Quiz: Where was the first ever Christian Church built?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: What is pedantry? To be pedantic?
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History for 6/3/2023
Birthdays: John Paul Jones, Jefferson Davis, Josephine Baker, King George V, Henry Shrapnel, Allen Ginsburg, Collen Dewhurst, Alain Renais, Curtis Mayfield, Paulette Goddard, Maurice Evans, Jack Oakey, Jan Peerce, Zoltan Korda, John Dykstra, Tom Arnold, Hale Irwin, Chuck Barris, Tony Curtis

1579- Sir Francis Drake, his ship the Golden Hind parked in Drake's Bay or Anchor Bay or wherever, claims California for England. He calls it Nova Albion. Early explorers thought America was a big island or series of islands. Magellan had found the way around the southern end. Drake repeated Magellan's route around South America to attack get into the Pacific. Now, he sailed north trying to find the northern end of the island so he could sail around the top to get back into the Atlantic.
But by Mendocino California, Drake realized that this was one big mother of an island, and it would be wiser to turn around and go home some other way. The Northwest Passage isn't discovered until Canadian icebreaker did it in 1958.

1778- MOTHER ENGLAND OFFERS A DEAL- After the French, Dutch and Spanish decide to intervene in the American Revolution, and pile on Britain, The British Government under Lord North offered the rebellious American colonies all of their grievances, taxation, seats in Parliament. What Mr. Pitt suggested he do three years ago when the Revolution started. Now they offered everything short of full independence. The Continental Congress said too late, you're dealing with a separate country now.

1779- British General Sir Henry Clinton had a problem. He had just captured Charleston South Carolina and accepted the surrender of the largest number of American rebels- 4,000, as many as his own army. Now orders came from London were to leave Lord Cornwallis with a force to subdue the South and return to New York. But what about the prisoners? Today Clinton published an edict that all rebels who take an oath of loyalty to the Crown will be released. His subordinate grumbled:” Sir Henry doesn’t understand that these rebels swallow an oath to their King then an oath to their Congress with the same ease his Lordship swallows a plate of poached eggs!”

1800- President John Adams arrived in the Washington D.C. area and took up residence at the Union Tavern in Georgetown while waiting for construction to be completed on the Executive Mansion, later called the White House. First Lady Abigail Adams and her suite got lost in the forest coming from Baltimore.
There were only then three thousand residents in DC, one fifth were slaves. Pennsylvania Avenue was “wide morass confused with alder bushes”. The only way to understand where the avenues went, were from the wooden pegs sticking in the mud. Secretary to the British Ambassador Augustus John Forster wrote to London forlornly that he was losing his sanity in this “absolute sepulcher, this rural hole.”

1846- In Texas, General Stephan Kearny with his Army of the West, received orders to march west and invade the Mexican state of Alta-California.

1851- The American clipper ship Flying Cloud began her maiden voyage from Sandy Hook New York. She was so fast she could sail from New York around South America to San Francisco in 89 days, making her the most celebrated Yankee merchant ship, and with the British Cutty Sark the subject of numerous model boat kits.

1864- BATTLE OF COLD HARBOR- The Civil War battles between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant had settled into something resembling the trench warfare of World War 1. This day General Grant, mistakenly believing Lee was abandoning his Petersburg defense lines, launched a huge frontal assault at Cold Harbor.
Seven thousand men were cut down in 20 minutes. Before rising from their fortifications to the attack, Union men wrote their names on pieces of paper and pinned them to their shirts so their bodies could later be identified. One Massachusetts private wrote in his journal: "June 3rd. I was killed today." He went out and was indeed killed. By the third assault the Yankee army was near mutiny. A captain reacted to the order to attack: "I won't go back out there if Christ Almighty himself came down and ordered me to!"
In two months, Grant had lost 20,000 men, more than Lee had in his entire army. The newspapers started to call him “the Butcher”. But Grant knew if he held on, he would defeat the Confederacy, if by sheer weight of numbers than nothing else. Still, for the rest of his life he regretted the attack at Cold Harbor.

1875- Harper's Weekly Newspaper reported the Kansas Pacific Railroad was bowing to editorial pressure from back east and would no longer allow it's passengers to shoot at buffalo from their moving trains. It had become quite the tourist attraction.

1885- Feast of the Martyrs of Uganda- Ugandan king Mwanga got angry that too many Christian missionaries were running around his kingdom. One of the royal pages who had been converted even had the audacity to baptize Mwanga's son Kizito. So he ordered dozens of them burnt alive or chopped up. His chief steward Joseph said as he perished:" Mwanga has condemned me without cause, but tell him I forgive him from my heart."
Mwanga's persecution stopped when the British invaded later that year and turned Uganda into a colony until 1956.

1888-The poem: "Casey at the Bat" by Edward Lawrence Thayer published in the San Francisco Examiner.

1898- While Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders waited at Tampico Florida to embark for Cuba, an interesting meeting occurred. One of the U.S. army’s commanders was an ex-Confederate general named Fighting Joe Wheeler. Wheeler encountered another elderly retired rebel General James Longstreet, who was now a railroad executive. The two joked about Jubal Early, a hotheaded colleague. Longstreet said: “Joe, I hope I die before you do, because I want to get to Hell in time to hear Jubal Early curse you for wearing that pretty Blue Uniform!!”

1923- Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini gave Italian women the right to vote.

1924- Writer Franz Kafka died in Kierling Austria. He left instructions to
Friends to burn all his unfinished manuscripts including The Trial, but
Fortunately, his friends did not.

1929- Movie stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr married Joan Crawford.

1928- General Zhang Zuolin “The Old Marshal” was one of the last Chinese warlords to surrender to the Kuomintang Nationalist front (KMT) led by Chiang Kai Shek. Zhang Zuolin surrendered Peking (Beijing), on a promise he could retire in peace. But soon after boarding a train to Manchuria he was killed by a bomb. It was blamed on Japanese agents, but no one is sure. The intrigue and internal chaos of the time inspired several films and novels like Shanghai Express, the Bitter Tea of General Yen, and Lost Horizons.

1932- In a game against the Philadelphia A’s, NY Yankee hitter Tony Lazzeri hit “for the cycle” a natural cycle. This meaning his first at bat was a single, the second a double, his third a triple and his fourth at bat he hit a home run, a grand slam actually. In all 150 years of recorded baseball, only 14 batters have ever hit a natural cycle.

1937- King Edward VIII of England had abdicated his throne over his affair with American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Now as Duke of Windsor, he and Wally were officially married this day.

