B-Days: William Penn-1644, King James II Stuart, Joseph Plateau, Sword master Masoaka Shiki 1867, Dwight Eisenhower, Lillian Gish, Ralph Lauren, Eamon De Valera, e.e. cummings, Mobutu Sese Seko, C. Everett Koop, John Dean III, Cliff Richards, Jack Arnold the director of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Ralph Lauren- real name Ralph Lifshitz, Roger Moore 007 actor and former animator.
1908- The Chicago Cubs defeated the Detroit Lions for their first World Series championship. The next time they won a World Series was 2016.
1926- A.A. Milne’s first book of Winnie the Pooh, Eeyore, Piglet and Christopher Robin debuted this day.
1934- The Lux Radio Theater premiered.
1950- The LAPD raided a house party of gay men, which was illegal back then. One of the men arrested was future movie star Tab Hunter. This was kept secret until in 1955, when an angry agent Hunter leaked the story to Confidential Magazine. “Tab Hunter Busted at Limp-Wristed Pajama Party!” It soon blew over and Tab Hunter went on to have a full movie career.
1954- First day of shooting on Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of the Ten Commandments staring Charlton Heston out in the Egyptian desert. It was so brutally hot that Anne Baxter joked to Vincent Price “ Vin, who do I have to sleep with to get OFF this movie?”
1955- Actor Zero Mostel testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Zero made jokes at the committee’s expense, and even made some of them laugh, but was still blacklisted. In a playful mood, he told the Committee that he was employed by "19th Century-Fox." Zero denied he was a Communist, but refused to name names. He told the Committee that he would gladly discuss his own conduct, but was prohibited by religious convictions from naming others. Consequently, he was blacklisted during the 1950s. Shut out from the movies, he also lost many lucrative nightclub gigs, and he had to make due by playing gigs for meager salaries and by selling his paintings until the mid 1960s.
1959- Errol Flynn died of a heart attack in Vancouver. Exhausted by overindulgence in his favorite vices, doctors said the 50 year old movie star had the body of a 70 year old. A descendant of one of the Bounty mutineers, the Tasmanian born actor's last film was ' Cuban Rebel Girls'.
1964- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr won the Nobel Peace Prize.
1972 - KUNG FU, starring David Carradine, premiered on ABC TV. In her memoirs, Bruce Lee's widow, Linda Lee Cadwell, asserts that Lee created the concept for the series. There is circumstantial evidence for this in a December 8, 1971 television interview that Bruce Lee gave on The Pierre Berton Show. In the interview, Lee stated that he had developed a concept for a television series called THE WARRIOR, meant to star himself, about a martial artist in the American Old West (the same concept as KUNG FU, which aired the following year), but that he was having trouble pitching it to Warner Brothers and Paramount. Show creator and producer Ed Spielman denied taking Bruce Lees idea. He claimed he had been working on it on the East Coast long before. The show’s star David Carradine was a “gweilo”-Cantonese for white foreigner, pretending to be Chinese.
1972- Joe Cocker and his backup band were busted in Australia for drug possession.
1978- Lover Scott Thorsten “outs” pianist Liberace by filing a palimony suit.
1979- Wayne Gretsky scored his first goal.
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