Birthdays: Gaetano Donizetti, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis), Louisa May Alcott, Chuck Mangione, Yakima Canutt, Gary Shandling, Cathy Moriarity, Don Cheadle, Vin Scully, Joel Coen is 68, Jacques Chirac, Howie Mandell, Chadwick Boseman, Anna Faris is 48
1887- The US Navy received permission from the Hawaiian King David IV Kalakaou to lease land for a base at Pearl Harbor.
1890- The first Army-Navy football game held at West Point. Midshipmen beat the cadets 24-0.
1914- In the first years of animated films, one artist like Winsor McCay drew everything alone, and may have hired a cameraman or assistant. This day, John Randolph Bray's cartoon "Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa" debuted. Bray adapted Henry Ford's assembly line system to making animation, today known as the Production Pipeline. He created the job classifications of layout, animator, inbetweener, background painter, inker, blackeners (cel painters), and camera. His wife Margaret Bray was his producer-production manager. In the 1920s the jobs of gag man (storyboarder), cleanup and checkers were created. After 1919, Bray shifted his studio focus from entertainment to technical and training films. J.R. Bray started the careers of Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, Max & Dave Fleischer, Dick Heumer, and Shamus Culhane.
1932- Cole Porter’s musical The Gay Divorcee’ opened on Broadway.
1935- Physicist Edwin Schrodinger published his thought experiment “ Schrodinger’s Cat”.
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1959- The Second Grammy Awards, broadcast for the first time on television. Bobby Darin’s rendition of Mack the Knife won top honors.
1961- NASA sent Enos the Chimp into orbit.
1963- A week after the Kennedy assassination, comedian Vaughn Meader announced he was giving up his act impersonating the slain president. Meader’s comedy album The First Family sold 7.5 million copies and won a Grammy in 1962, but now it just wasn’t funny anymore. Meader’s career faded, and he ended up managing a bar in Maine. He died of emphysema in 2004. When Lenny Bruce first took the stage after the Kennedy assassination, he opened his set with a long drag on his cigarette and sighed:” ….Man…. Vaughn Meader is really screwed!”
1972- Atari announced Pong, the first popular mass-marketed interactive game.
1981- Actress Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and
drowned. She was 43. Her husband Robert Wagner, and friend Christopher Walken were down in the ships cabin having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning.
1995- Pixar’s IPO stock offering after the success of Toy Story made Steve Jobs a billionaire.
2001- Beatle guitarist and composer George Harrison died of cancer. He was 58.
2017- Matt Lauer, the celebrity host of NBC’s Today Show, was fired after allegations of sexual misconduct with staffers.
2018- Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns opened. Directed by Rob Marshall.
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