1939- Movie director Alexander Korda married movie star Merle Oberon.

1942- Japanese planes bomb Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands, part of Alaskan territory. This attack was supposed to be the feint drawing attention from the main Japanese attack at Midway Island.

1943- First Day of the ZOOT SUIT RIOTS- In Los Angeles, Navy and Marine servicemen awaiting embarkation to the Pacific battlegrounds clashed with Hispanic gangs. Truckloads of off-duty servicemen drove up from San Pedro Harbor to enlarge the fight. The servicemen would choose whom to beat up based on whether they were wearing a fashionable zoot-suit. They beat up two 13 year olds sitting in a theater watching a movie. Downtown L.A. became an urban war zone for several days.

1944- Planning the D-Day Invasion, Meteorologists in Norway predict a storm system over Europe to last all week. German High Command was sure an invasion of Europe was imminent, but that Eisenhower would need at least 4 days of good weather to launch an attack. The original date for D-Day was supposed to be tomorrow June 4th but this night Eisenhower canceled the go-ahead until June 6th. The tides would never be this favorable again until September. Field Marshal Rommel, deciding there would be no invasion that week, went home to Germany for conferences and his wife's birthday, June 6th.

1946- A consumer study finds there are only 10,000 television sets in America.
A follow up study five years later finds the number at 15 million.

1948- The Hale telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory in California dedicated. The 200 inch mirror had taken 11 years to polish and the observatory two decades to build. A brand new kind of glass was invented for the Palomar mirror, called "pyrex". If you thought it was invented just for test-tubes and coffee pots. Called the “Giant Eye” it gave us out first looks at black holes, and doubled our depth perception of the size of the Universe.

1949 - Dragnet is 1st broadcast on radio (KFI in Los Angeles). It went to NBC TV in 1952. Creator Jack Webb wanted to capture the dry, non-theatrical delivery he heard real cops’ use. He ordered his actors to “stop acting, just read the lines”. Webb wrote the scripts from real LAPD cases and starred as well. He liked to mix martinis for the cast and crew in between setups.

1965- Edward White becomes the first American to walk in space in Gemini VII.

1967 - Aretha Franklin's "Respect" reaches #1. Sockittome, sockittome, sockittome.

1968- Artist Andy Warhol was shot in the gut three times by Valerie Solanas, author of the "SCUM Manifesto". Warhol barely lived. Solanas was institutionalized.

1971- The first artificial gene created.

1975- The Bob Fosse-Gwen Verdon musical Chicago opened on Broadway. Written by Kander and Ebb, based on a 1926 play Roxie Hart.

1976 –Galileo-Galileo Fig-a-ro! Queen's single "Bohemian Rhapsody" goes gold.

1980- President Jimmy Carter announced the United States would boycott the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. The Russians boycotted the LA Olympics in 1984.

1982- Schlomo Argov, Israeli ambassador to Britain, was shot outside of a London Hotel. Tensions had been building up between Israel and the Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Org. based in South Lebanon. Defense minister Arial Sharon planned an invasion of Lebanon, and was waiting for one more incident to spark it off. In the cabinet meeting over the killing, Mossad tried to point out that the assassin was identified as an Abu Nidal terrorist, who were enemies of the PLO. Prime Minister Menachem Begin waved them off.” They are all PLO”. The Israeli tanks rolled two days later. The War in Lebanon dragged on for twenty years, splintering Israeli opinion.

1986- Attorney Roy Cohn was disbarred by a federal appellate court. It was a symbolic act because Cohn was dying anyway of HIV/AIDS. In his career Cohn had prosecuted the Rosenbergs, helped Sen Joe McCarthy in his anti-Communist witch hunt and defended Mafia dons like John Gotti. Despite being gay himself, one of Cohn’s last acts was to lobby New York State legislators from his deathbed to defeat a Gay Rights Bill. His end was dramatized in the play Angels in America. Cohn was a mentor and big influence on young Donald Trump.

2001- Disney’s Atlantis the Lost Empire opened in theaters.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is pedantry? To be pedantic?

Answer: To be overly obsessed with minor details.

Quiz- What is pedantry? To be pedantic?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Do you have a raison d'être? What is a raison d'être?
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History for 6/2/2023
Birthdays: John Randolph, The Marquis DeSade, Martha Custis Washington, Thomas Hardy, Ludwig Roselius the inventor of decaf coffee 1874, Hedda Hopper, Sir Edward Elgar, Johnny Weismuller, Charlie Watts, Disney story artist Dick Heumer, Lotte Reinniger, Marvin Hamlisch, Barry Levinson, Jon Peters, Dana Carvey, Garo Yepremian, Jerry Mathers the Beaver of the old TV show Leave it to Beaver is 75, Dennis Haysbert is 69, Lasse Halstrom is 77

193AD- Shortly after he abdicated, Roman Emperor Didius Julianus was assassinated. As his own bodyguard turned on him and raised his sword, Julianus cried” What evil have I done? Who have I killed?” Unfortunately, Roman emperors were rarely allowed to retire.

303AD- Martyrdom of St. Elmo. This guy has to win the endurance record. The Emperor Diocletian had him starved, beaten with clubs, flogged with lead balled whips, rolled in tar and set on fire, roasted again in an iron chair, and he finally died after having his intestines wound out around a windlass. He is the patron saint of seafarers. When the blue electrical phenomenon appeared on ship's masts during a storm, it is called "St. Elmo's Fire".

1453-At Breslau, Papal Legate John of Capistrano presided over the torture of six Jews. After they confessed to Jewish practices, he had them burned at the stake. After John died the Protestants dug up his bones and threw them to their dogs. John was canonized San Juan Capistrano in 1690. A century later Franciscan monk Fra Junipero Serra named the picturesque little mission in California after him. And the swallows do migrate there, sometimes.

1502- 30 year old Caesar Borgia had conquered most of central Italy in the name of his father Pope Alexander VI. He attacked the town of Faenza that was stoutly defended by Astorre Manfredi and his brother. Caesar Borgia offered them generous terms and after the surrender treated the Manfredi Brothers very courteously, until they got back to Rome where he clapped them in a dungeon. This day the bodies of the Manfredi Brothers were found floating in the Tiber.

1533- Pope Paul III banned the enslavement of Indians in the New World. Whether anybody listened to him is another matter.

