Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for July 5, 2023

Birthdays: P.T. Barnum, Beatrix Potter, Mrs. Sarah Siddons, Jean Cocteau, Admiral David Farragut, Len Lye, George Pompidou, Shirley Knight, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Milburn Stone (Doc on Gunsmoke), Warren Oates, Bill Watterson, Henry Cabot Lodge IV, Eva Green is 44, Huey Lewis is 73, Edie Falco is 60, Animator-educator Dave Hilberman

1910- Writer O. Henry died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis at 47. His last words were "Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark." He became a writer while serving a jail term for embezzlement.

1930- The Fox Midland Theater held the first meeting of a Mickey Mouse Club. It soon had chapters across the country and became a TV show in the 1950s.

1933- Germans began building the Autobahn, a system of highways that became the envy of the world. The Bauhaus designers of the autobahn invented the ideas we take for granted today- the Cloverleaf Exit, Blending Lanes and the central meridian.

1935- The Wagner Act passed congress, decreeing all American workers have the right to collective bargaining and to form unions. When Walt Disney fired Art Babbitt and caused the DIsney Strike, it was in defiance of the Wagner Act.

1943- Betty Grable married bandleader Harry James.

1954- Elvis Presley recorded "That’s All Right" at Sun Records in Memphis. Some call it the first true Rock & Roll song, but that is disputed by Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Ike Turners Delta 88 and many other R&B hits. “That’s All Right” was written by black bluesman Arthur Big-Boy Crudup, who never profited from the song’s success and died living in a shack.

1954- Tomoyuki Tanaka announced the beginning of production on the movie Godzilla.

1975- Tennis player Arthur Ashe became the first African-American to win Wimbledon.

1989- The first episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld.

1994- In Bellevue Washington, a man named Jeff Bezos started a company named Cadabra. Shortly after he changed its name to Amazon. 

2002- International Professional Women’s Tennis had become dominated by two amazing American sisters, Venus and Serena Williams. This day Serena defeated Venus to win Wimbledon. Of 17 Wimbledon Women’s singles since, the Williams sisters won 14 of them.