Quiz: Name all the Warner Bros.

Yesterday’s Question: The Smurfs are immigrants. Where were they originally born?
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History for 5/9/2020
Birthdays: John Brown, James M. Barrie the creator of Peter Pan, Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum, Frank Frazetta, Glenda Jackson is 84, Billy Joel, Candice Bergen is 74, Mike Wallace, Pancho Gonzales, James L. Brooks, Rosario Dawson, John Corbett, Albert Finney
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To the ancient Romans this was the Lemuria, the Festival of Death. Like the ancient Greek Anthesterion in February, the Lemuria was a deal made with the Underworld that the dearly departed were allowed to visit the surface world and you should leave your door open and leave out food for them. This way they won't haunt you, and so you'll have good luck all year.
At sunset tomorrow the head of the house (Pater Familias) walks through the house hitting a little bronze gong, he throws a handful of black beans over his shoulder and chants 'With These Beans I Redeem Myself and My Family. O Shades of My Ancestors Depart! Lemuria has Ended!'

310AD- This is the Feast of Saint Pachonius, the first monk to bring other monks and nuns together to live communally, instead of living in caves as solitary hermits.

1421- A fire destroyed part of the just completed Forbidden City in Beijing.

1503- Columbus sails home to Spain from his fourth and final voyage. He traveled down the Central American coast as far as Venezuela. Despite modern history extolling his genius, Columbus never stopped thinking he had discovered Asia. Because the Nicaraguan Indians told him there is another ocean just beyond the jungle, in his diary he confuses it with the Indian ocean, so he thinks he is in Vietnam. (Cochin China)

1662- London diarist Samuel Pepys noted today he first saw a Punch & Judy puppet show in Convent Garden.

1754- THE FIRST NEWSPAPER CARTOON- Ben Franklin in his Pennsylvania Gazette prints a drawing of a segmented snake with each piece named for a colony with the inscription: Join or Die. (Okay, it's not Calvin and Hobbs, but it's a start).

1775- LUMBERJACKS ATTACK THE ROYAL NAVY- One of the stranger engagements of the American Revolution. Captain Henry Mowat, RN, anchored his warship off Falmouth Maine (present day Portland) to reassert Royal authority on the Maine seacoast. Suddenly several little boats rowed out to his ship. At first he thought they were royalists come out to greet him. But when they scampered up on board he saw they were Maine lumberjacks wielding their huge double bladed axes. Mowat and his startled crew surrendered and were roughly taken into custody. It was the first time a warship was ever captured by axe.
The Maine men, not having any central authority or instructions about what exactly to do with prisoners, eventually let them go. Once back on his ship Capt. Mowat ‘s revenge was to haul off shore, and bombard the coastline with red-hot cannonballs, burning the town of Falmouth to the ground. The incident created a violent resentment in the colonies, many of whom were still hoping for reconciliation with the Mother England.

1785 - British inventor Joseph Bramah patents the beer-pump handle. So pull us a dram for a pint of pure.-i.e. I’d like a glass of Guinness Stout, please.

1812- Napoleon left Paris to begin his March to Moscow.

1844-THE PHILAPELPHIA SECTARIAN RIOTS- in Philadelphia arguments between Irish and Protestant gangs over public funding of religious schools erupted into four days of rioting. 20 were killed, Catholic Churches were burned and the city placed under martial law. As news of the riots spread the Irish Catholic Bishop of New York warned the mayor that if one church were harmed in New York Irishmen would burn down the city. “We’ll make New York another Moscow!”- recalling that cities burning in 1812.
These are the first anti-immigrant fighting in U.S. history. Also it was the first time Americans would have to understand that some immigrants could be loyal Americans without assimilating into an Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. Anti-Irish anger would seethe until respect was won on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War.
Another fact about the Philadelphia Riot was newspapermen Will & Frederick Langeheim point their daguerreotype box camera out of the window and photographed the troops around City Hall. It was the first News Photo.

1865- In Gainesville Alabama hard fighting rebel cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest received news of the fall of Richmond and the surrender of the armies of Lee and Joe Johnston. He and a friend went on an all night ride to meditate what to do. “If one road led to Hell and the other to Mexico, I would be indifferent as to which to take.”

Finally Forrest announced to his men his decision: they would not go to Mexico, and they would not continue on as guerrillas, they would surrender and go home. When the governor of Mississippi protested, Bedford Forrest growled: “ Any man who is in favor of further prosecution of this war is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum! The attempt to establish and independent confederacy has failed, we should now meet our responsibilities like men.”
And despite Sherman offering a price for Forrest ‘s head, saying “There can be no peace in the land until he is dead!” Nathan Bedford Forrest was allowed to go home in peace.

1887- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show did its first performance in Europe. In London the English public, several European kings and writer Oscar Wilde thrilled to displays of trick riding, wild red Indians, cowboys and little Annie Oakley the trick shooter.

1896 - 1st horseless carriage show in London. It featured 10 models.

1919- Mustapha Kemal, called Ataturk, is ordered to disband his Turkish Army at Samsun in accordance with the armistice agreement ending the Great War. Instead he declared a revolt and resists the Greek invasion. It is the beginning of modern Turkey.
One of the interesting conflicts in Turkey today is the Islamic fundamentalist movements coming up against the legacy of strict church-state separation and state espoused by Ataturk. Today in Turkey it is a state crime to criticize Ataturk.

1919- Harlem bandleader James Europe had toured Europe while in uniform for World War I and had made the Old World wild for jazz. Europe was doing a triumphal tour of America with his doughboy band when his career was tragically cut short. In Boston, he argued with one hotheaded musician who stabbed him in the neck. He quickly bled to death. Had he lived, James Europe might have been as famous in Jazz history as Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington.

1926- Commander Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett left Spitzbergen Norway, flew over the North Pole in a Fokker monoplane called the Josephine Ford. He beat by two days Norwegian explorer Roald Ammundsen, who flew over the Pole in a dirigible built by Mussolini. Remember Lindbergh hadn’t flown across the Atlantic yet, and it was ten years before the Hindenberg disaster, so a dirigible was considered much safer than an aeroplane.
Commander Byrd won the Medal of Honor and became a household name. Modern scholarship based on his diary and testimony by Floyd Bennett now shows Byrd really didn’t go over the Pole but turned back 150 miles short because of an oil leak. He was too drunk to tell anyway. Although a former World War I pilot by now Byrd had grown skittish about flying.

1932 – London’s Piccadilly Circus first lit by electricity.

1935- The First Belch heard on nationwide radio. Melvin Purvis (the FBI man who killed John Dillinger) was doing an ad for Fleischmann’s Yeast when he committed the offense, which was dubbed “The Burp Heard Round the World”.

1937- ACTOR’S SHOWDOWN WITH L.B. MAYER- In a dramatic confrontation the heads of the Screen Actor’s Guild Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone go to MGM boss Louis B. Mayer’s beach house during a Sunday garden party. While IATSE-Capone mob gangster Willie Bioff stood by to give Mayer support, Montgomery told Mayer he had a 96% strike vote from the actors, so if Mayer didn’t recognize SAG as the sole bargaining agent for actors they would paralyze Hollywood Monday morning!
Mayer thought about it, then gave in. Bioff got from the actors a deal that the IA would back off if the actors would withdraw their support from a rival union to IATSE’s organizing the behind the scene’s technical artists. That night 5,600 actors and friends celebrated at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Next morning 200 waited in line to get their SAG cards including Garbo and Jean Harlow.

1937- Burne Hogarth began drawing the Tarzan comic strip. Hal Foster had been in contract negotiations with the syndicate over money and the right to his originals. He had created Prince Valiant as a bargaining chip when the syndicate called his bluff by giving the Tarzan job to Hogarth. Foster went on to greater glory with Valiant but remained angry at Burne.

1942- Chuck Jones wartime comedy short “ The Draft Horse” premiered.

1950- The French Premier Schumann warned that more deadly world wars would occur in Europe unless Europeans started to unite as one country.

1950- Former Naval reserve officer and pulp science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard published Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, his book defining his new religion Scientology.

1955- HAPPY BIRTHDAY KERMIT THE FROG! Washington D.C. station puts on a young Univ of Maryland grad named Jim Henson as filler before the TODAY Show. He antics with his green frog called Kermit, fashioned from fabric from one of his mothers old green coats. The Muppets are born.

1960- Dr. Gregory Pincus introduced the Birth Control Pill Enovid-10, aka The Pill.

1961- John F. Kennedy's newly appointed head of the FCC, Newton Minow, did his first major address to a luncheon of top television executives. In his speech he blasted them for TV’s mindless content and violence. He called television: " A Vast Wasteland."
What makes it historic is it's the first time anybody had noticed just how lousy TV is and how badly we are all addicted to it. In the show Gilligan’s Island, the boat they were on was named the Minnow for Newton Minnow.

1970- THE MORATORIUM DAY- Largest of the nationwide youth protests against the U.S. War in Vietnam and Cambodia. President Nixon was obsessed by the protests. He had a bunker command post built under the White House where video monitors observed the “long haired peaceniks” outside. When Nixon told his staff he was going to go watch some football, he meant he was going to brood over the monitors. Retired CIA director Bill Gates confessed in his memoirs that as a young operative he took the day off to go protest as well as did a lot of other CIA agents. In Chicago young student and future comic John Belushi was dragged off by friends after being struck in the chest with a fired tear gas shell.
In 2000 it was revealed that President Nixon was so depressed at this time, he was taking a mood altering prescription barbiturate named Dilantin. It was given him by Jack Dreyfus of the Dreyfus Fund without a doctor’s permission. He was so out of it that Secretary of Defense John Schlesinger ordered military and nuclear installations to ignore the orders of our stoned President, unless first cleared by the Defense Department.

1978- Italian authorities found the bullet-riddled body of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in a car trunk. He had been kidnapped and murdered by a left wing extremist group called the Red Brigade. The cruelty of the act backfired on the brigade. They lost any public support they may have had and were soon gone.

1995- The Center of Disease Control published findings on a new deadly strain of virus appearing near Kinshasha Zaire. They called it the Ebola Virus.

2005- Columnist Arianna Huffington started the on-line newspaper The Huffington Post. Its liberal slant was considered a response to blatantly conservative media like Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report and Fox News.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: The Smurfs are immigrants. Where were they originally born?

Answer: Belgium. Called the Schtroumpfs, cartoonist Peyo was Belgian, and first printed them in a Brussels newspaper.

Quiz: The Smurfs are immigrants. Where were they originally born?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: What is a denouement?
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History for 5/8/2020
Birthdays: Harry Truman, Roberto Rossellini, Leopold Bakunin, Louis Gottschalk, Oscar Hammerstein, Ted Sorenson, Sonny Liston, Toni Tennille, Ricky Nelson, Peter Benchley, Thomas Pinchon, David Attenborough is 94, Keith Jarrett, Alex Van Halen, Melissa Gilbert, French illustrator Jean Giraud aka Moebius, Enrique Inglesias, Bob Clampett, Don Rickles

1429- St. Joan of Arc saved the City of Orleans. English armies were besieging the city from a string of powerful fortresses built around it. At one point in the battle for a strongpoint called La Tourelles, a big English knight stood in the breach in the wall, hewing down Frenchmen with his two-handed broadsword. He seemed invincible, until a knight named Jean De Montesclere brought up one of those newfangled hand held firetubes. From a safe distance, Jean put a stone bullet through the big Englishman. The unknown knight was the first man ever shot by a gun.

