1835 – PT Barnum and his circus begin first tour of US
1851 – First alcohol prohibition law enacted in Maine
1873 – Construction begins on San Francisco’s Clay St for world’s first cable railroad
1875 – Alexander Graham Bell makes first sound transmission
1886 – Grover Cleveland is first to wed during his presidency.
He was born Stephen Grover Cleveland in Caldwell, New Jersey in 1837, the fifth of nine children to a Presbyterian minister. He had offers to have his college education paid for if he’d become a minister but he declined and headed west instead. He got as far as Buffalo and worked for a law firm and was later admitted to the bar in 1859. Before becoming president, he served as District Attorney, Sheriff of Erie County, Mayor of Buffalo, and Governor of New York.
1901 – Benjamin Adams arrested for playing golf on Sunday in New York
1925 – NY Yankee Lou Gehrig begins his 2,130 consecutive game streak
1935 – Babe Ruth, 40, announces his retirement as a player
1966 – US Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum; First lunar soft-landing
1975 – First record of snowfall in London in June
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Ken Jennings.
His total earnings on Jeopardy
were $ 3,196,300 |
1975 – VP Rockefeller finds no pattern of illegal activities at CIA
1986 – NYC transit system issues a new brass with steel bullseye token
1997 – Timothy McVeigh found guilty of 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, killing 168
2004 – Ken Jennings begins his 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy!
Birthdays
1732 – Martha Washington, the first, First Lady (1789-97)
1740 – Marquis de Sade, the first known sadist/writer
1840 – Thomas Hardy, poet/novelist (Far from the Madding Crowd)
1904 – