1844 John Henry Heinz – US food manufacturer who formed J.H. Heinz Company Inc. in 1905. He adopted the slogan “57 Varieties” in 1896
1884 Eleanor Roosevelt – US First Lady to the 32nd President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. She was the US Delegate to the United Nations
1906 Charles Revson – US founder of the Revlon Cosmetics line
1921 Linda Stirling - Actress (Jesse James Rides Again, Rio Grande Raiders)
1925 Elmore Leonard - Author (Get Shorty, Hombre, Fifty-Two Pickup, Stick) His 1992 novel, Rum Punch, was made into the movie Jackie Brown. He started out writing westerns before switching to mysteries
1928 Ennio Morricone – Italian composer (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good the Bad and the Ugly)
1932 Dottie West – Country singer (Here Comes My Baby, Country Sunshine, Paper Mansions, Rings of Gold, All I Ever Need is You)
1937 Ron Leibman - Actor (Kaz, Pacific Station, Norma Rae, Friends, Central Park West)
1943 John Nettles – British stage and screen actor (Midsomer Murders, Bergerac, The Liverbirds)
1943 Gene Watson – Singer (Fourteen Carat Mind, Love in the Hot Afternoon)
1945 Robert Gale - Medical doctor who was the co-founder of the International Bone Marrow Registry
1948 Daryl Hall – Singer with the group Hall & Oates (She's Gone, Kiss on My List, I Can't Go For That, Did It in a Minute, Maneater)
1953 David Morse - Actor (St. Elsewhere, The Langoliers, The Brotherhood of the Rose, Hack, Contact)
1957 Dawn French – Welsh comedienne and actress (French and Saunders, David Copperfield, The Vicar of Dibley, Murder Most Horrid, Girls on Top, The Trouble With Maggie Cole, Lark Rise to Candleford, Jam & Jerusalem)
1962 Joan Cusack – Actress (Saturday Night Live, Addams Family Values, Broadcast News, Married to the Mob, Working Girl, Toys)
1967 Luke Perry - Actor (Beverly Hills 90210, Terminal Bliss, Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
1968 Jane Krakowski – Actress (30 Rock, Ally McBeal, Mrs. Winterbourne, Alfie)
1970 Constance Zimmer – Actress (Boston Legal, Entourage, Good Morning Miami, Joan of Arcadia, UnReal, House of Cards, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D)
1976 Emily Deschanel – Actress (Bones, Boogeyman, Cold Mountain, The Heart Department, Rose Red, Animal Kingdom)
1977 Matt Bomer – Actor (White Collar, Chuck, Flightplan, Tru Calling, American Horror Story, Doom Patrol, The Sinner)
Died this Day
1779 Casimir Pulaski - Polish nobleman who was killed while fighting for American independence during the Revolutionary War Battle of Savannah, Georgia
1809 Meriwether Lewis, age 35 – US explorer of Lewis and Clark fame. He died under mysterious circumstances in the early hours of the morning after stopping for the night at Grinder's Tavern along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. Three years earlier, Lewis and his co-commander, William Clark, had completed their exploration of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and the Pacific Northwest. Famous and celebrated throughout the nation as a result, Lewis nonetheless found his return to civilised eastern life difficult. President Thomas Jefferson appointed him as governor of Louisiana Territory, but Lewis soon discovered that the complex politics and power struggles of the territory were earning him more enemies than friends. At the same time, bureaucrats in Washington, DC, were questioning the legitimacy of some of the purchases Lewis had made for the expedition in 1803, raising the threat of bankruptcy if he were forced to cover these costs personally. Also, Lewis still had failed to complete the work necessary to publish the critically important scientific and geographical information he and Clark had gathered in their journals - much to the disappointment of his close friend and mentor, Thomas Jefferson. For all these reasons, most recent historians have concluded that Lewis' death was a suicide brought on by deep depression and the heavy weight of worries he bore. According to the account given by Mrs. Grinder, the mistress of the tavern along the Natchez Trace where Lewis died, during his final hours Lewis began to pace in his room and talk aloud to himself "like a lawyer." She then heard a pistol shot and Lewis exclaiming, "O Lord!" After a second pistol shot, Lewis staggered from his room and called for help, reportedly saying, "O Madam! Give me some water, and heal my wounds." Strangely, Mrs. Grinder did nothing to help him, later stating that she was too afraid. The next morning servants went to his room where they reportedly found him "busily engaged in cutting himself from head to foot" with a razor. Fatally wounded in the abdomen, Lewis died shortly after sunrise. Based largely on Mrs. Grinder's story, most historians have argued that Lewis tried to kill himself with two pistol shots, and when death did not come quickly enough, tried to finish the job with his razor. However, in a 1962 book, Suicide or Murder? The Strange Death of Governor Meriwether Lewis, the author Vardes Fisher raised questions about the reliability of Mrs. Grinder's story and suggested that Lewis might have actually been murdered, either by Mrs. Grinder's husband or bandits. Since then a minority of historians has continued to raise challenges to the suicide thesis. The true nature of his death remains a mystery