1763- At the British Fort Michilimackinac near Lake Superior some Sauk and Chippewa Indians were playing lacrosse. While the British sentries were engrossed in the ball game Indian women gathered near the forts’ open gates. When one player hurled the ball up over the wall as a signal the women tossed concealed tomahawks to the players who then rushed the fort and defeated the garrison.

1780- THE GORDON RIOTS- Lord Gordon organized a public demonstration against a pending bill granting toleration of Roman Catholic worship in England. A mob marched on Parliament, then went went berserk and looted London for a week. Lord Gordon became the last nobleman ever executed in the Tower of London and Parliament passed the Riot Act. But his tactics scared Parliament from passing the Catholic bill. The Catholic Emancipation Bill would not pass until 1834. From then on whenever an unruly crowd won't disperse, before the Authorities start shooting and clubbing people, they first read them The Riot Act. The last reading of the Riot Act in the British Isles was in 1919 in Glasgow during a police strike.

1781- Thomas Jefferson was a great American statesman and thinker, but he was not much at military matters. This day, he sighted the British army approaching his mountaintop home of Monticello. He leapt on his horse Caractacus, and galloped away for his life, abandoning his household. The redcoats respected his home, but burned his barns and liberated 200 of his slaves. As Governor of Virginia Jefferson had compromised his states defenses when he refused to accept black volunteers in the Virginia militia, to make up the manpower lost to Washington’s army up north. In the meantime, Royalist governor Lord Dunmore was offering freedom for slaves who fought under the His Majesty’s colors. Jefferson resigned as governor and nine days later. Fellow Virginian Patrick Henry convened a committee to investigate Jefferson’s incompetence while in office.
Years later in 1820 when elderly Thomas Jefferson presided over a commemoration of Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, Jackson joked: “Well I’m glad to see the old gentleman got up enough courage to even remember a Battle!”

1886- President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in a White House ceremony. She was the daughter of his former law partner and Cleveland became her legal guardian after his death. Despite her being half his age and his reputation for fathering children out of wedlock, they were much in love and she especially charmed the American public. At age 21 she became the youngest woman to be First Lady. Songs were written for her and their first baby was honored with a candy bar- the Baby Ruth.

1896- Guglielmo Marconi took out a patent on wireless broadcasting - radio.
At the time his device could be heard from almost 12 miles away!

1908- James Spengler worked as a carpet cleaner in a dept. store in Akron Ohio. Being asthmatic, he found his work challenging, to say the least. So he invented the electric powered vacuum cleaner, which he patented this day. He eventually sold his invention to his cousin William Hoover.

1920- Eugene O’Neill won a Pulitzer Prize for his first play Beyond the Horizon.

1920- TERRORISM- Radical Anarchists set off 11 bombs in the US, including at the home of the U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer and his wife just missed being killed because the bomber’s device exploded as he was setting it down on their porch. This year they also set off a bomb in a wagonload of scrap metal on Wall Street and a man tried to shoot banker J.P. Morgan.
This sparked a large government crackdown called The Palmer Raids. Many innocent immigrants, suffragettes and union organizers were jailed or deported as criminals, including Emma Goldman. The progressive reaction to the crackdown was the birth of the American Civil Liberties Union. Palmers point man was young J. Edgar Hoover.

1924- Congress granted U.S. citizenship to all Native American Indians, whether they wanted it or not.

1918 -In Monroe NY, Velveeta Cheese was invented by Swiss immigrant Emil Frey as a way to recycle damaged and partially used cheese wheels.

1928- Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek of the Kuomintang (KMT) captured the imperial capitol of Peking (Beijing) from warlord Chang Zhou Lin, called the Old Marshal.

1932- The Screen Publicists Guild formed

1940- Will Eisner's "The Spirit" comic first appears.

1941- Lou Gehrig died of (ALS) Lou Gehrig's disease at age 38.

1946- Italians vote in a postwar referendum to become a republic. The monarchy of the House of Savoy was in place all during the regime of dictator Mussolini. Because of King Vittorio Emmanuele IV’s support of Fascism, he and the Royal House of Savoy were declared deposed.

1952 - Maurice Olley of General Motors began designing the Corvette.

1952- Queen Elisabeth II of England crowned. The date was set by meteorologists who predicted it would be one of the few days that year that would have bright sunshine. And-you guessed it... it rained all day. It was also the first Royal Coronation to be seen on television.

1956- Elvis Presley introduced his hit song “You Ain’t Nothin But a Hound Dog” on the Milton Berle TV show.

1958- An L.A. referendum allowed the county to buy Chavez Ravine from its inhabitants to build Dodger Baseball Stadium.

1961-Pulitzer Prize winning writer George S. Kaufman died. Playwright, humorist and critic who wrote Dinner at Eight, You Can’t Take it With You, and Stage Door. He was 71. He requested the epitaph on his headstone read: "Over My Dead Body!"

1973- London animator Richard Williams closed down his Soho studio for one month so his staff could be tutored by old Hollywood animation legends Art Babbitt, Chuck Jones, Grim Natwick, and Ken Harris.

1991- MTV’s nighttime show Liquid Television premiered with Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux.

1996- Ray Combs took over the job as host of the TV game show Family Feud after Richard Dawson, hanged himself with his bed sheets at Glendale Adventist Hospital. Richard Dawson was the British POW in the popular TV show Hogan’s Heroes.

1999- Pope John Paul II blessed the new Vatican Parking garage.

2003- One secret to the speed of the American victory in Iraq was many in Saddam’s army heeded an appeal from the invaders not to resist and they would be taken care of. After the victory the occupation authority announced the Iraqi Army would be disbanded and all career soldiers lost their pensions and benefits. Today thousands of unemployed Iraqi soldiers demonstrated in front of American Occupation Headquarters in Baghdad demanding to be paid. It is the first time a defeated army ever demanded back pay from the winner.

2017- Wonder Woman, directed by Patti Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, premiered.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Do you have a raison d'être? What is a raison d'être?

Answer: It means your reason for being.

Quiz: The comedy act The Three Stooges were brothers, except for one. Who was that?

Answer to Yesterday’s Quiz Below: What are jerrycans? (hint: a holdover from WW2)
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History for 5/31/2023
Birthdays: King Manuel I of Portugal 1495, Walt Whitman, Fred Allen, Don Ameche, Prince Ranier, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Ranier Fassbinder, Brooke Shields, Joe Namath, Richie Valens, John Kemeny-the co-creator of the computer language BASIC, Tom Berenger, Denholm Elliot, Peter Yarrow, Lea Thompson, John Bonzo Bonham of Led Zepplin, Colin Ferrell is 47, Clint Eastwood is 93

1578- A farmer plowing a vineyard near Rome caused the ground to collapse beneath him revealing the long buried Ancient Roman catacombs. Antonio Bosio studied them and in 1632 published his study, "Underground Rome".

