Birthdays: Plato, Swinburne, Booker T. Washington, Josef Lister, Bette Davis, Nadar, Jean Fragonard, animator Hicks Lokey, Nguyen Van Thieu, historian Robert Bloch, Gale Storm, Washington Atlee-Burpee the mail order seed king, Spencer Tracy, Frank Gorshin, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Nigel Hawthorne, Peter Greenway, Gregory Peck, Mary Costa, the voice of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Roger Corman, Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA is 74, Colin Powell, Pharrell Williams is 51.
1874- Johann Strauss Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus premiered in Vienna.
1923- Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band took a train from Chicago to Richmond Indiana to record Chimes Blues. Satchmo’s first record.
1930 -James Dewar invented the Twinkie. He said he got the name when he drove by a billboard advertising "Twinkle-Toe Shoes" and modified it to Twinkie. Dewar ate two every day of his life, and called them, “The best darn-tootin idea I ever had!”
1931- Fox Film Company dropped their option on young star John Wayne as a dud not going anywhere. Wayne eked out an existence doing cheap westerns for Republic and Monogram until John Ford of RKO made him a star in 1939’s Stagecoach.
1940- Disney short Donald’s Dog Laundry.
1945- The first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon.
1951- The Atomic Spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for espionage.
1955- Elderly Prime Minister Winston Churchill finally retired. He was succeeded as PM by Anthony Eden. Churchill, already the author of several books, joked with his cabinet: ”Gentlemen history shall be kind to us, for I intend to write it!”
1956- At Disneyland, The Bathroom of the Future opened at Tomorrowland.
1963- The Lava Lamp invented by Dr. Edward Craven Walker.
1965- Julie Andrews had created the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway. But when filming the motion picture, the studio head Jack Warner decided she was not a big enough star, so he used Audrey Hepburn with a dubbed singing voice. But Andrews had her revenge. At the Academy Awards this night My Fair Lady won Best Picture, but Julie Andrews won the best actress Oscar for Mary Poppins. She famously said, "I would like to thank Jack Warner for making this award possible!"
1975- The Best Animated Short Oscar went to Closed Mondays, claymation from Portland based Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton. In 2005 the Will Vinton Studio was renamed Laika.
1985- Singer David Lee Roth quit the rock band Van Halen to pursue a solo career.
1987- The young Fox TV network premiered The Tracey Ullman Show. She was an English sketch comedy actor who did clever impressions. But a highlight of the show was the unique animated interstitials before commercials. One in particular was a take on a family done by Matt Groening entitled The Simpsons. The Tracey Ullman Show eventually ended, but The Simpsons spun off into a regular TV show in 1989. It became one of the most famous, longest running TV series in history.
1994- Grunge rock star Kurt Kobain shot himself. His body wasn’t discovered until two days later.
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