1587- THE LOST COLONY- The Roanoke settlers left England for Virginia. When a supply ship reached their colony three years later in 1590, the houses were intact, but the colonists had all disappeared, leaving no bodies, or signs of violence. Only a mysterious message, CROTOAN, carved on a tree. Their ultimate fate has never been successfully determined.

1776- While the American Congress was debating whether to declare independence or not, the British Navy reminded them what was at stake. This day two warships, HMS Roebuck and Liverpool tried to shoot their way up the Delaware River to Philadelphia. They were finally turned back by the Yankee shore batteries.

1778- Sir George Clinton arrived in occupied Philadelphia to relieve British commander Sir William Howe. Clinton’s instructions from London were that since the French had entered the American Revolution on the American side, he was to abandon the rebel capitol of Philadelphia and consolidate British forces in New York. Instead of being reinforced with more troops, he was to detach a few regiments for an attack on Saint Lucia in the Caribbean.

1824- Ludwig Von Beethoven performed his Ninth (Choral) Symphony and Missa Solemnis in concert for the first time. Even though he was stone deaf he was still in demand as a conductor. The orchestra trained themselves to ignore the Maestro's baton waving and follow the lead of the concert-master (first violinist). It was said when they finished and the audience was cheering, Beethoven was still flapping his arms about and moaning the melody, unaware of the sound of his own voice.

1874- Massachusetts adopted a ten-hour workday for women, down from 12-14 hours.

1878- David Hughes invented the Microphone while trying to get over bronchitis.

1910-Russian-Jewish immigrant glove salesman Schmuel Gelpfisch married Blanche Lasky, the daughter of vaudeville performer Jesse Lasky. Gelpfisch later changed his name to Sam Goldfish, then Sam Goldwyn. He and his father in law Jesse Lasky went into the new flicker business and started the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. They soon moved to Hollywood.

1912- The movie studio Famous Players Lasky born. In 1914 they changed their name to Paramount Pictures.

1927- When Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, there were other aviators who attempted the same feat. This day French daredevils Charles Nungesser & Francois Coli took off from Paris to fly to New York in their plane L’Oiseau Blanc. They were never seen again, and their remains were never recovered. Later that year, authorities noticed that the $30,000.00 in prize money that crooked NY Mayor Jimmy Walker was supposed to present them with had mysteriously disappeared as well…

1933- When the Rockefellers were building their huge office complex Rockefeller Center in New York City they decided to get one of the greatest living Mexican painter Diego Rivera to design the murals for the interior of the atrium ’Man at the Crossroads". This despite the fact that Rivera was well known as a radical communist.
Soon Nelson Rockefeller noticed Rivera was painting in the center of the mural a huge portrait of Lenin stepping on his father John D. Rockefeller’s face! Over Rivera’s protests Rockefeller ordered the mural painted over and no record of it’s existence ever kept. But on the night before the painting was to be destroyed Swiss art student Lucienne Bloch slipped a camera into her shirt. While Frida Kahlo distracted the guards, she took the only photos of the mural for posterity.

1943- Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood"- Ooohh Wolfy !

1945-V.E. Day. Grand Admiral Doenitz, the successor to Adolf Hitler, officially surrendered the Third Reich to the allies. They repeated the ceremony to the Russians next day. Admiral Doenitz said after the signing:" I feel we shall not see our flag fly over a prosperous Germany in our lifetime." Well, not quite…
Nazi's repeat the surrender signing done for Eisenhower, now for the Russians in Berlin. The announcements were made, V-E day celebrations broke out around the world.

1947- Department store mogul Harry Gordon Selfridge died in poverty in Putney, a suburb of London. He was 89. Even though his store Selfridges made millions, in his old age he wasted so much money on gambling and women, his exec board stripped him of his power. In 1943 he was arrested for vagrancy for loitering in front of his own store.

1954- DIEN BIEN PHU- The Communist Viet Minh guerrillas decisively defeat the French in Indochina. The French strategy was to place a forward base in the heart of the guerrilla infested jungle to lure the Vietnamese into the open and defeat them. Instead they got a modern version of the Little Big Horn with the French soldiers going down under endless waves of attacking Vietnamese. The guerrilla forces had carried large howitzers in small pieces up mountaintops and assembled them to rain shells down on the French.

1962-"A Funny thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum" opened on Broadway.

1962- Director Joe Mankiewicz shot the climactic spectacle scene of Cleopatra –Elizabeth Taylor, entering Rome through the Arch of Titus on a mobile sphinx surrounded by thousands of extras. The shot had been delayed six months after a stunt woman fell off an elephant, and then the light in the Forum had not been right. When Elizabeth Taylor appeared in the scene, the Italian extras were supposed to shout "Hail Cleopatra!, but instead they all shouted "Liz! Liz!"

1973-A.I.M. Indian movement surrendered Wounded Knee to the F.B.I.

1978- Postman David Berkowitz confessed to being "Son-of-Sam" or the "44 caliber killer", the serial killer who terrorized New York City by shooting to death teenage couples at random and toying with letters to journalist Pete Hamill. Berkowitz said he received his orders to shoot people from his neighbor's Labrador dog Sam.

1991- President Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, propositioned waitress Paula Jones at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. With her legal bills financed by the Clinton-hating Neo-Cons, her case went as far as a Supreme Court. They decided to allow her to sue a President while in office. Clinton’s attorney didn’t help things with statements like :" Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park and who knows who you’ll turn up. "She got a lot of publicity, an $850,000 settlement and a nude spread in Penthouse Magazine.

1996- South Africa adopted its first post-apartheid constitution.

1998- The impotence drug Viagra gains national prominence when retired Senator Bob Dole confessed on the Larry King talk show that he participated in the drugs test trials and the had "thoroughly enjoyed himself."
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is a denouement?

Answer: Coming after the climax of a story, the denouement is the resolution of the plot. Sometimes the denouement is confused with an epilogue, which continues the story after the denouement, letting us know what happens after the resolution of the story. (Thanks FG).

