Birthdays: Salmon P. Chase, Horatio Alger-1834, Sophie Tucker, Gwen Verdon, Robert Stack, Charles Nelson Reilly, Rip Taylor, Brandon Tartikoff, Julie Louise Dreyfus is 64, T. Bone Burnett, Patrick Dempsey, Orlando Bloom is 48
1854- The modern accordion is patented by Anthony Faas. Polka fans rejoice!
1864- Stephen Foster, the composer of "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Camptown Races" was found dead, a penniless drunk in New York's Bowery slum. In his hand was a piece of paper with the words "Dear friends and gentle hearts... ". A Pennsylvania Yankee, despite writing a lot of music about the South, he only visited it once, to New Orleans in 1852.
1895- Oscar Wilde’s play The Ideal Husband, premiered in London.
1906- The first ad for a radio appeared in an American Science Magazine. It boasted an effective range of over one mile !
1910- Dr. Lee Deforest, experimenting with his new radio vacuum tubes broadcast singers from New York's Metropolitan Opera for the first time. The regular Texaco 'Live from the Met' broadcasts wouldn't get going until 1934.
1930- The Mickey Mouse comic strip first appeared in US newspapers. Originally Walt Disney himself wrote them, Ub Iwerks penciled and Winn Smith inked.
1939- Col. Jacob Ruppert died, the brewing tycoon and owner of the NY Yankees during their glory years of Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig. His will left his millions to a chorus girl Helen Weyant. She said “ they were just friends.”
1943- Movie star Frances Farmer was dragged out of a Hollywood hotel in a straightjacket. She screamed Rats! Rats! and listed her occupation on her arrest record as “c**ksucker”. Her career was ruined and she spent years in asylums. But it’s inconclusive whether she had actually suffered mental illness, or it was her mother overreacting to her sullen, temperamental nature.
1945- Sergei Prokoviev’s 5th Symphony (Classical) premiered in Moscow.
1946- In his comic strip, Dick Tracy first uses his two-way wrist radio.
1947- The comic strip “Steve Canyon”, by Milt Caniff first premiered in newspapers.
1957-THE FRISBEE went into production today. Two World War II fighter pilots who met in a German prison camp, Warren Fransconi and Walter Morrison, invented the plastic platter in a San Luis Obisbo home. Originally called Flying Saucers and Pluto’s Platters, they got the name Frisbee when they demonstrated it at Yale University. The students there were used to flipping pie plates at each other from the local Frisbee Pie Company, so when they played with the new disc, they cried “Frisbee, Frisbee!” which seemed to Walter a better name.
When Walt Morrison died in 2002, his family obeyed his last request, to have his body cremated, his ashes mixed with plastic, and molded into a Frisbee.
1958- Actress Jayne Mansfield married weightlifter Mickey Hargitay. Their daughter was Marisa Hargitay.
1962- In the wee hours of a rainy night, TV pioneer Ernie Kovacs died when he plowed his Corvair into a power pole at Beverly Glen and Santa Monica Blvd. He was attending a baby shower Billy Widler threw for Milton Berle and his wife. But it was also known that Ernie had a weakness for screwdrivers, vodka and orange juice. At the funeral, the pastor said Ernie wanted his life summed up like this,” "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."
1979- The Young Men’s Christian Association filed a lawsuit against the rock group the Village People over their hit song “YMCA”.
1979- Russian animator Yuri Norstein’s masterpiece Tale of Tales premiered.
1985- Carol Wayne, an actress who played sexy blonde roles on comedy shows like Johnny Carson, drowned while swimming in Mexico. She was 41.
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