Birthdays: Mary Shelley, Jacques Louis David, Huey Long, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Massey, Ted Williams, John Blondell, Nancy Kulp, Timothy Bottoms, Jean-Claude Killy, Shirley Booth, John Landis, Tug McGraw, Stephen Silver, R. Crumb is 81, Lewis Black is 76, Cameron Diaz is 52
1784- The Empress of China, a fast-sailing American clipper ship established trade between New England and China. Far East trade had been cut off by the British since the Revolution broke out.
1850- Honolulu became a city.
1873- The Royal Canadian Mounted Police- The Mounties formed.
1867- At the University of Göttingen, Albert Niemann isolated the chemical elements of the Columbian coca plant and named the powdery substance Cocaine.
1935- “Top Hat” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers premiered.
1936- First newspaper comic strip entirely devoted to Donald Duck.
1939- Two days before the outbreak of hostilities, the last peacetime voyage of the HMS Queen Mary left Southampton evacuating Americans escaping the impending war in Europe. Among the crowd was a large contingent of Hollywood stars like Robert Montgomery, Loretta Young, Bob Hope and Jack Warner who had planned to attend the first Cannes Film Festival (postponed until 1946). The Queen Mary kept radio silence across the ocean to hide from U-Boats. This was wise because her sister ship HMS Athenia was torpedoed.
1939- The first Marvel comic book went on sale. Marvel comic #1, introducing The Human Torch and the Submariner.
1942- Cartoonist Al Capp premiered his comic strip “Fearless Fosdick”, a spoof of Dick Tracy detective stories.
1963- The HOT LINE is set up between the White House and the Kremlin. It was never really a red telephone, more a coded teletype machine. It was to prevent misunderstandings like the Cuban Missile Crisis the previous year. In 1986 they became a fax machine, and since 2008 a secure e-mail link.
1968- The first 7-11 store opened in Palmdale California. Have a Slurpee!
1975- Ralph Bakshi's film "Coonskin". Bad boy Bakshi's portrayal of African American urban violence was deemed so offensive that it caused the first ever riot at the Museum of Modern Art, and it died at the box office. The film was retitled on video "Streetfight". When Ralph resurfaced, he turned his attention to Sword & Fantasy films.
1980- Willie Nelson released his hit song “On the Road Again.”
1983- Lt. Guion Bluford, the first African American in Space, went up on the Challenger space shuttle.
1992- Astronomers Jane Luu and David Jewitt discovered the Kuiper Belt. That out at the edge of our Solar System, where Pluto is, is a second asteroid belt of even more particles and debris. Recently it has been speculated that the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs originated in The Kuiper Belt.
1993- The David Letterman Show premiered on CBS. Letterman was wooed away from NBC for $42 million bucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment