1808 Salmon P. Chase - A founder of the US Republican Party. His portrait appears on the US $10,000 bill. He was President Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury
1832 Horatio Alger - Author of rags to riches tales (Ragged Dick, Luck and Pluck, Tattered Tom)
1884 Sophie Tucker - Russian born US vaudeville entertainer and singer (Some of These Days) She was known as the Last of the Red Hot Mamas, and was quoted as saying, "I've been poor, I've been rich. Believe me, rich is better"
1885 Alfred Carl Fuller - Canadian-born manufacturer, marketer, and founder of the Fuller Brush Company
1907 Jeff Morrow - Actor (The Robe, The Creature Walks Among Us, The Giant Claw)
1919 Robert Stack - Actor (The Untouchables, Strike Force, Airplane!, Unsolved Mysteries, The Name of the Game) He also played Jordan White in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Sinister Spirit
1920 Harry Worth - British comedian (How's Your Father, Here's Harry)
1925 Gwen Verdon - Actress, dancer (Damn Yankees, High Button Shoes, Cocoon)
1926 Michael Bond - British children's author (A Bear Called Paddington, Here Comes Thursday)
1930 Frances Sternhagen - Actress (Cheers, Misery, Communion, ER)
1930 Liz Anderson - Country singer, songwriter (Pick of the Week, Strangers, Ride Ride Ride) She is the mother of country-pop singer Lynn Anderson
1931 Charles Nelson Reilly - Comedian, actor, game show panellist (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Match Game, Lidsville, Cannonball Run II)
1932 Jon Cypher – Actor (Hill Street Blues, Major Dad, Dynasty, Knots Landing)
1938 Billy Gray - Actor (Father Knows Best, Love and Bullets)
1938 William B. Davis – Canadian actor (The X-Files, Robson Arms, Kingdom Hospital, The Murdoch Mysteries)
1943 Richard Moll - Actor (Night Court, Loaded Weapon 1, The Flintstones)
1961 Julia Louis-Dreyfus - Actress (Seinfeld, Saturday Night Live, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Hannah and Her Sisters, The New Adventures of Old Christine)
1964 Penelope Ann Miller - Actress (Kindergarten Cop, Chaplin, Adventures in Babysitting, Carlito's Way) She was also in the Nero Wolfe Mystery Motherhunt
1966 Patrick Dempsey – Actor (Grey’s Anatomy, Sweet Home Alabama, Enchanted, Valentine’s Day)
1977 Orlando Bloom – British actor (Pirates of the Caribbean, The Lord of the Rings, Elizabethtown, Troy, Ned Kelly)
Died this Day
1599 Edmund Spenser - British poet (The Faerie Queene, The Shepheardes Calender) He was buried in Westminster Abbey
1691 George Fox - British founder of the religious group The Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers
1864 Stephen Foster, age 37 - The US's first professional songwriter (Oh! Susannah, Camptown Races, Old Folks at Home aka Swanee River, Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, Beautiful Dreamer) He wrote over 200 songs, mainly sentimental and minstrel types, but despite his success, copyright laws were rarely enforced in music at the time, and he reaped few financial rewards from the widespread performance and publication of his songs. In 1857, economic difficulties led him to sell all rights to his future songs for just under $2,000. He died of a protracted fever in the charity ward of New York's Bellevue Hospital, with 38˘ in his pocket
1929 Wyatt Earp, age 80 - US frontiersman, lawman and gunfighter who, with his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and Doc Holliday, fought the Clanton Gang at the OK Corral. In the years following, Wyatt wandered throughout the West, speculating in gold mines in Idaho, running a saloon in San Francisco, and raising thoroughbred horses in San Diego. At the turn of the century, he joined the Alaskan gold rush, and ran a saloon in Nome until 1901. After participating in the last of the great gold rushes in Nevada, Wyatt finally settled in Los Angeles, where he tried unsuccessfully to find someone to publicise his many western adventures. Wyatt's role in the shootout at the OK Corral did attract the admiring attention of the city's thriving new film industry, and for several years he became an unpaid technical consultant on Hollywood Westerns, drawing on his colourful past to tell flamboyant matinee idols like William Hart and Tom Mix how it had really been. Ironically, the wider fame that eluded Wyatt in life came soon after he died. A young journalist named Stuart Lake published Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshall, a wildly fanciful biography that portrayed the gunman as a brave and virtuous instrument of frontier justice. Dozens of similarly laudatory books and movies followed, ensuring Wyatt Earp an enduring place in the popular mythology of the Wild West. He died quietly in Los Angeles
1941 James Joyce - Irish novelist (Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake) He died Zurich, Switzerland, two weeks before his 59th birthday
On this Day
1794 President Washington approved a measure adding two stars and two stripes to the US flag, following the admission of Vermont and Kentucky to the Union