Quiz: What is a denouement?

Yesterdays Quiz: Who was Swifty Lazar?
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History for 5/7/2020
Birthday: Johannes Brahms, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Gary Cooper, Gabby Hayes, Ichiro Honda, Robert Browning, Marcus Loew of Loews Theater chain, Darin McGavin, Edward Land (inventor of the Polaroid lens and camera), Amy Heckerling, Traci Lords

Greek Festival of the Birth of Apollo.

401 B.C. SOCRATES. Contrary to modern perception not everyone in ancient Greece loved philosophy. The Greeks had the same conflicts we have now between faith, tradition and rational thought and science. The scientist Anaxagoras was run out of town for saying that the Sun wasn’t Phoebus in a chariot, but just a burning rock floating in space.Euripides the playwright also got into trouble for saying that the gods did not exist.

But Socrates pushed the argument to its most extreme conclusion. The Athenian conservatives convicted Socrates of blasphemy and subverting the public morals. All hoped Socrates would just shut up and pay a fine, but Socrates unrepentant stance forced the law to go all the way to the death penalty. He was ordered to commit suicide by being given a cup of Hemlock. Actually, it wasn’t a cup., the poison was held in a leaf of Romaine Lettuce, then called Lettuce of the Isle of Cos. As he drank, he said,
“To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.”

558AD- The dome of the great Byzantine basilica the Hagia Sophia collapsed under its own weight. The Emperor Justinian ordered it immediately rebuilt stronger.

1718- The FIRST BOATLOAD OF FRENCH COLONISTS LAND IN LOUISIANA- Sieur de la Moyne-Bienville established a fort and trading post on some low ground between the Mississippi and Lake Ponchartrain. He named the place New Orleans, for Phillip of Orleans, then regent of France in the name of the child King Louis XV.
The French and Dutch always had a problem with their American colonies, in that nobody wanted to leave home to move there. One solution the French thought up was sweeping the streets of all the hookers, cutthroats and riffraff and shipping them all to America. Though it wasn't exactly "Pilgrim's Progress", this influx of card sharks and sportin' ladies helped New Orleans quickly establish it's reputation as one of the wildest towns of the New World.

1760- A British merchant ship named the Friendship arrived in Virginia from Barbados. On board for his first sea voyage and his first sight of America was a young Scottish apprentice named John Paul, who we would know as John Paul Jones.

1763- Chief Pontiac attacked Fort Detroit. Angry over British treatment after the French and Indian War, Pontiac had united all the Great Lakes tribes with their French trapper friends to attack all the forts simultaneously from Illinois to Maine. He later took the fort’s fat commander Captain Cambell hostage and gave him to the allied Chippewas who tomahawked him and ate his heart. Yum!

1789- To complete the break with Mother England, the Church of England in America renamed itself the Episcopalian Church.

1795- Throughout the French Revolution one region of France, La Vendee’, stubbornly stayed loyal to the monarchy and waged a long guerrilla war. Several French generals were sent to pacify the province but were unsuccessful. This day young whiz kid Napoleon Bonaparte learned he had been posted to the Vendee’. He immediately protested the posting and requested duty elsewhere. He recognized this move would be bad for his career but beyond that Nappy never wanted to be part of a civil war. Even after Waterloo, when he could have stayed in power by enforcing military control he refused, because it would have meant fighting the people. “There is no honor in spilling the blood of other Frenchmen.”

1800- The US Congress divided up the Northwest Territories, separating Indiana from Ohio.

1847-American Medical Assoc. founded.

1863- Hard-fighting Confederate general Earl 'Buck' Van Dorn was killed, but not in battle. A Tennessee doctor named J.G. Peters made an appointment with the general, went up behind him while he was at his desk and shot him in the back of the head. Peters then calmly got back into his carriage and rode to Union lines. Peters wasn't a Yankee spy or assassin. He was expressing his disapproval of the fact that Van Dorn was having an affair with his wife. William Faulkner alluded to his romantic exploits in books like Absalom Absalom.

1864-The WILDERNESS- LEE MET GRANT FOR THE FIRST TIME- Southern General Robert E. Lee lured Ulysses Grant's army into a dense tangled forest called the Wilderness and defeated him. The superior numbers of the Yankee troops became meaningless crawling about in the thick woods. At one point when the rebel line was in danger of breaking Lee rode to the front himself but was stopped by a Texas brigade. “Texan’s Always Move Them! “ Lee cried, and the inspired Texans threw back the enemy.
That night hundreds of wounded left on the ground burned to death because the cannons had started a brush fire. Grant suffered as many casualties as at previous Union defeats like Chancellorsville, yet instead of retreating to Washington to make excuses to Lincoln, he circled around and attacked again. The men cheered wildly when they saw Grant quietly sitting atop his horse directing the columns back around for another try. Grant exhibited an iron-like reserve in public, but that night alone in his tent he broke down and sobbed like a child. The two armies maneuvered for 60 days straight, until Grant penned Lee into his Richmond defense lines.

1896- Dr. H.H. Holmes hanged. One of the worst American serial killers, the doctor set up a practice during the Chicago Worlds Fair of 1893. As tourists disappeared around the fair, the doctor offered new medical specimens to the local medical college. Called the Devil of the White City, authorities found remains of as many as 200 victims around his property.

1904 - Flexible Flyer trademark registered

1915- THE LUSITANIA- Off the southern coast of Ireland, the civilian ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-20. 1,198 drowned, including 128 Americans, almost all civilians. The Kaiser later gave a medal to the U-boat Captain Walter Schweige. These acts outraged American opinion and led us into World War I, despite many pro-German immigrants. It was revealed decades later that the reason Lusitania sank so quickly, just 18 minutes - even Captain Schweige was surprised- was that it's cargo hold was full of explosives.
First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill fought the German U-boat blockade by covertly transporting purchased American weapons on hospital ships, civilian ocean liners and let some British freighters illegally fly the flags of neutral countries. The German government knew that the Lusitania had been classified by the British admiralty a military cruiser. But regardless, the sinking of an unarmed ship without warning was considered a gross violation of international law. The German government apologized to the American government, and stopped the unrestricted U-boat campaign for two years, but the Lusitania shifted neutral U.S. public sympathy irrevocably to the Franco-English side.

