1734 Daniel Boone – Legendary US frontiersman, explorer and hunter who was captured and adopted by Shawnee Indians as Big Turtle, and also captured by British
1755 Marie Antoinette – Austrian princess and Queen Consort of Louis XVI of France
1795 James Polk – 11th US President
1865 Warren G. Harding – 29th US President. He was the first president to speak on radio
1913 Burt Lancaster - Actor (Elmer Gantry, Trapeze, From Here to Eternity, The Bird Man of Alcatraz, The Phantom of the Opera, Airport, Come Back Little Sheba, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Judgement at Nuremberg) He was a former circus acrobat
1920 Ann Rutherford - Actress (The Andy Hardy series, Gone with the Wind, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty)
1938 Jay Black – Singer with the group Jay and The Americans (Only in America, Come a Little Bit Closer, Cara Mia, Sunday and Me, This Magic Moment, Walkin' in the Rain)
1942 Stefanie Powers – Actress (Hart to Hart, The Girl from UNCLE, The Feather and Father Gang, McClintock!, Die! Die! My Darling, Herbie Rides Again, The Interns, Deceptions)
1944 Keith Emerson – British musician with Emerson Lake and Palmer (From the Beginning, Lucky Man)
1961 K.D. Lang –Canadian singer-songwriter (Chatelaine, Crying, Constant Craving)
1964 Lauren Vélez – Actress (Dexter, Ugly Betty, Oz, New York Undercover, How To Get Away With Murder)
1966 David Schwimmer – Actor (Friends, Nothing But the Truth, Band of Brothers, Hotel, Monty)
Died this Day
1887 Jenny Lind, age 67 – Swedish singer who was known as The Swedish Nightengale for the purity of her voice. She died in Malvern Wells, Worcestershire
1950 George Bernard Shaw, age 94 – Irish-born playwright (Candida, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Caesar and Cleopatra, Widower’s Houses, Androcles and the Lion) The movie My Fair Lady was based on his play, Pygmalion
1957 Martha Black, age 91 – Canadian pioneer and politician. She was born Martha Louise Munger at Chicago, Illinois. In 1898, after being abandoned by her first husband, and while pregnant with her third child, she crossed the rugged Chilkoot Pass. She settled in Dawson City, Yukon, with her brother and mined several claims. In 1904 she married lawyer George Black, who was later a member of the Yukon Council, Commissioner of the Yukon Territory, and Conservative Member of Parliament for the Yukon. In 1935 when George was too ill to run again, Martha ran for Parliament, at age 70, becoming the second woman to sit in the House of Commons. She served for five years until George recovered
1961 James Thurber – US author and humorist who created the character of Walter Mitty (The Owl in the Attic and Other Perplexities, The Seal in My Bedroom and Other Predicaments, Fables for Our Time, My World and Welcome To It, Thirteen Clocks) James was born in Columbus, Ohio to Mary Fisher Thurber and Charles L. Thurber. He was the second of the family's three sons. In 1901, while the family had temporarily relocated to Washington, DC, James was shot in the eye while playing a bow-and-arrow game with his brothers, causing him to go blind in one eye. Throughout his adult life, the sight in his other eye continued to fail. Thurber was educated in Columbus, Ohio, and was elected class president in his senior year, graduating with honours. He attended The Ohio State University, where he reported for the college paper, the Lantern, and where he became editor-in-chief of the Sundial humour and literary magazine. Thurber left the university in 1918 without completing his degree. After a brief stint with the State Department, in Washington DC, and then at the US Embassy in Paris, Thurber returned to Columbus, and began working as a reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. Two years later, in 1922, he married Althea Adams. In 1925, the Thurbers went to France. James worked in Paris as a reporter for The Chicago Tribune, and was later transferred to the Riviera edition in Nice. June the following year they moved to New York City, where Thurber began working as a reporter and feature writer for the New York Evening Post. While attending a party, Thurber met E.B. White. White introduced him to Harold Ross, who immediately hired Thurber as an editor-writer for The New Yorker. Thurber's first cartoons appeared in The New Yorker in 1930. The Thurbers’ marriage was a difficult one, with many separations, and the couple finally divorced in May, 1935, when their daughter Rosemary was three-and-a-half years old. The following month James married an editor, Helen Wismer. They moved to Connecticut, and spent time travelling abroad in France and England, where Thurber had a one-man show of his drawings at the Storran Gallery in London. By the early 1940s, Thurber’s health was in decline. His sight had deteriorated, and he needed a Zeiss loop in order to continue drawing. In 1944, he was critically ill with appendicitis and pneumonia, and in 1953 he had a thyroid condition which caused erratic behaviour. In early October, 1961, Thurber was stricken with a blood clot in his brain, while in New York. He died a month before his 67th birthday, and his ashes were interred at Greenlawn Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio
