Birthdays: Plato, Swinburne, Booker T. Washington, Josef Lister, Bette Davis, Nadar, Jean Fragonard, animator Hicks Lokey, Nguyen Van Thieu, historian Robert Bloch, Gale Storm, Washington Atlee-Burpee the mail order seed king, Spencer Tracy, Frank Gorshin, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Nigel Hawthorne, Peter Greenway, Gregory Peck, Colin Powell, Mary Costa, the voice of Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Roger Corman, Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA is 75, Pharrell Williams is 52.
1874- Johann Strauss Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus (the Bat) premiered in Vienna.
1913- Ebbets Field opened in Flatbush. The Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Highlanders (Yankees) 3-2.
1915- Jess Willard knocked down Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion in a title fight in Havana Cuba. The older Johnson retired after the fight. Jess Willard wouldn’t hold the title long though, on July 4th Willard lost to new kid Jack Dempsey.
1923- Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band took a train from Chicago to Richmond Indiana to record Chimes Blues. Satchmo’s first record.
1930 -James Dewar invented the Twinkie. He said he got the name when he drove by a billboard advertising "Twinkle-Toe Shoes" and modified it to Twinkie. Dewar ate two every day of his life, and called them, “The best darn-tootin idea I ever had!”
1931- Fox Film Company dropped their option on young star John Wayne as a dud not going anywhere. Wayne eked out an existence doing cheap westerns for Republic and Monogram until John Ford of RKO made him a star in 1939’s Stagecoach.
1940- Disney short Donald’s Dog Laundry.
1945- The first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon.
1956- At Disneyland, The Bathroom of the Future opened at Tomorrowland.
1963- The Lava Lamp invented by Dr. Edward Craven Walker.
1965- Julie Andrews had created the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway. But when filming the movie version old studio head Jack Warner decided she was not a big enough star, so he used Audrey Hepburn with a dubbed singing voice. But Andrews had her revenge. At the Academy Awards this night My Fair Lady won Best Picture, but Julie Andrews won the best actress Oscar for Mary Poppins. She famously said, "I would like to thank Jack Warner for making this award possible!"
1975- The Best Animated Short Oscar went to Closed Mondays, claymation from Portland based Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton. In 2005 the Will Vinton Studio was renamed Laika.
1976- Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes died at age 76. Hughes had inherited his fathers oil rig tool company at 17, and built the mighty Hughes aircraft empire, and ran RKO pictures. He was a well-known Hollywood playboy and romanced beautiful stars like Jane Russell. But after surviving several test plane crashes, he became addicted to pain killers and became increasing paranoid and withdrawn from the world. He died a strange shut in, long haired and living on a diet of drugs, and saving his urine in mason jars.
1985- Singer David Lee Roth quit the rock band Van Halen to pursue a solo career.
1987- The young Fox TV network premiered The Tracey Ullman Show. She was an English sketch comedy actor who did clever impressions. But a highlight of the show was the unique animated interstitials before commercials. One in particular was a take on a family done by Matt Groening entitled The Simpsons. The Tracey Ullman Show eventually ended, but The Simpsons spun off into a regular TV show in 1989. It became one of the most famous, longest running TV series in history. Tracy Ullman later complained, “I played midwife to the Simpsons.”
1994- Grunge rock star Kurt Kobain shot himself. His body wasn’t discovered until two days later.
2063- FIRST CONTACT- According to Star Trek, this is the day Professor Zephram Cochran adapted an old-World War III missile and invented the Warp Drive, enabling the Earth to begin deep space exploration, and during whose maiden flight he made the first contact with an alien race- from the planet Vulcan.
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