Birthdays: Buddy Rich, Lena Horne is 90, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Hayward, Mike Tyson is 41, Deanna Durbin, Howard Hawks, Ron Swoboda, William Goldman, Martin Landau, David Alan Grier, Vincent D’Onofrio, Monica Potter, Rupert Graves

1559- King Henry II of France is warned by a weirdo named Michel de Nostre Dame or Nostradamus, to beware of lances. Henry laughed it off because nobody fought that way anymore. However to celebrate a dynastic marriage and peace treaty with Spain part of the Rue Saint Antoine in Paris was closed off for a joust with blunt lances–kind of a Renaissance version of a "Medieval Times" party. Forty year old King Henry jousted with the Dukes of Guise and Savoy and knocked them down. He complained they let him win and ordered his Scottish body guard Montgomery to lay on for real. In a freak accident on impact Montgomery’s lance splintered and shot through the king’s gold helmet visor and through his brain, killing him. Nostradamus was quickly put on the royal payroll.

1643- In Paris the son of an upholsterer named Jean Coquelin signed a contract to establish the Ilustre Theatre. Jean also took on a stage name- Moliere .

1841- The never-explained day it rained fish over Boston.

1856- Charles Dickens does his first public reading from his works in London.

1859- Daredevil Emile Blondin crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

1894 - London Tower Bridge opened.

1896 - W S Hardaway patented the electric stove.

1908-A mysterious explosion occurs in remote Tunguska Siberia with the estimated strength of several atom bombs. No meteorite remains was ever discovered. Soil at the epicenter had been turned to glass. It was speculated as a comet hit or a UFO crash but has never been completely explained.

1914 – A young English trained Indian lawyer named Mohandas K. Ghandi was arrested for the first time, trying to win equal rights for non-European citizens in South Africa. Years later in India he would earned the name the Mahatma, or the Great Soul.

1933- A group of actors meet in secret at Frank (the Wizard of Oz) Morgan and form the Screen Actors Guild. The secrecy was because studios threatened to blacklist anyone who so much as breathed the word union. Among the founding members that night are James Cagney, Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, Frederic March, Robert Montgomery and Boris Karloff.

1936- Margaret Mitchell's bestseller 'Gone With the Wind" first published.

1937- Congress voted to shut down the Federal Theater Program, the division of the government funded WPA that produced plays for Depression wracked poor people. The FTP produced cutting edge works of Orson Welles, Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill and at it’s height reached 25 million people. But conservative senators thought it had become too radicalized by lefties for a government program. Theater actors working in L.A. on a hit production of Pinnochio held a mock funeral for the puppet. Over it’s casket was the headstone FTP: Born 1934, Killed by an Act of Congress, June 30th 1937.

1940- Cartoonist Dale Messick takes over the Brenda Star comic strip and adds the trademark sparkles.

1948- Bell Laboratories announced the Transistor, a possible substitute for radio-vacuum tubes.

1953- The first Chevy Corvette rolled off the assembly line. Only three thousand were made, all white with red interior selling for $3500.

1975 - Cher, just 4 days after divorcing Sonny Bono married rocker Gregg Allman.

1996 - Margaux Hemingway, actress and considered the first modern Supermodel, committed suicide at 41. Her grandfather Ernest Hemingway committed suicide, and his father before him.

1997- Britain gave the colony of Hong Kong back to China upon the completion of the 99 year lease settled by the Second Treaty of Peking in 1898. While much was being made of a democratic state being turned over to a totalitarian regime, Hong Kong only had direct elections of it's own officials since 1991.