On this day in 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed
away partway through his fourth term in office, leaving Vice
President Harry S. Truman in charge of a country still fighting
the Second World War and in possession of a weapon of
unprecedented and terrifying power.

In the afternoon of April 12, 1945, in Warm Springs, Georgia,
while sitting for a portrait by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, Roosevelt
said: "I have a terrific headache." He then slumped forward in
his chair, unconscious, and was carried into his bedroom.

The president’s attending cardiologist, Howard Bruenn, had
diagnosed a massive intracerebral hemorrhage.

The last photograph of U.S. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, taken at Warm Springs, GA by Nicholas
Robbins for Elizabeth Shoumatoff.          
          

Engraving of the Four Freedoms at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, dedicated in 1997 in Washington,
D.C.

Orenthal James Simpson (July 9, 1947 – April 10, 2024)

In May 2023, Simpson reported that he had been diagnosed
with cancer and expressed confidence that he would beat it.

In February 2024, it was reported that he was undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. He died of the disease on
April 10, 2024, at the age of 76.

On April 11, 1921, KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasts the first
live sporting event on the radio, a boxing match between
Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee. Pittsburgh Daily Post
sports editor Florent Gibson calls the event, about four
months before KDKA’s Harold Arlin announces the first
Major League Baseball game broadcast on radio.

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13, the third lunar landing mission, was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying
astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert and Fred W. Haise.

After an oxygen tank exploded just over 200,000 miles from Earth
on the evening of April 13, however, the new mission objective
became to get the Apollo 13 crew home alive. The landing mission
was aborted.

   
The crew: Jim Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred Haise.

   
The Apollo 13 service module showing explosion damage. (NASA)

Dolly Marshall, left, and Clarice Lafreniere.

The highest civilian honor in the United States has been awarded
to two of Oregon’s own.

Clarice Lafreniere and Dolly Marshall were granted a Congressional
Gold Medal. It was part of a ceremony honoring hundreds of Rosie
the Riveters.

Lafreniere learned about the Pearl Harbor attack over the radio,
the same day that she gave birth to her daughter. Two years
later she was working as a welder and burner at the Kaiser
shipyard on Swan Island in Portland.

Marshall was was in high school when she worked as a plane
spotter in New Jersey.
(by KATU Staff)

Rosie The Riveter by Norman Rockwell (1943)