1839 George Cadbury – British social reformer and chocolate manufacturer who expanded his father’s business and established a model village for his workers at Bourneville. He was an ancestor of Jeremy Brett
1851 William Hesketh Lever – British entrepreneur who built the Lever Brothers firm. He began making soap from vegetable oils instead of tallow, and created the new town of Port Sunlight, Merseyside, to house the workers of Lever Brothers
1878 Charles Mauguin - French mineralogist and crystallographer
1887 Dr. Graham Edgar – US developer of the octane rating system for gasoline
1911 Sir William Golding – Author (Lord of the Flies, The Rites of Passage, The Paper Men) He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983
1913 Frances Farmer - Actress (Rhythm on the Range, Son of Fury, Ebb Tide, Ride A Crooked Mile)
1918 Penelope Mortimer – British author (The Pumpkin Eater)
1921 Billy Ward – Singer and pianist with the group Billy Ward and the Dominoes (Sixty-Minute Man, Have Mercy Baby, Star Dust, Deep Purple, St. Therese of the Roses)
1924 Don Harron - Canadian actor and comedian (Riel, Hee Haw, The Big Revue, And That’s The News Goodnight, The Hospital) and comedic author (Charlie Farquharson’s Histry of Canada, Charlie Farquharson’s Jogfree of Canda the Whirld and Other Places)
1927 Rosemary Harris – British actress (Crossing Delancey, The Chisholms, The Ploughman’s Lunch, The Boys From Brazil)
1928 Adam West - Actor (The Detectives, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Tammy and the Doctor, The Last Precinct, Danger Theatre, Hooper, The New Age) He was in the Perry Mason episodes The Case of the Barefaced Witness and The Case of the Bogus Books. And, of course, he was the best Batman
1930 Derek Nimmo – British actor (Casino Royale, Third Time Lucky, All Gas and Gaiters, The World of Wooster)
1931 Brook Benton - Singer (It's Just a Matter of Time, Baby You've Got What It Takes, The Boll Weevil Song, Rainy Night In Georgia)
1931 Ray Danton - Actor (The Longest Day, The George Raft Story, I'll Cry Tomorrow)
1933 David McCallum – Scottish-born actor (The Man from UNCLE, Colditz, Mother Love, The Invisible Man, Shattered Image, The Great Escape) He was in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Fifty-Millionth Frenchman
1934 Brian Epstein – The man who discovered, and at one time managed, the Beatles
1940 Bill Medley - Singer with The Righteous Brothers (You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling, Just Once In My Life, Unchained Melody, Ebb Tide, You're My Soul & Inspiration, Rock and Roll Heaven)
1940 Sylvia Tyson – Canadian folksinger with the duo Ian and Sylvia (Four Strong Winds, You Were On My Mind)
1940 Paul Williams – Actor (Phantom of the Paradise, The Cheap Detective, Smokey and the Bandit) and songwriter (Evergreen, Love Boat theme song, We've Only Just Begun, Can't Live a Day Without You)
1941 Mama Cass Elliott – Singer with The Mamas & The Papas, and solo (California Dreamin', Monday Monday, Creeque Alley, Dream a Little Dream of Me, It's Getting Better, Make Your Own Kind of Music)
1942 Freda Payne - Singer (Band of Gold, Bring the Boys Home)
1945 Randolph Mantooth - Actor (Emergency, Detective School, Operation Petticoat)
1946 Michael Elphick – British actor (Boon, EastEnders, David Copperfield, Three Up Two Down, The Krays, Little Dorrit, Withnail and I, Pull the Other One, Gorky Park, Smiley's People, Privates on Parade, The Elephant Man) He played Jimmy Fleet in The Sweeney episode, One Of Your Own
1948 Jeremy Irons – British actor (The Mission, Longitude, Reversal of Fortune, Die Hard: With a Vengeance, House of Spirits, M. Butterfly, Damage, Dead Ringers, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Lion King, Brideshead Revisited, The Borgias)
1949 Twiggy (Leslie Hornby) - Fashion model and actress (The Boy Friend, Madame Sousatzka, Body Bags, The Princesses)
1950 Joan Lunden – TV personality (Good Morning America, Behind Closed Doors)
1964 Kim Richards – Actress (Nanny and the Professor, Escape to Witch Mountain, Hello Larry)
1964 Trisha Yearwood – Country singer (She’s In Love With the Boy, The Woman Before Me, You Say You Will, Walkaway Joe, How Do I Live, XXX’s and OOO’s, There Goes My Baby) and cookbook author (Georgia Cooking in an Oklahoma Kitchen, Home Cooking with Trisha Yearwood) She also has a TV cooking show, Trisha’s Southern Kitchen. Her husband is Garth Brooks
Died this Day
1881 James A. Garfield – 20th US President, died of blood poisoning, eighty days after being shot in the back and the arm by a failed office seeker. He received the wounds in Washington, DC, and was then taken to the seashore at Elberon, New Jersey, where he attempted to recuperate with his family. The president never left his sickbed. Garfield had three funerals: one in Elberon; another in Washington, where his body rested in state in the Capitol for three days; and a third in Cleveland, where he was buried
