This Day in History: Monday, April 18, 2022

Television
In 1966, “The 38^th Annual Academy Awards” was the first Oscars ceremony to be broadcast in color. The winner that year for Best Picture was “The Sound of Music”…“Real People,” a combination of comedy, reality and talk, debuted on NBC in 1979. It aired for five seasons and the regular hosts included Sarah Purcell, Byron Allen, John Barbour, Skip Stephenson, Bill Rafferty, Mark Russell, Peter Billingsley and Fred Willard.

News
An earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, shook the town of San Francisco, California in 1906. Thirty thousand homes were either partially or wholly destroyed and an estimated 3,000 are reported dead. The earthquake set off a series of fires which swept through the city.

Sports
The first baseball game was played at Yankee Stadium in New York City in 1923, with the Yankees beating the Boston Red Sox 4-1.

Periodicals
In 1924, Simon and Schuster, Inc. published the first “Crossword Puzzle Book.“

Celebrity Birthdays
Actor James Woods is 75; Ventriloquist Jeff Dunham is 60; Conan O’Brien is 59; actress Melissa Joan Hart (“Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”) is 46; reality star Kourtney Kardashian is 43; “Superstore” star America Ferrara is 38.

-Did You Know?:
The fictional “Cloud 9” retail store on NBC’s “Superstore” has also been featured on comedy “The Mindy Project” and NBC’s recently introduced “Good Girls.”