Birthdays: Mary Shelley, Jacques Louis David, Huey Long, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Massey, Ted Williams, John Blondell, Nancy Kulp, Timothy Bottoms, Jean-Claude Killy, Shirley Booth, John Landis, Tug McGraw, R. Crumb is 77, Lewis Black is 72, Cameron Diaz is 48
1873- The Royal Canadian Mounted Police- The Mounties formed.
1867- At the University of Göttingen, Albert Niemann isolated the chemical elements of the Columbian coca plant and named the powdery substance Cocaine.
1935- “Top Hat” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers premiered.
1936- First newspaper comic strip entirely devoted to Donald Duck.
1939- The last peacetime voyage of the HMS Queen Mary evacuated Americans fleeing the impending war in Europe. Among the crowd was a large contingent of Hollywood stars like Bob Hope and Jack Warner who planned to attend the first Cannes Film Festival (postponed until 1946). The Queen Mary kept radio silence across the ocean to hide from U-Boats. This was a wise, because her sister ship HMS Athenia was torpedoed.
1942- Cartoonist Al Kapp premiered his comic strip “ Fearless Fosdick”, a spoof of Dick Tracy detective stories.
1968- The first 7-11 store opened in Palmdale California. Have a Slurpee !
1975- Ralph Bakshi's film "Coonskin". Bad boy Bakshi's portrayal of African-American urban violence was deemed so offensive that it caused the first ever riot at the Museum of Modern Art, and it died at the box office. The film was retitled on video "Streetfight".
When Ralph resurfaced, he turned his attention to Sword & Fantasy films.
1979- President Jimmy Carter claimed that while boating on vacation in Georgia he was attacked by an enraged rabbit.
1980- Willie Nelson released his hit song “On the Road Again.”
1993- The David Letterman Show premiered on CBS. Letterman was wooed away from NBC for $42 million bucks.
2012- At the Republican Presidential convention, venerable 80 year old filmmaker Clint Eastwood made a fool out of himself by improvising a rambling dialogue with an empty chair that he meant to be the absent Pres. Obama. Eastwood was supposed to introduce candidate Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech, but his bizarre performance upstaged anything Romney said. This followed the keynote speech by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who talked only about himself for 16 minutes before he ever mentioned Romney. For this and many other reasons, Romney lost by a landslide.
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