Birthdays: Roman general Pompey Magnus, Miguel de Cervantes, Admiral Horatio Nelson, Rudolph Diesel (inventor of the engine), Enrico Fermi, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Autrey, Lech Walesa, Stanley Kramer, Bryant Gumbel, Greer Garson, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ian McShane, Anita Ekberg, Andrew Dice-Clay, cartoonist Russ Heath, Tom Sizemore, Emily Lloyd is 51, Silvio Berlusconi, Stephanie Miller is 59
1913-Rudolph Diesel, inventor of the Diesel engine, celebrated his 55th birthday by jumping off his yacht into the English Channel and drowning himself.
1930-Ninety year old writer George Bernard Shaw turned down the offer of a Peerage.
1930- First day of shooting on the Tod Browning horror classic Dracula. Hungarian actor and morphine addict Bela Lugosi played the lead role he had already made famous on stage. Lugosi was identified with the character Dracula for the rest of his life. When he died, he was buried in the Dracula cape.
1933- The movie A Bill of Divorcement introduced the star Katherine Hepburn.
1953- The television show “Make Room for Daddy” premiered, making a star out of big nosed nightclub entertainer Danny Thomas. The Lebanese Thomas had tried to break into films with no luck. He burst into tears after Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn suggested he get a nose job and forget about it. Danny Thomas at one time was the richest man in Beverly Hills.
1959- Hanna Barbera's "Quick Draw McGraw" TV show. Baba Louie and El Kabong!
1961- Russian ballet star Rudolph Nureyev, acclaimed as the greatest dancer of his age, defected to the west in Paris and was granted asylum.
1967- The cult TV series The Prisoner premiered.
1969- The TV series Love American Style premiered.
1969- Country singer Merle Haggard released the song “I’m Proud to be an Oakie from Muskogee”. It was a huge hit on the country charts, but more than that, it was a conservative declaration of cultural war of against the urban-hippy, rock & roll counterculture that dominated American media at the time. It crystalized rural anger into an already polarized American public.
1975- The legendary R&B singer Jackie Wilson, collapsed of a heart attack while performing on stage for Dick Clark’s ‘Good Ol’ Rock and Roll Revue’ at the Latin Casino in Cherry Hill, N.J. He lingered in an out of a coma for 8 years, dying in 1984. He was only 49. All the time he was comatose, Dick Clark covered all his medical bills, and kept it a secret. This wasn’t revealed until Clark himself died in 2012.
1976- At his birthday party musician rocker Jerry Lee Lewis accidentally shot his bass player Norman Owens in the chest with his 357 magnum. He said he was using the gun to try and open a soft drink bottle and it accidentally went off. Owens survived and sued Lewis.
1996- The first Nintendo 64 bit game system, The NES, debuted in the US. It sold 500,000 the first day.
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