Scores On This Historic Day

May 1, 1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition opens in Chicago, celebrating -- a year later -- the 400th Anniversary of Christopher Columbus' voyage to "The New World," the incorrectly celebrated "discovery of America." The site was on the South Side, in Jackson Park, from 56th to 67th Street, from Stony Island Avenue to Lake Michigan. The centerpiece was an artificial lake that represented the Atlantic Ocean that Columbus crossed from August 3 to October 12, 1492. Around it were nearly 200 temporary buildings of neoclassical design, with (as most World's Fairs have) pavilions from countries and their colonies. Among the surviving buildings is the Art Institute of Chicago, the foremost art museum in America outside New York City. Among the paintings on display is  A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte  by  Georges Seurat. In the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off , the protagonists visit the museum, and Cameron Frye (played by Alan Ruck) s...

May 1, 1883: The New York Gothams defeat the Boston Beaneaters, 5-3, at a field at the northeast corner of Central Park in New York, 110th Street and 5th Avenue, a former polo field owned by newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett. It was nicknamed "The Polo Grounds." New York, the largest city in America, and Philadelphia, the 2nd-largest city in the East, had been without teams in the National League since the end of the 1876 season, when, struggling financially, the New York Mutuals and the Philadelphia Athletics were unable to pay their travel expenses and complete their schedule. Rather than help them out, William Hulbert, President of the NL, threw them out of the League, which struggled badly without the big cities. In the 1879, 1880, 1881 and 1882 seasons, a team called the Troy Trojans played in the NL, in Troy, New York, across the Hudson River from the State capital of Albany. That team went out of business, and some of its players were signed by a new team place...

May 1, 1872: Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 is put on display at the 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art in London. It gets mixed reviews, although it probably didn't help that the artist was an American. But why would anyone give a bad review of someone's mother? Anna Matilda McNeill was born on September 27, 1804 in Wilmington, North Carolina. In 1831, she married civil engineer George Washington Whistler. On July 10, 1834, in Lowell, Massachusetts, she gave birth to her 1st child, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Anna Whistler, 1858 James flunked out of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, and became a painter, with "art for art's sake" as his motto. He tended to give his paintings musical titles, such as "Arrangement" and "Nocturne." He studied art in Paris, and moved to London permanently in 1858. Soon after, his paintings began to sell. By then widowed, his mother eventually joined him there. James McNeill Whist...

April 30, 2011: The White House Correspondents' Dinner -- a.k.a. "Nerd Prom" -- is held. A good time was had by all -- except for one man. This led to unintended consequences -- terrible ones. The White House Correspondents' Association's annual dinner, begun in 1921,  has become a Washington, D.C. tradition. Starting with Calvin Coolidge in 1924, every President had attended at least one of them. It  is traditionally held on the evening of the last Saturday in April, at the Washington Hilton. The event was canceled in 1930, due to the death of Chief Justice and former President William Howard Taft; in 1942, due to America's recent entry into World War II; and in 1951, over what President Harry Truman called "the uncertainty of the world situation." In 1962, at the urging of UPI reporter Helen Thomas, President John F. Kennedy announced that he refused to attend the dinner unless the ban on women attending was dropped. It was. In 1981, President Ron...

April 30, 1993: Tennis star Monica Seles is stabbed at the Citizen Cup tournament in Hamburg, Germany. The stabbing itself was not caught on video, but her scream was caught on audio. Although her wound was not life-threatening, it cut enough muscle to put her out of action for a few months. It disturbed her enough mentally that she didn't come back for another 2 years after that. The native of Novi Sad, Serbia, but ethnically Hungarian, was 19 years old, and had already won 8 of the last 10 majors: The 1990, '91 and '92 French Opens; the '91, '92 and '93 Australian Opens; and the '91 and '92 U.S. Opens. Oddly, she hadn't yet won Wimbledon. Her attacker, Günter Parche, was obsessed with Steffi Graf, a fellow German whom Seles had replaced as the best female tennis player in the world. Prior to Seles' 1st major win, Graff had won the French Open in 1987, '88 and '93; the Australian Open in 1988, '89 and '90; Wimbledon in 1988, ...

April 30, 1986:  Steve Smith turns 23, and has the worst birthday in hockey history. In 1985, he made his NHL debut with the Edmonton Oilers. He played 2 regular season games, and was not put on their Playoff roster, as they won their 2nd straight Stanley Cup. But in 1985-86, he was one of the League's top defensive rookies. He looked like he had a good career ahead of him. On April 30, he took the ice with the Oilers against their Provincial rivals, the Calgary Flames, in Game 7 of the NHL Smythe Division Final, at the Northlands Coliseum in Edmonton. The Flames stunned their Alberta rivals by taking a 2-0 lead, early in the 2nd period. But before that period ended, the Oilers tied the game. At the 5:14 mark of the 3rd period, Smith took the puck near the side of his own net, and tried to pass it up the ice. But he made a mistake, and the puck went off the leg of Oiler goaltender Grant Fuhr, and into the goal. Perry Berezan was the last Flames player to touch the puck, so he got c...

April 30, 1975: The People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN, representing "the Democratic Republic of Vietnam," a.k.a. North Vietnam) and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF, or "Viet Cong") capture the capital of the Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. South Vietnam, Saigon. The Vietnam War is finally over: Vietnam is united, and it is Communist. The capture of the city was preceded by Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of almost all American civilian and military personnel in Saigon, more than 2 years after combat operations there had ended; along with tens of thousands of South Vietnamese civilians who had been associated with the Republic of Vietnam regime. The sight of civilians climbing a staircase in a desperate attempt to reach the last helicopter, on the roof of the American Embassy, became a symbol of America's 1st true military defeat. The War of 1812 may have been a stalemate, but tends to get treated like a victory. There was no way to spin...

April 30, 1971: The Milwaukee Bucks win the NBA Championship, in only their 3rd season. It remains a record for the NBA. It took them half a century to win another. The Bucks and the Phoenix Suns had both come into the NBA as expansion teams for the 1968-69 season. Like most expansion teams, both of them struggled: The Bucks finished last in the Eastern Division with a record of 27 wins and 55 losses, while the Suns finished with the worst record in the entire league, at 16-66. By all rights, they should have had the top pick in the 1969 NBA Draft. But, at the time, a coin flip between the teams with the 2 worst records was held to decide who got the rights to the 1st overall pick. The idea was that a team trying to lose in order to get the top pick -- "tanking" would eventually become the expression -- might end up losing it to the team with the 2nd-worst record. The Bucks won the coin flip, and, naturally, they picked Lew Alcindor, the center who had led UCLA to the last 3...

April 30, 1970: President Richard Nixon announces what became known as the Cambodian Incursion: A brief series of military operations conducted in eastern Cambodia in 1970 by South Vietnam and the United States, as an extension of the Vietnam War and the Cambodian Civil War. Thirteen major operations were conducted by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam between April 29 and July 22, and by U.S. forces between May 1 and June 30. Antiwar demonstrations broke out across America, and would reach a shocking climax 4 days later in Kent, Ohio. Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who had run a halfhearted campaign for the Democratic nomination for President at the 1968 Convention, and was gearing up for another run in 1972, suggested that Nixon be impeached for this action. On July 31, 1973, Representative Robert Drinan of Massachusetts, 1 of 2 Catholic priests who has ever been elected to Congress, submitted a recommendation for Nixon's impeachment, for various charges, some relatin...