1833 Benjamin Harrison - 23rd US President, and grandson of 9th US President, William Henry Harrison
1890 H.P. Lovecraft – US author who was a master of the macabre story and short novel. Most of his work appeared in the magazine, Weird Tales
1905 Jack Teagarden – US trombonist, singer and leader of his own band, who later went on to play with Louis Armstrong
1907 Alan Reed – Actor (Viva Zapata!, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I the Jury, Peter Loves Mary, Peter Gunn, Duffy’s Tavern) He was the voice of Fred Flintstone, and played General MacGruder in the Batman episode, Penguin Sets a Trend
1918 Jacqueline Susann – Author (Valley of the Dolls, Every Night Josephine, The Love Machine, Once Is Not Enough)
1923 Jim Reeves - Country singer (Four Walls, He'll Have to Go, Am I Losing You, I Won't Come In While He's There, Billie Bayou, Welcome to My World, This is It, Guess I'm Crazy, Mexican Joe) He also played baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals
1927 Yootha Joyce – British actress (Man About the House, George and Mildred, Steptoe and Son Ride Again, Horrors of Burke and Hare, A Man for All Seasons)
1927 Joya Sherrill - Singer (Long Strong and Consecutive, I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart)
1935 Justin Tubb - Singer (Looking Back to See, Sure Fire Kisses) and songwriter (Lonesome 7-7203, Love is No Excuse, Keeping Up with the Joneses) He is the son of Ernest Tubb
1936 Sam Melville – Actor (The Rookies, Roughnecks, Twice Dead)
1942 Isaac Hayes - Singer, songwriter (Theme from Shaft, Soul Man, Hold on I'm Coming) and actor (Tough Guys, Truck Turner, Escape From New York, Robin Hood: Men in Tights)
1947 Ray Wise – Actor (Twin Peaks, RoboCop, Reaper, 24, Good Night and Good Luck, Dallas)
1947 Jim Pankow – Trombonist and song writer with the group Chicago (Make Me Smile, Colour My World)
1948 John Noble – Australian actor (The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers & Return of the King, Fringe, The Last Airbender, Elementary)
1948 Robert Plant – Singer with Led Zeppelin (Stairway to Heaven, Whole Lotta Love, Immigrant Song, D'yer Mak'er, Fool in the Rain), the Honeydrippers (Big Log, Sea of Love, Rockin' at Midnight) and solo (Little Sister)
1953 Peter Horton - Actor (Thirtysomething, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers)
1956 Joan Allen - Actress (The Contender, Pleasantville, Nixon, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Crucible, Face/Off)
1962 James Marsters – Actor (Torchwood, Smallville, Angel, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
1967 Colin Cunningham – Actor (Da Vinci’s Inquest, Beggars and Choosers, Big Sound, Falling Skies)
1974 Amy Adams – Actress (Julie & Julia, Enchanted, Catch Me If You Can, Charlie Wilson’s War, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day)
1974 Misha Collins – Actor (Supernatural, 24, Girl Interrupted)
Died this Day
1804 Sergeant Charles Floyd – A member of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s Corps of Discovery, and the only one to die during the journey. He died three months after the voyage began, near what is now Sioux City, Iowa. He was also the first US soldier to die west of Mississippi. Floyd was a native of Kentucky who had enlisted in the US military a few years earlier. When word went out asking for volunteers to join the expedition across the continent to the Pacific, Floyd was among the first to apply. Young, vigorous, and better educated than most of the soldiers, Floyd was a natural choice, and Lewis and Clark not only selected him to join the mission, they promoted him to sergeant. Sadly, Floyd's part in the great voyage of the Corps of Discovery was short-lived. By late July, Lewis and Clark reported that Floyd "has been very sick for several days." He seemed to grow better for a time, but on August 15, he had been sick all night, and was “seized with a complaint somewhat like a violent chorlick [colic].” Concerned, the two captains did what they could to treat Floyd's ailment, but the previously robust young man steadily weakened. The illness grew severe during the evening of August 19, and Clark sat up with the suffering man almost the entire night. Floyd died in the early afternoon, reportedly "with a good deal of composure." The members of the expedition buried his body on a high bluff overlooking a river that flowed into the Missouri, affixing a red-cedar post with his name, title, and date of death over the grave. Lewis read the funeral service, and the two captains concluded the ceremony by naming the nearby stream Floyds River and the hill Floyds Bluff. Lewis and Clark regretted that their limited wilderness medical skills were inadequate to cure the young soldier, yet even if Floyd had been in Philadelphia, the best doctors of the day would likely have been unable to save him. Based on the symptoms described by Lewis and Clark, modern physicians have concluded that Floyd was probably suffering from acute appendicitis. When his appendix ruptured, Floyd quickly died of peritonitis. Lacking antibiotics and ignorant of the proper surgical procedures, no early 19th century physician could have done much more than Lewis and Clark did. On their return journey from the Pacific in 1806, Lewis and Clark stopped to pay their respects at Sergeant Floyd's grave
