Born this Day

1747 John Paul Jones - American Revolutionary War naval hero
1918 Sebastian Cabot – British actor (Family Affair, Family Jewels, The Time Machine, Twice-Told Tales, Omar Khayyam, Westward-Ho the Wagons, Kismet, The Jungle Book) He also narrated many of the Winnie the Pooh cartoons
1921 Nancy Reagan – Actress (Hellcats of the Navy, East Side West Side) and former First Lady, who was married to the 40th US President Ronald Reagan
1922 William Schallert - Actor (Dobie Gillis, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Patty Duke Show, The Grace Kelly Story, True Blood)
1925 Merv Griffin - Singer (I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts), broadcaster (The Merv Griffin Show) and game show developer (Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy)
1925 Bill Haley – US pioneer rock musician with the group Bill Haley and the Comets (Rock Around the Clock, Shake Rattle and Roll, Crazy Man Crazy, See You Later Alligator)
1927 Janet Leigh - Actress (Psycho, The Manchurian Candidate, Bye Bye Birdie, Houdini, Pete Kelly's Blues) She was the mother of actress, Jamie Lee Curtis
1931 Della Reese - Singer (Don't You Know, And That Reminds Me, Not One Minute More) and actress (Della, Chico & the Man, The Royal Family, Touched by an Angel, Let's Rock, Harlem Nights)
1937 Ned Beatty - Actor (Deliverance, Homicide: Life on the Street, Hear My Song, Friendly Fire, Superman, Rudy, The Toy, The Silver Streak, Radioland Murders, Network, Gray Lady Down, Charlie Wilson’s War, Thunderpants)
1937 Gene Chandler - Singer (Duke of Earl, Groovy Situation, Just be True)
1945 Burt Ward - Actor (Beach Babes from Beyond Infinity, Robo-chic, Smooth Talker) And, of course, he was Robin to Adam West’s Batman
1946 George W. Bush – The 43rd US President. He is a former governor of Texas, and is the son of President George H.W. Bush
1946 Fred Dryer – Actor (Hunter, Death Before Dishonour, The Fantastic World of D.C. Collins, Land’s End) and former football player with the NY Giants and LA Rams
1946 Sylvester Stallone - Actor (Rocky series, Rambo series, Cliffhanger, Cobra, Demolition Man, Nighthawks, Oscar, The Lords of Flatbush, Cop Land)
1950 Geraldine James – British actress (Calendar Girls, Seesaw, The Jewel in the Crown, Gandhi, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Alice in Wonderland, Northanger Abbey, Poirot: After the Funeral) She plays Mrs. Hudson in the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movies. She also played Helen Field in the Inspector Morse episode Who Killed Harry Field?
1951 Geoffrey Rush – Australian actor (Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Shine, Les Misérables, Shakespeare in Love, The King’s Speech, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, Munich, Ned Kelly, Frida, House on Haunted Hill)
1952 Shelley Hack – Actress (Charlie's Angels, King of Comedy, Annie Hall, A Casualty of War)
1954 Allyce Beasley – Actress (Moonlighting, Recess, Legally Blonde, Stuart Little, Rumpelstiltskin, The Tommyknockers, Loaded Weapon 1)
1958 Jennifer Saunders – British comedienne and actress (Absolutely Fabulous, French and Saunders, Let Them Eat Cake, Muppet Treasure Island, In the Bleak Midwinter, The Life & Times of Vivienne Vyle, Comic Relief: Uptown Downstairs Abbey, Dead Boss)
1983 Gregory Smith – Canadian actor (Everwood, The Patriot, Rookie Blue, Krippendorf’s Tribe)


Died this Day

1189 Henry II – French born King of England
1535 Sir Thomas More – English Lord Chancellor, who was executed on Tower Hill for refusing to accept Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England. He was later canonised for this act
1932 Kenneth Grahame, age 73 – British author (The Wind in the Willows, The Golden Age, Dream Days)
1962 William Faulkner, age 64 – US author (Go Down Moses, As I Lay Dying, Soldier’s Pay, Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury) and screenwriter (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep) Born near Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner dropped out of school during his sophomore year and took a series of odd jobs while writing poetry. In 1918 Faulkner left Mississippi and joined the British Royal Flying Corps, but World War I ended before he finished his training in Canada. He then returned to Mississippi and continued writing poetry. In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature
1971 Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong – Legendary US musician (Blueberry Hill, What a Wonderful World, Heebie Jeebies) He also appeared in many films (Pennies from Heaven, Cabin in the Sky, New Orleans, High Society, Hello Dolly, The Glenn Miller Story) Armstrong was a virtuoso jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and inventor of scat singing. His career began in New Orleans in 1918. He died in his sleep after suffering heart problems and other health complaints for many years. It was less than a month before his 71st birthday
1998 Roy Rogers, age 86 – Legendary singing cowboy who starred in numerous Westerns. He died in Apple Valley, California of congestive heart failure. At the time of his death, he had been married to Dale Evans for over fifty years
2003 Buddy Ebsen, age 95 – Actor (The Beverly Hillbillies, Barnaby Jones, Matt Houston, The Daughters of Joshua Cabe, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Northwest Passage, Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier)


