1903 Eliot Ness - US government agent who headed the Untouchables in Chicago and was involved in the arrest of Al Capone
1920 Frank Fontaine – Actor (Jackie Gleason and His American Scene Magazine, The Swift Show)
1925 Hugh O'Brian - Actor (Wyatt Earp, Ten Little Indians, The Shootist, The Cimmaron Kid, There's No Business like Show Business, Twins) He was also in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Two-Faced Turn-a-bout
1927 Don Barbour - Singer with The Four Freshmen (Graduation Day, Charmaine, Blue World)
1930 Dick Sargent - Actor (Bewitched, That Touch of Mink, Body Count, Down to Earth, The Ghost and Mr Chicken, Broadside, One Happy Family, Operation Petticoat)
1933 Jayne Mansfield - Actress (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Pete Kelly's Blues, The Girl Can't Help It) She was the mother of actress Mariska Hargitay
1935 Dudley Moore - Actor (Arthur, 10, Crazy People, Parallel Lives, Beyond the Fringe) He also did a movie spoof of The Hound of the Baskervilles
1937 Elinor Donahue - Actress (Father Knows Best, The Andy Griffith Show, Get a Life, Pretty Woman)
1941 Alan Price - Musician and singer with the groups Alan Price Combo and The Animals (House of the Rising Sun, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, O Lucky Man)
1943 Eve Graham - Singer with the group The New Seekers (Look What They've Done to My Song Ma, I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing)
1946 Tim Curry - British actor (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Hunt for Red October, Addams Family Reunion, The Three Musketeers, It, Clue, The Ploughman’s Lunch, Charlie’s Angels, Titanic, Lexx: The Dark Zone, Burke and Hare, Poirot: Appointment with Death)
1952 Tony Plana – Cuban-born actor (Ugly Betty, Goal!, 24, Half Past Dead, Resurrection Blvd, JFK, Born in East L.A. Three Amigos, Salvador, An Officer and a Gentleman)
1953 Ruby Wax – Comedienne and actress (The Ruby Wax Show, Girls on Top, Chariots of Fire) She is married to British director Ed Bye
1968 Ashley Judd - Actress (Eye of the Beholder, Double Jeopardy, Sisters, A Time to Kill, Kiss the Girls, Devine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, De-Lovely, Helen, Missing) She is the daughter of Naomi and the sister of Wynonna Judd
1972 Jennifer Taylor – Actress (Two and a Half Men, Rumor Has It…, The Waterboy, Wild Things)
1978 James Franco – Actor (127 Hours, Eat Pray Love, Pineapple Express, Howl, Milk, Spider-Man movies, Freaks and Geeks, General Hospital)
1979 Kate Hudson – Actress (Raising Helen, Alex & Emma, The Four Feathers, Almost Famous, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Something Borrowed, You Me and Dupree, the Skeleton Key) She is Goldie Hawn’s daughter
1981 Hayden Christensen – Canadian actor (Star Wars: Episode II Attack of the Clones, Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, Shattered Glass, Higher Ground, Jumper, Awake)
1989 Simu Liu – Chinese-born Canadian actor (Kim’s Convenience, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Blood and Water, Omega)
Died this Day
1824 George Gordon, Lord Byron, age 36 – Scottish-born romantic and satirical poet (Childe Harold, Don Juan, Manfred, The Vision of Judgement, Hours of Idleness, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers) Byron was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and raised in near poverty. Afflicted with a clubfoot, Byron endured a painful childhood. At age 10, he inherited his great uncle's title. He attended Harrow, then Trinity College, Cambridge, where he ran up enormous debts and pursued passionate relationships. After getting his master's degree in 1809, he travelled in Portugal, Spain, and the Near East for two years. In 1815, he married Anne Isabella Milbanke, and the couple had a daughter, August Ada, the following year. Ada proved to be a mathematical prodigy and is considered by some to be the first computer programmer, thanks to her work on Charles Babbage's computing machine. Byron’s marriage quickly foundered, and the couple legally separated as scandal broke out over Byron's suspected incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh. He was ostracized by polite society and forced to flee England in 1816. He settled in Geneva, near Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and became intimately involved with Mary's half-sister, Claire Clairmont. She bore Byron's daughter Allegra in January 1817. Byron moved to Venice that year and entered a period of wild debauchery. In 1819, he began an affair with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, the young wife of an elderly count, and the two remained attached for many years. Byron’s scandalous history, exotic travels, and flamboyant life made such an impression on the world that the term "Byronic" was coined to mean romantic, arrogant, dark, and cynical. Always an avid supporter of liberal causes and national independence, he joined the Greek war for independence, training troops in the town of Missolonghi. Byron died of marsh fever at Missolonghi, with the Greek insurgents fighting the Turks
1862 Simon Fraser, age 85 – Fur trader and explorer of British Columbia's Fraser River. Fraser was born at Mapletown, Near Bennington, Vermont. His father was a Loyalist Captain who was captured by American revolutionaries and died in prison in Albany, New York. Brought up by his uncle Judge John Fraser in Montréal, Simon joined the North West Company as a clerk in 1792. He became a partner in 1801, and from 1805 to 1808 was put in charge of expanding the North West Company’s activities in the northern interior of BC, which he called New Caledonia. He founded Fort McLeod, Fort St. James, Fort Fraser and what is today Prince George. In 1808 he journeyed down the hazardous river that David Thompson later named in his honour. In 1809 he transferred to the Athabasca district, then to Red River, where he was arrested by Lord Selkirk in 1816, and later acquitted for complicity in the Seven Oaks Massacre. In 1819 he retired to his estate in Glengarry County on the St. Lawrence, near Cornwall, Ontario, where he died
