Today in history–February 20

1792: President Washington signs a bill creating the Post Office Department.

1848: Railroad tycoon Edward Henry Harriman is born to an Episcopal minister and his wife at Long Island, New York.

1872: Funded by wealthy New York merchants, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens at 681 Fifth Avenue.

1872: Inventor Luther Childs Crowell of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, receives a patent for the flat-bottomed paper bag, the kind still in use today.

1893: Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, president of the New Orleans, Jackson & Mississippi Railroad and manager of the famed Louisiana Lottery, dies at New Orleans.  Oh, and he fought in the American Civil War.

1924: Jeans maven Gloria Laura Vanderbilt is born, the daughter of a railroad heir and a Swiss-Chilean socialite, at New York City.  She will not design the jeans that bear her name, but they will sell anyway.

1943: U.S. movie studios agree to allow film censorship by President Roosevelt’s Office of War Information.

1972: The man who invented modern journalism, Walter Winchell, dies in Los Angeles.  “I usually get my stuff from people who promised somebody else that they would keep it a secret.”

1986: Pitcher Orel Hershiser of the Los Angeles Dodgers becomes the first baseball player to win a $1 million salary in arbitration.

1993: Ferruccio Lamborghini, the former Italian army mechanic who starting a business converting war-surplus equipment into farm tractors, and who went on to found his own luxury car company, dies at age 76.