Harry A. Blackmun is born in Nashville, Illinois. He would spend his early years in St. Paul and return to the area after earning a degree from Harvard Law School. President Richard Nixon would appoint him to the US Supreme Court on April 14, 1970. Blackmun will be remembered for authoring the controversial 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in the United States, and for retracting his support for the death penalty in 1994 by writing, "I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death." He died March 4, 1999.