Today in History, 9/30

1399: Henry IV is proclaimed King of England.
1781: During the American Revolution, the French defeat the British at the Battle of Chesapeake Capes.
1788: The Pennsylvania Legislature elects the first two members of the U.S. Senate - William Maclay of Harrisburg and Robert Morris of Philadelphia.
1791: Mozart's opera The Magic Flute premieres in Vienna, Austria.
1882: The world's first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin.1888: Jack the Ripper kills his third and fourth victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
1901: Hubert Cecil Booth patents the vacuum cleaner.1917: Buddy Rich, big band drummer is born.

1921: Deborah Kerr, star of From Here to Eternity and The King and I is born.1924: Truman Capote is born.1927: Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 60 home runs in a season
1931: Angie Dickinson is born.1935: The Hoover Dam, astride the border between the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada, is dedicated.1935: Johnny Mathis is born.

1938: At 2:00 am, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to occupy the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
1943: Marilyn McCoo, singer for The Fifth Dimension is born. Here she is singing "I've Never Been to Me" on Solid Gold in 1982.

1947: The World Series, featuring New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, is televised for the first time.
1947: Dave Arneson is born. He, along with Gary Gygax, created Dungeons & Dragons.1949: The Berlin Airlift ends.
1955: Film icon James Dean dies in a road accident at age 24.1957: Fran Drescher is born.1961: Eric Stoltz is born.1961: Crystal Bernard is born. She was on the TV show Wings and that other TV show It's a Living with Ann Jillian. Here she is in a commercial for Diet Pepsi in 1984.

1962: Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez founds the United Farm Workers.
1968: Monica Bellucci is born. She played Persephone in the second and third Matrix movies.1971: Jenna Elfman is born. She was on that terrible sitcom Dharma & Greg about the fun-loving hippie chick who marries the straight-laced lawyer.1975: The Hughes (later McDonnell-Douglas, now Boeing) AH-64 Apache makes its first flight.1982: Cheers premieres on NBC. This isn't from that episode, but it's one of my favorite bits.


Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 9/29

522 BC: Darius I of Persia kills the Magian usurper Gaumâta, securing his hold as king of the Persian Empire.
1547: Miguel de Cervantes is born. He wrote Don Quixote, considered by many to be the first modern novel.1650: Henry Robinson opens his Office of Addresses and Encounters - the first historically documented dating service - in Threadneedle Street, London.
1725: Robert Clive is born. He established the military supremacy of Britain in India at the Battle of Plassey.1758: Admiral Horatio Nelson is born.1789: The U.S. War Department first establishes a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.
1885: The first practical public electric tramway in the world is opened in Blackpool, England.
1907: The cornerstone is laid at Washington National Cathedral in the U.S. capital.1907: Gene Autrey is born.

1913: Stanley Kramer is born. He directed The Defiant Ones, On the Beach, Judgment at Nuremberg and a bunch of others.
1916: John D. Rockefeller becomes the first billionaire.1918: The Hindenburg Line is broken by Allied forces during World War I.
1931: Anita Ekberg is born.1935: Jerry Lee Lewis is born.

1941: Near Kiev, German Einsatzgruppe C murders at least 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar Massacre.
1942: Madeline Kahn is born.

1942: Ian McShane is born. He is best known as Lovejoy on the BBC show, but he also appeared in the MST3K episode Codename: Diamondhead.
1954: New York Giants centerfielder Willie Mays makes a running catch with his back to home plate on a 450-foot blast by Cleveland Indians batter Vic Wertz in Game 1 of the World Series. It is widely considered to be the greatest catch ever made.

1963: Les Claypool, of the band Primus is born.

1966: Jill Whelan is born. She played Vicki Stubing on The Love Boat.1966: The Chevy Camaro, originally named Panther, is introduced.1969: Erika Eleniak is born.1978: Pope John Paul I is found dead in his Vatican apartment a little more than one month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.
1982: The Tylenol Crisis of 1982 beginswhen the first of seven individuals dies in metropolitan Chicago.
1989: Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor is convicted of battery for slapping a Beverly Hills police officer who had pulled her over.
1990: The YF-22, which would later become the F-22 Raptor, flies for the first time.Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 9/28

551 BC: Confucius is born.
48 BC: Pompey the Great is assassinated on orders of King Ptolemy of Egypt after landing in Egypt.
935: Saint Wenceslas is murdered by his brother, Boleslaus I of Bohemia. He's the guy in the Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas" except that the song doesn't spend too much time on the murder.1066: After the Battle of Stamford Bridge, a castle is built at Hastings and the Norman Conquest of England really gets underway. I just learned that there is also an Australian soccer player named Norman Conquest, which is one of the coolest names I've ever heard.
1708: Peter the Great defeats the Swedes at the Battle of Lesnaya.
1779: Samuel Huntington is elected president of the Continental Congress, suceeding John Jay.1781: American forces, backed by the French Navy, begin the Siege of Yorktown.
1836: Thomas Crapper, inventor of the modern flush toilet (allegedly) is born.
1850: Flogging is abolished by the US Navy.
1867: The US takes control of Midway Island.
1889: The first General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) defines the length of a meter as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of an alloy of platinum with ten percent iridium, measured at the melting point of ice.1901: Ed Sullivan is born.

1909: Al Capp is born. He did the comic strip Li'l Abner.1925: Arnold Stang is born. He played the nebbishy Pretzi opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger's Hercules in the you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it Hercules in New York.

1928: Sir Alexander Fleming notices a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory, discovering what later became known as penicillin.
1934: Bridgette Bardot is born.
1937: Rod Roddy, long time announcer for The Price Is Right is born.
1939: Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union agree on a division of Poland after their invasion during World War II.
1941: Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox finishes the season with a batting average of .406. He is the latest major league player to have a batting average of .400 or better.
1943: J.T. Walsh is born. Here is is in Sling Blade.

