- 68th Day of 2015 297 Remaining
- Spring Begins in 11 Days
- Sunrise:7:28
- Sunset:7:11
- 11 Hours 43 Minutes
- Moon Rise:11:05pm
- Moon Set:9:30am
- Phase:86%
- Full Moon April 4 @ 5:07am
- The name Full Pink Moon came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. Other names for this month’s celestial body include the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, the Egg Moon, and among coastal tribes the Full Fish Moon, because this was the time that the shad swam upstream to spawn.
- Tides
- High:1:36am/2:01pm
- Low:7:52am/7:46pm
- Rainfall:
- This Year to Date:17.01
- Last Year:8.65
- Avg YTD:19.33
- Annual Avg:23.80
- Holidays
- Barbie Day
- False Teeth Day
- Fill Our Staplers Day
- Get Over It Day
- Napping Day
- Workplace Napping Day
- Panic Day
- National Crabmeat Day
- National Meatball Day
- Baron Bliss Day-Belize
- On This Day
- 1781 --- After successfully capturing British positions in Louisiana and Mississippi, Spanish General Bernardo de Galvez, commander of the Spanish forces in North America, turns his attention to the British-occupied city of Pensacola, Florida
- 1788 --- Connecticut became the 5th state to join the United States.
- 1793 --- Jean Pierre Blanchard made the first balloon flight in North America. The event was witnessed by U.S. President George Washington.
- 1841 --- At the end of a historic case, the U.S. Supreme Court rules, with only one dissent, that the African slaves who seized control of the Amistad slave ship had been illegally forced into slavery, and thus are free under American law.
- 1858 --- Albert Potts of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania received the first U.S. patent (# 19,578) for a street mailbox. Designed to be mounted on a lamp-post they were soon used in Boston and New York City.
- 1859 --- The National Association of Baseball Players adopted the rule that limited the size of bats to no more than 2-1/2 inches in diameter.
- 1862 --- During the U.S. Civil War, the ironclads Monitor and Virginia fought to a draw in a five-hour battle at Hampton Roads, Virginia.
- 1910 --- Union men urged for a national sympathy strike for miners in Pennsylvania.
- 1913 --- Thirty-one-year-old writer Virginia Woolf delivers the manuscript of her first novel, The Voyage Out, to her publisher.
- 1932 --- Eamon De Valera was elected president of the Irish Free State and pledged to abolish all loyalty to the British Crown.
- 1954 --- President Eisenhower writes a letter to his friend, Paul Helms, in which he privately criticizes Senator Joseph McCarthy’s approach to rooting out communists in the federal government. Two days earlier, former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson had declared that the president’s silence on McCarthy’s actions was tantamount to approval. Eisenhower, who viewed political mud-slinging as beneath the office of the president, declined to comment publicly on Stevenson’s remark or McCarthy’s tactics. Eisenhower was not the only respected American to criticize McCarthy on March 9. Earlier in the day, in a congressional session, Senator Ralph Flanders had publicly censured McCarthy for his vicious persecution of innocent Americans whom he suspected of communist sympathies. That evening, journalist Edward R. Murrow warned in a newscast that McCarthy was treading a fine line between investigation and persecution in pursuing suspected communist infiltration of the federal government.
- 1959 --- The Barbie doll debuted at the American International Toy Fair in New York City.
- 1961 --- The Supremes released their first single, "I Want A Guy."
- 1965 --- The 3,500 Marines of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade under Brig. Gen. Frederick J. Karch continue to land at Da Nang. The Marines had begun disembarking from the USS Henrico, Union, and Vancouver on March 8 and were the first U.S. combat troops in South Vietnam.
- 1967 --- Svetlana Alliluyeva, Josef Stalin's daughter defected to the United States
- 1969 --- "The Smothers Brothers' Comedy Hour" was canceled by CBS-TV.
- 1981 --- A nuclear accident at a Japan Atomic Power Company plant in Tsuruga, Japan, exposes 59 workers to radiation. As seems all too common with nuclear-power accidents, the officials in charge failed to timely inform the public and nearby residents, endangering them needlessly.
- 1985 --- The first-ever Adopt-a-Highway sign is erected on Texas’s Highway 69. The highway was adopted by the Tyler Civitan Club, which committed to picking up trash along a designated two-mile stretch of the road.
- 1986 --- U.S. Navy divers found the crew compartment of the space shuttle Challenger along with the remains of the astronauts.
- 1997 --- In Los Angeles, the Notorius B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) was killed in a drive-by shooting at the age of 24.
- 2009 --- France raised the minimum age to purchase alcohol from 16 to 18 years of age.
- Birthdays
- Yuri Gagarin
- Irene Papas
- Joyce Van Patten
- Mark Lindsay
- Bobby Fischer
- Trish Van Devere
- Robin Trower
- Jeffrey Osborne
- Amerigo Vespucci
- Leland Stanford
- Mickey Spillane
- Benito Santiago
- Emmanuel Lewis
Monday March 9, 2015
