Birthdays: Fred Astaire, Phil Silvers, Nancy Walker, French royal minister Turgot, Marshal Jean Lannes, Marshal Nicolas Davout, John Wilkes Booth (assassin of Lincoln) Mark David Chapman (assassin of John Lennon), David O. Selznick, Mother Maybelle Carter, Ariel Durant, Jim Abrahams, Nancy Walker, Donovan, Homer Simpson, Gen. Lasalle*, Bono, Kenan Thompson is 43, Paige O’Hara the voice of Belle in Beauty & the Beast.
1928- General Electric started up WG4 Schenectady, the first T.V. Station.
1929- Yankee slugger Babe Ruth signs new contract that paid him more money than President Herbert Hoover. Babe replied, "Well, I had a better year than he had.”
1929- Walt Disney’s short Skeleton Dance premiered. Animated mostly by Mickey Mouse designer Ub Iwerks, it was a breakthrough in tightly done musical sync animation.
1933- Nazis Leader Josef Goebbels holds the first mass book-burning in Berlin. " We consign everything unGerman to the flames." 20,000 works by Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Freud and Einstein are burned.
1963- On the advice of George Harrison and Little Richard, Decca Records signed a new teen band called the Rolling Stones to a recording contract.
1977- Joan Crawford died of cancer and a heart attack. Once the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, now a neglected old recluse. She was 74. Soon after her daughter Christine published the memoir Mommy Dearest, in which she alleged years of abuse and neglect.
1993- 188 young women died in a fire in a toy making factory near Bangkok, Thailand. They were locked into the building by their employer like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire victims in 1911. They were making Bart Simpson dolls for America.
1994- Nelson Mandela inaugurated as first black president of South Africa.
1994- Former children’s party clown and serial killer John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection. Police found 28 children buried around his house. His last words: "Kiss My Ass!"
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