Birthdays: French King Louis X The Stubborn 1314, Richard Cromwell “Tumbledown Dick, “ Rutherford Hayes, Frederick Remington, Jean Millet, Buster Keaton, Englebert Dolfuss, Charlton Heston, Armand Assante, Damon Runyon, Alvin Tofler author of Future Shock, Anne Rice, Alicia Silverstone is 48, Christoph Waltz is 68, Liev Schreiber is 57, Melissa Benoist is 36, Susan Sarandon is 78.
1798- Lyrical Ballads, a small book of poems published jointly by English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The book opened with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and finished with Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey.” The book didn’t sell that well. Wordsworth blamed Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner poem for being too long. Some of the best sales of the book were by sea captains who thought The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a collection of sea shanties.
1869- Henry J. Heinz began his condiment company, bottling horseradish in a little shop in Pittsburgh. He was later called the Catsup King, -or Ketchup, if you prefer. Ketchup comes from a Chinese fermented fish sauce called Koe-chiap he adapted.
1909- St. Louis Missouri was site of the first –and only- airship race in the US. Four dirigibles, the total number in America, ran a course for a purse of $1,000 dollars.
1931- Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy" comic strip debuts.
1943- Actor Clark Gable was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for flying combat missions over Germany. It was said Gable took these deliberately dangerous missions instead of doing USO shows out of a death-wish he had in grief for his wife Carole Lombard, who was killed in a plane crash the year before. She had been urging Gable to volunteer shortly before her death. Adolf Hitler offered a cash reward of $5,000 to anyone who could bring Gable in alive. Adolf was a movie-fan and loved Gone With the Wind.
1950- The first Peanuts comic strip introducing Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy. At first Schulz was going to call him “Sniffy”, but then learned that name was already in another comic strip.
1955- The Brooklyn Dodgers a.k.a. "Da Bums" won the World Series for the first time, and the only time they won it while inhabiting the precincts of Flatbush. The name Dodgers came from the fact that several main trolley car lines intersected in front of Ebbets Field on Atlantic Avenue. To get into the ballpark you had to cross this area dodging the traffic. So they were known as the Brooklyn Trolley-Dodgers, then Dodgers.
1957- SPUTNIK- Russia first shot an object into space orbit and inaugurates the Space Age. A basketball sized satellite called" Sputnik-1". Sputnik means Fellow Traveler and the word spawned pop words like Beatnik, Nudnik and Peacenik. Americans used to thinking of themselves as the leaders in all technology reacted with shock. Why weren’t we first? We were losing the space race! Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson complained “I don’t want to sleep under a Commie Moon!”
The gov't reaction caused the creation of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funneled Defense Dept money into research through leading universities. Besides space, DARPA oversaw the development of computer graphics and the Internet.
1957-"Leave it to Beaver' debuts on CBS.
1961- The Alvin Show premiered.
1969- Diane Linkletter, the daughter of television personality Art Linkletter got high on LSD and leapt out of a window to her death. Her boyfriend snatched at the belt loops of her dress in an attempt to save her, but they tore away. Art Linkletter became a livelong crusader against drug abuse.
1970- Janis Joplin was found dead of a drug overdose at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood. Room 105. She was 27. Her song “Me and Bobby McGee” was as yet unreleased but soon topped the pop charts. Joplin left a considerable sum in her will for a party for her friends. The invitation read “ The Drinks are on Pearl”, her nickname.
1998- Rolie Polie Olie premiered on The Disney Channel. The French-Canadian Nelvana production, designed by William Joyce, is today considered one of the earliest animated TV series done entirely on computer.
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