1968 Chester Carlson – US inventor of the Xerox photocopying system
1973 Gram Parsons, age 26 - US singer and songwriter (She, How Much I've Lied, The New Soft Shoe, Grievous Angel, Hickory Wind, Las Vegas, In My Hour of Darkness) He died in Yucca Valley, California
On this Day
1648 Jacques Boisdon opened Canada's first licensed tavern, in Québec. He was forbidden to be open when church services were being held
1654 In the first Canadian marriage on record, 11-year-old Marguerite Sedilot married Jean Aubuchon at Trois Rivieres, Québec
1827 After a duel turned into an all-out brawl, Jim Bowie disembowelled a banker in Alexandria, Louisiana, with an early version of his famous Bowie knife. The actual inventor of the Bowie knife, however, was probably not Jim, but rather his equally belligerent brother, Rezin Bowie, who reportedly came up with the design after nearly being killed in a vicious knife fight. The Bowie brothers engaged in more fights than the typical frontiersman of the day, but such violent duels were not uncommon events on the untamed margins of US civilisation. In the early nineteenth century, most frontiersmen preferred knives to guns for fighting, and the Bowie knife quickly became one of the favourites. Rezin Bowie had invented such a nasty looking weapon that the mere sight of it probably discouraged many would-be robbers and attackers. Designs varied somewhat, but the typical Bowie knife sported a 9 to 15 inch blade, sharpened only on one side for much of its length, though the curved tip was sharpened to a point on both sides. The double-edged tip made the knife an effective stabbing weapon, while the dull-edge combined with a brass hand guard allowed the user to slide a hand down over the blade as needed. The perfect knife for close-quarter fighting, the Bowie knife became the weapon of choice for many westerners before the reliable rapid-fire revolver took its place in the post-Civil War period
1864 The first sleeping car patent was granted to Henry Meyer for his method of converting the backs of seats into beds
1876 Melville Bissell, US inventor, patented the carpet sweeper
1891 The Grand Trunk Railway opened the single track St. Clair Tunnel under the St. Clair River from Sarnia, Ontario, to Port Huron, Michigan. Construction on the railway linking Michigan and Ontario railways began in 1888
1893 With the signing of the Electoral Bill by Governor Lord Glasgow, New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant national voting rights to women. New Zealand women first went to the polls in the national elections of November 1893
1900 Robert Parker and Harry Longbaugh, better known as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, robbed the First National Bank in Winnemucca, Nevada, marking the first time that the duo worked as a team. Up until this point, both men had been loosely affiliated with the Hole-in-the-Wall gang, named after a secret Colorado mountain hideout. When the two met in 1900, they immediately became friends and partners
1934 Bruno Hauptmann was arrested in New York and charged with the kidnap-murder of the Lindbergh baby
1945 Nazi propagandist William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, was sentenced to death for treason by a British court. He spent the Second World War in Nazi Germany, broadcasting propaganda against Britain
1955 After a decade of rule, Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón was deposed in a military coup. Perón, a demagogue who came to power in 1946 with the backing of the working classes, became increasingly authoritarian as Argentina's economy declined in the early 1950s. His greatest political resource was his charismatic wife, Eva "Evita" Perón, but she died in 1952 and support for President Perón among the working classes became decidedly less pronounced. His attempt to force the separation of church and state was met with considerable controversy. In June 1955, church leaders excommunicated him, encouraging a clique of military officers to plot his overthrow. On September 19th, the army and navy revolted, and Perón was forced to flee to Paraguay. In 1960, he settled in Spain, where he served as leader-in-exile to the "Peronists" - a powerful faction of Argentines who remained loyal to him and his system. In October 1973, Perón was again elected president, and remained so until his death in July, 1974
1956 Ontario Premier Leslie Miscampbell Frost turned the sod for Canada's first nuclear power station, at Des Joachims
1957 The United States conducted its first underground nuclear test, in the Nevada desert
1959 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reacted angrily during a visit to Los Angeles upon being told that, for security reasons, he wouldn't be allowed to visit Disneyland
1975 The first episode of Fawlty Towers was broadcast by the BBC
1985 The Mexico City area was struck by the first of two devastating earthquakes that claimed some 6,000 lives
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