1669 -Samuel Pepys was forced to discontinue the diary he had kept from 1660 due to failing eyesight.

1759- Under pressure from religious groups, the Royal Colony of Pennsylvania banned theatrical plays. You could be fined 500 pounds for trotting the boards.

1790- The U.S. Congress passed its first laws protecting the copyright of written works. This law was lobbied for by Noah Webster, who wrote the first American dictionary.

1793- LA TERREUR- THE REIGN OF TERROR BEGAN- French extremists the Jacobins named for their meeting place, near the monastery of St.Jacob, Danton, Robespierre and Marat took over the French Government. They declared anybody who didn't agree with them to be counterrevolutionary dead meat. Robsepierre said: “Virtue without Terror is Impotence, Terror without Virtue is Criminal.”
Until 1794 their Committee of Public Safety guillotined 17,000 people, including Madame DuBarry, the great scientist Lavoisier, poet Andre Chenier and finally even fellow revolutionaries Danton and Camille Desmoulins. They also drowned hundreds in barges. One method of execution was the Republican Marriage- that meant tying up a man and woman face to face then throwing them into the sea to drown.
Napoleon, Josephine, Roget Du Lisle -who wrote Le Marseillaise, even American Thomas Paine barely escaped with their heads. Marat said: "If we cut off 10,000 heads today, it saves us having to cut off 100,000 tomorrow!" Robespierre kept a servant playing a little accordion in his office so he wouldn't have to listen to the screams and pleas of the condemned dragged off to execution. To their credit they enacted much needed social reforms, For the first time the public could enjoy the Royal art collections like the Louvre and the royal parks like the Luxembourg Gardens.
The modern concept of the restaurant also arises at this time. The name comes from a place to Restore-Your Health- Restaurant. In previous ages you could get a meal at an inn or public house, but it was never very good. The former chefs of great estates, now unemployed because their employer’s heads were in baskets, opened shops and cooked their grand cuisine for the average Jacques & Jill.

1837 - Joseph Grimaldi, England’s greatest clown (king of pantomime), died at 57. On stage since the age of 3 at Sadler-Wells, he never appeared in a circus ring. Instead, his
act was stage pantomime. In tribute to him, all English circus clowns are known as “Joey’.

1859- The famous clock in the Elizabeth Tower of Parliament called after its bell, Big Ben, began running, and its chimes sounded out across London for the first time.

1862- During the Civil War Battle of Fair Oaks, Professor Thaddeus Lowe first took an observation balloon aloft to study the defensive works of the enemy. He proved the military value of arial observation. Lowe created a balloon corps for the union army, and once gave a ride to General Custer. One of the military diplomatic observers who was very interested was the Prussian Count von Zeppelin. After the war Thaddeus Lowe moved to Pasadena California where he built a vacation resort, Mt. Lowe. His granddaughter Florence, “Pancho” Barnes was an aviator who raced Amelia Earhart, and was friends with Astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

1866- The FENIAN BROTHERHOOD, 1,500 Irish Union Army veterans decided the way to free Ireland from Britain was to invade Canada from New York State.

1870- President Ulysses Grant called for the U.S. purchase and annexation of Santo Domingo (The Dominican Republic). Congress defeated the measure as being too costly. Grant was disgusted, hadn't the gov't wasted millions already to purchase the frozen wastes of Alaska in 1868? Other times in American history we've made moves on Cuba and Nicaragua, and occupied Haiti in the 1920s, and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s.

1873- SCHLEIMANN FOUND TROY. Archaeologist Heinrich Schleimann unearthed the horde of gold known as Priam's Treasure in a mound near Hysarlik Turkey. This site was the Troy of Homer, proving the Trojan War was not a myth but a real historical event. There were actually 9 Troys on the site- from a Bronze Age village to a Late Roman Empire city. The Troy of the Trojan War was Troy number 4. It showed signs of destruction by fire.

1879- New York’s Madison Square Garden opened. Designed by Stanford White to resemble a Venetian Palazzo. The modern sports complex was opened in the 1960s.

1889-The Johnstown Flood. The South Fork Dam swollen by heavy rains burst and sent a 35-foot wall of water and debris over the town. 2,295 were killed.

1894- Happy Birthday Kellogg’s Corn Flakes! Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek Michigan patents "flaked cereal and the process for making same." He felt whole foods like Corn Flakes could help Victorian people curb their sexual urges.

1902-THE BOER WAR ENDED. After English troops entered Pretoria, Boer survivors signed the Treaty of Vereeniging. Transvaal President Kruger "Oom Paul"-Uncle Paul- fled to Holland. When the Queen of Holland appealed for help for the Boers, who were ethnically Dutch-German. The Kaiser was noncommittal. The leader of the second largest population of Germans, President Teddy Roosevelt of the United States, said, "It is right and natural that the larger nations should dominate the smaller."
On a troopship returning from South Africa, volunteer doctor Arthur Conan-Doyle was told by a Welsh doctor of a legend of a big ghostly dog that attacked people on the moors of his home estate. Conan-Doyle thought this would be a great story for his character Sherlock Holmes to solve. The Hound of the Baskervilles was the result.

1904- On the first day of a new Parliament the right honorable Tory member Mr. Winston Churchill entered the House of Commons, bowed to the Speaker, then took a seat with the Liberal Benches, publicly abandoning his Tory Party. In 1924 he changed his mind again and rejoined the Tories. This was why he was so shunned in the 1930’s. He was seen as a shameless opportunist, and not trusted by many of his peers.

1910- Not even ten years after the Boer independent state was defeated in the Boer War, the British formed it into the self-governing commonwealth known as The Union of South Africa, with former Boer General Jan Christian Smuts as its head.

1911- RMS Titanic launched from the Belfast shipyards. In a strange premonition of her eventual fate, she was never christened at launch time.

1913- The 17th Amendment was ratified. It called for senators to be elected by popular vote instead of nominated by the various state legislatures.

1916-The BATTLE OF JUTLAND. German and British battleships boom away
at each other in the only major fleet engagement of World War I. Giant battleships called Dreadnoughts were the nukes of the turn of the century power game. Yet when the first and third largest fleets in the world finally clashed, it was a tie. British Admiral Beatty was annoyed with the performance of his fleet: "Blast! Why are all me bloody battlecruisers sinking?” But the German High Seas fleet went back into Kiel harbor and didn't emerge again for the rest of the war.

