Today in history—April 12

1777: Future Kentucky lawyer and statesman Henry Clay is born at Hanover County, Virginia. One of his lesser-known later accomplishments will be his successful battle against anti-British elements to keep Kentucky a common-law state.

1902: Future Dutch prime minister Louis Beel (Nijmegen Law 1935) is born at Roermond, Limburg.

1908: Vibraphonist Lionel Hampton, the only jazz musician to have a university music department named for him (at the University of Idaho) is born at Louisville, Kentucky.

1937: At the British Thomson-Houston factory in Rugby, England, Sir Frank Whittle ground-tests the first jet engine designed to power an aircraft.

1945: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Columbia Law 1908) dies at Washington, D.C.

1949: Legal fiction writer Scott (One-L) Turow is born at Chicago, Illinois.

1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man to go where only dogs and chimpanzees had previously ventured: outer space.

1989: Abbie (Steal this Book) Hoffman commits suicide by swallowing 150 phenobarbital tables.  Or else he was murdered by the government because he was about to reveal the real truth about Iran-Contra.  Or something.

1992: EuroDisney opens in Marne-la-Vallee, France.

2001: Harvey Ball, the freelance artist who was paid $45 in 1962 to design a morale-boosting pin for the State Mutual Life Assurance Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, dies at age 79.  His creation had by that time become known as the “Smiley Face.”