SANDY KOZEL

Henry Louis Aaron (February 5, 1934 – January 22, 2021)

On April 23, 1954, Hank Aaron knocked out the first home run
of his Major League Baseball career. Twenty years later, Aaron
becomes baseball’s new home run king when he broke Babe
Ruth’s long-standing record of 714 career homers.

A native of Mobile, Alabama, Aaron  began his professional
baseball career in 1952 in the Negro League and joined the
Milwaukee Braves of the major leagues in 1954, eight years
after Jackie Robinson had integrated baseball. Aaron,
nicknamed "Hammer", was the last Negro League player
to compete in the majors.

MIKE GRACIA

Film director, writer, producer, and actor Quentin Tarantino
is 60 years old today.

Tarantino’s work has been subject to controversy and 
has garnered a cult following, as well as critical and
commercial success. He has received two Academy
Awards and four Golden Globes.

1994

John Lennon, a former member of the Beatles, the rock group
that transformed popular music in the 1960s, was shot and
killed by an obsessed fan in New York City.   

The 40-year-old artist was entering his luxury Manhattan
apartment building when Mark David Chapman shot him
four times at close range with a .38-caliber revolver. Lennon,
bleeding profusely, died on the way to the  hospital.

James Butler Hickok (May 27, 1837 – August 2, 1876)

“Wild Bill” Hickok, one of the greatest gunfighters of the
American West, was murdered in Deadwood, South Dakota
while  playing poker when Jack McCall walked up behind
Hickok,drew his Colt Model 1873 revolver and shot Hickok
in the back of the head at point-blank range, killing him
instantly.

McCall was hanged in a public execution in
Yankton, at age 24.

Colt Model 1873 revolver.

The poker hand purportedly held by Hickok at his demise.

James Earl Ray, suspect in the death of Martin Luther King, Jr.
is arrested.

James Earl Ray, an escaped American convict, is arrested in London,
England, and charged with the assassination of African American civil
rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

On April 4, 1968, in Memphis, King was fatally wounded by a sniper’s
bullet while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at
the Motel Lorraine. That evening, a Remington .30-06 hunting rifle was
found on the sidewalk beside a rooming house one block from the
Lorraine Motel. During the next several weeks, the rifle, eyewitness
reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect:
escaped convict James Earl Ray. A two-bit criminal, Ray escaped a
Missouri prison in April 1967 while serving a sentence for a holdup. In
May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. The FBI eventually
determined that he had obtained a Canadian passport under a false
identity, which at the time was relatively easy.