1912 General William Booth, age 83 - British minister and founder of the Salvation Army, which he began in 1865 while performing mission work to the poor in London's East End. He died after a lifetime of Christian work among the poorest and most destitute people in Britain. Booth and his helpers worked to bring Christianity into the places which the regular churches could scarcely touch. The Army, in spite of opposition to its beginnings, later met with sustained success and spread throughout the world
1989 George Adamson – British naturalist and conservationist. He is best known for his work with his wife, Joy, and the lioness Elsa. Their story inspired the movie, Born Free. He was murdered by bandits in a remote game park in Kenya
On this Day
1681 The hospital in Montréal Québec, the Hôtel Dieu, offered the first hospital insurance plan
1858 The colony of British Columbia was established and the Hudson's Bay Company relinquished control of Vancouver Island to local authorities
1866 President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over, even though the fighting had stopped months earlier
1869 A Canadian survey crew arrived in Fort Garry, Manitoba to re-survey the settlement. They would ignore existing agreements with the natives, igniting the Red River Rebellion
1882 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan was founded by The Temperance Colonisation Society, an Ontario group that wanted to make the settlement the capital of a temperance colony
1887 Pitcher Dan Casey of the Phillies struck out in the ninth inning of a game against the Giants, inspiring the poem, Casey at the Bat
1911 The New York Times sent the first around-the-world telegram via commercial service. The message read ''This message sent around the world,'' and travelled on 16 relays through the Azores, Bombay, the Philippine Islands, Guam, Honolulu, and San Francisco. The message, which travelled more than 28,000 miles, took about 16 minutes to transmit
1913 Adolph Pégond baled out from an airplane 700 feet above Buc in France. His parachute brought him down safely, making him the first to bale out from a plane
1920 The first commercial radio station began broadcasting. The station, in Detroit, Michigan, was owned by the Detroit News, and initiated the broadcast with a show called Tonight's Dinner
1940 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain, saying, ''Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.'' He spoke those words as the Battle of Britain raged in the skies
1942 Searchlights crossing the sky ceased to be a fixture of Hollywood premieres in an attempt to avoid attack and surveillance by enemy forces in World War II. The entire West Coast was required to dim its lights at night. During the war, movie studios were also limited in the amount of cloth they could use in costumes, the quantity of new construction they could devote to sets, and the amount of film stock they could purchase
1964 US First Lady, Lady Byrd Johnson, along with Marian Pearson, the wife of Canadian Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, opened the Roosevelt Campobello International Park on Campobello Island, New Brunswick
1975 Viking 1, an unmanned US planetary probe, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Mars. The following June the spacecraft entered into orbit around Mars and devoted the next month to imaging the Martian surface with the purpose of finding an appropriate landing site for its lander. On July 20, 1976, the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the Viking 1 lander separated from the orbiter and touched down on the Chryse Planitia region, becoming the first spacecraft to successfully land on the surface of Mars. The same day, the craft sent back the first close-up photographs of the rust-coloured Martian surface. In September 1976, Viking 2, which had been launched only three weeks after Viking 1, entered into orbit around Mars, where it assisted Viking 1 in imaging the surface, as well as sending down its own lander. During the dual Viking missions, the two orbiters imaged the entire surface of Mars at a resolution of 150 to 300 meters, and the two landers sent back more than 1,400 images of the planet's surface.
1977 The US launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft carrying a 12-inch copper phonograph record containing greetings in dozens of languages, samples of music and sounds of nature
1979 The US’s Diana Nyad became the first person to complete the over-60 mile swim from Bahamas to Florida
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