1722 Samuel Adams US revolutionary leader who helped plan the Boston Tea Party
1898 Vincent Youmans Musician and composer (Hit the Deck, Great Day!, No No Nanette, I Know that You Know, More than You Know, Rise 'n' Shine, Flying Down to Rio, The Carioca, Tea for Two)
1920 William Conrad - Actor (Cannon, Jake and the Fatman, Sorry Wrong Number, Killers, Naked Jungle, Nero Wolf) He was the narrator of The Fugitive and The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, and the radio voice of Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke
1920 Jayne Meadows - Actress (City Slickers, Murder by Numbers, Lady in the Lake, The Steve Allen Comedy Hour, Medical Centre) Shes the wife of Steve Allen and the sister of Audrey Meadows
1922 Arthur Penn - Director (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice's Restaurant, The Miracle Worker, Little Big Man, Night Moves)
1929 Sada Thompson Stage and screen actress (Family, Twigs, Our Town, Desperate Characters, Marco Polo, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
1933 Greg Morris - Actor (Mission: Impossible, Vegas, The Doomsday Flight)
1933 Kathleen Nolan - Actress (The Real McCoys, Jamie, Broadside)
1934 Wilford Brimley - Actor (Cocoon, The Natural, Tender Mercies, The Firm, Absence of Malice, The China Syndrome, The Electric Horseman, Our House, The Thing, The Waltons, Did You Hear About the Morgans?)
1943 Randy Bachman Canadian singer and musician with the Guess Who (These Eyes, American Woman, Bus Rider) and Bachman-Turner Overdrive (You Aint Seen Nothing Yet, Taking Care of Business)
1947 Marvin Aday (Meat Loaf) Musician and singer (Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, Paradise by the Dashboard Light) and actor (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Americathon, Roadie)
1948 A Martinez Actor (Longmire, Dark Winds, Ambulance, The Cherokee Kid, Santa Barbara, LA Law, Manhunt: Search for the Night Stalker)
1948 Michele Dotrice British actress (Some Mothers Do Ave Em, Bramwell, Vanity Fair) She is the daughter of actor Roy Dotrice, and the wife of actor Edward Woodward
1958 Shaun Cassidy - Singer (Da Doo Ron Ron, That's Rock 'N' Roll, Hey Deanie, Do You Believe In Magic), actor (The Hardy Boys Mysteries, Breaking Away, General Hospital, Blood Brothers) and producer (Invasion, Cold Case, The Agency, American Gothic) Hes the son of Jack Cassidy & Shirley Jones, and half-brother of David Cassidy
1965 Sofia Milos Swiss actress (CSI: Miami, The Border, Caroline in the City, Cafι Americain, The Ladies Man)
1970 Tamara Taylor Canadian actress (Bones, Serenity, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, Party of Five)
1972 Gwyneth Paltrow - Actress (Emma, Shakespeare in Love, Great Expectations, A Perfect Murder) She is the daughter of actress Blythe Danner and director Bruce Paltrow
1984 Avril Lavigne Canadian singer (Sk8er Boi, Mobile, Complicated, Falling Down, I'm With You)
Died this Day
1869 Samuel Strawhun Kansas ruffian who was killed by Sheriff Wild Bill Hickok. Just after midnight, Ellis County Sheriff Wild Bill Hickok and his deputy responded to a report that Strawhun and several drunken buddies were tearing up John Bitter's Beer Saloon in Hays City, Kansas. When Hickok arrived and ordered the men to stop, Strawhun turned to attack him, and Hickok shot him in the head. Strawhun died instantly, as did the riot. Such were Wild Bill's less-than-restrained law enforcement methods. Famous for his skill with a pistol and steely-calm under fire, James Butler Hickok initially seemed to be the ideal man for the sheriff of Ellis County, Kansas. The good citizens of Hays City, the county seat, were tired of the wild brawls and destructiveness of the hard-drinking buffalo hunters and soldiers who took over their town every night. They hoped the famous "Wild Bill" could restore peace and order, and in the late summer of 1869, elected him as interim county sheriff. Tall, athletic, and sporting shoulder-length hair and a sweeping moustache, Hickok cut an impressive figure, and his reputation as a deadly shot with either hand was often all it took to keep many potential lawbreakers on the straight and narrow. As one visiting cowboy later recalled, Hickok would stand "with his back to the wall, looking at everything and everybody under his eyebrows-just like a mad old bull." But when Hickok applied more aggressive methods of enforcing the peace, some Hays City citizens wondered if their new cure wasn't worse than the disease. Shortly after becoming sheriff, Hickok shot a belligerent soldier who resisted arrest, and the man died the next day. A few weeks later Hickok killed Strawhun. While his brutal ways were indisputably effective, many Hays City citizens were less than impressed that after only five weeks in office he had already found it necessary to kill two men in the name of preserving peace. During the regular November election later that year, the people expressed their displeasure, and Hickok lost to his deputy, 144-89. Though Wild Bill Hickok would later go on to hold other law enforcement positions in the West, his first attempt at being a sheriff had lasted only three months
1917 Edgar Degas, age 83 - French painter