1921-In Tulsa, after the news report came out about a black man grabbing a lady by the arm, angry white mobs began to gather at town hall at sunset. After midnight they began to move on the black neighborhood of Greenwood.

1928- The song “Old Man River “sung by Pail Robeson came out as a single.

1929- Steamboat Willie was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, but Mickey didn’t speak much. He just whistled, yelped and laughed. In the cartoon released this day “the Carnival Kid” Mickey spoke his first words “Hot Dogs!” The voice was musician Carl Stalling. Later Walt Disney decided to voice the mouse himself.

1935- Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Pictures merged to become Twentieth Century Fox. In 2017 Walt Disney Company purchased 20th Cent Fox and in the Summer of 2020 phased out the brand.

1948- The various guerrilla groups fighting for the new state of Israel, the Palmach, Haganna and Irgun, combine to officially become the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force,

1957- Malaya received its independence from Britain.

1958 - Dick Dale invents "surf music" with "Let's Go Trippin".

1962- Israel hanged Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered in the sea.

1969- John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded "Give Peace a Chance." at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in downtown Montreal. It became the theme song of the Anti-Vietnam War movement. Because of this song and Lennon’s support of the Hippie protesters the Nixon White House kept a file on him. Lennon spent most of 1972-73 under a constant threat of 60-day deportation from the US.

1979- The nation of Rhodesia reformed as the Republic of Zimbabwe under rebel leader Robert Mugabe. But unlike his contemporary Nelson Mandela, Mugabe made himself president for life and crushed all opposition. He was only forced to retire in 2017.

1984- Martial arts movie star Steven Segal married soap opera star Adrienne LaRussa. But what Adrienne didn’t know was he already had a wife named Miyako Fujetani and two kids waiting for him in Japan. A few months after this he fell for another actress named Kelly LeBrock.

1985- John Sculley was a former exec from Pepsi brought in by Apple Computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to help run the company. This day his solution to help the company run better was to fire Steve Jobs. Wozniak retired and Sculley eventually moved on. Before his death, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and make it the worlds most profitable company, as well as run Pixar, and be on the board of the Walt Disney Company.

1989- "Skinhead Day at the Magic Kingdom" Disneyland refused to admit a rally of skinheads, Nazis and Klansmen.

1990- Television sitcom Seinfeld premiered based on a TV special about the standup comedian called the Seinfeld Chronicles. No Soup for You!

1995- A young Mexican-American Tejana singer named Selena was gaining a growing crossover appeal in pop music and there seemed no limit. This day her career was cut short when she was shot and killed by the Yolanda Saldivia, the president of the Selena Fan club.

1996- Despite grief over the assassination of Labor Prime Minister Ytshak Rabin, the Israeli public voted for the right wing Likud anyway, making Benjamin “Bibi” Netnayahu Prime Minister. He was turned out in 1999 over corruption, but re-elected in 2009. After 12 years, he is still being investigated.

2000- The first Survivor show premiered, shepherding in the era in America of TV Reality shows.

2003- A wild dove got into the Pentagon and flapped around the Air Force Secretary's office on the 4th floor. Can we say- symbolism?

2004- Peppa Pig created by Astley Baker-Davies debuted on British TV.
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Yesterday’s Question: What are jerrycans? (hint: a holdover from WW2)

Answer: A portable can to carry gasoline. During WW2, the Germans were nicknamed the Jerries. In the North African desert where saving and using petrol was vital, the Anglo-American soldiers realized the German version of gas cans were far superior to their own. They held more and leaked less. They began using captured German gas cans in preference to their own. After the war the name Jerrycans stuck.

Quiz: What are jerrycans? (hint: a holdover from WW2)

Yesterday’s Quiz: Which president had the first Air Force One?
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History for 5/30/2023
Birthdays: Czar Peter the Great, Benny Goodman, Mel Blanc, Stepin Fetchit, Boris Pasternak, Irving Thalberg, Milt Neil, Howard Hawks, Gale Sayers, Agnes Varda, Michael J. Pollard, Wynonna, Keir Dullea is 86, Ceelo Green is 47, Idina Menzel is 51

1431- At Place de Vieux-Marche’ in English controlled Rouen, St. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. She was only 19. Her last request was for a priest to hold up high a crucifix, so she could pray aloud above the flames. When an English knight watched the maid call out to Christ as she died, he exclaimed in grief: "Brothers, we are lost, because I think we have just killed a Saint! " She was made a saint in 1920. Tradition says even after her death, her remains were incinerated a second time to break them down further. Then the ashes scattered in a river to ensure no one with preserve any “heretical” relics of her.

1593- English playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in an argument over a restaurant check at the Bulls Tavern in Depford. Marlowe, whose plays included “Tamburlane” and “Dr Faustus", was one of Shakespeare's competitors, and found time for some espionage on the side. Writer Sir Anthony Burgess theorized there may have been more spy-stuff to this case than not wanting to pay for ale & kippers. The murderer, Ingram Frizer, was quickly pardoned by Queen Elizabeth I, and Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave.
The recent theory was it wasn’t Marlowe whose body was buried. That he was smuggled to Italy to act as a special agent for Lord Walsingham. His plays continued to some out under the name William Shakespeare. Many of Will’s best plays date from after Marlowe’s “death”. Romeo and Juliet the following year. Many were set in cities in Italy like Verona, a place Will had no knowledge of, but Marlowe had visited extensively.

1630- King Gustavus Adolphus gave an emotional farewell speech to the Swedish Diet as he prepared to leave with his army for Germany. He had pledged to take up the Protestant cause in the brutal Thirty Years War then raging across Europe. Gustavus won many victories but he never saw Sweden again, because he was killed in battle at Lutzen in 1632.

1787- THE CRUCIAL VOTE creating the U.S. Constitution. The delegates of the thirteen states (actually twelve, Rhode Island refused to participate) had originally come to Philadelphia to iron out some bugs in the system called the Articles of Confederation.
On this day they were convinced to accept “the Virginia Plan” authored by James Madison and strongly backed by NY’s Alexander Hamilton. This was to scrap the entire U.S. government used up till then, and create a new central government with a two chamber Congress based on the Roman Senate. Also an elected chief magistrate called, at first, 'The Executive" and later The President. Some politicians not attending the meeting, like Patrick Henry and Sam Adams, were outraged. Thomas Jefferson, then ambassador in Paris, was dubious about the elected-president idea. “So they’ve decided to saddle us with a Polish King” he quipped, meaning an elected figurehead monarch with no real power. Aaron Burr wrote:” Same old pork, different sauce.”

