Villanova wins NCAA basketball title in stunning upset

On April 1, 1985, in one of the most shocking upsets in college basketball history, Villanova beats heavily favored, Patrick Ewing-led Georgetown, 66-64, to win the NCAA basketball title. The Wildcats, led by Dwayne McClain’s 17 points, execute a perfect game plan and shoot 79 percent from the field in the win.

Georgetown, the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament, came into the game with a 35-2 record. The Hoyas had five future NBA players. Ewing, a 7-foot center and one of the most decorated college basketball players, was a senior and looking to cap his storied career with back-to-back national championships.

Villanova, which entered the tournament with a 19-10 record, won its first three tournament games by a combined nine points. The Wildcats had three future NBA players, led by senior forward Ed Pinckney, but they had lost twice to the Hoyas during the season. The title game was expected to be no different. But as Jere Longman of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “Midnight never came for Cinderella.”

Before the game, Villanova coach Rollie Massimino said his team would need a perfect game to win. The Wildcats shot 22-for-28 from the field, including nine of 10 in the second half, and 22-for-27 from the free throw line. P.J. Carlesimo, the coach of rival Seton Hall at the time, later said it was “as close to the perfect game as any team [has played] ever.”

In addition to the incredibly efficient shooting, Villanova played excellent defense and deployed a wonderful game plan that got Ewing into foul trouble. The Wildcats also slowed the game. At the time, the NCAA did not have a shot clock—it added a 45-second clock for the 1985-86 season. 

Ewing, who finished with 14 points, has lamented how his college career ended. “We made a mistake, turned the ball over, and the better team did not win the game,” he said years afterward. “I said it then, and I’ll say it now.”

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First MLB players’ strike begins

At 12:01 a.m. on April 1, 1972, the first collective players’ strike in Major League Baseball history begins. The strike lasts 12 days, ending on April 13, and 86 games are cancelled, throwing the season into flux from the start.

The cause of baseball’s first strike was the expiration of the league’s three-year pension agreement. The Major League Baseball Players Association, led by seasoned union negotiator Marvin Miller, had made modest requests to increase benefits. However, the owners balked at the proposals, and never took the players’ threat to strike seriously.

In his book, A Whole Different Ballgame, Miller wrote: “The last thing I expected in 1972 was a strike. The owners had decided to bring the Players Association’s progress to a halt either by provoking a strike, which they felt confident of winning, or by forcing the players to back down and accept their unreasonable position in the negotiations.”

As it turned out, the players were prepared to take control of their own destiny. In fact, the players voted 663-10 in favor of authorizing their executive committee to call a strike. MLBPA general counsel Dick Moss advised the players that it was not the right time to strike because they had yet to be paid that season and didn’t have a strike fund. But the players stood their ground.

Oakland A’s star Reggie Jackson yelled at a meeting with Miller and Moss: “Goddammit, there are just times when you’ve got to stand up for your rights!” Although the players were not paid for the 12 days of the strike, their effort ultimately was a success. Owners agreed to a $500,000 increase in the pension fund and to allow salary arbitration.

The 1972 MLB season yielded some bizarre results from the strike—some teams only played 153 games instead of the customary 162. The Detroit Tigers won the AL East by a half-game over the Boston Red Sox, who played one fewer game than the Tigers. 

READ MORE: Who Invented Baseball?

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The Pilgrim-Wampanoag peace treaty

Year
1621
Month Day
April 01

At the Plymouth settlement in present-day Massachusetts, the leaders of the Plymouth colonists, acting on behalf of King James I, make a defensive alliance with Massasoit, chief of the Wampanoags. The agreement, in which both parties promised to not “doe hurt” to one another, was the first treaty between a Native American tribe and a group of American colonists. According to the treaty, if a Wampanoag broke the peace, he would be sent to Plymouth for punishment; if a colonist broke the law, he would likewise be sent to the Wampanoags.

In November 1620, the Mayflower arrived in the New World, carrying 101 English settlers, commonly known as the pilgrims. The majority of the pilgrims were Puritan Separatists, who traveled to America to escape the jurisdiction of the Church of England, which they believed violated the biblical precepts of true Christians. After coming to anchor in what is today Provincetown harbor in the Cape Cod region of Massachusetts, a party of armed men under the command of Captain Myles Standish was sent to explore the immediate area and find a location suitable for settlement. In December, the explorers went ashore in Plymouth, where they found cleared fields and plentiful running water; a few days later the Mayflower came to anchor in Plymouth harbor, and settlement began.

The first direct contact with a Native American was made in March 1621, and soon after, Chief Massasoit paid a visit to the settlement. After an exchange of greetings and gifts, the two peoples signed a peace treaty that lasted for more than 50 years.

