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RUSH at Anchor. Circa Early 1950s. Courtesy of Joseph Koye (1930-1984)

Updated 04/06/2012 (click)

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REUNION 2013 will be held at a date yet to be determined in CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA. Thus Charleston has the distinction of being our first "repeat city" and the site where we will celebrate our 20th Anniversary as an association! Stay tuned for more information as our reunion committee kicks into high gear and starts planning for 2013! We have been sending out proposals to the various hotels in Charleston, SC. The reunion committee is working on setting up a site visit to be conducted later this year.

RUSH GRAM 65 was mailed, emailed and posted to the Members Only area of this web site! Our thanks go out to Fred and Elaine Strachan who stuffed all of those envelopes and licked all of those stamps to get this latest edition into the mail. Please remember, if you have ADOBE READER on your computer and you haven an EMAIL address, to contact Jim Hocking. He will be happy to add you to the email distribution list for the RUSH GRAM. Fred and Elaine will be happy to lick one less stamp and stuff one less envelope!

REUNION 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee was an unqualified success. We'll be doing our best over the next several months to get our most recent reunion documented on this web site. Our "slow as molasses" webmaster has the photos, he just still needs to post them!

Members are encouraged to provide articles for publication in our newsletter, the RUSH GRAM. Any one who would like to contribute an article, small or large, please contact Jim Hocking.

When you notice an error with something on the website, please let me know! Yo, Mr. Editor: The proper spelling for the word meaning "a period of ten years" is DECADE not DECAD!!! OOPS!! THANKS!!

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13, the third lunar landing mission, was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise. The spacecraft's destination was the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon, where the astronauts were to explore the Imbrium Basin and conduct geological experiments. After an oxygen tank exploded on the evening of April 13, however, the new mission objective became to get the Apollo 13 crew home alive. Just before 1 p.m. on April 17, 1970, the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere. Mission control feared that the CM's heat shields were damaged in the accident, but after four minutes of radio silence Apollo 13's parachutes were spotted, and the astronauts splashed down safely into the Pacific Ocean.

The bloodiest four years in American history began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate shore batteries under General P. G. T. Beauregard opened fire on Union held Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Bay. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, US Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort.

On April 13, 1964, Sydney Poitier becomes the first African American to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, for his role as a laborer who helped build a chapel in Lilies of the Field (1963). Poitier was born in 1924 to poor farmers in the Bahamas. He dropped out of school at age 13 and later joined the U.S. Army. After his army stint, he became interested in theater and joined the American Negro Theater but progressed slowly, held back by his strong island accent. Poitier began directing in the early 1970s, with Buck and the Preacher (1971). In 1992, he won the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award, the first black actor and director to be so honored.

On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer, fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at a play at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the American Civil War.

ON April 15, 1947 Jackie Robinson, age 28, became the first African-American player in Major League Baseball when he stepped onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Exactly 50 years later, on April 14, 1997, Robinson's career was honored and his uniform number, 42, was retired from Major League baseball. Robinson's was the first-ever number retired by all teams in the league. Other items of interest that occurred on April 15: In 1865 President Abraham Lincoln died; In 1912 the SS Titanic sank; and in 1968 Pol Pot died.

April 16, 2008 marked the one-year anniversary of the tragedy at Virginia Tech in Blacks burg, VA, where 32 students and faculty were gunned down by a lone individual, himself a student. The shooter took his own life on that fateful day. Thousands of students, parents and alumni attended services, commemorative events and a candle-light vigil on and off campus, in Blacks burg and other localities across the United States. The President and Mrs Bush issued a statement that read, in part: "We join our fellow Americans in praying for the families and friends whose hearts ache for their lost loved ones. We continue to be amazed by the extraordinary Hokie spirit and inspired by the survivors of this tragedy. Students, teachers, and alumni have overcome evil with good by supporting each other with love and compassion. We are humbled by their resilience and confident in the university's bright future."

At 9:12 a.m. on April 16, 1947, in Texas City's port on Galveston Bay, a fire aboard the French freighter Grandcamp ignited ammonium nitrate and other explosive materials in the ship's hold, causing a massive blast that destroyed much of the city and took nearly 600 lives. At 12 minutes past nine, the fire caught the freighter's stores of ammonium nitrate, a compound used to make dynamite, and Texas City exploded. The mushroom cloud from the blast rose 2,000 feet, and fragments of the Grandcamp were hurled thousands of feet into the air, landing on buildings and people. The ship's anchor, weighing 1.5 tons, was flung two miles and embedded 10 feet into the ground at the Pan American refinery. The explosion was heard as far as 150 miles away.

On April 17, 1970, Appollo 13 returned to Earth. With the world anxiously watching, Appollo 13, a US lunar spacecraft that suffered a severe malfunction on its journey to the moon, safely returned to Earth. Other events of significance that happened on April 17 include the beginning of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the death of Benjamin Franklin in 1790.

An earthquake estimated at close to 8.0 on the Richter scale struck San Francisco, California, killing hundreds of people as it toppled buildings. The quake struck at 5:13 a.m. on April 18, 1906. Other events of significance that happened on April 18 include the ride of Paul Revere in 1775; an air raid on Tokyo, Japan led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle in 1942; the killing of journalist Ernie Pyle by enemy fire on Okinawa, Japan in 1945; and the destruction of the US embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983.