1788- French philosopher Francois Voltaire died of uremic illness at age 84. He breathed his last cradled in the arms of Benjamin Franklin. He had been trying to write a chapter of a new dictionary, trying to keep himself going by drinking 20 cups of coffee a day. A great critic of the Catholic Church, he refused the Sacrament up to the last but was still smuggled away after death to be buried in sacred ground. In 1793 his remains and Rousseau’s were moved to the Pantheon.
In 1814 a Royalist ghoul broke into Voltaire and Rousseau’s tombs, stuffed their bones into a sack and threw them into a garbage dump. The whereabouts of his remains are unknown to this day.

1806- ANDREW JACKSON KILLED CHARLES DICKINSON IN A DUEL. -the hotheaded Jackson challenged Dickinson after he welched on horse racing bet. After Jackson accused him, he made insulting remarks about Jackson’s wife Rachel, calling her a scarlet lady. In Long County Kentucky they faced off with pistols at ten paces.
Dickinson got off a shot first. Eyewitnesses said you could see the puff of dust from Jackson's jacket where the bullet entered his ribs. Amazingly, instead of falling, Jackson just coldly stood there, staring. He then lifted his gun and shot Dickinson dead. 
Jackson would carry the lead ball in his chest for the rest of his life, alongside two others earned in Indian wars.
When asked why he didn’t forgive Dickinson and shoot wide, He replied: "I'd have killed Dickinson, even if he had put a bullet in my brain!"

1821 - James Boyd patents the Rubber Fire Hose.

1848- William Young patents the ice cream freezer.

1883- A rumor among the strollers on the Brooklyn Bridge that the bridge was falling caused a panic and 12 people were trampled. Young street kid Al Smith recalled being under the bridge and seeing a rain of bowler hats and parasols as the crowd pushed and shoved. To prove the bridge was absolutely safe, the mayor asked P.T. Barnum to parade his circus elephants over the bridge to Brooklyn.

1899- Female outlaw Pearl Hart robbed the Globe, Arizona stagecoach.

1913- It’s Albanian Independence Day! The Treaty of London signed, ending the First Balkan War and acknowledging the independence of Albania. The Second Balkan War started thirty days later.

1919- Hollywood entrepreneur Charles Tolman bought a natural declivity north of Hollywood Blvd called Daisy Dell. People had been picnicking in the grass there for years. Now Tolman wanted to build a concert amphitheater. Conductor Hugo Kirchhofer remarked “ It looks like a big bowl!” So it became the Hollywood Bowl thereafter.

1921-In Tulsa Oklahoma, a 19 year old black man named Dick Rowland got into an elevator operated by a white girl named Sarah Page. We’ll never know what actually transpired, but Rowland was later arrested for allegedly assaulting Page. Page claimed he grabbed her arm but nothing more. This incident led to the massing of mobs that resulted in the Great Tulsa Race Massacre. Thousands were killed, businesses torched, and the black neighborhoods were actually bombed from the air.

1922- The Lincoln Memorial dedicated. The huge statue of Lincoln seated was carved by an Italian immigrant family in the Bronx. While President Harding talked, a guest of honor was elderly 86 year old Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe Lincolns only surviving child. He was a former Secretary of War. It was his last public appearance.

1927- In one of the more disturbing Memorial Day parades in New York City history, one thousand Ku Klux Klansmen and blackshirted Italian Fascists tried to march down Broadway, and got into fistfights with bystanders.

1930- The Lockheed Terminal was rededicated as Burbank Airport.

1935 - Babe Ruth's last game. He went hitless for the Boston Braves against Phillies.

1942- The British RAF launch the first of their 1000 plane bombing raids on Germany, this one flattened the city of Cologne.

1955- The New York chapter of the Catholic League of Decency pressured Loews Theater on Broadway to take down a giant 30-foot billboard of Marilyn Monroe trying to push her skirt down.

1961- Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was ambushed in his Chevrolet. Shot five times, he was left dead in the street.

1962- Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem had its first performance.

1972- Director choreographer Bob Fosse filmed a live performance of Liza Minelli’s one-woman show Liza with a Z. It was telecast in Sept. and became a sensation.

1994 - Death of Baron Marcel Bich, Italian-born French engineer and industrialist who created an empire of disposable BIC pens, lighters and razors.

2003- Pixar’s Finding Nemo opened in general release.

2020- Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the Dragon Rocket with two astronauts into orbit. The first private company space launch, and the first time American astronauts blasted off into orbit from America since the space shuttle program was retired ten years ago.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Which president had the first Air Force One?

Answer: Franklin Roosevelt was given a DC-3 as the first presidential flying office. But FDR disliked flying and preferred to go by train. So First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt used it for her appearances. In 1945 Harry Truman used his own plane exclusively, named the Spirit of Independence. President Eisenhower’s plane was the first to officially be given the designation Air Force One.

Quiz: Which president had the first Air Force One?

Yesterday’s question answered below: Why is an American soldier called a G.I. ?
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History for 5/29/2022
Birthdays: John F. Kennedy, King Charles II (the "Merry Monarch"), Bob Hope, G. K. Chesterton, Patrick Henry, Oswald Spengler, T.H. White, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Josef Von Sternberg, LaToya Jackson, John Hinckley Jr., Al Unser Jr., Beatrice Lilly, Danny Elfman, Annette Benning is 65, Melissa Etheridge is 62, Rupert Everett is 65

For those who are curious why America celebrates Memorial Day in May instead of November 11th like most of Europe, it is because of our Civil War.
The main Confederate field armies surrendered in early April; it took this long to quiet the entire countryside, the last fighting on May 27th. Once the countryside was finally at peace, the U.S. government declared a Day of Remembrance of the fallen. Abolitionist named James Redpath reported back to Washington that newly freed black families in Charleston South Carolina would decorate the graves of fallen union soldiers with flowers. The locals were only decorating their own Confederate graves. Later in 1868, Mary Cunningham Logan, wife of General John A. Logan, Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union Army Veterans Organization, went to Petersburg, where she mentioned to her husband the Southerners were decorating the graves of their soldiers.
The holiday was first called Decoration Day, and the first formal one was held May 28, 1868. By the end of WWI in 1918, Americans had gotten used to honoring all their war dead at the end of May, and the holiday’s name changed to Memorial Day.

