1890 Edward V. Rickenbacker - US World War I flying ace and aviation industrialist who went on to lead Eastern Airlines for thirty years. He was born in Columbus, Ohio
1895 Juan D. Perón - Argentinean president from 1946 to 1955, and from 1973 to 1974
1920 Frank Herbert – US writer (Dune, Children of Dune, Dune Messiah)
1928 Bill Maynard – British comedian and actor (Heartbeat, Oh No It’s Selwyn Frogitt, The Gaffer, Bless This House, Paper Roses, Till Death Do Us Part, Man About the House, Confessions of a Window Cleaner, The Life of Riley, Robin and Marian, Paradise Island) He appeared in several “Carry On” movies. He also played DCI Quirk in The Sweeny episode Supersnout
1939 Paul Hogan – Australian actor (Crocodile Dundee series, Lightening Jack)
1940 David Carradine - Actor (Kung Fu, Bound for Glory, Karate Cop, Dune Warriors, Gray Lady Down, Boxcar Bertha, North and South Book II, Kill Bill Vol. 2) He is the son of actor, John Carradine, and the brother of Keith and Robert
1941 Reverend Jesse Jackson – US civil rights leader and founder of the Rainbow Coalition
1943 Chevy Chase - Comedian and actor (Saturday Night Live, Fletch, Man of the House, Caddyshack, National Lampoon's Vacation series, Three Amigos, The Groove Tube) He was born Cornelius Crane Chase, in New York City
1943 R.L. Stine - Author (Goosebumps series)
1949 Sigourney Weaver – Actress (Alien series, Gorillas in the Mist, Working Girl, Dave, Ghostbusters series, Annie Hall, The Year of Living Dangerously) She is the daughter of Pat Weaver
1956 Stephanie Zimbalist - Actress (Remington Steele, Centennial, The Gathering, The Awakening) She is the daughter of actor Efrem Zimbalist, Jr
1968 Emily Proctor – Actress (CSI: Miami, The Dukes of Hazzard: Reunion, Jerry Maguire, Leaving Las Vegas)
1970 Matt Damon - Actor-screenwriter (Good Will Hunting , The Bourne Identity, Mystic Pizza, The Rainmaker, Saving Private Ryan, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Finding Forrester)
Died this Day
1754 Henry Fielding, age 47 – British author (The History of Tom Jones a Foundling, Amelia, Tom Thumb: A Tragedy) Fielding supported himself as a successful playwright after he lost his family's financial support when he dropped out of Eton at age 17. He wrote some 25 plays, but his career as a playwright was truncated when his satire Historical Register, For the Year 1736 earned Fielding the prime minister's ire. In search of a new livelihood, he studied law and edited a newspaper for several years. In 1748, the year before Tom Jones was published, Fielding was appointed justice of the peace for Westminster and Middlesex, where he played an important role in breaking up criminal gangs. In 1754 he left London for Lisbon, seeking a healthier climate. Fielding had suffered from ill health for some time, but his trip to Lisbon failed to ease his condition, and he died there two months later
1869 Franklin Pierce, age 64 – 14th US President, died in Concord, NH
On this Day
1085 St. Mark’s Cathedral was consecrated in Venice
1643 At Montreal, Quebec, Jeanne Mance opened the Hôtel Dieu, Montreal's first hospital and the first lay hospital in North America. She would treat the French and Indian populations there for over 30 years
1806 The British used a form of rocket propelled missiles for the first time in an attack on Boulogne
1871 Around nine o'clock on a Sunday evening, the Great Fire of Chicago broke out, either in, or very near to, the O’Leary Barn. Although the fire reportedly started after a cow kicked over a lantern in the barn of Mrs. O'Leary, the exact circumstances surrounding its origin remain unknown. It had been a dry summer, and within hours the conflagration, driven by a strong wind out of the southwest, engulfed the centre of the city, and around midnight jumped the Chicago River, burning the southern portion of the city to the ground by daybreak. As thousands of panicked Chicagoans fled to the north, the fire pursued them, and by Monday the flames reached Fullerton Avenue, then the northern-most limit of the city. Tuesday morning a saving rain began to fall, and the flames finally died out, leaving Chicago a smoking ruin. With damage estimated at $200 million, 90,000 Chicagoans were made homeless, and at least 300 people perished in the blaze. Chicago at that time was the unofficial regional capital and economic centre of the US West. Because of its location on the western edge of a system of lakes, rivers, and canals that linked the city to the East, Chicago was the natural destination for both western raw materials moving East and eastern manufactured goods moving West. After the Civil War, Chicago quickly eclipsed St. Louis as the primary trading hub between East and West, and the city's fate was inextricably tied to the rapidly growing settlement and development of western natural resources. Millions of dollars worth of cattle, lumber, swine, and grain that had originated in the plains of Wyoming or the mountains of Montana were channelled through the massive freight yards, slaughterhouses, and grain elevators of Chicago, and by the late 19th century nearly all railroads led to Chicago. Although the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed Chicago's downtown, it left most of the city's essential industrial infrastructure in place. Scarcely missing a beat, the towering grain elevators and vast stockyards continued to collect the growing output of the West, process it into pork sausages or two-by-fours, and send it onward to the insatiable markets of the East
