1347 Saint Catherine of Siena - Italian Dominican tertiary, mystic and patron Saint of Italy
1593 Jean de Brébeuf - Jesuit missionary to New France, he was born at Condé-sur-Vire, Normandy. He was tortured to death with Gabriel Lalemant by Iroquois invaders at St-Louis, Huronia in March, 1649. Brébeuf's skull is preserved in a golden reliquary in the Hotel Dieu at Quebec. He was canonised in 1930
1827 Stephen Luce - US founder and the first president of the Naval War College
1867 Arturo Toscanini - Conductor (Milan, Carnegie Hall, Philadelphia Orchestra, NBC Symphony Orchestra) He became a cellist at age 19 and spent 68 years in a musical career
1881 Béla Bartók - Hungarian pianist and composer. He collected old Hungarian folk songs, which were integrated into much of his work
1897 John Laurie – British actor (Dad’s Army, The 39 Steps, Hamlet, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Kidnapped, Hobson’s Choice, Treasure Island, The Four Feathers)
1901 Ed Begley, Sr – Actor (The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Sweet Bird of Youth, Sorry Wrong Number, On Dangerous Ground, The Oscar, Hang ‘Em High, Inherit the Wind, 12 Angry Men, The Guiding Light) He’s the father of Ed Begley Jr
1903 Frankie Carle - Pianist and bandleader (Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night of the Year), songwriter (Oh What It Seemed to Be, Falling Leaves, Lover's Lullaby)
1908 Sir David Lean - British director (Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Dr. Zhivago, A Passage to India, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations)
1918 Howard Cosell – Sports announcer (NFL Monday Night Football, ABC's Wide World of Sports)
1919 Jeanne Cagney - Actress (A Lion is in the Streets, Quicksand) She’s the sister of James Cagney
1921 Nancy Kelly - Actress (The Bad Seed, To the Shores of Tripoli)
1921 Simone Signoret - Actress (Room at the Top, Ship of Fools, Is Paris Burning?)
1922 Eileen Ford – Founder of the Ford Modelling Agency in 1946
1925 Flannery O'Connor - US author (Wise Blood, A Good Man is Hard to Find)
1928 James Lovell, Jr. - US astronaut. He was aboard Gemini 7 for a rendezvous in orbit with Gemini 6, was on Apollo 8 which was the first to go around the moon, and he was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission to the moon, which had to be aborted before the moon landing could take place (“Houston, we have a problem.”)
1932 Gene Shalit – Movie critic (The Today Show) He was the original host of PBS’s Mystery! television series
1934 Johnny Burnette - Singer (Dreamin', You're Sixteen) He is the brother of singer Dorsey Burnette
1938 Hoyt Axton - Singer, musician, songwriter (Greenback Dollar, The Pusher, Joy to the World, Never Been to Spain)
1940 Anita Bryant - Singer (Paper Roses, Till There Was You) She was a former Miss Oklahoma and runner-up to Miss America
1942 Aretha Franklin - Singer who is known as The Queen of Soul (Respect, Baby I Love You, Natural Woman, Chain of Fools, Think, Day Dreaming) and actress (The Blues Brothers) In 1987, she was the first woman to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
1942 Richard O'Brien – British actor (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Dungeons & Dragons, Ever After: A Cinderella Story, Phineas and Ferb) and writer (The Rocky Horror Picture Show)
1943 Paul Michael Glaser - Actor (Starsky & Hutch, Single Bars Single Women) director (Butterflies are Free, The Air up There, The Running Man, Band of the Hand)
1947 Sir Elton John - British musician, singer, songwriter (Your Song, Honky Cat, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Bennie & The Jets, Daniel, Philadelphia Freedom, Crocodile Rock) He trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London
1948 Bonnie Bedelia - Actress (Parenthood, Die Hard, Presumed Innocent, They Shoot Horses Don't They?, The Division, Needful Things)
1953 Mary Gross - Actress-comedian (Saturday Night Live, Baby Boom, Troop Beverley Hills, Sabrina the Teenage Witch)
1958 James McDaniel - Actor (NYPD Blue, Cop Rock, Queen)
1960 Brenda Strong – Actress (Starship Troopers, Desperate Housewives, Everwood, Party of Five, Spaceballs, Dallas)
1961 John Stockwell – Actor (Top Gun, Christine, North and South, Eddie and the Cruisers)
1962 Marcia Cross – Actress (Desperate Housewives, Melrose Place, Everwood, Dancing in September, The Last Days of Jesse and Frank James)
1964 LisaGay Hamilton – Actress (The Practice, Jackie Brown, True Crime, Men of a Certain Age, The Sum of All Fears, Beloved, Twelve Monkeys)
1965 Sarah Jessica Parker - Actress (Honeymoon in Vegas, Square Pegs, Footloose, Mars Attacks!, Sex and the City)
1966 Jeff Healey - Canadian singer and guitarist (I Think I Love You Too Much, Angel Eyes, See the Light) Healey lost his sight when he was a year old to eye cancer. His parents gave him his first guitar at age three and his adversity led him to develop an unconventional lap-top technique that involves using all five fingers for effects and bending strings with his thumbs. Healey's technique has been praised by blues guitarists Albert Collins, B.B. King and Stevie Ray Vaughn, who said that Healy would revolutionise guitar playing
1970 Kari Matchett – Canadian actress (Covert Affairs, Heartland, 24, Wonderfalls, Invasion, 5ive Days to Midnight, Blue Murder, Men With Brooms, Angel Eyes, Power Play, The Rez) She also appeared in numerous A Nero Wolfe Mystery episodes
1984 Katharine McPhee – Actress (Smash, The House Bunny, The Pink House, You May Not Kiss the Bride, Scorpion, American Idol)
