Birthdays: Guy de Maupassant, Amboise Thomas, William- first black child born in British America, Neil Armstrong, John Huston, Robert Taylor, Conrad Aiken, Roman Gabriel, Selma Diamond, Patrick Ewing, Joseph Merrick the Elephant Man, Loni Anderson, John Saxon, Jonathan Silverman is 50
1667- Moliere’s comedy “Tartuffe” first played for the public. The next day the Parliament of Paris ordered the theater closed and its posters ripped down. The Archbishop of Paris threatened excommunication of anyone who saw it or performed it. It seemed the Church didn’t like all the jokes about a con man who steals everything from a family by pretending to be a priest. But King Louis XIV thought it was funny. He overruled the prelates and ordered the play resumed.
1769- Marching up the California coast, Gaspar de Portola discovered the San Fernando Valley. He came down out of the Sepulveda pass, made a left at Ventura Blvd. and went over to the Chumash village by a spring. They called it Encino, Spanish for grove of oaks. The original Indian word for this valley was “Valley of Smoke” because of all the brush fires creating a lingering haze.
1847 -Author Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne. They went for a hike together in the Berkshires.
1921- KDKA Pittsburgh does the 1st radio baseball broadcast Pirates-8, Phillies-0.
1924- Arf, Arf ! the first Little Orphan Annie comic strip drawn by Harold Gray.
1926- Magician Harry Houdini stays in a coffin under water for one hour.
1927- RCA-Victrola record producer Ralph Peer realized there might be a market for “Hillbilly Music”. So he set up a makeshift recording studio above a furniture store in Bristol Tennessee, and put an ad in the local papers for talent. In one day he recorded stars Jimmy Rogers the Singing Brakeman, The Carter Family, The Tennessee Mountaineers and Ernest “Pop” Stoneman. This session has been called the “ Big Bang of Country Music.”
1953- The film “From Here to Eternity” opened, starring Deborah Kerr, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift. But the big story was Frank Sinatra’s Oscar winning performance as Maggio that signaled the turnaround in his slumping career.
1955- The Screen Actor’s Guild strikes Hollywood for television residuals. Their president was Walter Pidgeon who had played Dr. Morbius in Forbidden Planet.
1956- Chuck Jones short Rocket By Baby premiered. “Mot!”
1957- American Bandstand featuring the eternally teenage Dick Clark debuts on television.
1962- Marilyn Monroe found nude in bed, dead of barbiturate overdose. She was 36.
1964 - Actress Anne Bancroft & Comedian Mel Brooks wed.
1966- Caesar’s Palace Hotel & Casino first opened to the public. This was the first of the super-resort casinos, with a total theme park design and three times the space and accommodations of anything yet seen on the Vegas Strip. Its success ushered in an accelerated era of building for Las Vegas casinos.
1967- Bobby Gentry released “Ode to Billy Jo”.
1980- The Osmond Brothers break up.
1984- Welsh actor Richard Burton died of cerebral hemorrhage at 64. With a tumultuous career and two marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, the hard drinking Burton was the most famous English-speaking actor of his day. But unlike Olivier and Gielgud, he was never knighted. The monarchy objected to their portrayal when Burton starred in a TV miniseries on Winston Churchill. Burton was buried with a copy of Dylan Thomas’ poems.
1984- Joan Benoit won the first Women’s Olympic Marathon.
1986 - It's revealed painter Andrew Wyeth had secretly created 240 drawings & paintings of his neighbor Helga Testorf, in Chadds Ford, Pa
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