Born this Day

1762 John Jacob Astor – German-born US founder of the Astor dynasty
1889 Erle Stanley Gardner - US novelist and lawyer who wrote the Perry Mason series of books. Gardner attended college in Indiana but dropped out and moved to Southern California. He worked as a typist in a law firm for three years, before becoming an attorney himself. As a trial lawyer in Ventura, he started turning his law practice experience into short stories, which he successfully submitted to pulp magazines. His stories included detailed descriptions of court and the antics of trial attorneys. Gardner used to write 200,000 words a month, as well as devoting two days a week to his law practice. He completed more than 80 Perry Mason novels, as well as writing two other detective series. Perry Mason first appeared in 1933 in the book, The Case of the Velvet Claws. In 1943, Perry Mason became a radio serial, which was part crime show, and part soap opera. Perry Mason then moved to television in 1957, while the soap opera portion of the radio series was spun off into the TV soap The Edge of Night
1899 James Cagney - Actor (Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mr. Roberts, Man of a Thousand Faces, Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty Faces)
1905 William Gargan - Actor (Dynamite, The Canterville Ghost, Rain)
1912 Art Linkletter - TV host (House Party, Kids Say the Darndest Things, The Art Linkletter Show, People Are Funny) He was born Arthur Gordon Kelly at Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan
1917 Phyllis Diller – Comedienne and actress (The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show, Boy Did I Get the Wrong Number, Eight on the Lam) She played Scrubwoman in the Batman episode The Minstrel’s Shakedown
1930 Ray Galton – British scriptwriter who was one half of the Galton and Simpson writing team (Hancock’s Half Hour, Steptoe and Son, Before the Fringe)
1935 Donald Sutherland – Canadian actor (JFK, Backdraft, M*A*S*H, The Dirty Dozen, National Lampoon's Animal House, The Eagle Has Landed, A Dry White Season, Bethune, Kelly’s Heroes, Eye of the Needle, Space Cowboys, The Hunger Games, The Pillars of the Earth) He is the father of actor Kiefer Sutherland
1935 Diahann Carroll - Actress (Claudine, Julia, Dynasty, The Five Heartbeats, The Diahann Carroll Show, The René Simard Show, White Collar, Lonesome Dove: The Series) and singer who recored many albums (Diahann Caroll Sings Harold Arlen, Best Beat Forward, Fun Life, Showstopper, The Time of My Life) She played Lydia Bishop in the Perry Mason movie A Case of the Lethal Lifestyle
1939 Spencer Davis – Musician with the Spencer Davis Group (Keep on Runnin', Somebody Help Me, Gimme Some Lovin')
1946 Alun Armstrong – British actor (The Mummy Returns, David Copperfield, Sleepy Hollow, Braveheart, Patriot Games, The Duellists, New Tricks, Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Van Helsing, Krull, Prime Suspect: Tennison) He played Chief Superintendent Holdsby in the Inspector Morse episode Happy Families He also played Peter Jenner in The Sweeney episode Stay Lucky, Eh?
1947 Camilla Parker-Bowles – HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. She is the wife of Prince Charles
1951 Lucie Arnaz - Actress (They're Playing Our Song, Here's Lucy, Who is the Black Dahlia?, The Jazz Singer) She is the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz
1952 David Hasselhof - Actor (Bay Watch, Knight Rider, The Young and the Restless)
1952 Phoebe Snow - Singer (Poetry Man, Gone at Last)
1968 Bitty Schram – Actress (Monk, A League of Their Own, One Fine Day)
1965 Alex Winter – British-born actor (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Freaked, The Lost Boys, Haunted Summer)
1979 Mike Vogel – Actor (The Help, Pan Am, Miami Medical, She’s Out of My League, Blue Valentine, Cloverfield, The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, Bates Motel, Under the Dome)
1983 Sarah Jones – Actress (Alcatraz, Sons of Anarchy, Still Green, Love Takes Wing, Vegas, Texas Rising)


Died this Day

1790 Adam Smith, age 67 – Scottish social philosopher and political economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776
1793 Charlotte Corday, age 25 – Executed by guillotine in France, for the murder of leading French politician Jean-Paul Marat four days earlier. The executioner held up her severed head for the crowd to see and slapped her face. The cheeks reddened and “her countenance expressed the most unequivocal marks of indignation” according to a doctor who witnessed the execution. It seemed that the head lived on briefly after it was speedily and cleanly removed from the body
1903 James McNeill Whistler – US painter and etcher (Whistler’s Mother) He died one week after his 69th birthday
1959 Billie Holiday, age 44 - Jazz and blues singer known as 'Lady Day' (Night and Day, The Man I Love, Lover Man, They Can't Take that Away from Me, Strange Fruit, God Bless the Child) She died in New York City Hospital, of kidney disease
1967 John Coltrane, age 40 – Jazz composer and musician on the tenor and soprano saxophone (Stablemates, Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, Greensleeves, Chim Chim Cheree, In a Sentimental Mood)
2006 Mickey Spillane, age 88 – Author (I the Jury, The Killing Man, The Girl Hunters, One Lonely Night, Vengeance is Mine!)


