Born this Day

1364 Sir Henry Percy - Also known as Harry Hotspur, he was a supporter of King Henry IV. He was the model for Shakespeare's Hotspur in the play Henry IV
1759 William Thornton - US architect of the Capitol Building in Washington DC
1818 William George Fargo - US businessman who co-founded Wells, Fargo & Company, which carried freight swiftly west beyond Buffalo. Through its success, he was invited to become president of the newly-formed American Express Company in 1868
1895 R.J. Mitchell - British aircraft designer who developed the Spitfire fighter plane
1904 Margery Allingham - British mystery author who created the amateur detective, Albert Campion (The Crime at Black Dudley, Mystery Mile, Look to the Lady, Police at the Funeral, Sweet Danger, Death of a Ghost, The Case of the Late Pig, The Tiger in the Smoke)
1908 Jimmy Stewart - Actor (Philadelphia Story, The Glenn Miller Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Harvey, Rear Window, Anatomy of a Murder, Bell Book and Candle, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Vertigo, The Man from Laramie, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) He studied architecture at Princeton
1915 Moshe Dayan - Israeli soldier, statesman and archaeologist
1916 Patricia Ellis - Actress (Three on a Match, Back Door to Heaven, The Case of the Lucky Legs, Postal Inspector)
1919 George Gobel - Comedian: "Well I'll be a dirty bird" (The George Gobel Show, The Eddie Fisher Show) and actor (Better Late than Never, The Fantastic World of DC Collins, Harper Valley PTA)
1920 Vic Ames - Singer with his family group The Ames Brothers (Rag Mop, Sentimental Me, The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane, Tammy, Melodie d'Amour)
1923 Edith Fellows - Actress (The Grace Kelly Story, In the Mood)
1927 Bud Grant - Pro Football Hall of Famer, player & coach (Philadelphia Eagles, Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Minnesota Vikings) He also played basketball for the Minneapolis Lakers
1927 David Hedison - Actor (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, TJ Hooker, Licence to Kill, Live and Let Die) He was sometimes credited as Al Hedison, as he was in the original version of The Fly. He also played Damion White in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Dodging Domino
1930 James McEachin - Actor (The Dead Don't Die, Double Exposure)
1933 Constance Towers - Actress (General Hospital Naked Kiss, On Wings of Eagles)
1936 Anthony Zerbe - Actor (Cool Hand Luke, They Call Me Mister Tibbs, Rooster Cogburn, The Dead Zone, Licence to Kill, Star Trek: Insurrection, The Omega Man, Papillon, Harry O, Centennial) He also played Dr. John Mortimer in the 1972 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles
1937 Teddy Randazzo - Singer (Way of a Clown)
1940 Stan Mikita - Hockey player with the Chicago Blackhawks
1944 Joe Cocker - British singer, songwriter (With a Little Help from My Friends, She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, The Letter, You are So Beautiful)
1946 Cher (Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre) - Actress (Moonstruck, Silkwood, Mask) and singer, with the group Sonny & Cher (I Got You Babe, The Beat Goes on) and solo (Gypsys Tramps and Thieves)
1949 Dave Thomas - Canadian comedian and actor (Second City TV, Stripes, Strange Brew, The Red Green Show, Coneheads, Grace Under Fire) Along with Rick Moranis, he created the characters Bob and Doug MacKenzie of the Great White North, which satirized many Canadian stereotypes
1959 Bronson Pinchot - Actor (Perfect Strangers, Risky Business, Beverly Hills Cop, The Flamingo Kid, The First Wives Club)
1960 John Billingsley – Actor (Star Trek: Enterprise, True Blood, 2012, The Last Word, 24, Prison Break, The Others)
1960 Tony Goldwin – Actor (Ghost, The Pelican Brief, Nixon, Kiss the Girls, Scandal, The Last Samurai, From the Earth to the Moon, Law & Order)
1961 Owen Teale – Welsh actor (Game of Thrones, It’s Alive, Lewis: Old School Ties, Jack Brown and the Curse of the Crown, Murphy’s Law, Island at War, Conspiracy, The Cherry Orchard)
1966 Mindy Cohn – Actress (The Facts of Life, The Boy Who Could Fly, The Secret Life of the American Teenager)
1968 Timothy Olyphant – Actor (Deadwood, Justified, Damages, Live Free or Die Hard, Hitman)
1975 Tahmoh Penikett – Canadian actor (Battlestar Galactica, Dollhouse, Cold Squad, Murder on the Iditarod Trail, Whistler)
1977 Matt Czuchry – Actor (The Good Wife, Eight Legged Freaks, Gilmore Girls, Friday Night Lights, Hack, The Resident)


Died this Day

1506 Christopher Columbus -Italian navigator who made four voyages of discovery. Columbus died in Valladolid, Spain, without realising the great scope of his achievement: he had discovered for Europe the New World, whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth
1948 George 'Buzz' Beurling, age 26 – Canadian flying ace. He was killed when the Norseman plane he was piloting for the Israeli underground army Haganah blew up at Urbe airport. He was buried in Rome's English cemetery between the graves of Keats and Shelley, but two years later the grateful state of Israel exhumed his body, laid him in state in Haifa, and buried him at the base of Mount Carmel, near the cave of Elijah the Prophet
1989 Gilda Radner, age 42 - Comedian who found fame as part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live. She died of cancer, in Los Angeles. At the time of her death, she was married to Gene Wilder
1996 Jon Pertwee, age 76 – British actor (Doctor Who, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Worzel Gummidge) He also appeared in several “Carry On…” films