1946: Jeffrey Jones is born.

1952: Sylvia Kristel, star of the French Emmanuelle movies is born.1964: Janeane Garofalo is born.1967: Mira Sorvino is born.Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 9/27

1540: The Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) receives its charter from Pope Paul III.
1590: Pope Urban VII dies 13 days after being chosen as the Pope, making his reign the shortest papacy in history.
1777: Lancaster, Pennsylvania is the capital of the United States, for one day.
1787: The United States Constitution is delivered to the states for ratification.
1821: Mexico gains its independence from Spain.
1822: Jean-François Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta stone.1854: The steamship SS Arctic sinks with 300 people on board. This marks the first great disaster in the Atlantic Ocean.
1903: The wreck of the Old 97, a train crash made famous by the song of the same name takes place. Here's Boxcar Willie's version proving that even shapeshifting alien overlords love a good train wreck song.

1905: The physics journal Annalen der Physik published Albert Einstein's paper "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", introducing the equation E=mc².
1908: The first production of the Ford Model T automobile is built at the Piquette Plant in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit Ruins has some good pictures (somewhere - it's not laid out very well) of the plant as it stands today.1919: Johnny Pesky is born. The right field foul pole in Fenway is named after him.1937: The Balinese Tiger is declared extinct.1840: Thomas Nast, political cartoonist is born.1920: William Conrad, First Alert pitchman is born.
1932: Roger C. Carmel is born. He is best known for playing the interstellar conman, Harry Mudd on classic Star Trek. Here, Kirk imprisons him with dozens of android duplicates of his ex-wife. Harcourt Fenton Mudd!

1934: Wilford Brimley is born. He's one of the many high points of John Carpenter's The Thing.1936: Don Cornelius is born. He was the super-groovy host of Soul Train. Here he is interviewing Minnew Riperton.

1938: The ocean liner Queen Elizabeth is launched in Glasgow.1941: The SS Patrick Henry is launched becoming the first of more than 2,700 Liberty ships.1942: Glenn Miller and his Orchestra perform for the last time before Miller enters the US Army.

1947: Denis Lawson is born. He played Wedge Antilles in Star Wars.
1947: Meat Loaf is born.
1948: Tom Braidwood is born. He played the Scully-obsessed Melvin Frohike on The X-Files and the short-lived Lone Gunmen.1954: Tonight! (later renamed The Tonight Show) makes its nationwide debut on NBC with host Steve Allen.
1956: USAF Captain Milburn G. Apt becomes the first man to exceed Mach 3 while flying the Bell X-2. Shortly thereafter, the craft goes out of control and Captain Apt is killed.1958: Shaun Cassidy is born.

1964: The Warren Commission releases its report, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
1972: Gwyneth Paltrow is born.Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 9/26

46 BC: Julius Caesar dedicates a temple to his mythical ancestor Venus Genetrix in accordance with a vow he made at the battle of Pharsalus.
1181: Saint Francis of Assisi is born.1580: Sir Francis Drake circumnavigates the globe.
1687: The Parthenon in Athens is partially destroyed after an explosion caused by the bombing from Venetian forces led by Morosini who were besieging the Ottoman Turks stationed in Athens.1687: The city council of Amsterdam votes to support William of Orange's invasion of England, which became the Glorious Revolution.
1774: Johnny Appleseed is born.1777: British troops occupy Philadelphia during the American Revolution.
1789: Thomas Jefferson is appointed the first United States Secretary of State, John Jay is appointed the first Chief Justice of the United States, Samuel Osgood is appointed the first United States Postmaster General, and Edmund Randolph is appointed the first United States Attorney General.
1867: Winsor McCay is born. He did the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland and the early cartoon Gertie the Dinosaur.

1888: T.S. Eliot is born. When I was in college I did a number of just awful dramatic recitations of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land.1908: Ed Reulbach became the first and only pitcher to throw two shutouts in one day against the Brooklyn Dodgers.1914: The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is established by the Federal Trade Commission Act.
1914: Jack LaLanne, fitness guru is born.1926: Julie London is born. She played Dixie McCall, RN on Emergency!1927: Robert Cade is born. He invented Gatorade! I always thought it was a natural byproduct of petroleum refining.
1932: Richard Herd is born. He played John the head lizard in the V saga and Tom Paris's aloof dad on Star Trek: Voyager, along with a ton of other roles.

I love those sunglasses!

1933: Donna Douglas is born. She played Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies.

1934: The steamship RMS Queen Mary is launched.1942: Kent McCord is born. He is best known as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but he was also in Galactica: 1980, Airplane II, The Sequel and Return of the Living Dead III. He is currently Vice President of the Screen Actors Guild. (Melissa Gilbert is President!)

1944: Anne Robinson is born. She's that mean lady who hosts The Weakest Link.1946: Andrea Dworkin, feminist is born.1948: Olivia Newton John is born. Here she is in Xanadu.

1956: Linda Hamilton is born. Presumably, this is also the birthday of her twin sister who played Sarah Connor in a dream sequence in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.1957: West Side Story premieres on Broadway.
1960: In Chicago, the first televised debate takes place between presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

1963: Lysette Anthony is born. She played Princess Lyssa in the 80's cornball classic Krull.

1969: The Beatles release Abbey Road. Paul's bare feet on the album cover are a clue that he is dead.1973: The Concorde makes its first non-stop crossing of the Atlantic in record-breaking time.1980: The Cuban government closes Mariel Harbor, ending the freedom flotilla of refugees that began the previous April.
1981: Serena Williams is born.1983: Soviet military officer Stanislav Petrov averts a global thermonuclear war by defying orders and identifying an incoming threat as a false alarm.
Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.