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RAF founded

Year
1918
Month Day
April 01

On April 1, 1918, the Royal Air Force (RAF) is formed with the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). The RAF took its place beside the British navy and army as a separate military service with its own ministry.

In April 1911, eight years after Americans Wilbur and Orville Wright made the first flight of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft, an air battalion of the British army’s Royal Engineers was formed at Larkhill in Wiltshire. The battalion consisted of aircraft, airship, balloon, and man-carrying kite companies. In December 1911, the British navy formed the Royal Naval Flying School at Eastchurch, Kent. In May 1912, both were absorbed into the newly created Royal Flying Corps, which established a new flying school at Upavon, Wiltshire, and formed new airplane squadrons. In July 1914, the specialized requirements of the navy led to the creation of RNAS.

One month later, on August 4, Britain declared war on Germany and entered World War I. At the time, the RFC had 84 aircraft, and the RNAS had 71 aircraft and seven airships. Later that month, four RFC squadrons were deployed to France to support the British Expeditionary Force. During the next two years, Germany took the lead in air strategy with technologies like the manual machine gun, and England suffered bombing raids and frustration in the skies against German flying aces such as Manfred von Richthofen, “The Red Baron.” Repeated German air raids led British military planners to push for the creation of a separate air ministry, which would carry out strategic bombing against Germany. On April 1, 1918, the RAF was formed along with a female branch of the service, the Women’s Royal Air Force. That day, Bristol F.2B fighters of the 22nd Squadron carried out the first official missions of the RAF.

By the war’s end, in November 1918, the RAF had gained air superiority along the western front. The strength of the RAF in November 1918 was nearly 300,000 officers and airmen, and more than 22,000 aircraft. At the outbreak of World War II, in September 1939, the operational strength of the RAF in Europe had diminished to about 2,000 aircraft.

In June 1940, the Western democracies of continental Europe fell to Germany one by one, leaving Britain alone in its resistance to Nazi Germany. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler planned an invasion of Britain and in July 1940 ordered his powerful air force–the Luftwaffe–to destroy British ports along the coast in preparation. The outnumbered RAF fliers put up a fierce resistance in the opening weeks of the Battle of Britain, leading the Luftwaffe commanders to place destruction of the British air fleet at the forefront of the German offensive. If the Germans succeeded in wiping out the RAF, they could begin their invasion as scheduled in the fall.

During the next three months, however, the RAF successfully resisted the massive German air invasion, relying on radar technology, more maneuverable aircraft, and exceptional bravery. For every British plane shot down, two Luftwaffe warplanes were destroyed. In October, Hitler delayed the German invasion indefinitely, and in May 1941 the Battle of Britain came to an end. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said of the RAF pilots, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

By the war’s end in 1945, the strength of the RAF was nearly one million personnel. Later, this number was reduced and stabilized at about 150,000 men and women.

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The “Polish Prince” killed in plane crash

Year
1993
Month Day
April 01

On April 1, 1993, race car driver and owner Alan Kulwicki, who won the 1992 National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) Winston Cup championship by one of the tightest margins in series history, is killed in a plane crash near Bristol, Tennessee, where he was scheduled to compete in a race the following day. The 38-year-old Kulwicki had been the first owner-driver to collect the championship since Richard Petty did so in 1979, as well as the first NASCAR champ to hold a college degree.

Kulwicki was born on December 14, 1954, in Greenfield, Wisconsin, a fact that later marked him as an outsider among the other NASCAR drivers of his era, who typically hailed from the southern U.S. Kulwicki’s father, Gerry, built race-car engines and as a teenager Alan became involved in Go-Kart racing. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in mechanical engineering, Kulwicki raced stock cars, first as a hobby then as a professional. In the mid-1980s, he relocated to North Carolina and, with no financial backing, began competing in NASCAR events. In 1986 he was named the Winston Cup Series (now known as the Sprint Cup) Rookie of the Year. Kulwicki, who earned a reputation as a hard-working perfectionist, later turned down offers to drive for other teams, opting to remain on his own.

In 1988, Kulwicki, who was nicknamed “The Polish Prince” and “Special K,” won his first Winston Cup race at the Phoenix International Raceway in Arizona. Afterward, he spun his car around and took a victory lap the wrong way around the track, a move that was subsequently dubbed a “Polish Victory Lap.”

One of the most exciting races of Kulwicki’s career occurred on November 15, 1992, at the Hooters 500, the last race of the Winston Cup season, in front of more than 100,000 fans at the Atlanta Motor Speedway. Going into the race, six drivers had a chance to win the Winston Cup championship, which is based on points accumulated over the season. Kulwicki, who considered himself an underdog, altered the lettering on the front of his Ford Thunderbird to read Underbird. He finished the race in second place, behind Bill Elliott, but scored enough points to capture the series championship title. The race was also notable because it marked the first Winston Cup start for future star driver Jeff Gordon and the last for seven-time NASCAR champ Richard Petty, who retired afterward.