1919- Defeated Germany learned just how bad the terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty were going to hit them. They expected bad times but were shocked at just how severe and steep the reparation payments were going to be. Millions were to be paid in indemnities and large areas of their industrial heartland would be under foreign occupation. The anger over this treaty did a lot to stoke the fires for revenge that would bring Hitler to power.

1926- Gangster Al Capone killed 3 men with a baseball bat over dinner.

1937-Nobel Prize winning writer William Faulkner hired by MGM Studios, earning $500 a week. He celebrated by going on a two week drinking binge. MGM's Head of Writing Sam Marx had him tracked down to an Oakie migrant camp in the Imperial Valley. He was dragged off, boozily whining: " Ah wanna write for Mickey Mouse!!"

1939- Los Angeles Union Station opened. It was built on top of L.A's original China Town.

1941-Glen Miller records the "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" for RCA. the first gold record million seller.

1942- Battle of the Coral Sea-The U.S. Navy, suffering only defeats up till then, stopped a Japanese task force. This is the first engagement in which the two fleets never saw each other, but fought long distance with carrier launched airplanes. Veterans commented that one of the sadder losses was when the aircraft carrier USS Lexington went down, she took the fleet's supply of 6 Bugs Bunny cartoons with her. War is Hell.

1945- V.E. Day. Grand Admiral Doenitz, the successor to Adolf Hitler, officially surrendered the Third Reich to the allies. They repeated the ceremony to the Russians next day. Admiral Doenitz said after the signing:" I feel we shall not see our flag fly over a prosperous Germany in our lifetime." Well, not quite…

1945- German fighter ace Eric Hartmann celebrated the end of the war by going up in his Messerschmitt ME109f and shooting down one last allied plane. He caught the Ilyushyin Russian fighter doing a victory roll. Hartman was called the Black Devil of the Ukraine, because he shot down 352 enemy planes. After ten years imprisoned in a Siberian gulag, he went home to his farm in Holstein and lived peacefully.

1945- In a top secret test at Los Alamos the Manhattan Project scientists detonated in the desert a single blast 100,000 pounds of TNT. This was to measure the effect of a blast that big and provide a control to gauge the effectiveness of the Atomic Bomb. 100,000 pounds of TNT became known as one Kiloton. The Hiroshima A-Bomb was 20 kilotons,
the largest thermonuclear device was 50 kilotons.

1950- The Carolwood Pacific Railroad. Walt Disney had grew up around and loved trains. Animator Ward Kimball got him interested in collecting model trains. Walt grew so enamored he built a miniature steam train big enough to take children on rides3e3. The tracks ran all around the back of his Holmby Hills home. This day was the first running of his new hobby. The germ of his idea for Disneyland began here. After the home was sold, in the 1990s the Carolwood Barn and trains were moved to Griffith Park.

1966- “Monday Monday” by the Mammas and the Poppas becomes #1 in the pop charts.

1989- Police in Buenos Aires discovered the body of actor Guy Williams ( Zorro, Lost In Space) He had died of a brain aneurysm in his apartment. He was 65.

1996- Comedian Martin Lawrence went berserk and ran down a main intersection in Van Nuys Cal. raving and waving a pistol. When asked to explain himself, Lawrence blamed it on “Dehydration.”

1998- Apple Computers introduced the iMac.

2009- Decorated career soldier Lt. Dan Choi directly challenged the US military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell ban on gay soldiers by outing himself on Rachel Maddow’s national news program. He was discharged by July, but his plea helped make the case for gay service-people. In Dec 2010, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed by Congress with overwhelming popular support.

2012- Vladimir Putin inaugurated for the umpteenth time as Russia’s president, premier, prime minister, or whatever.

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Quiz: Who was Swifty Lazar?

Answer: A legendary Hollywood agent in the 50s and 60s. Humphrey Bogart nicknamed Irving Lazar him “Swifty” because of his speed and getting a contract completed.

Quiz: Which Hollywood studio is older? Warner Bros., Walt Disney, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: What is a Sopwith Camel?
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History for 05/05/2020
Birthdays: Tyrone Power, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Cochrane called Nellie Bly, Soren Kierkegard, Alice Faye, James Beard, Michael Palin is 78, Jim Kelly, Pat Carroll, Patrick Ewing, John Rhys Davies is 76, Lance Henriksen is 80, Brian Williams, Floyd Gottfredson

In Mexico and parts of the US, this is Cinco de Mayo (see 1862 below)

In Japan this is a holiday known as Children's Day.

National Teacher's Day.

National Cartoonist's Day.

2,349 BC- According to Bishop Ussher, an XVI Century Flemish cleric who tried to calculate an actual date for every important event in the Bible, today is the day Noah’s Ark struck dry ground on Mount Ararat.

840- Louis the German, a son of Charlemagne, died of fright during a total eclipse of the sun.

1504 -Sir Anton of Burgundy, known as The Great Bastard, died at 82.

1534- King Henry VIII executed a nun named Elizabeth Barton, who claimed to have been instructed by God to condemn the King’s divorce. She claimed supernatural forces had shown her the place in Hell being prepared for King Henry.

1640- King Charles I dissolved Parliament after only three weeks for being uppity. It was called the Short Parliament. When they refused to grant him tax money to fight his wars the King levied a 1% property tax on everyone in England. If you didn’t pay it right away you could lose your ears and be branded on the cheeks with a hot iron. Bright ideas like this cost Charles his head, after losing the English Civil War in 1649.

