1880 Charles Kraft – Cheesemaker and entrepreneur who, with his brother James, founded the Kraft Food Company
1885 Baroness Karen Blixen – Danish author (Out of Africa) She published the book under the pseudonym of Isak Dinesen
1886 Spring Byington - Actress (Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Angels in the Outfield, In the Good Old Summertime, Jezebel, Little Women, Laramie) She played J. Pauline Spagetti in the Batman episode The Sandman Cometh
1900 Jean Arthur - Actress (Shane, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Devil and Miss Jones, The Jean Arthur Show, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Mysterious Dr Fu Manchu)
1902 Irene Ryan - Actress (The Beverly Hillbillies, Heading for Heaven, O My Darling Clementine)
1903 Nathanael West – US author (Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust, A Cool Million)
1915 Arthur Miller – US playwright (Death of a Salesman, A View From the Bridge, It Takes a Thief, The Misfits)
1918 Rita Hayworth - Actress (Miss Sadie Thompson, Pal Joey, Separate Tables, They Came to Cordura, You'll Never Get Rich, The Lady From Shanghai)
1920 Montgomery Clift - Actor (From Here to Eternity, Suddenly Last Summer, Judgement at Nuremberg, The Misfits, A Place in the Sun)
1921 Tom Poston - Actor and comedian (The Steve Allen Show, On the Rocks, Mork & Mindy, Newhart, A Perfect Little Murder, Up the Academy) He was married to Suzanne Pleshette
1926 Beverly Garland - Actress (My Three Sons, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, The Bing Crosby Show, DOA, The Desperate Hours) She played Mauvis Meade in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Mythical Monkeys
1938 Evel Knievel – US stuntman and daredevil
1941 James Seals – Singer and musician with Seals and Crofts (Summer Breeze, Diamond Girl, Hummingbird)
1942 Gary Puckett – Singer with The Union Gap (Young Girl, Woman Woman, This Girl is a Woman Now, Over You, Lady Willpower)
1947 Michael McKean - Actor (Laverne & Shirley, Grand, The Brady Bunch Movie, Radioland Murders, Planes Trains & Automobiles, This is Spinal Tap, Coneheads, The Big Picture, Used Cars)
1948 Margot Kidder – Canadian actress (Superman series, The Amityville Horror, Vanishing Act, Nichols)
1948 George Wendt - Actor (Cheers, Man of the House, Never Say Die, Fletch, No Small Affair, Dreamscape)
1950 Howard Rollins – Actor (In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier's Story, Ragtime, The Member of the Wedding)
1957 Vincent Van Patten - Tennis player and actor (The Break, The Dirty Dozen: The Deadly Mission, Payback, Charley and the Angel, Apple's Way) He is the son of actor Dick Van Patten
1958 Alan Jackson - Country singer (Chattahoochie, Don't Rock the Jukebox)
1962 Mike Judge – Ecuador-born animator (King of the Hill, Beavis and Butthead)
1963 Norm Macdonald – Canadian actor-comedian (Saturday Night Live, The Norm Show, Billy Madison)
1967 Venus Terzo – Canadian actress (Da Vinci’s Inquest, Shattered, The Quality of Life, Painkiller Jane, Street Legal, Madison, Spectacular!)
1969 Rick Mercer – Canadian actor-comedian (This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Made in Canada, Secret Nation, Understanding Bliss, Monday Report)
1974 Matthew Macfayden – British actor (MI-5/Spooks, Death at a Funeral, Pride & Prejudice, Little Dorrit, Frost/Nixon, Pillars of the Earth, Marple: A Pocketfull of Rye)
Died this Day
1849 Frédéric Chopin, age 39 – Polish pianist and composer. He died from tuberculosis
1868 Laura Secord, age 93 – Loyalist and heroine of Upper Canada. In June, 1813, during the War of 1812, Secord heard two US officers billeted in her house talking about a surprise attack on the British post at Beaver Dams. She walked 20 miles through US lines, sometimes leading her cow as a decoy, to warn Lieutenant Fitzgibbon. The attacking US soldiers were ambushed by Fitzgibbon and the Iroquois
1910 Julia Ward Howe – US poet and author (The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Passion Flowers, Later Lyrics, Margaret Fuller, Modern Society)
1970 Pierre Laporte – Québec Labour Minister who was kidnapped by the militant separatist group the Front de Liberation du Québec. The following day, his body would be discovered as police in Montreal opened the trunk of a suspicious Chevrolet sedan parked beside a hangar at St-Hubert Airport. He was strangled with the chain of a religious medal
1998 Joan Hickson, age 92 – British stage and screen actress (The Thirty-Nine Steps, Carry On Constable, Theatre of Blood) She died of natural causes. She is best remembered for her portrayal of Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple In 1946, Agatha Christie saw Joan Hickson in the play of the Christie novel, Appointment With Death. Agatha sent Joan a note that read, "I hope one day you will play my dear Miss Marple"
On this Day
1671 In London, England, the first auctioning of furs from Hudson Bay took place, at Garroway's Coffee House
