Birthdays: Roman Emperor Vitellius, Duke Albrecht Wallenstein, Chief Justice John Marshall, Francis Scott Key, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Raft, Chief Joseph, Sheila MacCrae, Anthony Newley. Phil Hartman, Mean Joe Greene, Billy Bletcher the voice of Pegleg Pete, Pedro Almodovar is 73, Jim Henson.
1906- Teddy Roosevelt designated Devils Tower Wyoming as our first national monument. Teddy’s desire to preserve natural resources was blocked by Congressmen bribed by rich developers. So, he circumvented Congress and by Presidential Executive order declared the entire mountain a national monument.
1934- Stanford graduate Frank Thomas’s first day as at Walt Disney studio.
1936- Babe Ruth's last appearance in a baseball game. Yankees lost to Boston 5-0.
1936- Noel Coward's play 'Private Lives' opened.
1938- Bob Clampett's cartoon "Porky in Wackyland" ( Foo!)
1938- Tennis champion Dan Budge won the US Open in Forrest Hills. Budge became the first person to win a Grand Slam, all four major tennis meets in one year- Wimbledon, French Open now called Roland Garros, Australian Open and Forrest Hills, now called the US Open.
1953- US Army scientist Frank Olsen jumped out of a NY hotel window to his death after unknowingly taking LSD slipped into his cocktail as part of a CIA monitored program. Olsen’s widow sued twenty years later when she finally found out the circumstances of her husbands’ death. The case was only resolved recently.
1953-UPA's "Unicorn in the Garden" directed by Bill Hurtz, based on the cartoon style and story by James Thurber.
1953- The movie "The Robe" premiered, the first movie in CinemaScope. It's success was part of a wave of 'Sword & Sandal" epics and fostered many variations on wide screen processes- Superama,VistaVision, Dynarama, WarnerVision, TotalScope-etc.
Fox had actually finished an earlier picture Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, but studio chief Darryl Zanuck held it for The Robe, because a costume spectacular was a better way to showcase the technique.
There had been earlier experiments with wide screen - Abel Gance's 1925 Napoleon, which used three 35mm images shown simultaneously, and The Big Trail 1930, which was a true wide screen 70mm film starring a very young John Wayne. It was superseded by 1967 by the more advanced Panavision lens. For many years in Hollywood, we called a wide screen formatted picture a "Scope" picture.
1960- The "Howdy Doody Time" children's show ended after thirteen years. The show remains a pivotal memory in the minds of thousands of American baby-boomers who grew up in the fifties. As the last song and the last credits rolled by, just before the cameras switched off, Clarabell the mute clown goes up to the lens and in a haunting voice said; "Goodbye, Kids."
1964- The Munsters TV comedy starring Fred Gwynne, Yvonne DeCarlo and Al Lewis premiered.
1968- CBS T.V. show "60 Minutes" debuted. Mike Wallace was pared with Harry Reasoner. The show was originally aired Tuesday nights at 10PM and fared poorly in the ratings. When it was moved to Sundays at 7:00PM it became a weekly institution.
1977- The TV series “The Love Boat “debuted.
1988- The Godfather of Soul James Brown got a little crazy sometimes. This day he burst into his own offices in Georgia waving a pistol and shotgun and demanded everyone stop using his washroom! After locking the bathrooms, he led police on high-speed chase through Georgia and South Carolina, only stopping when the cops shot out his tires. He rode the sparking rims till they collapsed. James Brown did 2 years for being under the influence of drugs. Hey!
Answer: Colditz was a maximum security Nazi prison camp where they sent all the Allied POW’s who kept trying to escape. Its name became a synonym for harsh incarceration.
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