Kulwicki competed in just a handful of other races before he was killed, along with three other people, aboard a private plane that crashed on April 1, 1993. In 2005, a film about his life, titled Dare to Dream: The Alan Kulwicki Story, was released.

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April Fools’ tradition popularized

Year
1700
Month Day
April 01

On April 1, 1700, English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other.

Although the day, also called All Fools’ Day, has been celebrated for several centuries by different cultures, its exact origins remain a mystery.

Some historians speculate that April Fools’ Day dates back to 1582, when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, as called for by the Council of Trent in 1563. People who were slow to get the news or failed to recognize that the start of the new year had moved to January 1 and continued to celebrate it during the last week of March through April 1 became the butt of jokes and hoaxes.

These pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and being referred to as poisson d’avril (April fish), said to symbolize a young, “easily hooked” fish and a gullible person.

April Fools’ Day spread throughout Britain during the 18th century. In Scotland, the tradition became a two-day event, starting with “hunting the gowk,” in which people were sent on phony errands (gowk is a word for cuckoo bird, a symbol for fool) and followed by Tailie Day, which involved pranks played on people’s derrieres, such as pinning fake tails or “kick me” signs on them.

READ MORE: April Fools! 9 Outrageous Pranks in History

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U.S. troops land on Okinawa

Year
1945
Month Day
April 01

On April 1, 1945, after suffering the loss of 116 planes and damage to three aircraft carriers, 50,000 U.S. combat troops, under the command of Lieutenant General Simon B. Buckner Jr., land on the southwest coast of the Japanese island of Okinawa, 350 miles south of Kyushu, the southern main island of Japan.

Determined to seize Okinawa as a base of operations for the army ground and air forces for a later assault on mainland Japan, more than 1,300 ships converged on the island, finally putting ashore 50,000 combat troops on April 1. The Americans quickly seized two airfields and advanced inland to cut the island’s waist. They battled nearly 120,000 Japanese army, militia and labor troops under the command of Lieutenant General Mitsuru Ushijima.

READ MORE: Remembering the Battle of Okinawa 

The Japanese surprised the American forces with a change in strategy, drawing them into the mainland rather than confronting them at the water’s edge. While Americans landed without loss of men, they would suffer more than 50,000 casualties, including more than 12,000 deaths, as the Japanese staged a desperate defense of the island, a defense that included waves of kamikaze (“divine wind”) air attacks. Eventually, these suicide raids proved counterproductive, as the Japanese finally ran out of planes and resolve, with some 4,000 finally surrendering. Japanese casualties numbered some 117,000.

Lieutenant General Buckner, son of a Civil War general, was among the casualties, killed by enemy artillery fire just three days before the Japanese surrender. Japanese General Ushijima committed ritual suicide upon defeat of his forces.

The 1952 film Okinawa starring Pat O’Brien, is one of several movies to depict this decisive episode in the history of the war.

READ MORE: The Pictures that Defined World War II 

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President Nixon signs legislation banning cigarette ads on TV and radio

Year
1970
Month Day
April 01

On April 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signs legislation officially banning cigarette ads on television and radio. Nixon, who was an avid pipe smoker, indulging in as many as eight bowls a day, supported the legislation at the increasing insistence of public health advocates.

Alarming health studies emerged as early as 1939 that linked cigarette smoking to higher incidences of cancer and heart disease and, by the end of the 1950s, all states had laws prohibiting the sale of cigarettes to minors. In 1964, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) agreed that advertisers had a responsibility to warn the public of the health hazards of cigarette smoking. In 1969, after the surgeon general of the United States released an official report linking cigarette smoking to low birth weight, Congress yielded to pressure from the public health sector and signed the Cigarette Smoking Act. This act required cigarette manufacturers to place warning labels on their products that stated “Cigarette Smoking May be Hazardous to Your Health.”

READ MORE: When Cigarette Companies Used Doctors to Push Smoking 

By the early 1970s, the fight between the tobacco lobby and public health interests forced Congress to draft legislation to regulate the tobacco industry and special committees were convened to hear arguments from both sides. Public health officials and consumers wanted stronger warning labels on tobacco products and their advertisements banned from television and radio, where they could easily reach impressionable children. (Tobacco companies were the single largest product advertisers on television in 1969.) Cigarette makers defended their industry with attempts to negate the growing evidence that nicotine was addictive and that cigarette smoking caused cancer. Though they continued to bombard unregulated print media with ads for cigarettes, tobacco companies lost the regulatory battle over television and radio. The last televised cigarette ad ran at 11:50 p.m. during The Johnny Carson Show on January 1, 1971.

