Birthdays: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Jack "King" Kirby. George Villiers the Duke of Buckingham- minister of James I, Sean O'Flagherty, Donald O'Connor, Charles Boyer, Karl Boehm, Bruno Bettleheim, Disney designer Ferdinand Horvath, Ben Gazzara, Janet Evans, Ron 'Louisiana Lightning' Guidry, Nancy Kulp, Daniel Stern, Shania Twain, anim historian Charles Solomon, Jack Black is 55, Luiz Guzman is 68, Rita Coolidge is 63.
1850- Lohengrin, the first opera written by Richard Wagner, premiered in Weimar. The Third Act chorus “Treulich Gefuhrt” became famous for weddings as “Here Comes the Bride, All Dressed in White”. Wagner asked his friend Franz Liszt to produce the opera because he was in exile for his political views. Wagner himself did not see Lohengrin performed until 1861.
1907- UPS small package delivery service started in Seattle.
1922- The first broadcast commercial on radio. It was for a real estate firm Queensboro Realty lasting ten minutes, and cost $100 dollars. The firm selling suburban homes in Queens NY immediately did $100,000 worth of business. The business world took note of this new method of advertising.
1938- Northwestern University conferred an honorary degree upon the ventriloquist puppet Charlie McCarthy- Edgar Bergen’s famed ventriloquist dummy. The Dean of the School of Speech conferred a Master of Innuendo and Snappy Comeback upon the wooden celebrity.
1945- One of the largest Japanese operated POW camps was outside of Singapore. 50,000 Allied soldiers were held there. There had been rumors since May that the war was ending, but nothing official. This day two heavy English bombers flew low over the camp and dropped a shower of leaflets. They said the Japanese had surrendered, the war was over, and help was on the way. One of the prisoners cheering was 25 year old art-school dropout Ronald Searle.
1951- Robert Walker was a boyishly handsome actor who had played in a number of successful Hollywood movies like The Clock, Bataan, See Here Private Hargrove and Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. This day a combination of amobarbital and alcohol caused him to suddenly collapse and stop breathing. He was 32. Accounts differ as to his mental state at the time, and whether his psychiatrist compelled him to take the injection of the sedative that brought about this fatal seizure. His son Robert Walker Jr went on to a successful acting career on things like Star Trek. Walker Jr. died in 2019 of old age.
1963- Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the climax of the first ' Poor People's March 'on Washington”. Organizer A. Phillip Randolph conceived a poor people’s march taking weeks not unlike the Bonus Marchers of 1929. The sympathetic John F. Kennedy administration prevailed upon them to keep it to one day to reduce the chance of violence and maximize media exposure. They had planned for 100,000 but they got 400,000. Movie stars like Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, James Garner, Paul Newman and Charlton Heston attended.
1990- Computer pioneer Sandy Lerner was fired from the company she founded- Cisco Systems.
1996- The Prince and Princess of Wales Charles & Diana got divorced. This was the first Royal divorce since Henry VIII annulled Anne of Cleves in the 1530's, not counting George IV's secret marriage to Mrs. Fitzherbert, which was hushed up, and his later cavorting with Lady Cunningham who was nicknamed "the Vice-Queen", and Edward VII's chasing every woman in Europe but his wife, etc.
2020- Actor Chadwick Boseman, who played T’Chala in The Black Panther, died of colon cancer at age 43.
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