On this Day

1189 On the death of his father, Henry II, Richard the Lionheart (Richard I) became King of England
1483 Richard III was crowned King of England
1862 Samuel Clemens began his writing career as his first story as a reporter was published in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. His articles covered the bustling frontier-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada. Like many newspapermen of the day, Clemens adopted a pen name, signing his articles with the name Mark Twain, a term from his old river boating days. His stint as a Nevada newspaperman revealed an exceptional talent for writing
1885 French scientist Louis Pasteur successfully tested an anti-rabies vaccine on a boy who had been bitten by an infected dog
1886 The first box numbers were used in classified advertising by the Daily Telegraph, in England
1906 The Canadian Parliament passed the Lord's Day Observance Act following a bitter debate. The act prohibited work, entertainment, sport, and almost all commerce on Sundays
1928 In New York, the first all-talking picture, Lights of New York, opened. The Jazz Singer, which had premiered earlier, was only part ‘talkie’
1930 Fred Newton began swimming the Mississippi River from Fort Dam, Minnesota to New Orleans, Louisiana. He reached his destination on December 29th after swimming more than 1,800 miles
1942 In Nazi-occupied Holland, 13-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family were forced to take refuge in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The day before, Anne's older sister, Margot, had received a call-up notice to be deported to a Nazi "work camp", and the family, fearing deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, took shelter in a factory run by Christian friends. During the next two years, under the threat of murder by the Nazi officers patrolling just outside the warehouse, Anne kept a diary that is marked by poignancy, humour, and insight. In August 1944, just two months after the successful Allied landing at Normandy, the Nazi Gestapo discovered the Frank's Secret Annex, and the family was sent to the Nazi death camps along with two of the Christians who had helped shelter them, and another Jewish family and a single Jewish man with whom they had shared the hiding place. Anne and most of the others ended up at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. In early 1945, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister, Margot, to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they caught typhus and died in early March. After the war, Anne's diary was discovered undisturbed in the Amsterdam hiding place and in 1947 was translated into English and published
1944 In Hartford, Connecticut, a fire broke out under the big top of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, killing 167 people and injuring 682. Two-thirds of those who perished were children. The cause of the fire was unknown, but it spread at incredible speed, racing up the canvas of the circus tent. Scarcely before the 8,000 spectators inside the big top could react, patches of burning canvas began falling on them from above, and a stampede for the exits began. Many were trapped under fallen canvas, but most were able to rip through it and escape. However, after the tent's ropes burned and its poles gave way, the whole burning big top came crashing down, consuming those who remained inside. Within 10 minutes it was over, and some 100 children and 60 of their adult escorts were dead or dying. An investigation revealed that the tent had undergone a treatment with flammable paraffin thinned with three parts of gasoline to make it waterproof. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus eventually agreed to pay $5 million in compensation, and several of the organisers were convicted on manslaughter charges. In 1950, in a late development in the case, Robert D. Segee of Circleville, Ohio, confessed to starting the Hartford circus fire. Segee claimed that he had been an arsonist since the age of six and that an apparition of an Indian on a flaming horse often visited him and urged him to set fires. In November 1950, Segee was sentenced to two consecutive terms of 22 years in prison, the maximum penalty in Ohio at the time
1957 Fifteen-year-old Paul McCartney attended a church picnic in the village of Woolton, near Liverpool, where he met 16-year-old John Lennon. Lennon had formed a band called the Quarrymen, which was playing at the picnic. Between sets, McCartney played a few songs on guitar for the band, and a few days later Lennon invited him to join. At first, McCartney didn't take the group seriously, and missed his first performance with the band because he had a scouting trip
1967 The Biafran War erupted. It lasted more than two years and claimed some 600,000 lives
1988 One-hundred and sixty-seven crew members were killed in an explosion and fire aboard the Piper Alpha oil rig in the North Sea. The worst disaster of its kind to that date was blamed on a gas leak. The rig's owner, Occidental Petroleum, later offered families of the victims compensation totalling US$180-million
1997 The rover Sojourner rolled down a ramp from the Mars Pathfinder lander onto the Martian landscape to begin inspecting soil and rocks