Birthdays: King Henry II Plantagenet, Antonio Vivaldi, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, Count Pulaski, Miriam Makeba, Nancy Wilson, Bernard Haittink, John Garfield, Knute Rockne, Chastity Bono, Ray “Boom-Boom” Mancini, Patsy Kensit, Katherine O’Hara is 72, James Ellroy, Mykleti Williamson. Ward Kimball
1887- William Randolph Hearst bought the little San Francisco Examiner and began to build the Hearst newspaper empire. Hearst’s father was part owner of the famed Comstock Mine, and thought his son crazy for wasting his time in the penny-paper business. Hearst died in 1951 at age 88, leaving an estate of $160 million.
1902- AAA the Auto Club founded.
1917- Jeanette Rankin became the first female member of Congress.
1922- F.W. Murnau’s classic film Nosferatu, the Vampire, opened in Berlin.
1924- The song “Happy Birthday to You” copyrighted by Claydon Sunny.
1933- Franklin Roosevelt gave his famous speech“ The only thing we have to fear is, Fear itself.” at his first inauguration.
1936- Screenwriter Dudley Nichols publicly refused the Best Screenplay Oscar for John Ford’s “The Informer” as a protest in support of the struggling Writer’s Guild.
1936- First flight of the German dirigible Graf Hindenburg.
1938- Walt Disney made the first inquiry by mail to the English publisher of Pamela Travers’ book Mary Poppins about securing the film rights. It took 22 year before he finally got them.
1944- Louis Lepke Buchalter went to the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. Buchalter with Albert Anastasia headed the heavy enforcement arm of Lucky Lucciano’s New York Mafia Syndicate. Nicknamed “Murder Incorporated,” the Brooklyn gang committed at least 100 murders, including Dutch Schultz, and Lucciano’s mentor Joey the Boss Masseria.
1946- Alex Raymond's comic strip 'Rip Kirby" premiered.
1952- Ronald Reagan married Nancy Davis at the Little Red Church on Coldwater Canyon Blvd. in L.A. William Holden was their best man.
1952- Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher:" I've completed a new novel. I think it's my best one to date." The Old Man and the Sea.
1956- Burger King introduced their signature hamburger the Whopper.
1958- U.S.S. Nautilus, first nuclear sub, reached the North Pole under the ice cap.
1960- American opera baritone Leonard Warren dropped dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in the 2nd act of Verdi's La Forza Del Destino.
1961- In the early stages of filming Cleopatra in London, actress Elizabeth Taylor developed pneumonia and slipped into a coma. She would have died, had not doctors at a convention at London’s Dorchester Hotel performed and emergency tracheotomy. When you seen the film today you can still see the tracheotomy scar at the base of her throat.
1976- Due to the intervention of San Francisco mayor George Moscone, the Giants baseball team would stay in city by the bay. In a last minute deal, the Stoneham family sells the team to Bob Lurie and Bud Herseth instead of the Labbatt's Brewery, which had planned to move the Giants to Canada.
1982- The Abrahams/Zucker Bros TV comedy Police Squad! premiered.
1994- 375 pound comedian John Candy died of sleep apnea. He was 43.
1997- The senate of Brazil finally allowed women to wear slacks to work.
25 anniv 2000- The Japanese launch of Sony Playstation 2. It was designed to compete with Segas Dreamcast and Nintendo’s Cube. The Playstation 2 was the most anticipated videogame launch in history. 600,000 units were sold. One store in Tokyo’s Ginza had 4,000 people lined up at their door. It remained hot for 13 years.
2004- A New York court convicted interior decorating guru Martha Stewart of four counts of stock fraud. This was for dumping her stock in a pharmaceutical firm called InClone after getting an inside tip that their cancer cure didn’t actually work.
2008- The first Simon’s Cat short cartoon appeared on YouTube. English commercial animator Simon Tofield wanted to teach himself Adobe Flash, a 2D computer animation program. He decided to make a cartoon of his cat, and his quirky behavior. He took the results and posted it on YouTube for a laugh. It got thousands of views and made him famous. Now he has a staff, sells merchandise and is working on longer films.
2016- Disney’s Zootopia opened, directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush.
2018- Pixar’s Coco won the Academy Award for Best Animated Film.
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