Birthdays: Lorenzo De Medici” the Magnificent”, Pope Alexander VI Borgia, Paul Revere, Betsy Ross, Mad Anthony Wayne, E.M. Forrester, J. Edgar Hoover, Alfred Stieglitz, Xavier Cugat, Barry Goldwater, Kuniyoshi Utagawa, Chesley Bonestell, Dana Andrews, Idi Amin, Kliban, Verne Troyer (Mini-Me), Frank Langella is 85
1677- Racines greatest play “Phedre” premiered at the Theatre du Bourgogne in Paris. Phedre is the role all French actresses aspire to, the way English speaking actors dream of doing Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
1788- THE LONDON TIMES is born. Daily newspapers had appeared in Europe in the early 1600s. Publisher John Walters had started a small one sheet in 1785 called the Daily Universal Register. In 1788 he changed the name to the simpler "The Times" and created the format for newspapers around the world for centuries to come. The Walters family ran the newspaper for 125 years and Walters even had to edit it for two years while serving a prison term for libel.
1839- Twelve years after Franz Schubert's death composer Robert Schumann was rooting around in an old trunk at his friend's house when he discovered the score for Schubert's Great C Major Symphony. That is why this Symphony is called # 9 when the Unfinished Symphony is called #8.
1863- Poet Walt Whitman visited Washington D.C., but passed on a chance to meet Abraham Lincoln. Whitman was looking for his brother, and the New Years reception line in front of the White House was just too long to bother. Whitman reasoned Lincoln was young and running for a second term. So there would be plenty occasions to meet him later...
1881- The Eastman Kodak Company formed. Kodak supposedly was named from the sound of the snapping camera shutter. Ko-DAK!
1888- Johannes Brahms met Peter Tchaikovsky. The two musical giants shared a birthday, but otherwise they disliked each other, and hated each other’s music. Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary about Brahms, “What an unharmonious German bastard he is!” Usually Anton Bruckner could get them together. This night the two met for dinner with violinist Josef Brodsky after a rehearsal and had quite a pleasant time together. As he left the house that night, Anna Brodsky asked Tchaikovsky if he liked what he had heard during the rehearsal. “Don’t be angry with me, my dear friend,” he answered, “but I did not like it.”
1890- The First Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena California.
1914- The Archbishop of Paris threatened with excommunication young people who dance the Tango. "It's lascivious nature offends morality."
1939- Vladimir Zworkin patented the Iconoscope (the eye of a TV camera) and Kinescope. The television process evolved over so many years -there were experimental TV stations in 1923 and the Berlin Olympics of 1936 were televised. So you can't really point to one Tom Edison type inventor, although Zworkin, Englishman James Logie Baird in 1924, Philo Farnsworth, and Dr. Lee DeForest all at one time tried to take the full credit.
1942- Because of the fear of a Japanese attack on the California coastline, the Rose Bowl that year was played in North Carolina.
1943- Walt Disney's Donald Duck cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face premiered. Originally titled Donald Duck in NutziLand, it was changed to match to the song after Spike Jones recorded it.
1953- Country music star Hank Williams had spent New Years drinking whiskey and doing chloral hydrate. When a West Virginia policeman pulled over his car, he remarked to the driver that his passenger looked dead. The driver said he was just sleeping and drove on. 29 year old Hank Williams was dead. His last recorded song was “I’ll never get out of this World Alive.”
1959- The Chipmunk Song by David Seville (aka Ross Bagdassarian) tops the pop charts..
1960- The Radio and Television Director's Guild merge with the Screen Directors Guild to form the DGA.
1963- Tetsuwan Atomu or Atom Boy, an animated television show by Osamu Tezuka premiered on Japanese TV. As Astro Boy it became the first Japanese anime show to break into the mainstream American market.
1966- Ailing Walt Disney served as Grand Marshal for the Tournament of Roses Parade. Standing in the crowd on the curb with his mother was 8 year old John Lasseter.
1976- Potheads sneak up to the Hollywood Sign and change the two “O’s to “E’s so the sign read HOLLYWEED.
1980- The debut of Gary Larson's surreal single panel comic strip "The Far Side". Larson has recently revived it online.
1984- By court order, the phone system AT&T also called The Bell System, which had dominated telephone communication exclusively since Alexander Graham Bell, was ordered broken up into 22 regional companies, the Baby Bells. The explosion of telecommunications, smart phones, blackberries, and bigger phone bills result.
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