Arch Oboler and Boris Karloff on Lights Out.

Lights Out is an old-time radio program devoted mostly to
horror and the supernatural.

Created by Wyllis Cooper and then eventually taken over by
Arch Oboler, versions of Lights Out aired on different networks,
at various times, from January 3, 1934 to the summer of 1947
and the series eventually made the transition to television.

Lights Out was one of the earliest radio horror programs,
predating Suspense and Inner Sanctum. 

Wyllis Oswald Cooper
(January 26, 1899 – June 22, 1955)

On May 24, 1941, Germany’s largest battleship, the Bismarck,
sunk the pride of the British fleet, HMS Hood.

The Bismarck was the most modern of Germany’s battleships,
a prize coveted by other nation’s navies, even while still in the
blueprint stage (Hitler handed over a copy of its blueprints to
Joseph Stalin as a concession during the days of the Hitler-
Stalin neutrality pact).

Some six weeks after the United States formally entered
the First World War, the U.S Congress passed the Selective
Service Act on May 18, 1917, giving the U.S. president the
power to draft soldiers.

By the end of World War I in November 1918, some 24 million
men had registered under the Selective Service Act. Of the
almost 4.8 million Americans who eventually served in the
war, some 2.8 million had been drafted.

On May 11, 1960, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi SS officer who
organized Adolf Hitler’s “final solution of the Jewish question," 
was captured in Argentina. On May 23, Israeli Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion announces to the world that he will stand
trial in Israel.

Rafi Eitan, the Mossad agent who led the Israeli team that captured
Nazi Adolf Eichmann, died at aged 92 in 1919.

On May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson (above) issued a
presidential proclamation that officially established the first
national Mother’s Day holiday to celebrate America’s mothers.

The idea for a “Mother’s Day” is credited by some to Julia Ward
Howe (1872) and by others to Anna Jarvis (1907), who both
suggested a holiday dedicated to a day of peace.

In his first Mother’s Day proclamation, Wilson stated that the
holiday offered a chance to “[publicly express] our love and
reverence for the mothers of our country.”

J. C. Leyendecker painted ‘Pot of Hyacinths’ to be used
on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post’s May 30, 1914
issue.