently died in the camp. He saw American jeeps rolling into the camps, and he later wrote, “I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage and shame. … We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude, but we didn’t have the strength. We were too weak to even applaud him.”
Bob Dylan’s New York City debut occurred at Gerdes’ Folk City 49 years ago tonight.