TIME TRAVELING, MAY 22 1802 President George Washington’s devoted widow and the nation’s former First Lady Martha Dandridge Custis Washington dies at her Mount Vernon, Va., home at age 70. She is buried at Mt. Vernon, where her husband was buried three years earlier. 1843 A massive wagon train made up of 1,000 settlers and 1,000 head of cattle sets off down the Oregon Trail from Independence, Mo. Known as the “Great Emigration,” the expedition comes two years after the first modest party of settlers makes the long, overland journey. The Great Emigration completes the 2,000-mile journey in five months, arriving in Oregon in October. 1849 Eventual U.S. president Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, Ill., who works as an occasional patent attorney, receives a patent for an inflatable bellows to lift boats over obstructions. He is the only U.S. president to hold a patent. 1856 After making a two-day speech on the Senate floor decrying the reintroduction of slavery into the Kansas and Nebraska territories where it had been banned for 30 years, Senator Charles Sumner is savagely beaten at his Senate desk by cane-wielding Southern Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, a cousin of one of the congressmen Sumner had criticized in his speech. 1859 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, is born. 1868 The Reno gang commits the Great Train Robbery near Marshfield, Ind., netting $96,000 in cash, gold, and bonds. The Reno gang, headed by Indiana brothers Frank, John, Simeon, and William Reno, are widely regarded as the country’s first train robbers. 1900 The Associated Press is incorporated as a non-profit news cooperative in New York. 1906 Orville and Wilbur Wright receive a patent for their flying machine. 1939 A military alliance known as the Pact of Steel” is signed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. 1955 A scheduled dance to be headlined by Fats Domino is canceled by police in Bridgeport, Conn., for fear that rock and roll dances might be featured and rock and roll riots could break out. 1967 Mister Rogers Neighborhood premiers on PBS. 1969 A lunar module of “Apollo 10” flies within nine miles of the moons surface in rehearsal for the first lunar landing. 1972 President Richard Nixon becomes the first U.S. president to visit Russia. He meets with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. 1977 Auto racer Janet Guthrie sets the fastest time of the second weekend of qualifying, becoming the first woman to earn a starting spot in the Indianapolis 500 since its inception in 1911. 1985 Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds passes baseball legend Hank Aaron as National League run scoring leader with 2,108. 1992 After a 30-year run, Johnny Carson hosts NBCs Tonight Show for the last time. 2002 The remains of former Federal Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy are found in Washington, D.C.s Rock Creek Park over a year after the 24-year-old is last seen at a health club. The case garners intense national coverage after it becomes known that California Congressman Gary Condit, 53, whose district includes Levy’s hometown of Modesto, had an affair with Levy. He is questioned in the case due to his relationship with the intern. 2002 A jury in Birmingham, Ala., convicts former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry of murder in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four girls. 2002 Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants hits his 583rd career home run, tying Mark McGwire for fifth on the all-time list. 2003 Golfer Annika Sorenstam becomes the first woman to play in a PGA tour event since Babe Didrikson 58 years earlier after receiving a sponsor’s exemption to compete in the Bank of America Colonial in Fort Worth, Texas. She shoots just one over par on the first day but gets a four-over 74 the second day, missing the cut to play for the championship by four shots.
Posted on: Thu, 22 May 2014 05:05:01 +0000