Milestones: April 26, 2024

April 26, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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A DISASTROUS EXPERIMENT — THE CHERNOBYL NUCLEAR REACTOR DISASTER on April 26, 1986, was caused by an engineer’s experiment that went horribly wrong. A group of engineers at the Chernobyl atomic power station at Pripyat in Ukraine began an electrical engineering experiment on the Number 4 reactor, even though they had scant knowledge of reactor physics. They wanted to see if the reactor’s turbine could run emergency water pumps on inertial power. The result was an explosion and a fire that burned for days, spewing radioactive material into the atmosphere. More than 100,000 persons were evacuated from a 300-square-mile area around the plant. Within three months later 32 people were reported to have died, with thousands more exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. The plant was encased in a concrete tomb in an effort to prevent the still-hot reactor from overheating again and to minimize further release of radiation.

However, Soviet authorities were not quick to admit the accident, and it took Swedish officials to report the fallout before the Soviets reluctantly acknowledged what had happened.

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ASSASSINS DIE BY BULLETS — ONE OF TWO ASSASSINS who did not live long after shooting a U.S. President, John Wilkes Booth, was shot to death while hiding in a barn, some 12 days after assassinating Abraham Lincoln at the Ford Theater. Already a famous actor at the time he shot Lincoln, he was also a strong supporter of the Confederacy and was angered by General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant just days earlier. After shooting Lincoln, Booth broke a leg; the doctor who treated him in his escape to Maryland, Dr. Samuel Mudd, was sentenced to life in prison as the court implicated him in an assassination conspiracy. Booth got as far as Virginia and hid out at a farm owned by a man named Garrett. Union soldiers who had originally bypassed Garrett’s farm returned on a tip and discovered Booth and an accomplice in the barn. When Booth refused to emerge, the barn was set on fire to get him out, but he was shot while still inside.

The other famous presidential assassin, of course, was Lee Harvey Oswald, who killed President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and then a police officer. Oswald, while in police custody, was being transferred two days later when night club owner Jack Ruby shot him in the basement of Dallas police headquarters.

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LOVED PAINTING BIRDS — JOHN JAMES AUDUBON, the naturalist who cataloged and painted America’s bird species, was born April 26, 1785, at what was then Les Cayes, Santo Domingo, now Haiti. Believed to be the illegitimate son of a slave and a French trader and plantation owner, Audubon sought to escape the slave revolts of his native lands and then, having evacuated to France, and to avoid being drafted into Napoleon’s army, he was sent to America. Audubon found international success during the 1820s exploring the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to document and paint all the birds of America. His lively and idiosyncratic paintings made him a great success in America and Europe. His book, “Birds of America”, published in several volumes from 1827 to 1838, is a landmark of both art and printing.

The Audubon Society, formed in 1905 and named for him, focuses not only on birds but also the environment. This non-profit organization, now one of the oldest of its kind in the world, also works to protect the natural habitats of birds and other ecosystems.

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FOREMOST BROOKLYN AUTHOR — BERNARD MALAMUD, born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn on April 26, 1914, became a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and a two-time recipient of the National Book Award. Among his works are “The Natural” (1952), “The Fixer” (1966), and “Idiots First” (1963), a collection of short stories. Malamud was considered one of the best-known American Jewish authors of the 20th century.

His baseball novel, “The Natural”, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford, Glenn Close and Robert Duvall. It was nominated for four Academy Awards.

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OLMSTED’S PARKS — FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED, born on April 26, 1822, became known as “the father of landscape architecture in America.” While also a journalist and author, Olmsted is best known for designing more than 500 public parks and parkways, communities, institutions and private residences. With Calvert Vaux he won the plum job of designing Central Park in New York City. Olmsted also designed Yosemite National Park and, during the Civil War, was director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission.

Olmsted’s parks include three in Brooklyn: the famous Prospect Park, Fort Greene Park and Herbert Von King Park named for a personage known as “the Mayor of Bedford-Stuyvesant.”

See previous milestones, here.