It's the birthday of Hank Aaron, for many years American
baseball's all-time champion home-run hitter (with 755), who was born in 1934. In the mid-1970s, Hank Aaron grabbed the attention of the
baseball world as he chased a sacred sports record. Babe Ruth, a beloved New
York Yankees star, had smacked a record 714 career home runs from 1914 to 1935.
As Hank neared this magic number, the pressure grew—and not just for hitting
more homers. The Atlanta Braves slugger began to receive threatening letters
from racists who didn't want an African American to hold such a cherished
record. In Ruth's day all major league players were white.
Hank Aaron entered
"the Show" in the first wave of African American ballplayers after Jackie
Robinson blazed the trail in 1947. Like Jackie he showed courage and
determination. On Apr. 8, 1974, "Hammerin' Hank" drove his 715th home
run over the left-field fence at Georgia's Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.
(Trivia fans: the pitch came from Al Downing of the Los Angeles Dodgers.)
Baseball had a new champion, who went on to set his record of 755 career home
runs. Another African American, Barry Bonds, broke Aaron's record in 2007 and
finished the season—and his career—with a new record total of 762.
More Events of February 5:
2003: U.S. secretary of state Colin
Powell used satellite photographs, tapes of intercepted conversations, and
other material to argue before the United Nations Security Council that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction; no such weapons were found after the Iraq
War.
2001: Four members of Osama bin
Laden's terrorist network, Al Qaeda, went on trial in New York City for the
bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
1994: White supremacist Byron De
La Beckwith was convicted in Jackson, Miss., of the 1963 murder of civil rights
leader Medgar Evers and sentenced to life in prison.
1988: The Arizona House of
Representatives impeached Gov. Evan Mecham; he was subsequently convicted by
the Senate and removed from office.
1974: The U.S. space probe Mariner
10 passed within approximately 3,585 mi (5,770 km) of Venus.
1968: Second baseman Roberto
Alomar, elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2011, was born in Ponce, Puerto
Rico; his father and his brother, both named Sandy, were also major leaguers.
1963: Abd el-Krim, the Moroccan
leader who led the Berber tribes of the Rif in revolt against Spanish and
French rule during the 1920s, died.
1948: Idiosyncratic American
documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, whose Thin Blue Line (1988; with
music by Philip Glass) challenged convention, was born.
1947: Darrell Waltrip, one of
the leading drivers on the NASCAR circuit during the 1980s, was born.
1942: Roger Staubach,
quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, whom he piloted to seven divisional, five
league, and two Super Bowl championships, was born.
1938: American playwright John
Guare, author of The House of Blue Leaves, Six Degrees of Separation,
and other award-winning plays, was born.
1937: U.S. president Franklin D.
Roosevelt proposed to Congress increasing the number of Supreme Court justices
from 9 to 15; this attempt to "pack" the Court with justices more
sympathetic to his New Deal programs provoked an uproar and was dropped.
1933: Addison Mizner, the
architect who gave Palm Beach, Fla., its distinctive residential style, died.
1931: D. H. Matthews, a British
marine geologist responsible for a basic advance in modern plate tectonics, was
born.
1929: Drummer Hal Blaine, a
sideman who is probably one of the most-heard and least-known pop and rock
musicians around, was born.
1928: Andrew Greeley, an
American Roman Catholic priest who wrote more than 30 best-selling novels as
well as nonfiction sociological works, was born.
1926: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger,
Sr., publisher of the New York Times from 1963 to 1992, was born.
1919: Andreas Papandréou, prime
minister of Greece from 1981 to 1989 and from 1993 to 1996, was born; his
father, Georgios Papandréou, also served as premier.
1917: Mexico adopted its current
constitution.
1915: American physicist Robert
Hofstadter, who shared the 1961 Nobel Prize for his work on the structure of
protons and neutrons, was born.
1915: Canadian-American novelist
Margaret Millar, one of the finest practitioners of the psychological suspense
novel, was born.
1914: William S. Burroughs, an
American writer whose work had a profound influence on the writers of the beat
generation, was born; he is best remembered for his novel Naked Lunch
(1959).
1914: Alan Lloyd Hodgkin, a
British physiologist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize for work toward
understanding how nerve impulses are transmitted along a nerve fiber, was born.
1900: Adlai E. Stevenson II, twice the Democratic candidate
for president (1952 and 1956) and twice defeated by Republican Dwight
Eisenhower.
1899: French composer Georges
Auric, one of the group called Les Six, was born.
1887: Otello, the
next-to-last opera by Verdi, premiered at Milan's La Scala.
1881: The farming community of Phoenix,
in the Arizona Territory, was incorporated.
1871: Maxine Elliott, a
much-admired American actress at the turn of the 20th century, was born.
1859: Alexandru Ion Cuza became
prince of Walachia, unifying the two principalities of Romania.
1858: Mahlon Pitney, an associate
justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1912 to 1922, was born.
1856: Otto Brahm, a German
theater director who helped introduce naturalism to the modern German stage,
was born.
1848: Joris Karl Huysmans, a
French novelist and art critic best known for his novel À Rebours (1884;
Against the Grain), called "the breviary of the decadents,"
was born.
1848: The famous American outlaw
Belle Starr was born.
1840: John Dunlop, a Scottish veterinary surgeon who
manufactured the first pneumatic tires.
1840: Hiram Stevens Maxim, the American inventor who
produced the first practical automatic machine gun, the Maxim gun, which became
standard equipment for every army.
1837: Dwight L. Moody, an
American evangelist who took his revival campaigns to major American and
British cities for almost 20 years, was born.
1826: Millard Fillmore, the
future 13th president of the United States, married Abigail Powers.
1810: Ole Bull, a celebrated
Norwegian violinist, was born.
1806: Robert Montgomery Bird, an
American playwright and novelist best known for his romantic tragedies, was
born.
1804: Johan Ludvig Runeberg, a
Finnish poet who wrote in Swedish and laid the foundation of an idealist-heroic
tradition that subsequently had far-reaching effects on Scandinavian
literature, was born.
1797: Jean Duhamel, a French
mathematician known for his contributions to acoustics and to mathematical
physics, especially partial differential equations, was born.
1788: Robert Peel, the British statesman who founded
Britain's Conservative party and served three times as prime minister; one of
his most important actions, which cost him his office, was the repeal of the Corn
Laws.
1783: "Capability"
Brown, the leading English landscape architect of the 18th century, died.
1770: Alexandre Brongniart, a
French geologist who pioneered the use of fossils for identifying layers or
strata of sedimentary rocks, was born.
1725: James Otis, a
distinguished American lawyer and political leader in prerevolutionary Massachusetts,
was born.
1723: John Witherspoon, who
served (1768–94) as president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton
University) and was the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence,
was born in Scotland.
1703: Gilbert Tennent, a
Presbyterian leader of America's first widespread religious revival, the Great
Awakening, was born.
1631: Roger Williams, the
radical Puritan thinker who was to found the colony of Rhode Island, arrived at
Boston from England.
1626: Madame de Sévigné, a
French noblewoman whose correspondence of more than 1,500 letters contains
wonderful portraits of Corneille, La Rochefoucauld, Racine, and Turenne, was
born.
1590: Bernardino de Sahagún, the
Spanish Franciscan friar who compiled the Florentine Codex (or General
History of the Things of New Spain), regarded as the greatest single source
of information about Aztec Mexico, died.
1578: Giovanni Battista Moroni,
a northern Italian painter noted for his portraiture, died.
1451: Murad II, the sultan who
completed the restoration of the Ottoman Empire's unity after the invasion
(1400–02) of Timur, died.
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