Birthdays: Jean Pierre Blanchard the balloonist-1753, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Calvin Coolidge, Rube Goldberg, Louis Armstrong*, Edward Walker the inventor of the Lava Lamp, Mayer Lansky, Tokyo Rose, Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Emerson Boozer, Neil Simon, Mitch Miller, Eva Marie Saint is 98, Gina Lollobrigida is 95, George Steinbrenner, Ann Landers, Ron Kovic, Geraldo Rivera, Victoria Abril is 63, Pam Shriver, Rene Laloux, Gloria Stuart, Malia Obama
• Louis Armstrong always claimed his birthday was July 4th 1900, although records show his birth was August 4th 1901.
1855- Henry Davis Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. He was the first U.S. writer to describe nature as a thing of beauty instead of a mortal enemy to be conquered. This date is considered the birth of the American Conservation Movement.
1855- Walt Whitman published his quarto of poems The Leaves of Grass. Many people were shocked at its frank description of sexual desire. Whitman’s mother said: ”Walt is a good boy, but strange.”
1862- Oxford mathematics professor Charles Dodgson rowed ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sister up the Thames in a small punt. The little girls begged him for a story, so Dodgson made up fantastic tales of March Hares, Mad Hatters and the Queen of Hearts.
Dodgson later wrote them down and published them in 1865 as Alice in Wonderland. He used the pen name Lewis Carroll, which was a joke on the fact that Renaissance scholars adopted big stuffy Latin names like Ludovicus Carolus Magnus.
1883- Buffalo Bill staged his first Wild West Show in North Platte Nebraska. Bill and his partners took the show all over the US and played for the crowned heads of Europe until 1916.
1905- Los Angeles developer Abbott Kinney had broken with his partners over the Santa Monica Pleasure Pier. He moved down the coast to some marshy wetlands and built a new community with canals, lagoons and gondolas. The town of VENICE California was dedicated this day. In 1925, the City of LA got rid of most of the canals and gondolas. Venice went on to be a seaside mecca for Beatniks, Hippies and weightlifters like young Arnold Schwarzenegger.
1911- The first rollercoaster on the Pacific Coast opened on Santa Monica Pier.
1914- First day of filming on D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”
1915- Heavyweight Champion Jess Willard who had taken the championship from Jack Johnson was himself beaten by a new kid named Jack Dempsey, the Manassas Mauler.
1926- Hungarian film director Mano Mikhali Kertesz arrived in Hollywood. He changed his name to the more manageable Michael Curtiz and directed great classic films like Captain Blood and Casablanca.
1927-Walt Disney’s Trolley Troubles with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit premiered.
1956- MIT’s TX-1 Whirlwind computer added an adapted typewriter keyboard to enter data. The first computer keyboard.
1966- President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act.
1968- “The Green Berets” premiered. John Wayne financed and produced this attempt to counter the antiwar sentiment sweeping America by creating a pro-war WWII style movie about the Vietnam conflict.
1969-“ Give Peace a Chance.” released by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.
1976- What’s Love Got to Do With It? Singer Tina Turner left Ike Turner.
1976- The Ramones first arrived in England for a tour. They greatly inspired future bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols. When playing at the Palladium the Sex Pistols said they couldn’t get tickets to get in so the Ramones pulled them in through the men’s room window. Hey, Ho, Lets Go!
1981- UPA producer Steve Bosustow passed away.
1982- Jimmy Connors defeated John McEnroe for his final Wimbledon Championship.
1982- Ozzie Ozbourne married Sharon Ozbourne.
1990- 2 Live Crew released the song Banned in the USA.
1997- NASA landed Pathfinder on Mars and deployed Sojourner, the first ever autonomous robotic rover. Expected to function for only two months, the rover collected data on the Red Planet for the next ten years.
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