Birthdays: Richard the Lionhearted, Michel Caravaggio, Antonin Dvorak, Patsy Cline, Jimmy Rogers the Singing Brakeman, Peter Sellars, Sid Caesar, Freddy Mercury, Lyndon LaRouche, Ewell Gibbons- natural food advocate, Heather Thomas, David Arquette is 48, Jonathan Taylor-Thomas, Pink is 41, Alvy Ray Smith is 77
1504- Michelangelo unveiled his completed statue of David. The project had humble origins. The Florentine Republic had commissioned a statue from another artist who gave up after gouging a large hole in a huge block of pure Carrara marble. Stuck with the block, magistrates asked Michelangelo if he could do anything with it. Michelangelo carved the David positioning the hole where the legs stand spread.
1892- Writer Francis Bellamy published "The Pledge of Allegiance" in the Youth's Companion magazine as a vehicle to instill a sense of Patriotism in America's youth. Bellamy was a socialist
1921 - 1st Miss America crowned -Margaret Gorman of Washington DC.
1926- Screen actress Greta Garbo skipped her own wedding and left John Gilbert alone at the altar. They still stayed lovers and lived together.
1930 - Richard Drew creates Scotch tape.
1935-A vocal group called "4 Joes from Hoboken" get their first break on Major Bo's radio show. One of the singers is a young man named Frank Sinatra.
1935- Top Hollywood musical director Buzby Berkeley (42nd Street, Footlight Parade) got drunk at a party in Malibu and drove his Cadillac head on into oncoming traffic on Pacific Coast Highway near where Gladstones Fish Restaurant is today. He piled into three other cars. Berkeley was unhurt but three people died and four were injured. After three trials for 2nd degree murder Berkeley was found innocent. The reason star defense attorney Jerry Geisler gave was “cancerous tires”. Later it was revealed that all the tire experts who testified for the defense were on the Warner Bros. payroll.
1939- British film director Alfred Hitchcock began shooting his first Hollywood picture- Rebecca, for David Selznick.
1954- Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
1960- Penquin Books was charged with obscenity for the first large public paperback printing of D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady's Chatterley's Lover'.
1965 - Dorothy Dandridge, beautiful black actress (Island in the Sun), dies at 41 in
Hollywood of sleeping pills overdose.
1966- STAR TREK debuts. LA policeman turned screenwriter Gene Roddenberry pitched it to Desilu Productions as, “Wagon Train in Outer Space.” The first episode “ The Man Trap” aired tonight. That season it ranked 52nd in the Neilsen ratings, behind #1 "Iron Horse" starring Dale Robertson, and "Mr. Terrific". It was canceled after two seasons but a letter writing campaign won it a third season. Star Trek then found a new life in syndication.
The cult fan base called Trekkies kept the memory of the show alive for ten years until Paramount felt compelled to revive it to cash in on the Star Wars-Close Encounters craze. First as a Filmation animated series, and then from 1979 a series of feature films, then spin-offs.
Frank Sinatra once said: "The only good thing to come out of the 1960s was Star Trek."
1966 - "That Girl" starring Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell premieres on ABC-TV
1971- Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center opened. It was planned in the early sixties by John and Jackie Kennedy, although then unaware that their name would be on it. The performance featured the debut of Leonard Bernstein’s choral work “Mass”.
1974- Daredevil Evil Knieval in his most famous stunt, jumped the Snake River Gorge in a rocket powered motorcycle.
1979- Jean Seberg, actress (Breathless, Airport), committed suicide at 40. She had been in love with a member of the radical Black Panther Party and was under continual harassment by the FBI and other Federal authorities.
1986- The Chicago based television talk show the Oprah Winfrey Show went national and became one of the most successful talk shows ever.
2008- The Rachael Maddow Show premiered on TV.
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