On this Day

1347 Rome was established as a republic by Cola di Rieza, tribune of the people who had driven out the nobles and senators
1498 Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama became the first European to reach India via the Atlantic Ocean or Mediterranean Sea when he arrived at Calicut on the Malabar Coast. He had discovered a route via the Cape of Storms, later named the Cape of Good Hope, around the southern tip of Africa
1536 Henry VIII married his third wife, Jane Seymour, the day after he had his second wife, Anne Boleyn, beheaded
1803 Chief Justice William Osgoode declared slavery to be inconsistent with the laws of Canada
1856 The telegraph ticker was patented by Edward Hughes of Louisville, Kentucky. It was the first ticker to print successfully. Hughes had already sold his patent rights to the Commercial Company for $100,000 in November 1855
1859 George Barstow was elected Mayor of Nanaimo, BC. There was only one vote cast
1861 North Carolina voted to secede from the Union
1861 The capital of the Confederacy was moved from Montgomery, Alabama, to Richmond, Virginia
1862 In an important milestone in the settlement of the American West, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act, a program designed to grant public land to small farmers at low cost. The act gave 160 acres of land to any applicant who was a head of a household and twenty-one years or older, provided that the person settled on the land for five years and then paid a small filing fee. If settlers wished to obtain title earlier, they could do so after six months by paying $1.25 an acre. By the end of the Civil War, some 15,000 land claims had been made. Most homesteaders were experienced farmers from the crowded East or Europe, and by 1900, some 600,000 claims had been made for 80 million acres of public land. Although, numerous claims continued to be made into the twentieth century, the mechanization of US agriculture in the 1930s and 1940s led to the replacement of individual homesteads with a smaller number of much larger farms
1867 Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone for the Royal Albert Hall
1873 Acting at the behest of a Reno, Nevada, tailor who had invented the idea, Levi Strauss secured the necessary patents for canvas pants with copper rivets to reinforce the stress points. In 1853, he arrived in San Francisco with a load of merchandise that he hoped to sell in the California mining camps. Unable to sell a large supply of canvas, Strauss hit on the idea of using the durable material to make work pants for miners. Strauss' canvas pants were an immediate success among hardworking miners who had long complained that conventional pants wore out too quickly. In 1872, Strauss received a letter from Jacob Davis, a customer and tailor who worked in the mining town of Reno, Nevada. Davis reported that he had discovered canvas pants could be improved if the pocket seams and other weak points that tended to tear were strengthened by copper rivets. Davis' riveted pants had proven popular in Reno, but he needed a patent to protect his invention. Intrigued by the copper-riveted pants, Strauss and his partners agreed to undertake the necessary legal work for the patent and begin large-scale production of the pants. In exchange for his idea, Strauss made the Reno tailor his production manager. Eventually, Strauss switched from using canvas to heavyweight blue denim, and the modern "blue jeans" were born
1882 The first performance of Ibsen's "Ghosts" was staged, not in Norway, but in Chicago, before an audience of Scandinavian immigrants
1895 Income tax was declared unconstitutional in the US
1902 The United States ended its occupation of Cuba
1910 The funeral procession of Edward VII was held in London. He had died two weeks earlier
1922 Heartthrob Rudolph Valentino was arrested for bigamy. A Los Angeles judge ruled that Valentino had married his second wife, Natasha Rambora, before his first marriage was legally dissolved. The charges were dropped a few weeks later. After his marriage to Rambora, an actress and film designer, he turned his career over to her to manage. He appeared in increasingly effeminate roles, and Rambora irritated studio executives so much that she was banned from the sets of her husband's movies
1927 At 7:52 a.m., American aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., took off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island, New York, on the world's first solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Lindbergh, a young airmail pilot, was a dark horse when he entered a competition with a $25,000 payoff to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. He ordered a small monoplane, configured it to his own design, and christened it the Spirit of St. Louis. It was a rainy morning when he took off from Roosevelt Field, and his monoplane was so loaded down with fuel that it barely cleared the trees at the end of the runway. He flew north and then on from Newfoundland, Canada. The next afternoon, after flying 3,610 miles in thirty-three-and-a-half hours, Lindbergh landed at Le Bourget field in Paris, becoming the first pilot to accomplish the nonstop transatlantic crossing. Lindbergh's achievement made him an international celebrity, and won widespread public acceptance of the airplane and commercial aviation
1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to make a solo plane flight across the Atlantic Ocean, flying from Newfoundland to Ireland
1939 Regular trans-Atlantic air service began as a Pan American Airways plane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from Port Washington, NY, bound for Europe
1946 Universal released the movie, Dressed to Kill. It was the 14th and last film starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
1946 British poet W.H. Auden became a US citizen
1963 The US Supreme Court ruled that neither state nor city governments might interfere with peaceful sit-in demonstrations for racial integration
1969 After ten days and ten bloody assaults, Apbia Mountain, known as Hamburger Hill by the US soldiers who fought there, was finally captured by US and South Vietnamese troops. It was one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War
1970 Some 100,000 people demonstrated in New York's Wall Street district in support of US policy in Vietnam and Cambodia
1972 US President Richard Nixon left for Moscow, becoming the first US leader to visit the Soviet Union
1980 Québec voted against a move to take the French-speaking province out of Canadian federation
1991 The Soviet parliament approved a landmark bill that would allow its citizens to travel abroad and emigrate freely for the first time in more than 60 years
1993 An estimated 93 million people tuned in for the final first-run episode of Cheers on NBC-TV