Birthdays: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Jack "King" Kirby. George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham- minister of James I, Sean O'Flagherty, Donald O'Connor, Charles Boyer, Karl Boehm, Bruno Bettleheim, Disney designer Ferdinand Horvath, Ben Gazzara, Janet Evans, Ron 'Louisiana Lightning' Guidry, Nancy Kulp, Daniel Stern, Shania Twain, anim historian Charles Solomon, Jack Black is 54, Rita Coolidge is 62.
1837 - Pharmacists John Leah & William Perrin invented Worcestershire Sauce. A gentleman returning from the Raj asked them to recreate a favorite Indian condiment from a recipe he gave them. The initial result proved inedible. The bottles lay forgotten in their cellar for a few years. Upon rediscovery, it proved to have matured into the wonderful comestible that we enjoy today.
1850- Lohengrin, the first opera written by Richard Wagner, premiered in Weimar. The Third Act chorus “Treulich Gefuhrt” became famous for weddings as “Here Comes the Bride, All Dressed in White”. Wagner asked his friend Franz Liszt to produce the opera because he was in exile for his political views. Wagner himself did not see Lohengrin performed until 1861.
1938- Northwestern University conferred an honorary degree upon the ventriloquist puppet Charlie McCarthy- Edgar Bergen’s famed ventriloquist dummy. The Dean of the School of Speech conferred a Master of Innuendo and Snappy Comeback upon the wooden celebrity.
1951- Robert Walker was a boyishly handsome actor who had played in a number of successful Hollywood movies like The Clock, Bataan, See Here Private Hargrove and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. This day a combination of amobarbital and alcohol caused him to suddenly collapse and stop breathing. He was 32. Accounts differ as to his mental state at the time, and whether his psychiatrist compelled him to take the injection of the sedative that brought about his seizure. His son Robert Walker Jr went on to a successful acting career on things like Star Trek. He died in 2019 of natural causes.
60th Anniv 1963- Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the climax of the first ' Poor People's March 'on Washington”. Organizer A. Phillip Randolph conceived a poor people’s march taking weeks not unlike the Bonus Marchers of 1929. The sympathetic John F. Kennedy administration prevailed upon them to keep it to one day to reduce the chance of violence and maximize media exposure. They had planned for 100,000 but they got 400,000. Movie stars like Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, James Garner, Paul Newman and Charlton Heston attended.
1990- Computer pioneer Sandy Lerner was fired from the company she founded- Cisco Systems.
2020- Actor Chadwick Boseman, who played T’Chala in The Black Panther, died of colon cancer at age 43.
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