1838 William Lyon Mackenzie, Scottish born Canadian radical and former mayor of Toronto, fled to the US after he had led an abortive uprising against the lieutenant-governor, and the establishment families that virtually ruled Toronto
1842 A British army doctor reached the British sentry post at Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the lone survivor of a 16,000-strong Anglo-Indian expeditionary force that was massacred in its retreat from Kabul. He told of a terrible massacre in the Khyber Pass, in which the Afghans gave the defeated Anglo-Indian force and their camp followers no quarter. In the 19th century, Britain tried to protect its Indian colonial holdings from Russia by establishing authority in neighbouring Afghanistan. The British replaced the existing Emir Dost Mohammad with a former emir known to be sympathetic to the British. However, after an Afghan revolt in Kabul, Dost Mohammad was restored, and the British had no choice but to withdraw. The withdrawal began on January 6, but bad weather delayed the army's progress. The column was attacked by swarms of Afghans led by Mohammad's son, and those who were not killed outright in the attack were later massacred by the Afghan soldiers. A total of 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers were killed. Only one man, who called himself Dr. Bryden, escaped to recount the details of the military disaster. In retaliation, another British force invaded Kabul, burning a portion of the city. In the same year, the war came to an end, and in 1857 Emir Dost Muhammad signed an alliance with the British. In 1878, the Second Anglo-Afghan War began, which ended two years later with Britain winning control of Afghanistan's foreign affairs
1849 The Hudson's Bay Company signed a lease with the British government acquiring control of Vancouver Island for seven shillings a year
1854 A patent for the accordion was issued to Anthony Faax of Philadelphia
1898 French writer Emile Zola's inflammatory newspaper editorial, entitled "J'accuse," was printed. The letter exposed a military cover-up regarding Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Dreyfus, a French army captain, had been accused of espionage in 1894 and sentenced in a secret military court-martial to imprisonment in a South American penal colony. Two years later, evidence of Dreyfus' innocence surfaced, but the army suppressed the information. Zola's letter excoriated the military for concealing its mistaken conviction. Zola became one of the most famous writers in France with the publication of his 1877 hit, The Drunkard, part of his 20-novel cycle exploring the lives of two families. Zola's letter provoked national outrage on both sides of the issue, among political parties, religious organisations, and others. Supporters of the military sued Zola for libel. He was convicted and sentenced to one year's imprisonment, but he fled France to avoid the sentence. In 1899, Dreyfus was pardoned, but for political reasons was not exonerated until 1906. Zola returned to France shortly after Dreyfus' pardon, and died in 1902
1906 The first advertisement for a radio receiver, a Telimco selling for $7.50, appeared in Scientific American. It was made by Hugo Gemsback's Electro Importing Company of New York. The product included a spark coil and a four-cell dry battery and was guaranteed to receive signals from as far as a mile away
1918 A ferocious storm blew into the area around the twin cities of Sarnia, Ontario and Port Huron, Michigan. It lasted more than a week. Brisk winds churned heavy snow into thirteen foot drifts - crippling trains and rescue snowploughs
1920 The New York Times ridiculed aviation pioneer Robert Godard for saying that rockets would work in outer space. The paper issued an apology and retraction after the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing
1928 Three experimental television sets were installed by RCA and GE in homes in Schenectady, NY. The picture was only 1.5 inches square. GE began broadcasting regular programs three times per week in May 1928
1837 Much of the business district of Saint John, New Brunswick was wiped out by a fire
1947 Britain's Privy Council announced that Ottawa was within its rights in passing legislation making the Supreme Court of Canada the final court of appeal. Until then, Canadians could take their cases to the Privy Council in England
1949 Prince Edward Island banned the sale and manufacture of margarine because dairy farmers opposed its sale, as it took consumers away from butter. Margarine's sale was also banned or regulated in many other countries. In Canada, margarine didn't become legal until 1948, when Parliament sent the question to the Supreme Court
1964 Canadian and US negotiators reached agreement on a hydro and flood-control project on the Columbia River. It allowed BC to build dams and sell electrical power to the US for 30 years
1964 A reluctant Capitol Records released the first Beatles record in the US "to see how it goes". I Wanna Hold Your Hand became their fastest selling single ever, with one million copies being sold in the first three weeks
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