Leonard Bloomfield died (18-4-1949)

His birthday (1-4-1887) was noted  during my 2018 Linguistic Birthdays sequence. He was still very influential in linguistics when I began to learn about it in the 1960s, particularly for his book _Language_ (1933).
Crystal has a quote from Chapter 2 of that book:
"The most difficult step in the study of language is the first step. Again and again, scholarship has approached the study of language without actually entering upon it. Linguistic science arose from relatively practical preoccupations, such as the use of writing, the study of literature and especially of older records, and the prescription of elegant speech, but people can spend any amount of time on these things without actually entering into linguistic study."