Birthdays: Henri Matisse, General George C. Marshall, Odetta (real name Holmes Felicious Gordon), Simon Weisenthal, Virginia Davis, Pola Negri, Jules Styne, Sarah Miles, Donna Summer, Patti Smith, Elizabeth Arden, Tim Matheson, John Denver, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Psy, Ben Kingsley-born Khrishna Banji is 81, Anthony Hopkins is 87, Val Kilmer is 65, Gong Li is 59
1862-3 - SLAVERY ENDED IN THE UNITED STATES- In a service at Boston's Music Hall Abolitionist leaders Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubmann, Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison sang 'Battle Hymn of the Republic" and celebrated midnight when the Emancipation Proclamation would officially take effect.
1879- Thomas Edison did a public demonstration of his new invention the Light Bulb. Special commuter trains brought people to Menlo Park New Jersey for the show.
1881- Los Angeles became the first U.S. city to be lit entirely by electricity.
1901-Los Angeles Angel's Flight cable tram opened. It closed down in the 1980's but was restored in 1996, then broke down a few years later.
1923-24-BBC overseas radio service first broadcast the Chimes of Big Ben around the world.
1929- New York's "21" Club opened as a speakeasy. Barkeep Jack Kramer opened the hangout at 21 west 52nd street. With a wine cellar hidden behind a two-foot thick stone wall door. The feds raided 21 once and found nothing after hours of searching. When they went back outside all their cars had been towed away by NYPD traffic cops. It seems the Mayor of New York Jimmy Walker was having dinner in the wine cellar with his mistress and was annoyed by the intrusion. In subsequent years it was normal to see movie stars, Lucky Lucciano, J. Edgar Hoover and John F. Kennedy eating side by side. Richard Nixon loved their tater-tots. 21 Club closed in 2021 due to covid.
1941- A Warner Bros memo dated this day from producer Hal Wallis office announced that the movie to be made from a play by Murray Bennett called “Everybody Goes to Rick’s” has been renamed “Casablanca”. This was to capitalize on an already popular film title “Algiers” with Charles Boyer “come with me to ze Casbah” etc.. Humphrey Bogart got the lead after George Raft first turned it down.
1946- The first Pismo Beach Clam Festival.
1947- Roy Rogers married Dale Evans.
1952- At the Cosmopolitan Club in East St. Louis, bandleader Johnny Johnson had a problem. Scheduled to play his regular gig at New Years, one of his trio suffered a stroke. Johnson looked around for a substitute musician and settled on a young construction worker trying to break in show business named Chuck Berry. Johnson played Boogie-Woogie piano, and Chuck Berry listened to country western on the radio and invented his own up-tempo variations. The two of them collaborating evolved a distinctly new sound we now recognize as Rock & Roll.
1955- Chuck Jone's 'One Froggy Evening' premiered. Director Steven Spielberg called it the "Citizen Kane of Cartoons." If you wonder why you never heard the old time ditty 'The Michigan Rag' anywhere else but here, was because Chuck Jones & Mike Maltese wrote it specifically for the cartoon.
1965- “Dot and the Line”, Academy Award winning cartoon short opened. Directed by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble.
1965- Soupy Sales hosted one of the more successful kiddie shows on daytime TV. In an age when very few adults were monitoring children’s content, Soupy often improvised his own comedy bits between introducing old cartoons.
This day Soupy jokingly asked his kiddie audience to go into mommy’s purse while she was asleep, take out all those green pieces of paper with presidents on them and mail them in to Soupy Sales c/o the station. All that week the station received thousands of dollars in small envelopes. The resultant outcry from parents and consumer groups got Soupy Sales fired off the air.
1967- The Ice Bowl- Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers defeated the Dallas Cowboys 21-17 for the NFL championship ( the Superbowl had not been invented yet). It was nicknamed the Ice Bowl because the game was played in Green Bay in the outdoors in below zero weather, with a wind chill of 40 below zero. Referees’ whistles froze to their lips.
1979- The debut of Gary Larson’s daily newspaper cartoon The Far Side.
1985- Singer Ricky Nelson died when his band's converted old DC-9 airplane crashed near DeKalb, Texas. Nelson had been living on a steady diet of cheeseburgers and Snickers bars.
1995- The last Calvin and Hobbes comic strip by Bill Waterston. He just decided one day to end it, before it became stale.
1999-2000 - The Y2K MANIA. While the world prepared to celebrate the new century and the Third Millennium, the American tabloid media whipped up fear over a theory that the change from 1999-2000 would cause most computers to crash. Planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear missiles would launch themselves, and marauders would rule the streets like something out of Mad Max. The US Government spent $65 million to prepare for the crisis. But at midnight absolutely nothing happened. Even older less sophisticated computers were unaffected, and everything ran normally. Meanwhile many of the US public shivered at home and watched the rest of the world have fun on television.
2001-2002- The European Union currency exchange went into effect. Adieu, Adios and Ciao to the French Franc, Belgian Franc, Italian Lire, German Deutschmark, Austrian Schilling, Dutch Gulden, Greek Drachma, Irish Pound, Portuguese Escudo and Spanish Peseta. Welcome the Euro.
2020- Because of the global covid pandemic, many world capitols cancelled their large public New Years celebrations or held them virtually.
HAPPY NEW YEAR 2025!
No comments:
Post a Comment