[Azred]

A brief browse over to the History Channel shows that the following events happened on 9 April in years past:

* NASA introduces the Mercury astronauts to the public--Scott Carpenter, L. Gordon Cooper Jr., John H. Glenn Jr., Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Walter Schirra Jr., Alan Shepard Jr., and Donald Slayton. (1959)
* Robert E. Lee surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at the courthouse in Appamatox, Virginia. (1865)
* German forces invade Norway with the assistance of Vikud Quisling; the word "quisling" now means "traitor" in several languages. (1940)
* West Side Story wins an Academy Award (1962)
* Mark Twain receives steamboat pilot's license (1859)
* Billy the Kid convicted of murdering the sheriff of Lincoln County, NM (1881)
* Douglas Engelbart wins the Lemelson-MIT Prize, a prestigious award for inventors, for inventing both the graphical user interface and the mouse then unveiling them at the Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco in 1968. (1997)
* The Chicago Eight plead "not guilty" to conspiracy to incite riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, 1968. (1969)
* Congress passes the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act, a controversial economic act. (1909)
* Major General Edward P. King Jr. surrenders 78,000 (only 12,000 were American, the rest were Filipino) troops at Bataan, Philippines to Lieutenant General Homma Masaharu; this is the largest contingent of U.S. soldiers ever to surrender. The "Bataan Death March" and captivity happened after this, resulting in the eventual death of 1,600 American and 21,000 Filipino POWs. (1942)

People born on 9 April:
Ward Bond (actor, 1903)
Julian Dash (tenor sax jazz musician, 1916)
J. Presper Eckert (co-inventory of ENIAC, 1919)
Hugh Hefner (publisher of Playboy magazine, 1926)
Carl Perkins (early rock-n-roll musician, 1932)

...and...

Azred marries the lovely Belle at the city park in Frisco, TX. (2003) [img]graemlins/lovestory.gif[/img] [img]graemlins/petard.gif[/img]