1789- King Louis XVI reluctantly convened an Estates General, the French national parliament, to get the country out of a fiscal crisis. He had fired the Swiss financier Jacques Necker, the only man who seemed to be stopping the economys slide. Up to now Louis' understanding of fiscal policy was to cut the budget spent on the royal lapdogs. An assembly like this had not been convened since 1611. The Parliamentarians demanded permanent power and by refusing to adjourn when the Royal command came, set in motion the French Revolution. Napoleon said the French Revolution began when the king fired Necker.

1800- Shortly after winning his Federalist parties nod to run for re-election President John Adams was told by his wife Abigail Adams” Tis a pity that politicians would sacrifice all that good men hold dear and sacred, just to win an election.”

1808- THE SPANISH ULCER- The Spanish Royal Family was having problems. King Charles IV, his chief minister Godoy who was also a lover of the Queen, the Infante Ferdinand VII and the Prince of Asturias were all trying to overthrow one another while Goya made funny portraits of them.
French Emperor Napoleon offered to mediate. After he lured them all to Bayonne on French soil, he told them: “ I’ve got an idea. I’ll lock you up in this fortress, and my brother Joseph will be King of Spain.” Napoleon sent an army into Spain to enforce his idea but the Spanish people wouldn’t stand for it and fought first in the open, and then as “guerrillas”- little wars.
While Napoleon was trying to conquer the rest of Europe he had to constantly keep troops in Spain fighting the guerrillas and the Duke of Wellington’s English. Spain was finally liberated in 1814 and the Royal Family promptly went back to arguing.

1821"...le Armee'......Josephine....." Napoleon Bonaparte died on the island of St. Helena at age 52.

1827- In Tennessee a 17-year old tailor's apprentice named Andrew Johnson married 16 year old Eliza McArdle. Johnson was illiterate, so one of his bride's first chores was to teach him to read and write. Johnson became the 17th President of the United States.

1862-HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO- Battle of Puebla-Mexican Juaristas under Zaragosa defeated a French invasion force sent by Napoleon III. One of the heroes of the battle was a soldier named Porfiro Diaz. After Benito Juarez’s presidency Diaz made himself dictator and reigned 38 years until being ousted in the Mexican Revolution in 1910.

1864-While Lee and Grant’s armies began to battle in the Wilderness, Sherman began his Atlanta campaign. Sherman told Grant:" You hold Lee down and give me enough troops and I can make Georgia howl!"

1889- THE PARIS WORLD EXHIBITION opened. This exposition was what the Eiffel Tower was built for: it was the centerpiece of this World's Fair to mark the centennial of the French Revolution.
Americans remembered it as the event where American painting first stood out on the world stage, despite being given a small gallery space between Bosnia and Denmark. The judging of the artwork was controversial. Here they are trying to show the world the uniqueness of American painting, yet with not a single Copley, Bierstadt, Thomas Eakins, or Winslow Homer was accepted.
James McNeill Whistler considered himself American although he lived most of the time in London. When the show was announced, he patriotically entered a dozen paintings but the American judges rejected them all. He angrily re-submitted them as a British artist and won a gold medal.

1891-Carnegie Hall in New York opened. One old musician told me the acoustics are so perfect that you can fart in the trumpet section and you'll be heard in the second balcony.

1920- Britain and France get the League of Nations to sanction their colonial takeover of the Middle East. France occupies Syria and Lebanon and Britain Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq). The League officially considered them 'mandates' to administer territory of the defeated Turkish Empire, but Britain and France held them in effect as colonial possessions.

1932- Charles Revson founded the Revlon Cosmetics Company.

1942- The last U.S. forces on the besieged Island of Corregidor surrendered to the Japanese. General MacArthur was ordered to escape to Australia, leaving his friend Jonathan Wainwright to lead his men into captivity. But when he was asked to recommend General Wainwright for the Congressional Medal of Honor, MacArthur refused. "The Medal of Honor cannot be awarded to a general who pulls down Old Glory and surrenders!". MacArthur had Wainwright at his side to sign the surrender documents on the U.S.S. Missouri in 1945.

1945- In a desperate plan to get at America, Japanese generals tried tying bombs to high flying atmospheric weather balloons that could catch the jet stream across the Pacific. This day the only World War II casualties on the U.S. mainland occurred when an Oregon woman Elsie Mitchell and her two children were killed by one of these strange bombs while picnicking.

1945- Happy 75 Birthday Yosemite Sam! Hare Trigger, the first cartoon to feature the red mustachioed desperado premiered.

1953- Broadway Director Jerome Robbins was riding high after directing hits like On the Town and King & I, when he was labeled a Communist. To save his career, this day he testified before Joseph McCarthy’s House UnAmerican Activities Committee and named names. One actress he finked on, Margaret Lee said” I’ve just been stabbed by a wicked fairy”. Ironically, Jerome Robbins went on to direct two of his biggest hits “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the Fiddler on the Roof using blacklisted actors like Zero Mostel, Beatrice Arthur and Jack Gilford, who all hated him.

1960- Soviet Premier Khruschev announces to the world press the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over Russia. President Eisenhower vigorously denied anything of the sort until Khruschev in a world news conference produced the plane wreckage and pilot Lt. Francis Gary Powers. The incident not only deepened the Cold War, but for the first time in modern history a U.S. President was caught lying his head off. But sadly, not the last time.

1961- Alan Shepard became the first American in space on board Friendship VII. The rocket took him 115 miles into space but not high enough to achieve an orbit. That was done one year later by John Glenn. Shepard was kept on the ground in his capsule for so long he had to pee in his suit. In the upside down position the fluid ran up his back and puddles in his helmet behind his head. NASA realized it needed to make modifications on the space suit….

