Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr.was fatally
shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story
room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation
workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet
struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord.

On November 23, 1936, the first issue of the pictorial magazine
Life was published, featuring a cover photo of the Fort Peck
Dam’s spillway by Margaret Bourke-White.

Life actually had its start earlier in the 20th century as a different
kind of magazine: a weekly humor publication, not unlike today’s
The New Yorker in its use of tart cartoons, humorous pieces and
cultural reporting.

When the original Life folded during the Great Depression, the
influential American publisher Henry Luce bought the name and
re-launched the magazine as a picture-based periodical on this
day in 1936.

Henry Robinson Luce (1898 – 1967)

This 2012 photo shows the Fort Peck Dam spillway in
northeast Montana.

U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Guion S. Bluford became
the first African American to travel into space when the
space shuttle Challenger lifted off on its third mission. It
was the first night launch of a space shuttle, and many
people stayed up late to watch the spacecraft roar up
from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 2:32 a.m.

The Challenger spent six days in space, during which time
Bluford and his four fellow crew members launched a
communications satellite for the government of India,
made contact with an errant communications satellite,
conducted scientific experiments, and tested the shuttle’s
robotic arm.

Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. will be 82 years old on
November 22.

Ryan O’Neal (April 20, 1941 – December 8, 2023)

O’Neal was a native of Los Angeles, he trained as an amateur
boxer before beginning a career in acting in 1960. In 1964, he
landed the role of Rodney Harrington on the ABC nighttime
soap opera Peyton Place.

In April 2012, O’Neal stated he had been diagnosed with stage
4 prostate cancer. He later stated it was stage 2.