Tobacco has played a part in the lives of presidents since the country’s inception. A hugely profitable crop in early America, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Jackson owned tobacco plantations and used tobacco in the form of snuff or smoked cigars. Regulation of the tobacco industry in the form of excise taxes began during Washington’s presidency and continues to this day. In 1962, John F. Kennedy became the first president to sponsor studies on smoking and public health.

Tobacco has not been the only thing smoked at the White House. In 1978, after country-music entertainer Willie Nelson performed for President Carter there, he is said to have snuck up to the roof and surreptitiously smoked what he called a big fat Austin torpedo, commonly known as marijuana.

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Marvin Gaye is shot and killed by his own father

Year
1984
Month Day
April 01

At the peak of his career, Marvin Gaye was the Prince of Motown—the soulful voice behind hits as wide-ranging as “How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” Like his label-mate Stevie Wonder, Gaye both epitomized and outgrew the crowd-pleasing sound that made Motown famous. 

Over the course of his roughly 25-year recording career, he moved successfully from upbeat pop to “message” music to satin-sheet soul, combining elements of Smokey Robinson, Bob Dylan and Barry White into one complicated and sometimes contradictory package. But as the critic Michael Eric Dyson put it, the man who “chased away the demons of millions…with his heavenly sound and divine art” was chased by demons of his own throughout his life. That life came to a tragic end on this day 1984, when Marvin Gaye was shot and killed by his own father one day short of his 45th birthday.

If the physical cause of Marvin Gaye’s death was straightforward—”Gunshot wound to chest perforating heart, lung and liver,” according to the Los Angeles County Coroner—the events that led to it were much more tangled. On the one hand, there was the longstanding conflict with his father dating back to childhood. Marvin Gay, Sr., (the “e” was added by his son for his stage name) was a preacher in the Hebrew Pentecostal Church and a proponent of a strict moral code he enforced brutally with his four children. He was also, by all accounts, a hard-drinking cross-dresser who personally embodied a rather complicated model of morality. By some reports, Marvin Sr. harbored significant envy over his son’s tremendous success, and Marvin Jr. clearly harbored unresolved feelings toward his abusive father.

Those feelings spilled out for the final time in the Los Angeles home of Marvin Gay, Sr., and his wife Alberta. Their son, the international recording star, had moved into his parents’ home in late 1983 at a low point in his struggle with depression, debt and cocaine abuse. Only one year removed from his first Grammy win and from a triumphant return to the pop charts with “Sexual Healing,” Marvin Gaye was in horrible physical, psychological and financial shape.

After an argument between father and son escalated into a physical fight on the morning of April 1, 1984, Alberta Gay was trying to calm her son in his bedroom when Marvin Sr. took a revolver given to him by Marvin Jr. and shot him three times in his chest. Marvin Gaye’s brother, Frankie, who lived next door, and who held the legendary singer during his final minutes, later wrote in his memoir that Marvin Gaye’s final, disturbing statement was, “I got what I wanted….I couldn’t do it myself, so I made him do it.”

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Jane Austen declines royal writing advice

Year
1816
Month Day
April 01

Jane Austen responds to a letter from the Prince Regent (the future King George IV) suggesting she write a historic romance, saying, “I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.”

Austen’s correspondence with the Prince Regent, as well as literary figures of the day, was prompted by the success of her novels Sense and Sensibility, (1811) Pride and Prejudice, (1813) Mansfield Park, (1814) and Emma (1815). Two additional novels were published after her death. Her identity as the author was known to only a small circle; the general reading public only knew that “a lady” had written the books. Although enjoying the appreciation of such leading contemporary authors as Sir Walter Scott, Austen led a quiet, retiring life in the English country until she died at age 42.

Austen was born in 1775, the seventh of eight children born to a clergyman in Steventon, a country village in Hampshire, England. She was very close to her older sister, Cassandra, who remained her faithful editor and critic throughout her life. The girls had five years of formal schooling, then studied with their father. Jane read voraciously and began writing her own sketches as young as age 12, completing an early novella at age 14.

Austen’s quiet, happy world was disrupted when her father retired to Bath in 1801. Jane hated the resort town but amused herself by making close observations of ridiculous society manners. After her father’s death in 1805, Jane, her mother, and sister lived with one of her brothers until 1808, when another brother provided them a permanent home at Chawton Cottage, in Hampshire.

Jane wrote on small pieces of paper that she could easily slip under a blotter when someone came into the room. Though she avoided society, she was charming, intelligent, and funny at home. She rejected at least one proposal of marriage. She died in 1817 of what today is thought to be Addison’s disease.

READ MORE: Why Jane Austen Never Married 

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