A cloud was over the sun. It was not like any cloud they had ever seen before. It was a cloud of something like snowflakes, but they were larger than snowflakes, and thin and glittering. Light shone through each flickering particle.
 
There was no wind. The grasses were still and the hot air did not stir, but the edge of the cloud came on across the sky faster than wind. …
 
Plunk! Something hit Laura’s head and fell to the ground. She looked down and saw the largest grasshopper she had ever seen.Then huge brown grasshoppers were hitting the ground all around her, hitting her head and her face and her arms. They came thudding down like hail.
 
The cloud was hailing grasshoppers. The cloud was grasshoppers. Their bodies hid the sun and made darkness. Their thin, large wings gleamed and glittered. The rasping whirring of their wings filled the whole air and they hit the ground and the house with the noise of a hailstorm.
 
Laura tried to beat them off. Their claws clung to her skin and her dress. They looked at her with bulging eyes, turning their heads this way and that. Mary ran screaming into the house. Grasshoppers covered the ground, there was not one bare bit to step on. Laura had to step on grasshoppers and they smashed squirming and slimy under her feet.—Laura Ingalls Wilder

The largest recorded swarm of locusts descended on the Midwest on this date in 1875. It was the Rocky Mountain locust (above), a form of grasshopper, and the cloud, an unending stream of locusts searching for food in the midst of a western drought, was larger than California: 1800 miles long and 110 miles wide, and it stretched from southern Canada to north Texas.
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Because the game of baseball is played differently nowadays at the major league level, it is more difficult for pitchers to accumulate as many opportunities for wins as they once could.

Starting pitchers one hundred years ago pitched once every three games, for instance. Now, they pitch every fifth game or so. The greatest starters in the most recent era each accumulated about 350 or so career victories. Thus, Cy Young’s career baseball achievement of 511 victories looks like a schoolboy’s scribbled fantasy. Walter Johnson’s second place record of 417 also looks superhuman.

On this date in 1910, Cy Young (above) won his third game of the season; it was his 500th career win. There is a reason why the two annual awards for pitcher of the year are named the “Cy Young” awards.
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John Glenn (above) is 95 today. The last member of the Mercury Seven, America’s first astronaut corps, he is also the oldest living former U.S. Senator, and—with his October 1998 mission as a payload specialist on Discovery mission STS-95 at age 77—he remains the oldest person to have traveled in space.

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Douglas Corrigan was supposed to fly from Brooklyn, New York, to California on July 17, 1938. However, he probably always intended to fly in the opposite direction, to Europe, taking his self-built plane on a solo transatlantic flight. (His plane had been rejected for a cross-ocean flight because it was deemed not flight-worthy for such a long trip with no place to land in case of emergency.)
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