1892 Sergei Rachmaninoff publicly performed his piano piece “Prelude in C-sharp Minor” for the first time
1895 Sound recording pioneer Emil Berliner founded the Berliner Gramophone Company in Philadelphia. Berliner dramatically improved the phonograph when he developed the flat gramophone record, which quickly replaced Thomas Edison's recording cylinder. He also developed a method for mass-producing records
1904 The cities of Edmonton, Alberta and Prince Albert, Saskatchewan were incorporated
1916 In London, England, James Richardson was awarded the Victoria Cross posthumously for inspiring the men of 16th Canadian Battalion to capture a German position at the Somme in World War I. Richardson was fearlessly marching in front of the enemy playing his bagpipes when he was killed
1918 During World War I, US Corporal Alvin C. York was credited with single-handedly killing 25 German soldiers and capturing 132 in the Argonne Forest of France. The action saved York's small detachment from annihilation by a German machine-gun nest and won the soldier from Tennessee the Congressional Medal of Honor. In the 1920s, he used his fame to raise funds for the York Industrial Institute (now the Alvin C. York Institute), a school for underprivileged children in rural Tennessee. He later opened a Bible school. Sergeant York, the 1941 film starring Gary Cooper, was based on his life
1919 The first transcontinental air race in the US began, with sixty-three planes competing in the round-trip aerial derby between California and New York. As fifteen planes departed the Presidio in San Francisco, California, forty-eight planes left Roosevelt Field in Mineola, New York. Lieutenant Belvin W. Maynard, flying a Havilland-4 with a Liberty motor, won the 5,400-mile race across the continent and back. Maynard reached the Presidio in just over three days, rested and repaired his plane for another three days, and then returned to Roosevelt Field in just under four days. Maynard won the event for his lowest elapsed time, but in actual flight time - twenty-four hours, fifty-nine minutes, and forty-nine seconds - he was eclipsed by three others
1928 The US Supreme Court decided that Canadians working in the US would be not liable for immigration fees when crossing the border
1934 Bruno Hauptmann was indicted for murder in the death of the infant son of US aviator Charles Lindbergh
1937 Dorothy L. Sayers’ fictional detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, finally married Harriet Vane, a prickly mystery writer he had pursued through several novels. The wedding took place in the book Busman's Honeymoon, one of the last featuring the two English sleuths. In the story, Strong Poison, Wimsey solved a mysterious poisoning and won freedom for the wrongly accused mystery novelist Harriet Vane, with whom he fell in love. In Gaudy Night, set at an Oxford reunion, Vane finally accepted Wimsey’s proposal. The pair were married and set off on a comical honeymoon, accompanied by Wimsey's faithful butler, Bunter, in Busman's Honeymoon
1938 The British comic book hero Rockfist Rogan of the RAF first appeared in the Champion
1944 The radio show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, aired its first episode
1945 President Truman announced that the secret of the atomic bomb would be shared only with Britain and Canada
1967 A Bolivian guerrilla force led by Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara was defeated in a skirmish with a special detachment of the Bolivian army. Guevara was wounded, captured, and executed the next day
1970 Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature
1971 In Ottawa, Ontario, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Indian women could not be deprived of Indian status because of marriage to non-Indians
1991 A colonial-era burial site for African-American slaves was discovered by construction workers hired to build a new federal building in lower Manhattan. Over a dozen skeletons have been discovered in the only known Revolutionary-era cemetery for African-Americans. The site, now located at Broadway and Reade Street, was once the northern section of an eighteenth century potter's field, where records show there existed a "Negro Burial Ground" that was closed in 1790
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