Died this Day
1918 Claude Debussy - French composer (La Mer, Prélude à L'après-midi d'un Faune, Nocturnes, Etudes)
1998 Daniel Massey, age 64 - British stage and screen actor (GBH, Star!, Mary Queen of Scots, The Crucible, Scandal, In the Name of the Father) He was the son of actor Raymond Massey, brother of Anna Massey, one time brother-in-law of Jeremy Brett, and the godson of Sir Noël Coward. He played Anthony Donn in the Inspector Morse episode Deceived by Flight He also played J. Neil Gibson in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Problem of Thor Bridge
On this Day
1409 Rebel bishops met at Pisa and voted to excommunicate the two Popes, Benedict the 13th and Gregory the 12th. They chose the Cardinal of Milan to assume the papacy, which meant there were three men instead of two claiming to be the pope. The Great Schism lasted until 1414
1609 English navigator Henry Hudson undertook his third and final voyage of exploration to try and find the North West Passage through North America. He was the discoverer of Hudson's Bay
1634 Maryland was founded by English colonists sent by the second Lord Baltimore
1805 In Montreal, Quebec, the Assembly passed an act to preserve apple trees. It was the first Canadian legislation for the control of farm pests
1807 The British parliament abolished the slave trade, largely as a result of the campaigning of Wilberforce, supported by the Quakers
1839 A truce was called in the damaging Aroostook lumber war over the New Brunswick boundary with Maine. Later, an agreement was struck between Lord Ashburton and Daniel Webster
1853 In Windsor, Ontario, Samuel Ward and Mary Ann Shadd published the first edition of The Provincial Freeman, a newspaper for the 40,000 ex-slaves who had fled the southern US
1893 A Toronto cab driver was fined for driving on Sunday. The penalty was $2 or 10 days in jail
1894 Jacob S. Coxey began leading an "army" of unemployed from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, DC, to demand help from the federal government
1903 Britain and the US established the Canada-Alaska Boundary. US President Theodore Roosevelt told the British government the boundary must be fixed the way the US wanted or troops would be sent to enforce it. Canada was left out of the talks and ended up with no seaports in northern BC or the Yukon. As a result, Ottawa decided Canada must handle its own foreign affairs and the External Affairs Department was created in 1909
1911 An 18 minute fire in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory killed 146 of the 500 employees. Many of the factory workers were women, between the ages of thirteen and twenty-three. They were, for the most part, recent Italian and European Jewish immigrants who had come to the US with their families to seek a better life. The fire occurred in the Asch building at the northwest corner of Washington and Greene streets, where the Triangle Shirtwaist Company occupied the top three of ten floors. It began shortly after 4:30 p.m. in the cutting room on the eighth floor, and fed by thousands of pounds of fabric it spread rapidly, though how it started was undetermined. To keep the women at their sewing machines the proprietors had locked the doors leading to the exits. Panicked workers rushed to the stairs, the freight elevator, and the fire escape. Most on the eighth and tenth floors escaped, but dozens on the ninth floor died, unable to force open the locked door to the exit. The rear fire escape collapsed, killing many and eliminating an escape route for others still trapped. Some tried to slide down elevator cables but lost their grip, and many more, their dresses on fire, jumped to their death from open windows. Three male cutters formed a human chain from the Shirtwaist's 8th floor window to the adjacent window next door. Some girls were able to cross over on the backs of the three. But then the men lost their balance and all three souls fell 80 feet to join the already growing number on the pavement. Pump Engine Company 20 and Ladder Company 20 arrived quickly but were hindered by the bodies of victims who had jumped. The ladders of the fire department extended only to the sixth floor, and life nets broke when workers jumped in groups of three and four. Additional companies were summoned by four more alarms transmitted in rapid succession. Although there was widespread revulsion and rage over the working conditions that had contributed to the fire, many defended the right of shop owners to resist government safety regulation, and some in government insisted that they were at any rate powerless to impose it. Eight months after the fire a jury acquitted Blanck and Harris, the factory owners, of any wrong doing. Twenty-three individual civil suits were brought against the owners of the Asch building, and three years after the fire, Harris and Blanck settled, paying $75 per life lost. The New York legislature, appalled by the event, created a commission to investigate conditions in the city's sweatshops. The Factory Investigating Commission of 1911 gathered testimony, and later that year the city established the Bureau of Fire Investigation, which gave the fire department additional powers to improve factory safety. In addition to the many changes in health and safety laws in the sweatshops, the tragedy galvanised the US's labour movement
1913 The home of vaudeville, the Palace Theatre, opened in New York City
1947 A coal mine explosion in Centralia, Illinois killed 111 people
1957 The European Common Market was set up by the Treaty of Rome
25
Responses