1777 During the US War for Independence, British General John Burgoyne surrendered over 5,000 British and Hessian troops to Patriot General Horatio Gates at Saratoga in New York. Ten days earlier, General Gates had routed Burgoyne's forces at the Battle of Bemis Heights in New York, prompting a desperate British retreat that failed to break through the Patriot lines. By the 13th, over 16,000 Patriots surrounded the British, and four days later, Burgoyne was forced to agree to the first large-scale surrender of British forces in the Revolutionary War. When word of the Patriot victory reached France, King Louis XVI agreed to formally recognise the independence of the United States. Soon after, French Foreign Minister Comte de Vergennes made arrangements with US Ambassador Benjamin Franklin to begin providing French aid for the Patriot cause
1835 The first resolution formally creating the Texas Rangers was approved. Texans approved the resolution which would create a corps of armed and mounted lawmen designed to "range and guard the frontier between the Brazos and Trinity Rivers." In the midst of their revolt against Mexico, Texan leaders felt they needed a semi-official force of armed men who would defend the isolated frontier settlers of the Lone Star Republic against both Santa Ana's soldiers and hostile Indians, and the Texas Rangers filled this role. But after winning their revolutionary war with Mexico the following year, Texans decided to keep the Rangers, both to defend against Indian and Mexican raiders and to serve as the principal law enforcement authority along the sparsely populated Texan frontier
1855 Britain's Sir Henry Bessemer patented his process for making steel
1869 Henry M. Stanley was commissioned by the New York Herald to find Dr. David Livingstone, the British explorer of Africa
1877 At Fort Walsh, Saskatchewan, Major James Walsh of the North West Mounted Police hosted a meeting between General A.H. Terry, commander of US troops on the western plains, and Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull, who had crossed into Canada 11 months earlier after defeating George Custer and his US Seventh Cavalry at Little Big Horn. The Sioux had joined their Assiniboine cousins at Wood Mountain, and Walsh met them in December to warn them about raiding into the US. Because the Sioux were US treaty Indians, they were not eligible for Canadian provisions and reserves. Sitting Bull led them back to Dakota after several hard winters, surrendering to the US government at Fort Buford in July, 1881
1902 The first Cadillac was made in Detroit
1907 Regular radio service was instituted, six years after the first transatlantic radio signal was sent. The first message was sent in code from Ireland via Nova Scotia to The New York Times in New York City
1931 Mobster Al Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in prison. He was released in 1939
1933 Albert Einstein arrived in the US, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany
1941 A German submarine torpedoed the US destroyer Kearney 350 miles south-west of Iceland, killing eleven crew members and seriously wounding two. The Kearney, the first destroyer attacked by a German submarine, sustained heavy damage but managed to stay afloat under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Danis. Two days later, the Kearney arrived safely in Iceland
1943 In the face of mounting opposition to communism and the Soviet Union in US society, the Young Communist League declared itself dissolved at a special convention held in New York City. In an about turn, the four hundred delegates organised American Youth for Democracy, which only offered membership to non-Communists. During the 1940s, US Communist groups that once enjoyed prominence in labour organisations and other groups, suddenly found themselves alienated from society, and most publicly abandoned their ideology and Soviet connections in order to avoid being blacklisted
1957 French author Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature
1956 The world's first nuclear power station was opened at Calder Hall in Britain
1978 President Jimmy Carter signed a bill restoring US citizenship to Confederate President Jefferson Davis
1979 Mother Teresa of India was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her years of work on behalf of the destitute in Calcutta
1989 A deadly earthquake struck the San Francisco Bay area in California. The quake, measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale, was witnessed on live television by millions of people watching the third game of the World Series of baseball between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, held at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The tremor hit moments before the start of the game, and sportscasters performed the duties of news anchors as they reported on the resulting pandemonium in the stadium. The earthquake killed a total of sixty-seven people, while over three thousand others were injured and more than 100,000 buildings damaged
1994 Taxicab driver Jeremy Levine returned to London, England, from a round-trip journey to Cape Town, South Africa. Passengers Mark Aylett and Carlos Aresse paid £40,000 for the 21,691-mile trip, setting a world record for the longest known taxicab ride. Their journey took them through Eastern Europe, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and down into Africa
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