Birthdays St. Francis Xavier, William Wordsworth, Mongo Santamaria, Walter Winchell, David Frost, Percy Faith, Daniel Ellsberg, Jerry Brown, Alan Pakula, Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Irene Castle, Wayne Rogers, Stan Winston, James Garner, Olkirk Christenson- the inventor of Lego toys, Francis Ford Coppola is 85, Russell Crowe is 60, Jacky Chan (born Chan Kong Shang) is 70
1805- Ludwig Van Beethoven premiered his Symphony # 3 Eroica at Vienna’s Theater-an-der-Wein. It marks his break with the classical styles of Mozart and Haydn and the evolution of his full mature sound.
1891- Showman P.T. Barnum died of old age. The man who invented kiddie matinees, the Greatest Show on Earth, and coined the word “Jumbo” and “ There’s a sucker born every minute.” His last words were "How were the box office receipts today?"
1927- An audience at the Bell Laboratory watched a three inch television screen broadcast a sound image of US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.
1927- Abel Gance’s classic film Napoleon premiered at the Paris Opera. Gances active camera and editing were years ahead of their time, climaxed by a triptych of large images on three movie screens linked by synchronized projectors. One American man in the audience, Walter Wallin, was inspired to develop the Panavision wide screen lens, used in many modern movies.
1939-"The Ugly Duckling" the last Disney Silly Symphony short cartoon.
1939- At the Philadelphia Academy of Music, recording sessions began for the music of Walt Disney’s Fantasia and would continue for 42 more days. Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Philharmonic.
1949- Musical "South Pacific" debuts. Some Enchanted Evening…
1970- The film Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and John Voight won the Best Picture Oscar. The only x-rated (NC-17)film ever to do so. Walt Disney’s It’s Tough to be a Bird” won best animated short.
1990- The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center opened a show of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC cancelled. Mapplethorpe’s explicit depictions of gay and s/m lifestyles shocked neoconservative critics of the national endowments for the arts. A media debate on whether government should subsidize or censor art raged, and Dennis Barry the museum director was tried for obscenity. His acquittal was seen as a victory for free expression, but the argument cast a pall on future funding of controversial art.
1995- A Goofy Movie opened theaters. Directed by Kevin Lima. A lot of the animation was done at Disney’s Paris animation studio.
1995- Frank & Ollie premiered, a documentary written and directed by Frank Thomas’ son, Ted Thomas.
1998- Pop star George Michael was busted after exposing himself to an undercover policeman in a public park men’s room in Beverly Hills.
1998- Lead singer for the punk band The Plasmatics, Wendy O. Williams, committed suicide with a shotgun. The outrageously mohawked punk rocker was known for stunts on stage like destroying her amplifiers with a chainsaw, skydiving in the nude, autoeroticism with a sledgehammer, and crashing a burning school bus into a wall of television sets.
2155- According to the show Babylon 5 today marked the first contact between humans and the Centauri Alliance.
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