This Day in History: Feb. 14

On this day, Feb. 14 …

1929: “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” - Seven members and associates of Chicago's North Side Gang are gunned down in a hail of bullets resembling a firing squad. Al Capone is widely believed to have ordered the hit but is never officially tied to the killings.

Also on this day:

• 1876: Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray apply separately for patents related to the telephone. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually rules Bell the rightful inventor.)
• 1913: Labor leader Jimmy Hoffa is born in Brazil, Ind.
• 1920: The League of Women Voters is founded by Carrie Chapman Catt in Chicago during the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
• 1931: The original "Dracula" film starring Bela Lugosi is released.
• 1948: NASCAR holds its first race for modified stock cars on a 3.2 mile-course at Daytona Beach, Fla.
• 1954: Sen. John F. Kennedy, D-Mass., appears on "Meet the Press" for the first time.
• 1962: First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy gives a tour of the White House shown on television which 3 out of 4 Americans watch.
• 1967: Aretha Franklin records her cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” at Atlantic Records in New York City.
• 1984: Great Britain's Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean win the Olympic ice skating championship with the free dance performance of Ravel's "Bolero."
• 1989: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of Iran, issues a death sentence on British writer Salman Rushdie for his authorship of the book "Satanic Verses."
• 2005:  A terrorist bomb in West Beirut kills nine, including former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, in an apparent assassination.
• 2013: Oscar Pistorius, who had recently competed in both the Olympics and Paralympics as a runner, is arrested over the shooting death of his model/actress girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. (He is currently serving a 13-year prison term for culpable homicide.)
• 2014: A federal judge in Virginia overturned the state's ban on gay marriage. This decision marks the first time that a gay marriage ban had been overturned in a Southern state.
• 2018: A gunman identified as a former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier.

• 2019: William Barr is sworn in for his second stint as U.S. attorney general.