526 AD -An earthquake destroyed the city of Antioch. Another major quake two years later caused much rebuilding efforts to be abandoned. Once one of the largest cities in the ancient world, on a par with Rome and Athens, today it is a forgotten little Turkish border town.

1415- The Grand Council of churchmen at Constance trying to heal the Great Schism ordered the deposition of Pope John XXIII. John ran the Vatican like a mercenary captain, taxing everything including gambling and prostitution. It was said he had slept with 200 women including maids, matrons and nuns. He fled Constance disguised as a groom and was given sanctuary by Cosimo de Medici of Florence. Today he is counted an AntiPope, an illegal one, so Salvatore Roncalli in 1958 was given his number John XXIII.

1453- CONSTANTINOPLE CONQUERED BY THE TURKS- Sultan Mehmed II the "Scourge of Christendom" stormed the capitol of the old Byzantine Empire. His great cherry wood cannons firing giant stone balls blew great holes in the city walls, proving the end of castles as serious defenses.
When he knew the battle was lost, the last Eastern Emperor of the Romans, Constantine XI Paleologus, sallied out sword in hand and went down fighting. His body was identified out of a pile of corpses only by the bejeweled purple shoes. As Mehmed II rode into the city in triumph he recited a Persian poem:" A spider weaves it's web in the palace of the Caesars, a shadow falls over the House of Amonhasarib.”
Except for Spain, Christian Europe hadn’t given much thought to expansionist Islam since the Crusades. Now Turkey became Europe’s number one rival for the next 300 years. The Byzantine Empire’s loss did have one beneficial effect on Western Civilization. All the fleeing Greek scholars, with their arms full of the works of Plato and Aristotle, would settle in European capitols and help spark the Renaissance.

1606- Michel Caravaggio the artist shot a man over a tennis match. Caravaggio was a mad-artist before the term was invented. The police records of Rome show the master painter constantly in trouble, seducing man, woman and child, throwing rocks at soldiers, stabbing waiters, etc.

1660- RESTORATION DAY- After Oliver Cromwell executed King Charles I, he declared the British Monarchy abolished, and ruled England as The Lord Protector. The Commonwealth never became a true representative government. It just replaced a king with a dictator. When Cromwell died in 1659 he tried to leave his son Richard Cromwell in his place. But the son is not the father. The rickety system didn’t work, and Richard got the nickname “Tumbledown-Dick”. A junta of generals led by General Monck had no choice but to recall King Charles’ son Charles II from exile in Holland to come ascend the throne. This day King Charles II entered London. For many years after Restoration Day was a holiday in the UK. In the rural counties today is also called Happy Oak/Apple Day commemorating when Charles was on the run from Cromwells troops he hid in an oak tree.

1692- The Battle of La Hogue- Great naval battle when the French fleet of Admiral de Tourville was ordered by Louis XIV to attack an Anglo-Dutch navy despite being heavily outnumbered. The French admiral did a brilliant job but lost anyway, and the French monarch turned his back on the navy, abandoning supremacy of the seas to England.
Once considered the most important naval engagement until Trafalgar, La Hogue is now mostly remembered on cheap, framed prints of naval battle paintings you see hanging in doctor’s waiting rooms.

1765 - Patrick Henry gave a defiant speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses against the English Stamp Act. Someone in the crowd yelled "Treason!" Henry smiled: "If this be treason, make the most of it!"

1780- THE WAXSAWS or TARELTON’S QUARTER- In the later part of the American Revolution the British Army tried encouraging Loyal Americans to fight their Rebel brothers. A British officer named Banastre Tarleton raised a hard riding company of American Loyalist dragoons to subdue unruly South Carolina. But Tarleton had a sadistic streak that made him go beyond the gentlemanly war of the era.
At the Waxsaws in North Carolina, Tarleton rode down a company of Virginia militia and slaughtered them as they tried to surrender. After the battle ended he ordered his men to comb the battlefield and bayonet the wounded. So he won the tactical victory but Butcher Tarleton’s tactics made more enemies than friends for his side. Many North Carolina hill country folk who had been sitting out the war lost kin at the Waxsaws and so joined the American side in droves. Knowing they may get “Tarleton’s Quarter” made many Minutemen fight harder rather than surrender.

1790- Two years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Rhode Island had still not ratified the document. Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the convention drafting it, and only after the other twelve states threatened to completely sever all commercial ties with it did they knuckle under and vote to join the union, but only by a majority of only two votes.

1814- Napoleon’s Empress Josephine died of a cold contracted while entertaining Czar Alexander of Russia. She was 50. A woman’s fashion of the time was to wear a flimsy muslin dress dampened with water to make it see-through, the equivalent of the modern wet T-shirt. Dressed this way she went for an evening stroll through the gardens of Malmaison with the Russian emperor, caught a chill and soon expired. Napoleon learned of her death while he was in exile on Elba. He locked himself in his room for two days grief stricken. He admitted, “ I loved her, but I did not respect her..”

1843- John C. Freemont began his second surveying expedition mapping out vast areas of California and Oregon and studying its geography. For this he was nicknamed the Pathfinder and later became the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party.

1848- Wisconsin became a state.

1856- THE LOST SPEECH- Former Congressman Abraham Lincoln was called upon to deliver the adjournment speech to the convention inaugurating the new Illinois Republican Party. He had decided to abandon his strategy of mincing words about slavery and “hit it hard.” Lincoln delivered what many regarded as the best speech of his life, a speech better than the Gettysburg Address or “With Malice Towards None” the Second Inaugural.
And maddeningly for history we have no record of what he said. The newspapermen jotting it down shorthand were so amazed by what they heard that they stopped writing, confident they would share the notes of a colleague later. Even Abe’s close friend Herndon, who was a prodigious note taker, gave up after fifteen minutes, admitting he “threw pen and paper away and was swept up in the inspiration of the hour”. The speech made Lincoln one of the rising stars of the party, yet we don’t know anything he said that night.

1859 –Illinois Congressman Abe Lincoln says in a better documented occasion "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of time, but you can't fool all of the people all of time"

1905- Third Day of the Battle of Tsushima Straights. Japanese Admiral Togo catches up to the second half of the Russian Navy and sinks it. In 1985 Japanese salvage crews brought up a huge hoard of gold bullion meant for the payroll for the Tsarist sailors. A Japanese venture capitalist tried to use it to buy back the Kurile Islands- the few small islands in the north that Soviet Russia invaded in the closing days of World War II and have never given back. Russia said 'No Deal."

