Birthdays: German Emperor Otto I -972AD, Edward Rutledge, President Franklin Pierce, Krystoff Penderecki, Manuel DeFalla, William Henry Pratt better known as Boris Karloff, William Bonney better known as Billy the Kid, Roman Petrovich Tyrtof better known as Erte’, Arthur Marx better known as Harpo, George O’Hanlon the voice of George Jetson, Susan Anspach, Victor Jory, animator Ray Patterson, Vincent Cassel is 56, Joe Esterhaus is 80, Miley Cyrus is 30.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING (U.S.) Since the earliest times societies had harvest festivals to give thanks to the appropriate deities that they're not going to starve that winter. A letter written in 1621 by pilgrim Edward Winslow described how Pilgrim Gov. Bradford and Miles Standish invited Massasoit and 90 of his Wampanoag people to a feast to celebrate their first successful harvest. The Indians brought several deer they hunted. Gov. Bradford, who later wrote a detailed history of the Plymouth colony, does not mention the event. The custom of Thanksgiving was a New England custom for decades thereafter.
In 1789 George Washington called for a thanksgiving celebration in late November to celebrate the new Constitution. But Pres. Thomas Jefferson thought Thanksgiving was the most ridiculous idea he ever heard of. He considered it a violation of the separation of church and state, as did Andy Jackson and Zachary Taylor. So, the holiday didn’t really become an annual custom until the Civil War. Sarah Hale was the editor of the Ladies Magazine who wrote the poem Mary Had a Little Lamb. She was the Martha Stewart of the mid 1800s. She had been lobbying the US Government to make the New England custom a national one. In 1864 after the great union victory at Atlanta, President Lincoln issued a decree that the last Thursday of November be set aside as a feast of national Thanksgiving. As blue clad troops chowed down on their turkey and chicken dinners, the Confederates withheld their fire in honor of the new Yankee holiday. Thanksgiving was declared by Presidential decree, usually a notice buried in back of a newspaper until made an official holiday in 1941. The first Macy’s Parade in NY was in 1924, the big balloons debuted in 1927.
1874- Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy first published.
1876- The first intercollegiate College Football association set up in Springfield Mass.
1889- The first Juke Box installed at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco. Created by Louis T. Glass and William Arnold, it used Edison cylinders instead of records and cost 5 cents a play. Juke comes from Juke Joint, a slang term then for a cheap dance hall.
1897- Windsor Castle saw the first performance for Queen Victoria of a cinematograph moving picture. Her Majesty watched footage of the procession of her Diamond Jubilee taken in June. Also on the program was Monsieur Taffary's Calculating Dogs.
1903- Italian tenor Enrico Caruso made his debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in Verdi’s Rigoletto. The great singer loved drawing caricatures, collecting police badges, pinching ladies bottoms and doing practical jokes, like filling your hat with flour. Painter Norman Rockwell recalled when he was paying his way through school by being a Met stagehand, backstage Caruso liked to talk art with him and he asked about George Bridgeman’s class, the great anatomy teacher.
1936- The first florescent lighting tubes are installed in the U.S. Patent office.
1938- Bob Hope recorded his signature tune “Thanks for the Memory” for the movie The Big Broadcast.
1942- The movie CASABLANCA premiered. Based on a never produced musical, “Everybody Comes to Ricks’, Howard Koch and the Epstein Brothers adapted the play into one of the most memorable Hollywood love stories ever. It was never expected to be more than a rehash of the popular Charles Boyer film Algiers. (Dahling, come with me to zee Casbah…”). Humphrey Bogart told a friend about his new project “ Aw, its just some more shit like Algiers.” Bogie acted opposite Ingrid Bergman, although he had to stand on apple boxes to appear taller than his Swedish leading lady.
During the famous scene where the French exiles drown out the singing Germans with a stirring rendition of le Marseillaise the Germans are singing Watch On the Rhine. The director wanted them to sing the Nazi party anthem The Horst Wessel Song but the Warner Legal Dept discovered it was copyrighted! We’re fighting nazis, but we don’t want them to sue us. All the people singing were actual European exiles living in Hollywood.
At the time of filming the real Casablanca was still in a war zone so director Michael Curtiz and his art director Carl Jules Wyl had to fake what a North African French colonial city might look like. A decade later, while filming in Almeida, Spain, they took a ferry over to Casablanca to see how close they came. Driving around the city, Curtiz remarked “Carl, this doesn’t look anything like our movie!!”
1952- Animator Fred Moore, who drew Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and the Brave Little Tailor, died from cerebral injuries incurred in an auto accident in the Big Tujunga Canyon area of Los Angeles. He was 41.
1960- The Hollywood Walk of Fame is dedicated, featuring over 1,500 names- but not Charlie Chaplin, who was banned until 1972 because of his lefty political views. Chaplin was never a communist, but the right wing politicians simply assumed he was.
1963- The very first episode of Dr. Who premiered on the BBC TV. William Hartnell played the first Dr. Who.
1985- The first commercial compact discs (CDs) go on sale.
1990- 37-year-old baseball catcher Bo Diaz was crushed to death by a large satellite dish he was trying to install.
2016- Disney’s Moana opened in theaters.
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