Birthdays: English King Edward VII, Emile Dickinson, Ada Lovelace, E. H. Shepard the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh. Chet Huntley, Morton Gould, Victor McLaughlin, Dan Blocker, Tommy Kirk, Fionnula Flanagan, Kenneth Branaugh is 62, Dorothy Lamour, Susan Dey is 70, Michael Clarke Duncan
1607- Captain John Smith left the Jamestown camp with two men to find food. They were captured by the Indians who killed the other men and dragged Smith before chief Powhatan. He ordered Smith’s head to be placed on a flat stone and bashed in with a war club. But Powhatan’s favorite daughter Pocahontas threw herself over Smith and protected him. Smith could speak no Algonquin and the Indians no English and neither could sing any Broadway tunes. Was this an execution prevented or a ritual of admission into the tribe? Powhatan was known to extend his rule through dynastic alliances with other tribal leaders, and he was well aware of the white strangers, wiping out a Spanish attempt to land on his beach in 1600. Maybe this was his way of wanting to bring the white man’s powers to his side. No one knows for sure. John Smith is the only source for the story, and he didn’t write of this incident until back in England 14 years later.
1879- Birth of artist E. H. Shepard the illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.
1905- O. Henry’s short story “A gift from the Magi” first published.
1915- President Woodrow Wilson married Edith Bolling Galt in a ceremony in the White House.
1938- To make the film "Gone With the Wind" Producer David Selznick and director Victor Fleming shot the massive "Burning of Atlanta" in Culver City, California. The sequence was storyboarded and designed by William Cameron-Menzies, who designed the sets for Intolerance for D.W. Griffith. Selznick used the opportunity to clean the studios backlot storage, burning sets from King Kong, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Last of the Mohicans in the inferno. They shot the scenes with three Rhett Butler stand-ins.
1962- Happy Birthday Iron Man. The character Iron Man first appeared in the Marvel comic Tales of Suspense.
1966- The Beach Boys “Good Vibrations” hit #1 in pop charts.
1967- R&B star Otis Redding and four of his band the Bar Kays were killed in a small plane crash near Madison Wisconsin. He was 26. Redding had recorded his hit “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” just three days earlier.
1969- Disney’s It’s Tough to be a Bird opened in theaters. Directed by Ward Kimball.
1978- The world premiere of Richard Donner’s Superman, The Movie. The incomparable Christopher Reeve with Margot Kidder and Gene Hackman.
2013- Richard Williams unfinished epic animated film the Thief and the Cobbler: A moment in Time, received its premiere at the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills. It was begun 40 years earlier in 1972 and never completed.
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