Birthdays: Niccolo Macchiavelli, Bing Crosby, Golda Meir, Sir Richard D'Oly-Carte, Peter Gabriel, James Brown, Pete Seeger, Betty Comden, Doug Henning, Beaulah Bondi, Mary Astor, Sugar Ray Robinson, Alex Cord, 70’s singer Engelbert Humperdinck, Dule Hill, Walter Slezak, Christina Hendriks, Bill Sienkiewicz
1675- Massachusetts Puritans passed a law that church doors be locked during Sunday services. Too many people were leaving during long, boring sermons. Two large ushers walked up and down the aisles with long staffs. One tipped with a feather to wake up the ladies. The other with a brass knob to wake up the men.
1812- A new poem called Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage became a huge hit in London and sold out in just three days. The author Lord Byron became the toast of London overnight. He said: "I awoke one morning and found myself famous."
1888- The Poem "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Thayer first published.
1926- The El Capitan theater opened in Hollywood as a legit stage revue. As a movie theater it went through several hands, The Hollywood, the Paramount. Citizen Kane premiered there. The Disney company bought it in the 1980s, and restored it to its 1926 splendor.
1931- E.C. Segar introduced Popeye’s friend J. Wellington Wimpy in his Thimble Theatre comic strip. Based on Segar’s old boss William Shuchert, who own a local opera house in Decatur, Illinois and ate a lot of hamburgers. “I would gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today.”
1933- Fritz Lang’s movie M released in the US. It made a star of Peter Lorre.
1936- Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio first game for the New York Yankees. He got three hits.
1948- THE PARAMOUNT DECISION- In 1938 the independent theaters and producers (including the Walt Disney Company) had brought suit in Federal court against the major Hollywood Studios over their monopolistic practices. Ten years later the Supreme Court ruled the Motion Picture Studios did constitute a monopoly and under the Sherman AntiTrust Act ordered them to sell their theater chains.
One casualty of this rule was the short cartoon. Because theater managers no longer were forced to run a cartoon, newsreel and short with a feature (block-booking), they opted for the time to run more showings of the main feature. Many people were starting to become interested in that new television machine, anyway.
1952- U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma stepped out of a plane and walked to the exact North Pole, the first known person to do so. Commander Robert Peary claimed to have reached the Pole in 1909 as did others, but modern scholars think they were all off by several degrees.
1952- President Harry Truman showed off the newly renovated White House to the newfangled network television cameras.
1969- Groundbreaking in Valencia for the California Institute of the Arts.
1971- National Public Radio’s news program "All Things Considered" goes on the air, the first U.S. news program with women anchors like Susan Stanberg.
1973- Chicago’s Sear Tower was topped off at 443 meters, to be the tallest office building in the U.S.A.
1978- THE FIRST SPAM E-MAIL- Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for Digital Equipment Corp wanted to invite all the scientists and professors on the ARPANET system to an event. It was too much work to do one e-mail at a time, so he devised a way to mail 600 people at once.
1991- Steve Jobs agreed to the deal between Walt Disney and Pixar to create the film Toy Story. He insisted the Pixar logo be at the head of the film, instead of in the back roll credits. “The world needs to know that Pixar are the one’s making these movies, not them. It’s all about marketing. The public will soon know who we are, more than they are.”
1994- The Walt Disney Company announced their new cruise line.
1997- The Chairman of Phillip Morris Tobacco Company James J. Morgan testified to a congressional committee that cigarettes are no more addictive than Gummy Bears candy.
1999- Oklahoma City was hit by a force 5 tornado with wind speeds of over 300 miles per hour, the strongest ever recorded.
2002- Spiderman, directed by Sam Raimi, and starring Tobey McGuire and Kirsten Dunst.
2013- Marvel’s Ironman 3 premiered.
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