Birthdays: Bishop Theitmar of Merseberg- 975AD, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Stuart K. Hine 1899 missionary who wrote the hymn "How Great Thou Art", Woody Strode, Walter Payton, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illena Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-conceived by invitro-fertilization is 46
1788- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony #40 in G minor.
1846 -The Spanish-Californios residents of pueblo Los Angeles chase the U.S. occupying force out of town a second time.
1871- The electric carousel was patented by Wilhelm Schneider, Davenport, Iowa
1897- Young writer Jack London went to the Klondike to look for gold. He didn’t find much gold but did get material for a lot of good stories.
1909-Frenchman Louis Bleriot flew the English Channel.
1918- In Russia, the anti-Communist White Guards entered Ykaterinburg one week too late to prevent the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family. They discovered the bullet ridden blood soaked room and after capturing one of the Bolshevik agents involved in the murder spread the news of the crime to the world. Soviet apologists for years maintained that the murder of the Imperial Family was done upon the initiative of the local Soviet council under Commissar Yakovlev. But documents discovered in 1989 revealed the murders were a direct order from Lenin himself.
1936- Orchard Beach opened in the North Bronx.
1935- Mickey Mouse short Alpine Climbers released.
1940- In Nazi occupied Paris, a Gestapo agent walked into the French offices of MGM studios and confiscated the six prints of "Gone With The Wind" sent from America. They were taken to Berlin for a screening for top Nazi officials. Gone with the Wind was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite movies. For the entire period of the Occupation, Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, hid a surviving print of Gone With The Wind under his bed. The day Paris was liberated, the Cinémathèque was reopened with the first public screening.
1946- MARTIN & LEWIS- Singer Dean Martin had met young comedian Jerry Lewis the year before at a club in New York City. This day in Atlantic City’s 500 Club they debuted as a team when Lewis suggested to the club owner that Martin would be a good replacement for a singer who called in sick. They became a major sensation, with movies, records and TV shows. They hired young writer Norman Lear and Ed Simmons to write for them.
1951- CBS conducted the first television broadcast in color. NBC made color TV popular in the mid 1960's.
1953- Chuck Jones’ "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".
1956- Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed for the last time as a duo at NY’s Copacabana. Exactly ten years from their first appearance.
1958- Jack Warner cheated his two surviving brothers Harry and Al out of their share of Warner Bros Studios. The three had agreed to all retire together and sell to an investor group led by a man named Sememenko. But by a pre-arranged deal with Sememenko, Jack then bought him out and named himself President of Warner Bros. When brother Harry read the news in Variety the next day, it gave him a heart attack. He lingered for a week then died this day. The family never spoke to their brother Jack again. Harry Warner’s wife Rhea said “He didn’t die. Jack killed him.”
1965- Folk Music star Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Folk Festival for using an electric guitar. Alan Lomax, the great Smithsonian Folk Music historian got into a fistfight over it, and Pete Seeger threatened to pull the electric plugs.
1975 - "A Chorus Line," longest-running Broadway show (6,137), premiered.
1984- Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became 1st woman to walk in space.
1984- The groundbreaking CGI film The Adventures of Andre and Wally-B premiered at the Siggraph convention in Minneapolis. Directed by Alvy Ray Smith and the computer designers who would eventually form Pixar. They were aided by new hire John Lasseter, who brought his traditional Disney animation skills to forming credible character animation on computer.
1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS. He had collapsed in France and he made the announcement while being treated at a French clinic. He was the first major public figure to acknowledge he had the mysterious new disease. People then were so afraid of AIDS and how it was transferred, everyone’s initial response was to shun the sufferer. The French-American hospital insisted Hudson leave, so he called his friends Pres. Ronald and Nancy Reagan for an airlift to a U.S. military hospital. They ignored him. Rock Hudson had to pay out of his own pocket to hire a 747 airliner to fly him directly home to LA.
1989- Steve Rubell, the owner of Studio 54 died of HIVAIDS. He was 45.
1990 - Roseanne Barr sang the National Anthem at a San Diego Padre game. As a joke she impersonated ball players by spitting, grabbing her crotch and screeching during her rendition. It didn’t go over well with the more patriotically minded in that very conservative town.
2000- An Air France Concord supersonic jetliner exploded on takeoff, killing everyone on board. The investigation proved a piece of metal debris that fell off the previous Continental jetliner exploded one of the Concords tires and the resultant wreckage was sucked into the plane’s engine. Both Britain and France suspended SST flights for over a year and in 2003 discontinued them forever as being too expensive.
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