1908- Teddy Roosevelt signed the first ban on child labor in the U.S.

1911 -The first Indianapolis 500

1912- In Philadelphia, 15 young women were fired by the Curtis Publishing Company for dancing "Turkey Trot" during their lunch break.

1914- THE COLONEL REDL AFFAIR- In the years before World War I, the Great Powers of Europe spent vast sums on spies and agents to discover each other's future war plans. The period was known as the “soft war” not unlike the Cold War of a later generation. Coloneloberst Redl was on the Austro-Hungarian General Staff but was passing information on to Russian Intelligence. He was exposed by an Italian double agent who was also his male lover. According to the Austrian military code of honor, Redl was forced by his fellow officers to shoot himself. An eccentric man, his apartment was filled with life-size mannequins in chairs. Hungarian director Istvan Szabo made an award-winning film in 1986 about Redl with Klaus Maria Brandauer. There were earlier films made of the story in 1931 and 55.

1932- The BONUS MARCHERS reached Washington D.C. Men who joined the army during the Great War were promised an extra bonus to be received in 1945. Similar bonuses were given by the Gov’t to Civil War Veterans in the 1890s. But by 1932 the Great Depression had so ruined people's lives a movement was started by a Portland veteran named Captain William Waters to pass a bill in Congress to get their bonus early. Veterans would lobby congress by mounting a poor people's march on Washington. People's marches of this sort had happened before, like "Coxey's Army" in 1896, the Civil Right's march in 1964, and the Million-Man March in 1995. Veteran's groups came from all over the nation and by the time they got to Capitol Hill they numbered around 80,000. The set up shantytowns on the Mall nicknamed “Hoovervilles”.

Everyday Senators going to work had to slip through a huge line of homeless men shuffling silently around the Capitol Building. The Hoover government panicked and believed Soviet-style revolution was imminent. The opposition to the bonus bill was led by Senator Howard Vidal, father of writer-activist Gore Vidal and uncle to Al Gore.

1941-THE GREAT WALT DISNEY CARTOONISTS STRIKE.. The picket line and campsite went up across the street where St. Joseph's Hospital is today. Chef's from nearby Toluca Lake restaurants would cook for the strikers on their off time and the aircraft mechanics of Lockheed promised muscle if any ruff stuff was threatened.
Picketers included Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), Walt Kelly and Margaret Selby (later Kelly) (Pogo), Bill Melendez (A Charlie Brown Christmas), Steve Bosustow and John Hubley (Mr. Magoo), Maurice Noble and Chuck Jones (What's Opera Doc?), George Baker (Sad Sack), Dick Swift ("the Parent Trap") Frank Tashlin (Cinderfella) Ade Woolery (Playhouse), and four hundred others. Animators from Warner Bros. MGM and Walter Lantz marched with their Disney brothers and sisters, because they knew this was where the fate of their entire industry would be settled. Celebrities like Dorothy Parker, Frank Morgan, and John Garfield gave speeches. The studio claimed no one of importance was on strike.

The strike was eventually settled by Federal arbitration and a little arm twisting by the Bank of America. Many of the artists who left the studio afterwards set up U.P.A. and pioneered the modern 1950's style.

1942- JOHN BARRYMORE- The great dramatic actor, the first American to dare to play Hamlet in England, died of cirrhosis and kidney failure at age 60. Whether the infamous prank actually happened where Raoul Walsh, Bertholdt Brecht, Peter Lorre, W.C. Fields and some others (the "Bundy Drive Boys") kidnapped Barrymore's body from Pierce Brothers Funeral Home and propped it up at the poker table to scare the willys out of Errol Flynn is a matter of debate. Flynn and Paul Heinried said it was true, writer Gene Fowler said it was false. John Barrymore's last words were to screenwriter Gene Fowler: "Say Gene, isn't it true you are an illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?"

1942- Bing Crosby recorded "White Christmas," debatably the greatest selling record of all time.

1952- Edmund Hillary and Sherpa guide Tenzing Norga became first men to reach the top of Mt. Everest. The tallest mountain on the Earth.

1954- New York Police raided the studio of Irving Klaw, the photographer of the Betty Page kinky pin-up photos. Klaw tried to appeal to the Supreme Court but couldn’t get a hearing.

1956- Hollywood director James Whale (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) drowned himself in his pool. His career was over and his health was deteriorating from a series of strokes. Bruises were found on his head and at first the police suspected foul play. It wasn’t until 1989 his gay partner made his suicide note public. His head had struck the pool’s bottom as he jumped in causing the bruise.

1972- Moe Berg died of old age. He was a master spy who using a front as a catcher for the Washington Senator’s Baseball team. He was fluent enough in quantum physics to converse with Einstein. He was once ordered by Washington to go to Switzerland and meet with Rudolph Heisenberg, the Nazi Einstein, and kill him if he felt the Germans were getting too close do developing their own atomic bomb. He chose not to shoot him. In his later years he was a regular contestant on TV game shows. Believe it or not!

1973 - Columbia Records fired president Clive Davis for misappropriating
$100, 000 in funds, So Davis went on and founded Arista records.

1977 - Janet Guthrie becomes 1st woman to drive in Indy 500.

1978 - Bob Crane, (Hogan-Hogan's Heroes), died at 49 under mysterious circumstances. He was found in a Tucson hotel room surrounded by pornography, bludgeoned to death by a camera tripod. The murder was never solved.

1987 –pop singer Michael Jackson attempted to buy the XIX century remains of Joseph Meredith a.k.a. the Elephant Man.

1999- Hikers in a Malibu ravine discovered the remains of Phillip Taylor Kramer, the bass guitar player of the 1960’s band Iron Butterfly. The musician had disappeared four years before. Now his skeleton was found sitting in his Ford Aerostar at the bottom of a steep ravine.

2003- The BBC aired a news expose alleging that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government “sexed up” or exaggerated the proof of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the unpopular invasion of Iraq. The documentary named a shy government researcher named Dr. David Kelly as the perpetrator. He committed suicide as a result.

2007- Apple sold it’s first iPhone.
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Quiz: Why is an American soldier called a G.I. ?

Answer: GI stood for Government Issue. When you were drafted everything you got, your helmet, boots, socks, said Government Issue. So a G.I. Joe meant a government issue guy.