On this Day

1648 The first temperance gathering in North America took place at Sillery, Québec, in a settlement for the Christianised Indians of Loretteville
1790 Thomas Saint, of London, patented the first sewing machine, but there is no record of it ever being produced
1820 The future Prime Minister of Canada, John Alexander Macdonald arrived from Scotland with his family
1840 Samuel Cunard arrived at Halifax with his daughter on his first steamship, the paddle steamer Britannia, from Liverpool, England. The ship then sailed on to Boston on the 19th, completing the new Liverpool-Halifax-Boston mail route in 14 days and 8 hours. It was the first scheduled transatlantic mail service by steamship, and a blow to the age of sailing ships
1841 The first edition of Punch was published in London
1886 A lone outlaw held up the Prince Albert mail coach. It was the first stagecoach robbery in Saskatchewan
1897 The Klondike gold rush began with the arrival of the treasure ship Portland at Seattle, Washington, from Skagway with the first group of gold-laden Yukon prospectors
1898 During the Spanish American War, Spanish troops in Santiago, Cuba, surrendered to US forces. Nine days later, Spain sought peace terms
1913 Mabel Normand hit Fatty Arbuckle in the face with a pie in the silent film A Noise from the Deep. It was the first film appearance of the pie-in-the-face routine
1917 The British royal family adopted the name Windsor, giving up all German titles and the dynastic names of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The names had been acquired through the marriage of Queen Victoria to Prince Albert
1938 Pilot Douglas Corrigan took off from New York for a flight to California. He landed at Dublin, Ireland, and earned the nickname "Wrong-way Corrigan". Corrigan was among the mechanics who had worked on Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis aircraft, for that famous flight across the Atlantic eleven years earlier, but that mere footnote in the history of flight was not enough for the Texas-born aviator. In 1938, he bought a 1929 Curtiss Robin aircraft off a trash heap, rebuilt it, and modified it for long-distance flight. In July 1938, Corrigan piloted the single-engine plane non-stop from California to New York. Although the transcontinental flight was far from unprecedented, Corrigan received national attention simply because the press was amazed that his rattletrap aircraft had survived the journey. Almost immediately after arriving in New York, he filed plans for a transatlantic flight, but aviation authorities deemed it a suicide flight, and he was promptly denied. Instead, they would allow Corrigan to fly back to the West Coast, and on July 17 he took off from Floyd Bennett field, ostentatiously pointed west. However, a few minutes later, he made a 180-degree turn and vanished into a cloudbank to the puzzlement of a few onlookers. Twenty-eight hours later, Corrigan landed his plane in Dublin, Ireland, stepped out of his plane, and exclaimed, "Just got in from New York. Where am I?" He claimed that he lost his direction in the clouds and that his compass had malfunctioned. The authorities didn't buy the story and suspended his license, but Corrigan stuck to it to the amusement of the public on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time "Wrong Way" Corrigan and his crated plane returned to New York by ship, his license suspension had been lifted, he was a national celebrity, and a mob of autograph seekers met him on the gangway
1944 A pair of ammunition ships exploded in Port Chicago, California, killing 322 people
1951 The famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin burned down. The play that evening closed with soldiers on stage singing Keep the Home Fires Burning
1955 Disneyland, Walt Disney's metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy, and futurism, opened. The $17 million theme park was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, and soon brought in staggering profits. In the early 1950s, Disney began designing a huge amusement park to be built near Los Angeles. He intended Disneyland to have educational as well as amusement value and to entertain adults and their children. Land was bought in the farming community of Anaheim, about 25 miles south-east of Los Angeles, and construction began in 1954. In the summer of 1955, special invitations were sent out for the opening of Disneyland on July 17. Unfortunately, the pass was counterfeited and thousands of uninvited people were admitted into Disneyland on opening day. The park was not ready for the public: food and drink ran out, a women's high-heel shoe got stuck in the wet asphalt of Main Street USA, and the Mark Twain Steamboat nearly capsized from too many passengers. Disneyland soon recovered, however, and attractions such as the Castle, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, Snow White's Adventures, Space Station X-1, Jungle Cruise, and Stage Coach drew countless children and their parents. Special events and the continual building of new state-of-the-art attractions encouraged them to visit again
1955 Arco, India became the first community in the world to receive all its light and power from atomic energy
1975 Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft crew members visited each other in the first US and Soviet co-operative venture in space
1976 Queen Elizabeth officially opened the Montréal Olympic Games
1978 Canada and the US agreed to let Canadians in American jails and Americans in Canadian prisons go home and finish their sentences
1981 A pair of walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a dance, killing 114 people
1997 After 117 years, the Woolworth Corporation closed its last 400 five-and-dime stores, laying off 9,200 employees