Birthdays: Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV-1642, Frederic Opper the cartoonist of Happy Hooligan, Phillip Freneau, Roger Miller, Issac Asimov, Julius LaRosa, Tito Schipa, Renata Tebaldi, Tex Ritter, Dick Huemer, Cuba Gooding Jr, is 56, Tia Carrere, Kate Bosworth is 41
1815- Lord Byron married Lady Anna Milbanke.
1878- Farmer John Martin thought he saw something shiny flying in the sky above Denizen Texas. He is the first person to describe it as a “flying saucer.”
1897- Young writer Stephen Crane survived a shipwreck when the good ship SS Commodore went down off the coast of Florida. He went on to write The Open Boat and The Red Badge of Courage.
1933- The character Nancy first appeared in Ernie Bushmiller’s comic strip Fritzi Ritz.
1937- Hollywood actor Ross Alexander had hit on tough times. He had been in a few movies like Captain Blood and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but his career seemed to be stalled, he was in debt, and his wife committed suicide. This day the 29 year old went into the barn behind his Encino home and shot himself. The Warner Bros. Studio looked around for a replacement to refill their roster of handsome male leads. They replaced Alexander with an Illinois college sportscaster called “Dutch”- Ronald Reagan.
1963- The Magic Castle opened in Hollywood. The Academy of Magicians renovated this 1908 mansion and declared it the world’s most unique private club. Even today, you can only get in by being invited by a member.
1965- Soupy Sales hosted one of the more successful kiddie shows on daytime TV. He often improvised his own comedy bits in between showing old cartoons. This day Soupy jokingly asked his kiddie audience to go into mommy’s purse while she was asleep and take out all those green pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on them, and mail them to Soupy Sales, c/o the studio. All that week, Soupy received thousands of dollars in small envelopes. The resultant outcry from parent groups got Soupy suspended.
1975- In a letter to MITS, college kids Bill Gates and Paul Allen offered their computer language adaptation of BASIC for the new Altair personal computer. They named themselves Microsoft.
1984- The Zenith Corporation announced it would stop selling video recorders in Betamax format and go over wholly to VHS. Other electronics giants followed suit and VHS won out over the higher quality Beta system.
1995- Washington D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was inaugurated for a second term after winning re-election, despite his conviction for smoking crack. Comedian Chris Rock said: “Who ran against him? Who was such a bad choice that people said- I’d rather vote for a crackhead? “
2000- Internet developers Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, had a conversation about writing data entries for collaborative websites called wikis. Saunders conceived of an open on-line encyclopedia encompassing all world knowledge. He called it Wikipedia.
2019- The Chinese space probe, the Chang’ 4 became the first man made object to successfully land on the Dark side of the Moon.
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