On April 19, 1995, on the second anniversary of the disastrous fire at Waco, Texas, a massive truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. The blast collapsed the north face of the nine-story building, instantly killing more than 100 people and trapping dozens more in the rubble. When the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later the death toll stood at 168 people killed, including 19 young children who were in the building's day care center at the time of the blast.

On April 20, 1999, two teenage gunmen killed 13 people in a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, south of Denver. At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold, 18, and Eric Harris, 17, dressed in trench coats, began shooting students outside the school before moving inside to continue their rampage. Shortly after noon, the two teens having killed 12 fellow students and wounding another 23 people, turned their guns on themselves and committed suicide.

On April 21, 1945, Soviet forces fighting south of Berlin, at Zossen, assaulted the headquarters of the German High Command. The only remaining opposing "force" to the Russian invasion of Berlin were the "battle groups" of Hitler Youth, teenagers with anti-tank guns, strategically placed in parks and suburban streets. In a battle at Eggersdorf, 70 of these Hitler teens strove to fight off a Russian assault with a mere three anti-tank guns. They were bulldozed by Russian tanks and infantry.

Earth Day, an event to increase public awareness of the world's environmental problems, was celebrated in the United States for the first time on April 22, 1970. Millions of Americans, including students from thousands of colleges and universities, participated in rallies, marches, and educational programs. Earth Day was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, a staunch environmentalist. "The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy," Senator Nelson said, "and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda."

On April 23, 1954, Hank Aaron knocked out the first home run of his Major League Baseball career. Twenty years later, Aaron became baseball's new home run king when he broke Babe Ruth's long-standing record of 714 career homers. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Aaron began his professional baseball career in 1952 in the Negro League and joined the Milwaukee Braves of the major leagues in 1954, eight years after Jackie Robinson had integrated baseball.

At a news conference in Washington on April 24, 1967, Gen. William Westmoreland, senior U.S. commander in South Vietnam, caused controversy by saying that the enemy had "gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily." Though he said that, "Ninety-five percent of the people were behind the United States effort in Vietnam," he asserted that the American soldiers in Vietnam were "dismayed, and so am I, by recent unpatriotic acts at home."

The Soviet Union released a letter, on April 25, 1983, that Russian leader Yuri Andropov wrote to Samantha Smith, an American fifth-grader. This rather unusual piece of Soviet propaganda was in direct response to President Ronald Reagan's vigorous attacks on what he called "the evil empire" of the Soviet Union. Smith had written the Soviet leader as part of a class assignment, one that was common enough for students in the Cold War years. Most of these missives received a form letter response, if any at all, but Andropov answered Smith's letter personally.
On April 26, 1986, the world's worst nuclear power plant accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did the Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred.

The British Parliament passed the Tea Act on April 27, 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and thus granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade. When three tea ships, the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver, arrived in Boston Harbor, the colonists demanded that the tea be returned to England. After Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson refused, Patriot leader Samuel Adams organized the so-called Boston Tea Party with about 60 members of the radical Sons of Liberty. On December 16, 1773, the Patriots boarded the British ships disguised as Mohawk Indians and dumped the tea chests, valued at £18,000, into the water.

On April 28, 1958, "The Witch Doctor" hit the No. 1 spot on Billboard's pop charts. The song used the unusual technique of recording the singer's voice at a different speed than the music. Songwriter and singer Ross Bagdasarian (who recorded under the name David Seville) topped the charts again at the end of the year with "The Chipmunk Song," sung by his chipper cartoon band creation, the Chipmunks.

In Los Angeles, California, on April 29, 1992, four Los Angeles police officers who had been caught beating an unarmed African-American motorist in an amateur video were acquitted of any wrongdoing in the arrest. Hours later, after the verdicts were announced, outrage and protest turned to violence, as rioters in south-central Los Angeles blocked freeway traffic and beat motorists, wrecked and looted numerous downtown stores and buildings, and set more than 100 fires.

Der Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany, burrowed away in a refurbished air-raid shelter, consumed a cyanide capsule, then shot himself with a pistol, on April 30, 1945, as his "1,000-year" Reich collapsed above him. Warned by officers that the Russians were only a day or so from overtaking the chancellery, the dictator chose suicide. It is believed that both he and his wife swallowed cyanide capsules. For good measure, he shot himself with his service pistol. The bodies of Hitler and Eva were cremated in the chancellery garden by the bunker survivors (as per Der Fuhrer's orders) and reportedly later recovered in part by Russian troops. A German court finally officially declared Hitler dead, but not until 1956.

On May 1, 1931, at the White House in Washington, D.C., President Herbert Hoover pushed a button that turned on the lights of New York City's Empire State Building, officially opening the tallest building erected to that date. Standing 102 stories, or 1,454 feet from the top of its lightning rod to its base at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue below, the skyscraper became a world-famous symbol of American ambition and still dominates the Manhattan skyline. Designed by architect William Frederick Lamb, the Empire State Building was constructed during the height of the Great Depression but took just over a year to complete at a cost of only $40 million.