1961 Chico Marx, age 70 – The piano playing Marx Brother (Duck Soup, Animal Crackers, A Night at the Opera)
1985 Tex Williams, age 68 - Singing cowboy (Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! That Cigarette) He died in Newhall, California of lung cancer
On this Day
1521 Pope Leo X conferred the title “Defender of the Faith” on Britain's King Henry VIII, for his treatise against Martin Luther
1689 Peter the Great became Tsar of Russia
1754 Near what is now Red Deer, Alberta, Anthony Henday met a party of Blackfoot Indians. He tried to convince them to travel to the Hudson Bay to trade, but they declined. It was the first time the Blackfoot had encountered a European
1776 During the American Revolution, a British fleet under Sir Guy Carleton defeated fifteen US gunboats under the command of Brigadier General Benedict Arnold at the Battle of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain, New York. Although nearly all of Arnold's ships were destroyed, it took over two days for the British to subdue the naval force, delaying Carleton's campaign and giving the Patriot ground forces adequate time to prepare a crucial defence of New York. Four years later, Benedict Arnold, as commander of West Point, agreed to surrender the important Hudson River fort to the British for the price of £6,000. The plot was discovered after British spy John Andre was captured, forcing Arnold to flee to British protection where he joined in their fight against the country that he once so valiantly served
1811 The first steam-powered ferryboat, the Juliana, was put into operation between New York City and Hoboken, NJ
1871 The Great Fire of Chicago was finally extinguished
1887 US inventor Thomas Edison patented an electric voting machine
1890 The Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in Washington DC
1899 The Boer War began between the British Empire and Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State in South Africa. Boers, also known as Afrikaners, were the descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa. At the end of the Napoleonic wars, Britain took possession of the Dutch Cape colony, sparking resistance from the independence-minded Boers, who resented the Anglicisation of South Africa, and Britain's anti-slavery policies. In 1833, the year that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, the Boers began an exodus into African tribal territory, where they founded the republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The two new republics lived peaceably with their British neighbours until 1867, when the discovery of diamonds and gold in the region made conflict between the Boer states and Britain inevitable. Following declarations of independence from the Boer states during the 1880s, minor fighting with Britain ensued before the outbreak of full-scale war in 1899. By mid-June of 1900, British forces had captured most major Boer cities and formally annexed their territories, but the Boers launched a guerrilla war that frustrated the British occupiers. Beginning in 1901, the British began a strategy of systematically searching out and destroying these guerrilla units, while herding the families of the Boer soldiers into concentration camps. By 1902, the British had crushed the Boer resistance and at the end of May 1902, the Treaty of Vereeniging was signed in Pretoria, ending hostilities in the South African Boer War. In 1910, the Union of South Africa was created within the British Empire, comprising the two Boer republics and the old Cape and Natal colonies
1942 The RCMP schooner, St. Roch, arrived in Halifax after the first west-to-east crossing of the Northwest Passage. One of the eight-man crew died of a heart attack as the schooner spent the winter in the ice less than 50 miles from the Magnetic Pole. The St. Roch had sailed from Vancouver in the summer of 1940
1952 CBFT in Montréal carried the first hockey telecast in Canada. The Montréal Canadiens played the Detroit Red Wings
1962 Vatican II was convened by Pope John XXIII. It was the first ecumenical council in ninety-two years, in the name of working to foster greater unity between Catholicism and the other religions of the world
1968 Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, was launched with astronauts Walter M. Schirra, Jr., Donn F. Eisele, and Walter Cunningham aboard. Under the command of Schirra, the crew of Apollo 7 began an eleven-day orbit of Earth, during which the crew transmitted the first live television broadcasts from orbit. The crew also successfully performed a docking manoeuvre with a lunar module as a preparation for the future manned lunar landing, accomplished by Apollo 11 in 1969
1982 The Mary Rose, an English ship that sank in 1545, was raised to the surface off Portsmouth, England. Most of the ship's oak frame was intact
1984 Kathy Sullivan was the first US woman to walk in space when she stepped outside the shuttle Challenger
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