Tom Sito's Animation ALmanac for June 24, 2024

Birthdays: Earl Kitchener, the Sirdar of Omdurman, Roy O. Disney, E.I. Dupont, Ambrose Bierce, Jack Dempsey, John Ciardi, Mick Fleetwood, Phil Harris- singer and voice of Baloo in Disney’s Jungle Book, Billy Casper, Michelle Lee, Claude Chabrol, Chief Dan George, Pete Hamill, Peter Weller, Sherry Springfield

1889- The Bank of Telluride Colorado was robbed by a former Mormon miner named Robert Parker, who now called himself Butch Cassidy. He teamed up with the Sundance Kid later.

1901- The first exhibit in a Paris salon on the Rue Lafitte of a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso.

1939- Pan-Am airlines began regular transatlantic passenger flights from New York to London.

1945- Meet the Press debuted on radio. Two years later it moved to television and it remains TV’s longest running program.

1947- THE FIRST MODERN UFO SIGHTING. A commercial airline pilot flying out of Seattle notices 6 silver disc shaped objects hovering over Mt. Reinier near Seattle. They then shot off at terrific speed. They are never identified nor explained. The pilot, Kenneth Arnold had impeccable credentials as an ex-combat Marine pilot and chamber of commerce member. The government response was to hit him with an IRS audit. The "flying-saucer" craze, with allegorical overtones to postwar atomic paranoia, swept the American imagination throughout the 1950’s.

1949 - "Hopalong Cassidy" became the first network western on television-NBC.

1963 - 1st demonstration of a home video recorder, at BBC Studios, London

1964- The movie “Robin and the Seven Hoods” opened. Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack friends play the Robin Hood story as Chicago gangsters. Mainly remembered for Frank singing “ My kind of town, Chicago is….”

1970 – The Mike Nichols movie "Catch 22" opened in movie theaters.

1973- Eamon de Valera resigned as President of the Irish Republic at age ninety. The American-born Irish patriot had been a guerrilla in the 1916 Easter Sunday Uprising and was president since 1932.

1994- Walt Disney’s The Lion King opened in regular theaters. 

1997- Brian Keith, actor (Family Affair, The Parent Trap), shot himself at 75. He was suffering from incurable emphysema and lung cancer and tired of fighting the disease.