Birthdays: Queen Mary I Tudor -Bloody Mary, Pietro Guarnieri the violin maker, Harry Grover-Seeley one of the founders of Paleontology, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Andre Segovia, Wendell Wilkie, Billy de Wolfe, Enzo Ferrari, Adolphe Menjou, Jack Palance, Milos Forman, Bobby Bachman of the Bachman Turner Overdrive, Gahan Wilson, Johnny Hart, John Hughes, Cybil Shepherd is 74, Matt Dillon is 60, John Travolta is 70, John Hughes, Dr. Dre, Yoko Ono is 91, Disney animator Tony Anselmo.
1564- Michelangelo Buonarotti died just 6 days before his 89th birthday. He was carving yet another Pieta a few days before his death.
1842- Two hundred of New York City’s high society held a banquet in honor of the visiting English author Charles Dickens. Dickens spent the evening depressing everyone talking about his tour of the cities prisons, slums and poorhouses.
1885- Mark Twain's 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' published.
1888- The Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego Cal. opened for guests. It remains one of the largest remaining wood structures in the U.S. Several presidents stayed there, the Duke of Windsor met Wallis Simpson there, and L. Frank Baum wrote three of his Wizard of Oz books there. Films like the Marilyn Monroe film Some Like it Hot and The Stuntman were shot there. The script for the movie Blade Runner was written there.
1930- The planet Pluto discovered- in 1909 Scientist Lord Percival Lowell had detected signs of a planet at the edge of our Solar System beyond Neptune but could not definitely confirm or identify it. They named it for the time being 'Planet X'. The Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona had searched in vain for decades until Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, a 24 year old amateur astronomer who was allowed to occasionally use Lowell’s telescope to justify the public grants they got. Lord Lowell had just passed away before the discovery he had dedicated his life to.
When the New Horizons spacecraft flew to Pluto in 2015, it carried a capsule of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes.
1950- The first Mr. Magoo cartoon "Ragtime Bear".
1953- The first 3-D stereoscopic movie, "B'wana Devil" starring Robert Stack.
1964- Death of Jean-Armand Bombadier, inventor of the snowmobile.
1973- Richard Petty the Stock Car King won his first Daytona 500 race. He would go on to win 6 more and prove that NASCAR racing was one of America’s favorite though most underreported sports.
2001- Dale Earnhardt Sr, the reigning NASCAR racing car champion, died in a crash on the final lap of the 2001 Daytona 500. His eldest son Dale Jr. placed second.
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