Sir Elton Hercules John (Reginald Kenneth Dwight) is 72.
Rock and roll legend Elton John has sold over 250 million albums in a career that’s spanned over 50 years. He is best known for such hit songs as "Rocket Man," "Tiny Dancer," "Bennie and the Jets" and "Candle in the Wind."Elton began playing the piano at age three and won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music.
On this day in 1965, the United States landed about 3,500 Marines in South Vietnam to defend the U.S. air base at Da Nag. They were the first American combat troops to land in Vietnam. They joined 23,000 American military advisors already in Vietnam.
As American troops fight their first large scale battles against the North Vietnamese Army, college students march against the war in Boston, October 16, 1965.
Joseph Paul DiMaggio (November 25, 1914 – March 8, 1999)
Joe DiMaggio was a baseballcenter fielder who played his entire 13-year career in Major League Baseball for the New York Yankees. He is widely considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time, and is perhaps best known for his 56-game hitting streak (May 15 – July 16, 1941), a record that still stands. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955 and was voted the sport’s greatest living player in a poll taken during the baseball centennial year of 1969.
DiMaggio, a heavy smoker for much of his adult life, was admitted to Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Florida, on October 12, 1998, for lung cancer surgery and remained there for 99 days. He returned to his home in Hollywood, Florida, on January 19, 1999; he died there at age 84 on March 8.
On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen with batons and tear gas drove them back into Selma.
African American taxi driver Rodney King was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers on this day in 1991 during an arrest that followed a pursuit through the streets of Los Angeles. The scene was captured on amateur video, one of the first police brutality videos of its kind. It forever changed the conversation about police and race in America.
Over six nights in April, 53 people were killed and more than 2,000 injured; property damage topped $1 billion.
National Guardsmen patrol Los Angeles during the rioting after the acquittal of officers involved in the beating of Rodney King.
The first issue of Time magazine was published on this day in 1923 by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce. It was the first weekly news magazine in the United States. The distinctive red border for which the magazine has come to be known was lacking. On the cover was the now-obscure Joseph G. Cannon, former House Speaker. .