Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on April 9, according to the Tribune’s archives.
Is an important event missing from this date? Email us.
Front page flashback: April 10, 1865
1865: The Tribune reported “THE END.” Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia.
Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago)
- High temperature: 80 degrees (1887)
- Low temperature: 20 degrees (1989)
- Precipitation: 1.49 inches (1882)
- Snowfall: 2 inches (2018)
1926: Former Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins wrote the play “Chicago.”
1941: For 26 months, Brookfield Zoo keepers gave Nancy the elephant extra rest, a special diet and even held a baby shower, thinking she was pregnant.
On this day they declared she wasn’t. “She gained 600 pounds but only because she was fed so well,” the Tribune reported.
1947: Contrary to widespread belief, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls did not win Chicago’s first pro basketball title. The Chicago American Gears — featuring George Mikan and Bobby McDermott — did it by winning the National Basketball League playoffs in the Professional Basketball League of America over the Rochester Royals.
The Gears were cruising when the league declared bankruptcy and evaporated the next November. Thus the title of former Gear Dick Triptow’s book, “Dynasty That Never Was.” Megabucks contracts did not destroy the NBL. Mikan signed what was considered a gigantic contract at $12,000 per year. Most players played for $5,000 or less. Gears tickets at Cicero Stadium or the Amphitheater ranged from 95 cents to $1.85. Players earned bonuses of $6 per basket and $3 per free throw or assist in winning games.
1993: Bo Jackson hit a home run in his first at-bat for the Chicago White Sox after hip replacement surgery.
1994: National anthem singer Wayne Messmer was shot in the neck after leaving Hawkeye’s Bar and Grille on Taylor Street in Chicago. While he would recover, doctors were worried if he would recover his voice.
Just six months later, Messmer was joined by his wife, Kathleen, in once again singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the debut of the Chicago Wolves hockey team. Messmer, the team’s executive vice president, said, “No one can imagine how I felt.”
1997: Bronislaw “Bruno” Hajda, a retired machinist from Schiller Park, was stripped of U.S. citizenship for lying to immigration authorities in the 1950s about serving as a guard at Nazi concentration camp Treblinka in Poland during World War II.
After a federal appeals court affirmed the decision, Hajda was ordered deported in November 1998.
2015: Two people were killed in one of the strongest tornadoes to hit northern Illinois in more than two decades, and that tornado, which hit and virtually obliterated the town of Fairdale, population 150, was one of two tornadoes to carve through part of northern Illinois.
Fairdale residents return home after tornado: ‘It’s just heartbreaking’
The more powerful of the two packed winds of 180 to 200 mph, weather service meteorologists said the following day in Rochelle, which also suffered significant damage. As an EF-4, the tornado was one notch below the strongest classification on the Enhanced Fujita Scale. The worst damage was in tiny Fairdale, where neighbors Geraldine Schultz, 67, and Jacklyn K. Klosa, 69, were killed. A total of 11 people suffered injuries serious enough to be taken to area hospitals.
2017: United Airlines passenger David Dao was forcibly removed from an overbooked flight at O’Hare International Airport by airport police.
Dao, of Elizabethtown, Kentucky, and his wife were flying home to Louisville, Kentucky, through O’Hare after a vacation in California. Dao was one of four passengers told to leave a full flight to make room for four airline employees. When he refused, he was dragged from the plane and suffered a significant concussion, a broken nose, a sinus injury and lost two front teeth, his attorney Thomas Demetrio said.
When legislators summoned airline executives and industry leaders to appear before Congress a month later, some blamed the uproar over the Dao incident for rising tension between passengers and crew. Lawmakers complained about practices like overbooking and increasingly crowded cabins that left passengers feeling more like cargo than customers, while industry groups worried flyers would feel entitled to flout the rules.
But by that time, Chicago-based United had reached an undisclosed settlement agreement with Dao.
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