April 26, 1879: Madame Nordica (1857-1914) takes nine curtain calls after a stunningly successful performance in Verdi’s “La Traviata” at Brescia, Italy, during the opening phase of her long singing career. The singer, who spent the first eight years of her life in Farmington, Maine, as Lillian Norton, changed her name to make it more […]

April 25, 1906: Portland-born John Knowles Paine, one of the first Americans to achieve recognition for large-scale orchestral music, dies at 67 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Paine’s father owned a music store, led a Portland band and published music. The son also drew inspiration from Hermann Kotzschmar (1829-1908), a German musician, conductor and composer who settled […]

April 24, 1816: Four hundred to 500 people show up at the courthouse in Augusta in response to an invitation to attend a convention, moderated by Judge Daniel Cony (1752-1842), an Augusta physician and Revolutionary War veteran, about a proposal to separate Maine from Massachusetts. The crowd, composed of residents of Kennebec, Lincoln and Somerset […]

April 23, 1945: Two weeks before the German surrender in World War II, the USS Eagle PE-56, a Navy patrol vessel taking part in a bomber training exercise 5 miles off the coast of Cape Elizabeth, explodes and sinks. The incident kills 54 of the Eagle’s 67 crew members. A passing Navy vessel picks up […]

April 22, 1922: WMB, a radio station owned by the Auburn Electrical Co., makes Maine’s first radio broadcast by transmitting an Arbor Day speech. The station, one of only 24 government-licensed stations in the nation, goes off the air after a few years. April 22, 1976: A bomb explodes at the Suffolk County Courthouse in […]

April 21, 1951: Maine singer-songwriter David Mallett, who has released more than a dozen albums, is born in the Piscataquis County town of Sebec. One of his early compositions, “Garden Song,” is recorded by John Denver, Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, and many other acts. Mallett begins performing at the age of 11 in […]

April 20, 1775: Sixty militiamen from the town of York begin marching to Massachusetts to confront the British after receiving news about the opening battles of the Revolutionary War at Lexington and Concord. Other groups of fighters from Biddeford, Scarborough and Falmouth soon follow them, but all are turned back because they no longer are […]

April 19, 2013: Associate Justice Donald G. Alexander of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court  rules that former celebrity lawyer F. Lee Bailey of Yarmouth is “almost fit to practice law, except for an outstanding tax debt of nearly $2 million,” essentially clearing a path for Bailey to return to the profession. The Maine Board of […]

April 18, 1983: Foreshadowing her gold-medal triumph the following year at the Los Angeles Summer Olympics, Cape Elizabeth native Joan Benoit wins the Boston Marathon for the second time and notches a women’s world-record – 2:22:43. Greg Meyer of Michigan wins the men’s race that year, finishing at 2:09:00. After that, through 2020, only one […]

April 17, 2014: Aerospace engineer John C. Houbolt, who convinced NASA to use the lunar-orbit rendezvous method to land American astronauts on the moon, dies at 95 in Scarborough, where he has been living in retirement. Houbolt, who grew up in Iowa and Illinois, was the key figure in a rancorous, protracted behind-the-scenes debate in […]