National Chocolate Chip Day
Police Officer’s Memorial Day
1004 – Henry II (the Saint) crowned King of Italy on May 15, 1004. He was King of Germany in 1002 and was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1014.
1252 – Pope Innocent IV issued the papal bull Ad ex tirpanda, which authorized, but also limited, the torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition.
Robert Walpole became England first prime minister on May 15, 1730.
In 1791 Maximilien Robespierre proposed the “Self-denying Ordinance”. The National Constituent Assembly dissolved itself on 30 September 1791. Upon Robespierre’s motion it decreed that none of its members should be capable of sitting in the next legislature; this is known as the Self-Denying ordinance, early French version of Term Limits.
Birthday of Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856), American writer, author of “Wizard of Oz”.
Birthday of Ellen Axson Wilson ( (May 15, 1860), wife of Woodrow Wilson, first lady in 1913 to her death in 1914.
1862 – Union Grounds, Brooklyn, first baseball enclosure, opens. Union Grounds was a baseball park located in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. The grounds opened in 1862, its inaugural match being played on May 15. It was the first baseball park enclosed entirely by a fence, thereby allowing proprietor William Cammeyer or his tenant to charge admission. This permitted paying customers to watch the games from benches in a stand while non-paying spectators could only watch from embankments outside the grounds.
1905 – Las Vegas, Nevada founded. It was named “The Meadows” because the valley contained artesian wells that supported extensive green areas or meadows.
1912 – Ty Cobb rushes a heckler at a NY Highlander game and is suspended.
Per Wikipedia:
“On May 15, 1912, Cobb assaulted a heckler, Claude Lueker, in the stands in New York’s Polo Grounds where his Tigers were playing the Highlanders. Lueker and Cobb had traded insults with each other through the first three innings, and the situation climaxed when Lueker called Cobb a “half-nigger.” Cobb, in his discussion of the incident in the Holmes biography, avoided such explicit words but alluded to Lueker’s epithet by saying he was “reflecting on my mother’s color and morals.” He went on to state that he warned Highlander manager Harry Wolverton that if something wasn’t done about that man, there would be trouble. No action was taken. At the end of the sixth inning, after being challenged by teammates Sam Crawford and Jim Delahanty to do something about it, Cobb climbed into the stands and attacked Lueker, who it turns out was handicapped (he had lost all of one hand and three fingers on his other hand in an industrial accident). When onlookers shouted at him to stop because the man had no hands, he reportedly retorted, “I don’t care if he got no feet!””
When Cobb was suspended, the rest of the Detroit Tigers’ team went on strike to protest the lack of protection of players from abusive fans. This eventually led to the formation of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association.
1918 – First airmail postal service inaugurated with service from New York to Philadelphia and to Washington, D.C. The first U.S. airmail stamp cost 24 cents. Domestic airmail became obsolete in 1975 and international air-mail in 1995.
1940 – McDonald’s opens its first restaurant in San Bernardino, California.
The first Arab-Israeli War of 1948: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq & Saudi-Arabia troops attack Israel.
1960 – Sputnik 4 launched into Earth orbit; later recovery failed.
1969 – Associate Justice Abe Fortas was forced to resign from Supreme Court due to ethics violations. He had been appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.
May 15, 1972, assassination attempt on US Governor George Wallace of Alabama by Arthur Bremer in Laurel, Md. Wallace was shot five times, one of the bullets lodging in his spinal cord. Wallace was paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. He died in 1998. Arthur Bremer’s motivation was fame, not politics. He was imprisoned until 2007 at which time he was released.
1972 – The island of Okinawa, under U.S. military governance since its conquest in 1945, reverts to Japanese control.
1973 –Nolan Ryan pitches his first no-hitter. He had seven in his active career.