1968- Albert Dekker, character actor and star of movies like Dr. Cyclops, was found dead kneeling in his bathtub, handcuffed, Noose around his neck, ballgag and wearing ladies lingerie. A narcotics needle was sticking in his arm. Someone wrote in red lipstick on his butt “ whip”. The police declared it an “ auto-erotic episode that had gone wrong."

1975- Anne Rice’s hit novel The Interview With The Vampire first published.

1981- Young IRA supporter Bobby Sands made himself a martyr in the Northern Ireland crisis by dying of a hunger strike while in jail. He went 66 days without food.

1983- At a regional Comicon, the first edition comic of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles came out and sold out within two hours.

1985- President Ronald Reagan started a firestorm of controversy among WWII veterans when he laid a wreath in Germany at a cemetery in Bitburg that contained graves of 49 Nazi Waffen-SS soldiers. Some of them may have participated in the infamous Malmedy Massacre of US prisoners.

2006- Walt Disney Company formally acquired Pixar Studio.
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Quiz: What is a Sopwith Camel?

Answer: It was a WWI biplane fighter plane used by the Allied powers. In the Snoopy and the Red Baron comics, Snoopy referred to his doghouse as a Sopwith Camel.

Quiz: What is a Sopwith Camel?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Who were the Bobbsey Twins?
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History for 5/4/2020
Birthdays: Bartolomeo Christofori'-inventor of the piano, Alice Liddel 1852- the inspiration of Alice in Wonderland, Audrey Hepburn –real name Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Rusten, Roberta Peters, Maynard Ferguson, Pia Zadora is 67, Howard Da Silva ,Tammy Wynette, Randy Travis, Hosni Mubarak, George Will, Richard Jenkins

11BC- Dedication of the theater of Marcellinus in the Campus Martius.

1471-"Now are the Winter of our discontentment made glorious Summer by this Son of York"... TEWKESBURY, the deciding battle of the War of the Roses. Edward IV with his brothers Clarence and Richard the Hunchback defeat Lancastrian King Henry VI. The white rose vanquished the red.

1493- the Papal Bull Inter-Contrera and the Treaty of Tordesillas was announced. Pope Alexander VI Borgia divided up the entire world between Portugal and Spain- Spain could conquer everything west of the Cape Verde Islands like the Americas, and Portugal could have everything east like Africa and India.
Damned sporting of him! Columbus knew of this impending treaty when he sailed. So he may have deliberately falsified coordinates in his ship's logs to hide the fact he was violating Portuguese territorial waters to catch the current he counted on getting him across the Atlantic.

1521- Martin Luther had been invited under a safe passport by Emperor Charles V to come to the Imperial Court at Wurms and explain himself. This was still very dangerous. A generation ago Czech reformer Jan Hus was similarly invited, then burned at the stake. Shortly after Luther openly defied both Pope and Emperor, he was kidnapped and disappeared. Liberals like Erasmus and Albrecht Durer were shocked, but it was all turned out to be a charade. Luther’s protector Frederick the Wise of Saxony was concerned Luther would be arrested, so he arranged to spirit him away into hiding at the Wartburg Castle in Eisenbach until things cooled down. Martin Luther changed out of his monks clothes, grew a beard and called himself Junker Karl.

1626- Peter Minuit arrived at the settlement of New Amsterdam to be its first governor.

1715- A French inventor Jean Marius demonstrated the first lightweight folding umbrella. Parasols and sunshades go back to the Egyptians and Romans, but this was one of the earliest types of modern folding umbrella.

1776- Jumping ahead of the independence debate in the Continental Congress, the colonial assembly of Rhode Island renounced their allegiance to the Crown.

1776-While marching up the California coast, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola came upon a Chumash Indian village on the shore of a big bay. It being Saint Monica's Day, he named the bay Santa Monica.

1788 - Catherine the Great's chancellor Prince Potemkin appointed as Rear Admiral of the Russian Navy, Pavel Ivanovich Jones, or as we know him, John Paul Jones. Jones had gone to Russia to organize the Black Sea Fleet,

1799- The Assault on Seringhapatam- In India, the British army stormed the fortress of Sultan Tipoo Sahib the 'Tiger of Mysore' . Commanding General John Baird leapt up on the parapet and shouted over the scream of rockets, cannon and roaring elephants:" Up my brave lads, and show the world you are worthy of the title- British Soldiers!" Present at the battle was a young colonel named Arthur Wellesley who 16 years later would gain fame as the Duke of Wellington.
Tipoo Sahib was England's chief enemy in India and had been defeated a decade earlier by Lord Cornwallis, who made up for his loss to George Washington at Yorktown. After the battle among the plunder they found the Sultan's favorite toy- a life-size mechanical tiger clawing a man. The tiger had a set of organ keys that played a medley of roars and screams for Tipoo's amusement. It's in the Victoria and Albert Museum today.

1863-Final day of the Battle of Chancellorsville.- The day after Stonewall Jackson was shot made the Southern soldiers fight with all the fury of revenge. One Confederate officer wrote how he paused to attend to a young boy shot and dying. The boy said” Go tell my buddies that though the Yankees have killed me, they have not conquered me!” Union commander Fighting Joe Hooker was stunned when a shell struck a pillar he was leaning against. When he came to his nerves snapped and all he could think of was retreat. Robert E. Lee had been surrounded and outnumbered and had to fight both in front and rear. But he turned the tables on his enemy and won. Chancellorsville was Lee’s greatest tactical victory.

1876- THE ARREST OF GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER- General Custer almost didn't make his fateful ride to the Little Big Horn. He had gotten in big trouble with the Grant administration when he testified to Congress about waste and corruption in the War Department. He even implicated President Grant's own brother-in-law Orville as leading a graft ring and his testimony helped impeach Secretary of War William Belknap.

