Birthdays: Mary Harris a.k.a. Mother Jones, Marshal Vauban 1633, Benjamin Latrobe, Calamity Jane, Joseph Addison, Kate Smith, Jack Paar, Joseph Heller, Rita Coolidge, Steve Cauthen, Judy Collins, Glen Ford, Ray Parker Jr., Maurice Noble, Fyodor Khytruk, Louis Nye, John Woo, Wes Anderson is 54, Joanna Lumley is 77, Eric Goldberg is 68.
May is named for Maia Majestus, Roman god of flowers, one of the Pleiades, a daughter of Fauna and Vulcan. It’s also the Roman festival for the Bona Dea or the Good Goddess, a deity of fertility.
1373- Dante Alighieri met the love of his life Beatrice at a MayDay party in Florence. Although she married another, he was inspired to write his Divine Comedy to her.
1786- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO premiered in Vienna. So many encores and bows were demanded that the evening went on twice as long.
1898- BATTLE OF MANILA BAY- Admiral Dewey's fleet sank the Spanish fleet when he gives the order to the captain of the USS Olympia :"You may fire when ready, Gridley:" I'm sorry, Bugs Bunny didn't say it first.
1902- Richard Outcault's comic strip Buster Brown and Tige first appeared. Outcault, the creator of the first hit cartoon the Yellow Kid was so famous that as part of his deal to do this strip he negotiated the first back-end deal for a percentage of the merchandise sales.
1914-THE BIRTH OF THE BIG BLUE- Thomas Watson got a job at a little business machine company called CTR, the Calculating Typewriter and Regulating Company. He quickly rose to the top and renamed the company International Business Machine or IBM. When he retired in 1956 it employed 60,000 workers, and was one of largest companies in the world.
1926- Famed black baseball pitcher Satchel Page pitched his first game. His nickname came from Satchel-mouth.
1931- The Empire State Building in New York dedicated. For fifty years it was the worlds tallest office building and King Kong’s hangout. It’s topmost deck was designed to be a dirigible mooring post, but despite several tries, no zeppelin has ever been able to park there. A Goodyear Blimp attempted mooring there in 1976 but the high winds bobbed it around like a bucking bronco. The building was dedicated during the depths of the Great Depression when business was so bad it was nicknamed the 'Empty State Building'.
1935- Lou Gehrig, the Yankee "Iron Man" who had never missed a baseball game, takes himself out of a game because of illness. It is the first sign of the degenerative muscular disease ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, that would soon be called Lou Gehrig's Disease.
1941- Orson Welles film "Citizen Kane" debuted at the Paramount theater (the El Capitan) in Hollywood. At the last minute William Randolph Hearst's friend Louis B. Mayer tried to buy and destroy every print of the film and the Hearst press went crazy attacking it. Hearst spokesperson Louella Parsons threatened "A Beautiful Lawsuit" if the film was not pulled. Despite winning some Oscars, the film didn't do well in its initial release, but it remains one of the greatest films of all time. Orson Welles said later:" The problem I've always had is my movies become classics ten years later."
1964- Scientist John Kemeny at Dartmouth created the computer language BASIC.
1967- Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin casino in Las Vegas.
1989- Walt Disney Feature Animation in Orlando Florida opened. It closed in 2006.
1993- The Florida Animation Union Local 843 chartered.
1997- Frank Gifford, ABC television sportscaster and husband of morning show celebrity Kathy Lee Gifford, was caught on videotape doing the nasty with stewardess Suzie Johnson. She got paid by a tabloid and posed nude for Playboy.
1997- Bebe, the dolphin who played Flipper on the television show, died at age 40.
1999- Spongebob Squarepants premiered on Nickelodeon.
3019TA- Aragorn II was crowned King of Gondor (according to Tolkien)
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