Birthdays: Tamerlane, Lenin, Paul Robeson, Jean Paul Belmondo, Ward Bond, Seve Balesteros, Carl Perkins, Michael Learned, Tom Lehrer, Paula Poundstone, Cynthia Nixon, Hugh Hefner, Dennis Quaid is 66, Elle Fanning is 22
1553- French comic writer Francois Rabelais died. His last words were: ” I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”
1747- Famed British actor David Garrick signed a contract to take over the management of London’s Drury Lane Theatre.
1778- In Paris the philosopher Voltaire is initiated into the Masonic Order of the Nine Sisters on the arm of his friend, Benjamin Franklin.
1859- Mark Twain received his Mississippi riverboat pilot’s license.
1914- The first all color film” The World, The Flesh and the Devil” premiered in London.
1921- The Fly-In Lunch Party. Leslie Brand was a millionaire who developed Glendale California north of Los Angeles. This day he invited guests to a special garden party provided they call arrived in their own airplanes. The little biplanes parked all around his grounds, today known as The Brand Library.
1942- Black opera star Marian Anderson gives her concert at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to an audience of 75,000. She was snubbed from giving a recital at the Daughters of the American Revolution Hall which caused a furious Eleanor Roosevelt to resign from the DAR and arrange this concert.
1943- A U.S. Patents court concluded that Gulgielmo Marconi had used several of Nichola Tesla’s patents to create Wireless Broadcasting. So in effect, Tesla was the real inventor of radio broadcasting. Vindication came too late. Marconi died a rich Nobel-Prize winner, and Tesla died alone and penniless.
1948- Variety columnist Lee Mortimer had been needling Frank Sinatra for his advocacy of liberal causes. He accused Old Blue Eyes of draft-dodging, and hinted maybe he had pro-Communist sympathies. This day as Sinatra passed Mortimer in front of Ciro's restaurant on Sunset Blvd. he heard Mortimer call him a “dirty Dago”. Frank went at Mortimer and punched his lights out.
1953- The first issue of the T.V. Guide.
1966- actress Sophia Loren married producer Carlo Ponti, with whom she had been living with for a decade but not allowed to marry because Catholics did not allow divorce from their previous spouses.
2004- Archaeologists in Cyprus discover a 9,000 year-old grave of a New Stone Age man. In his arms were the remains of a kitten. This is the oldest evidence of man domesticating cats. So rest in peace- Gronk and Fluffy.