On May 4th when Custer stepped off a train in Chicago, he was met by two officers who told him he was under arrest, and should remain there to await orders. He defied this order and continued on to Fort Lincoln, where he tearfully begged Generals Terry and Sheridan to intercede for him to get his beloved Seventh Cavalry back. Terry's written pleas to Grant and Sherman worked. Custer was allowed to resume his command. Terry had drawn up a contingency plan for a Colonel Hazen to lead the Seventh to the Little Big Horn. So we almost had Hazen's Last Stand.

1886-The HAYMARKET RIOT. A defining incident in U.S. labor history. Striking workers demonstrating in Chicago for an eight hour workday confronted mass police and militia. Suddenly a bomb exploded among the police, who immediately opened fire on the crowd. The culprits are never identified, but authorities blamed the union leaders- The Haymarket Eight - who were all arrested. Despite an international outcry from celebrities like George Bernard Shaw and William Morris they were all convicted and hanged.
The Haymarket incident was considered damaging to the prestige of the union movement at the time but the union organizers hanged on circumstantial evidence became martyrs to the average working person. As the defiant Albert Parsons dropped from the gallows door he shouted: "Oh America, Let the voice of the People be heard!" A decade later a Chicago mayor re-examined the evidence and concluded they had executed innocent men. He lost his reelection. In 1968, a monument erected to the slain policemen was blown up by hippy radicals.

1891 –THE DEATH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES According to Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, this was the day Sherlock Holmes perished at the Reichenbach Falls grappling with sinister Prof. Moriarity- The Napoleon of Crime. Conan Doyle had tired of his eccentric detective and wanted to get on to other types of novels. But readers were horrified he had killed off the great sleuth. Conan-Doyle couldn’t take a walk down the street without someone stopping him:” Sir, How could you?!” When touring the US he wanted to lecture about historical subjects, but people only wanted know more about Holmes & Watson. After a decade, Arthur Conan-Doyle gave in and began a new series of the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

1897- GREATER NEW YORK- Governor Frank Black signed the act unifying the City of Brooklyn and the counties of Queens and Richmond (Staten Island) to New York creating the City of Greater New York, the five boroughs. The mayors of New York and Brooklyn immediately tried to veto the incorporation act, but the State legislature overrode them.

1897- In Paris during a charity cinematograph show the nitrate film catches fire and 200 die. Movie film before the 1940’s was made from a very unstable Nitrate mixture and could explode from the slightest contact with flame.

1927- The Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences formed. Studio heads Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer originally conceived the Academy as an arbiter where studio artists could air grievances without fear of retaliation, thereby sidetracking the call for unions. It didn't work, because of the nature of it's founders.
After the stock market crash the Academy supported the studio heads enforced employee salary cuts. Soon all pretense as an ombudsman was abandoned and AMPAS focused instead on being the arbiter of artistic achievement.
Writer Dorothy Parker commented: "Going to the Academy with your problems is like trying to get laid in your mother's house. Someone's always peeking through the curtains"

1940- The last British troops withdrew from Norway, leaving it to Nazis occupation.

1947- Paul Rafaelson, the only Jew ever convicted of Nazi war crimes was tried and hanged in Prague. As a concentration camp trustee he aided the Nazis in committing atrocities on the inmates of his own faith.

1948- Norman Mailor's first novel published: "the Naked and the Dead".

1953 - Pulitzer prize awarded to Ernest Hemingway for The Old Man & The Sea.

1957 - Alan Freed hosts "Rock n' Roll Show" 1st prime-time network rock music show.

1963- Nelson Rockefeller married Margaret Fitzler-Murphy, called Happy Rockefeller.

1967- The Big Mac hamburger is invented by Jim Delligatti at his MacDonalds franchise restaurant in Pittsburgh.

1970- KENT STATE. Two days after Vice President Spiro Agnew told law enforcement associations that, “You should treat the student anti-war protesters as you would have treated the brown shirted stormtroopers" Ohio National Guard units opened fire on college demonstrators at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine. Two weren't even protesting but had just paused to watch.
Troops also fired on students at Jackson State a week later. These incidents and the fatal bombing of a science lab by militants at Wisconsin caused the public to recoil from increasingly militant rhetoric over Vietnam. Shortly afterward one friend recalled seeing President Nixon at an appearance in Akron mutter something to the effect that he wished more students had been gunned down at Kent State. President Nixon had called the anti-war protesters "bumbs". The grieving father of one of the slain students wrote him: "Mr President, my daughter was not a bumb!"

1975- Moe Howard died, the last of the original Three Stooges.

1991- Bing Crosby’s son Dennis Crosby put a shotgun to his head and ended his life. In 1989 his younger brother Lindsay had committed suicide in a similar fashion.

1999- Goldman-Sachs, a 130 year old Wall Street investment bank that had once sparred with J.P. Morgan, becomes the last great bank on Wall St. to go public. In 2008 it’s shady dealings helped bring about The Great Recession, but soon most of it’s former execs scored jobs in the federal gov’t.

2000- The Love Bug Computer virus ravaged the worlds commerce through Microsoft Outlook causing $10 billion dollars in damage and shutting down temporarily the e-commerce of large firms like Reebok. It was launched by a Philippine grad student as part of his thesis.

2001- Bonnie Lee Blakely, the wife of actor Robert Blake, was found in her car dead of a gunshot wound to the head outside of Vitello’s Restaurant in Studio City, Ca. They had just had dinner, and Mr. Blake had returned into the restaurant to retrieve a gun he had left at his table. In 2005 the actor was acquitted of his wife’s murder, but lost a wrongful death suit to Blakely’s family. No other suspect has ever been identified.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who were the Bobbsey Twins?

Answer: The Bobbsey Twins were the main characters in a series of children's novels, begun in the early 1904 and continuing for decades. They were penned by several authors under the common pseudonym Laurel Lee Hope. The stories featured two sets of fraternal twins from the same family, who have adventures and solve mysteries.