Birthdays: Alex de Tocqueville, Benito Mussolini, Clara Bow, Natalie Wood, Paul Taylor, Sig Romberg, Dag Hammarskjold, Peter Jennings, Michael Spinks, Maria Ouspenskaya, Dave Stevens cartoonist creator of the Rocketeer, Ken Burns is 67, Booth Tarkington, David Warner, Steven Dorff, Professor Irwin Corey, William Cameron-Menzies, William Powell
1890- Near Auvers-sur-Oise, artist Vincent Van Gogh went behind a hay bale and was shot. He lingered for two more days and died of blood poisoning. He was 37. His brother Theo was so distraught he died six months later of a brain disease and melancholia.
For many years everyone believed he committed suicide. Recent scholarship established that van Gogh did not kill himself but tussled with a group of neighborhood children who liked to taunt the “Crazy Man”. A boy named Rene’ Secretan acted like a cowboy and carried a pistol. In the melee’ his pistol went off. Van Gogh later said he did it to himself to spare the children any jail. Decades later as an old man, Rene’ Secretan confessed he fired the fatal shot.
1922- In Kansas City, Walt Disney released his first Laugh-o-Gram short- Little Red Riding Hood.
1931- George Bernard Shaw traveled to Moscow and met Josef Stalin.
1936 - RCA shows the first real TV program: dancing, a short film on locomotives, a Bonwit Teller fashion show & monologue from the Tobacco Road radio comedy show.
1938- Three Missing Links- a Three Stooges comedy with the boys as cave men and Ray Crash Corrigan in a gorilla suit.
1942- Orson Welles left Rio De Janiero after RKO fired him and stopped production of "It's All True". RKO also had “the Magnificent Ambersons” re-cut to a more acceptable 90 minutes and fired the executive producer first who brought him to Hollywood.
1946- In Los Angeles, Jazz great Charlie Parker had learned of the death of his baby daughter back in New York. He showed up for a recording session so drunk and high his producer had to hold him up in front of the mike. Later that night he fell completely apart, ran naked down the street, set fire to his hotel room smoking in bed. The cops had to shake him violently to wake him, he fought with them and they beat him up and threw him in jail. He was committed to the Camarillo Mental Hospital.
1948- Former Disney assistant-animator Hank Ketcham’s comic strip "Dennis the Menace," 1st appeared.
1962- The film “Dr No” premiered, introducing the world to the suave spy James Bond 007. They first considered Cary Grant, David Niven and Patrick McGoohan, James Mason, who all turned them down. So the producers picked young Scots actor Sean Connery. Ian Fleming wrote of the choice, “ Disaster!!”
1965 - Beatles movie "Help" had its Royal World premiere at the London Pavilion in the West End. Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon in attendance. The film actually opened a month later. People said the movie was filmed “in a haze of marijuana smoke” and most people on the film didn’t know what was next as they were writing it as they went along .
1974- Mamas and the Papa's chubby singer Mama Cass Eliot dies of a stroke, not as was widely believed from choking on a sandwich.
1987- Ice cream makers Ben & Jerry announce the flavor Cherry Garcia, named for rock singer Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead.
1989- Hayao Miyazaki’s film Kiki’s Delivery Service premiered in Japan.
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