On This Day:
Thursday April 17, 2014 This is the 107th day of the year, with 258 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: Frisbee Frisbie pies were popular among the students at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1920s. Students figured out that if the tins were flung with a spinning motion, they would waft gracefully through the air to be caught and returned by a fellow scholar. The cry of "Frisbie!" was adopted as the game's equivalent of "Fore!" in golf. Within a few years, the game spread far beyond Yale and, in 1948, California inventor Fred Morrison began to make and market the first flying disc made of plastic as the "Frisbee." In 1955, Morrison joined the Wham-O toy company, and in 1957 Wham-O began to market his disc.
Holidays Feast day of St. Donnan, St. Aybert, St. Stephen Harding, St. Innocent of Tortona, St. Mappalicus and Others, and St. Robert of Chaise-Dieu.
Syria: Independence Day / Evacuation Day (withdrawal of French troops 1946).
American Samoa: Flag Day.
Events 1194 - Richard the Lionhearted returned to England and was crowned for the second time after his epic journey and victory in the Third Crusade.
1492 - Christopher Columbus and a representative of Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed a contract, giving Columbus a commission to seek a western route to the Indies.
1524 - Giovanni da Verrazano discovered New York Harbor.
1629 - Horses were first imported into the colonies by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1861 - Virginia voted to secede from the Union, the 8th state to do so.
1875 - The game "snooker" was invented by Sir Neville Chamberlain.
1916 - The American Academy of Arts and Letters obtained its charter from Congress.
1929 - Baseball player Babe Ruth and Claire Hodgeson, a former member of the Ziegfield Follies, married.
1941 - Yugoslavia surrendered to Germany in World War II.
1941 - Igor Sikorsky accomplished the first successful helicopter liftoff, in Stratford, Connecticut.
1961 - About 1500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.
1964 - Ford Motor Company unveiled the Mustang.
1969 - A jury in Los Angeles convicted Sirhan Sirhan of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
1969 - Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubcek was deposed.
1970 - The astronauts of Apollo 13 splashed down safely in the Pacific, after four days in a crippled spacecraft.
1975 - Phnom Penh fell to the Communist Khmer Rouge, ending Cambodia's five-year war.
2004 - Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, co-founder of the militant Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas, was killed by an Israeli missile hitting his car.
Births 1837 - John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan, American industrialist, financier.
1880 - Leonard Woolley, English archaeologist
1885 - Isak Dinesen (Karen Dinesen), Danish writer.
1894 - Nikita Khrushchev, USSR premier (1958 - 1964).
1897 - Thornton Wilder, American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
1923 - Harry Reasoner, American broadcast journalist.
1972 - Jennifer Garner, American actress.
Deaths 1936 - Charles Ruijs de Beerenbrouck, Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1918 to 1925, and from 1929 to 1933.
1998 - Linda McCartney, American-born wife of Paul McCartney.
2003 - Robert C. Atkins, American cardiologist and nutritionist, diet doctor.
2003 - Paul Getty, American-born philanthropist.
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