1881 Benjamin Disraeli, age 76 – The First Earl of Beaconsfield, British Prime Minister and author (Lothair, The Infernal Marriage, Venetia, Vivian Grey, Endymion, The Voyage of Captain Popanilla, The Young Duke)
1882 Charles Darwin, age 73 - British naturalist and author (On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection)
1906 Pierre Curie, age 64 - French physicist, who with his wife Marie, discovered radium. He was struck and killed by a car in Paris
1989 Dame Daphne du Maurier - British author (Rebecca, The Loving Spirit, The Birds, Frenchman’s Creek) She died a month before her 82nd birthday
1992 Frankie Howerd, age 75 – British comedian/actor (The Lady Killers, Up Pompeii, Carry On Doctor, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band)
On this Day
1627 Cardinal Richelieu signed the charter of the Company of One Hundred Associates, with a contract to develop and colonise Canada
1637 Ayme Everard became the first woman in Britain to be granted a patent, for her tincture of saffron and essence of roses
1775 The American Revolutionary War began as British troops and colonial Patriots engaged in the battles of Lexington and Concord the morning after the famous ride by Patriots Paul Revere and William Dawes. They were the first battles of the American Revolution, a conflict that would escalate from a colonial uprising into an all-out war that would give birth to the independent United States of America
1839 The Treaty of London made Belgium and Holland separate countries
1850 Britain and the US signed a treaty to build the Panama Canal. Later, the US decided to build the canal independently
1876 Wyatt Earp was dropped from the Wichita police force, as a Wichita, Kansas, commission voted not to rehire him after he beat up a candidate for county sheriff. In 1873, Wyatt joined his older brother James in Wichita, Kansas, the rowdy cattle town that was the northern terminus of the Chisholm Trail. At first he worked for a private security force employed by local saloons and businesses to keep order, but by 1875, Wichita Marshal Michael Meagher hired him as an official city policeman. Wyatt soon proved to be a daunting police officer. He knew how to use his Remington pistol, and he kept his skills sharp with frequent sessions of target practice. During the next year, in April, Wichita held an election for city marshal. An opponent named William Smith challenged Wyatt's boss, Meagher, for the office. Smith made several disparaging remarks about Meagher, and Wyatt took offence, confronting Smith and beating him in a fistfight. Although Meagher won reelection, he was unable to save Wyatt's job, and the commission decided that Wyatt's violent behaviour was unacceptable and did not rehire him as a police officer. After losing his job in Wichita, Wyatt immediately moved to Dodge City and found work on their police force. A few years later he joined several of his brothers in the booming mining town of Tombstone, Arizona, and in 1881, participated in the infamous gun battle at the OK Corral
1897 The first Boston Marathon was run from Ashland, Massachusetts, to Boston. Winner John J. McDermott ran the course in 2 hours, 55 minutes and 10 seconds
1904 The Great Toronto fire started in the evening, and raged for two days fed by high winds. The city's 200 firefighters called on crews from London, Niagara Falls, Hamilton, Peterborough and Buffalo for help, but bitter cold and a lack of adequate water pressure made the fire hoses almost ineffective. No people or horses perished, but the fire did an estimated $12 million dollars damage and destroyed 104 buildings, leaving 14 acres of the city's business core in ice-covered ruins
1910 After weeks of being viewed through telescopes, Halley's Comet was reported visible to the naked eye in Curaçao
1927 Mae West was found guilty of indecent behaviour in her Broadway production of "Sex". She was sentenced to ten days in prison and a $500 fine
1933 The US went off the gold standard
1945 The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Carousel, opened on Broadway
1951 General Douglas MacArthur, relieved of his command by President Truman, bid farewell to Congress, quoting a line from a ballad: ''Old soldiers never die; they just fade away''
1967 Women competed in the Boston Marathon for the first time, but were not official entrants
1992 After six days, engineers plugged a tunnel leak under the Chicago River. The leak had caused an underground flood that virtually shut down business in the heart of the city
1995 At 9:04 a.m. central time, a massive truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, as people were preparing for the workday. The blast collapsed the north face of the nine-story building, instantly killing over a hundred people and trapping dozens more in the rubble. Emergency crews raced to Oklahoma City from across the country, and when the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later, the death toll stood at 168 people killed, including nineteen infants and young children who were in the building's day care centre at the time of the blast
1997 More than 50,000 residents abandoned Grand Forks, ND, as the rising Red River overran sandbags. As if that weren't bad enough, a large portion of Grand Forks' downtown area caught on fire and was destroyed
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