1921 Englebert Humperdinck - German composer (Hansel and Gretel) He died less than one month after his 67th birthday
1944 Aimee Semple McPherson Canadian born US evangelist who used radio to reach a wide audience, building up a huge following and amassing a fortune. She died of barbiturate poisoning, two weeks before her 54th birthday
1972 Lester Bowles (Mike) Pearson, age 75 The 14th Canadian Prime Minister, from 1963 to 1968. He was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1957 for his work in establishing the United Nations Emergency Force
1979 Dame Gracie Fields British singer and entertainer (Sally, The Biggest Aspidistra in the World)
1991 Oona O'Neill Chaplin - Widow of Charlie Chaplin and daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill. Oona married Chaplin in 1943, when she was 18 and he was 54. The couple settled in Switzerland, where they raised eight children
On this Day
1540 The Jesuit order was established in Rome. The Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic missionary organisation, received its charter from Pope Paul III. The Jesuit order played an important role in the Counter-Reformation and eventually succeeded in converting millions around the world to Catholicism. The Jesuit movement was founded by Ignatius de Loyola, a Spanish soldier who became a priest in 1534. The first Jesuits, Ignatius and six of his students, took vows of poverty and chastity
1779 John Adams was named to negotiate the Revolutionary War's peace terms with Britain
1825 The Stockton and Darlington Railway, built by George Stephenson, inaugurated the worlds first public passenger railway service. The steam locomotive, Active, ran on a 27 mile track, pulled 32 passenger wagons, and had a speed of 10 mph
1839 A group of 58 convicted rebels left Quebec for exile in Australia
1854 The first great disaster involving an ocean liner in the Atlantic occurred when the steamship Arctic sank with 300 people aboard
1888 The first letter from the serial killer Jack the Ripper, known as the Dear Boss Letter, was received at the Central News Agency in London. During what was known as the Autumn of Terror, hundreds of letters were sent to the police and local press purporting to be written by the Whitechapel fiend. Most of them were deemed to be fakes written by either newspaper men trying to start a story or fools trying to incite more terror. Many experts believe them all to be hoaxes, but others believe some are genuine, including the Dear Boss letter, which also was originally believed to a hoax. Three days later, the double murder of Stride and Eddowes made them reconsider, especially once they learned a portion of the latter's earlobe was found cut off from the body, eerily reminiscent of a promise made within the letter. The police deemed the Dear Boss letter important enough to reproduce in newspapers and postbills of the time, hoping someone would recognise the handwriting. Whether or not the letter is a hoax, it was the first written reference which used the name "Jack the Ripper" in reference to the Whitechapel murderer
1905 A woman was arrested in New York City for smoking a cigarette in a car
1938 Four years and one day after the launching of the Queen Mary, the same ship yard saw the launching of an even bigger liner, the 80,000 ton Queen Elizabeth. It was launched by the Queen Mother
1942 Glenn Miller and his Orchestra performed together for the last time, at the Central Theatre in Passaic, NJ, prior to Miller's entry into the Army
1964 The Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released after a 10-month investigation, concluding that there was no conspiracy in the assassination, either domestic or international, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, acted alone. The presidential commission, headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, also found that Jack Ruby, the night-club owner who murdered Oswald on live national television, had no prior contact with Oswald. According to the report, the bullets that killed President Kennedy and injured Texas Governor John Connally were fired by Oswald in three shots from a rifle pointed out of a sixth floor window in the Texas School Book Depository. Oswald's life, including his visit to the Soviet Union, was described in detail, but the report made no attempt to analyse his motives. Despite its seemingly firm conclusions, the report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the event, and in 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in a preliminary report that Kennedy was "probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy" that may have involved multiple shooters and organised crime. The committee's findings, as with the findings of the Warren Commission, continue to be widely disputed
1989 At Niagara Falls, Ontario, Jeff Petkovich and Peter DeBernardi survived a barrel drop over Horseshoe Falls. They were the first two-man team to succeed
1994 The last US military base in Canada, a submarine detection base in Argentia, Newfoundland, was closed
1999 Tiger Stadium closed in grand fashion after 87 years as Detroit beat the Kansas City Royals 8-2
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