1992 Hal Roach, age 100 - Producer, director, and screenwriter (Our Gang, The Music Box, Of Mice and Men, One Million BC, Road Show) He worked with Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, and Will Rodgers, among others
On this Day
1671 Jean Talon opened the King's Brewery, Quebec City's first brewery
1721 Peter I, the ruler of Russia, abandoned the traditional Russian title of tsar in favour of the European-influenced title of emperor. The reign of Peter I, who became sole tsar in 1696, was characterised by a series of sweeping military, political, economic, and cultural reforms based on Western European models. Peter the Great, as he became known, led his country into major conflicts with Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Sweden. Russian victories in these wars greatly expanded Peter's empire and the defeat of Sweden in the Great Northern War won Russia direct access to the Baltic Sea. Here, Peter founded the new Russian capital of St. Petersburg, and Russia was now a major European power - politically, culturally, and geographically. Peter died four years after becoming Russian emperor, and was succeeded by his wife, Catherine I
1776 William Demont became the first traitor to the American Revolution. During the Revolutionary War, Demont, an adjutant to American Colonel Robert Magraw, deserted from the Fifth Pennsylvania Battalion and offered the British intelligence information concerning the Patriot defence of New York. He revealed to the British the location of Fort Washington in New York, thus enabling Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen to conquer the fort with a force of 3,000 Hessians
1871 In Britain, photographs of prisoners were taken for the first time, originating the world’s first “Rogues Gallery”
1896 The first motor insurance policies were issued in Britain, but they excluded damage caused by frightened horses
1889 North and South Dakota became the 39th and 40th states of the Union
1895 The first race in the US to feature gasoline-powered automobiles was held in Chicago. After delaying the event for several months at the request of entrants who were still working on their racing prototypes, they finally settled on an official race date of November 2. When the day arrived, eighty automobiles had been entered, but only two showed up: a Benz car brought over from Germany by Oscar Bernhard Mueller, and an automobile built by Charles and Frank Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts. They agreed to delay the official race yet again until Thanksgiving, but approved an exhibition contest to be run on the 2nd between the two who showed up. The Duryea automobile was forced off the road and into a ditch by frightened horses and was rendered undrivable. Mueller was declared the winner of the exhibition race by default
1903 The Daily Mirror was first published, in Britain. It was devised as a daily paper for women
1920 KDKA radio in Pittsburgh broadcast the results of the 1920 presidential race between Warren G. Harding and James M. Cox. This was the first significant public radio news broadcast
1936 A new Canadian Broadcasting Act created the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
1947 Howard Hughes piloted his huge wooden airplane, known as the Spruce Goose, on its only flight, which lasted about a minute over Long Beach Harbour in California. A World War II contract and the entrepreneurial drive of Hughes led to the Spruce Goose, an enormous flying, white elephant. Powered by eight engines, the two-hundred-ton plywood colossus, with a wing span longer than a football field, was designed to take seven hundred men into battle. However, the war ended before it was completed. The Senate demanded that Hughes prove the plane air-worthy, and he obliged. The aircraft never flew again
1947 The Canadian government dropped price controls on sugar and molasses, ending over five years of wartime food rationing. Rationed items included butter, meat, tea, coffee, preserves, nylon and gasoline
1948 In the greatest upset in US presidential history, Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman defeated his Republican challenger, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, by just over two million popular votes. In the days preceding the vote, political analysts and polls were so behind Dewey that on election night, long before all the votes were counted, the Chicago Tribune published an early edition with the banner headline "Dewey Defeats Truman"
1963 Archeologists in the US found evidence that the Vikings arrived in North America 500 years before Columbus
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