Birthdays: Czarina Catherine the Great, Domenico Scarlatti, Manfred Von Richthofen the Red Baron, Bing Crosby, Dr. Benjamin Spock the Baby Doctor, Vernon Castle, Lorenzo Music, Theodore Bikel, Lesley Gore, Roscoe Lee Browne, Satyajit Ray, Pinky Lee, Link Wray of the Wraymen, Christine Baranski, Doug Wildey, Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock is 51, animator Marty Abrahams.
1519- Leonardo Da Vinci died of a stroke at the Chateau d’Amboise in the arms of King Francis I. He had accepted the offer of the French King of a stable retirement (even then artists worried about that kinda stuff). He was 67.
1885- First Good Housekeeping Magazine.
1920 –The Negro National League, the first successful all-Black baseball league, held its first game in Indianapolis. The league was founded earlier that same year by legendary baseball player, Andrew "Rube" Foster, and featured teams such as the Chicago American Giants, Chicago Giants, Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos, Indianapolis ABCs, Kansas City Monarchs and St. Louis Giants in its first season.
1921- Chicago’s Field Museum opened to the public. It was housed in the building originally called the Hall of Fine Arts in the Great Chicago Exhibition of 1893.
1932- Jack Benny's Radio Show debuts. Oh Rochester! Mel Blanc the voice of Bugs Bunny did many characters and voices on the show, including the sputtering engine of Jacks’ old Maxwell automobile. He didn't start doing voices for Looney Tunes until 1935.
1933- The first modern sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. The Inverness Courier published an account of a couple that sighted Nessie and offered a reward for proof.
1964- Disney’s audio-animatronic Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln opened at the NY World’s Fair.
1972- First day shooting on Steven Spielberg’s film JAWS. The giant mechanical shark used as a prop was nicknamed "Bruce" after Spielberg’s lawyer.
1982- The 24 hour Weather Channel started.
1983- Microsoft introduced the three-button mouse.
1999- Actor Oliver Reed was filming the movie Gladiator in Malta with Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott. Reed, like many British actors of his generation was a very hard drinker. Some like Richard Harris and Anthony Hopkins managed to pull themselves out of their spiral and went on to full careers in later life. But Oliver Reed did not. This day in a local pub, he got into a drinking contest with several young English sailors from HMS Cumberland. At one sitting Oliver Reed drank 8 pints of beer, a dozen shots of rum, half a bottle of whiskey and a few shots of Hennessey cognac. Then when arm wrestling the sailors, he suffered a massive heart attack and dropped dead. Oliver Reed was 61. Ridley Scott had to use computer imaging to complete his remaining scenes in the film.
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