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 50, Jonathan Taylor-Thomas, Pink is 43, Alvy Ray Smith is 79.
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.
1920 - US Air Mail service begins (NYC to SF)
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.
1939- British film director Alfred Hitchcock began shooting his first Hollywood picture- Rebecca, for David Selznick.
1946 - SF 49ers play their first AAFC game, losing to the NY Yankees 21-7.
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. The show was produced by Lucille Ball’s production company, Desilu. That season Star Trek ranked 52nd in the Nielsen 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 for Sci-Fi. 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
1967 - Surveyor 5 launched; makes a soft landing on Moon, Sept 10.
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”.
1973- Hanna Barbera’s The Superfriends premiered on ABC TV.
1974- Daredevil Evil Knievel in his most famous stunt, jumped the Snake River Gorge in a rocket powered motorcycle.
1979- The decomposing body of actress Jean Seberg (Breathless, Paint Your Wagon), was discovered in the back seat of a car in Paris. She had been missing since Aug. 30th. Today it is assumed she committed suicide. She had been in an affair with a member of the radical Black Panther Party and was under continual harassment by the FBI and other Federal authorities. She was 40.
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 MSNBC TV.
2009- A pair of Queen Victoria’s old underwear was recovered from a private collector and returned to the Royal Collection. Her waist size? 56 inches.
No comments:
Post a Comment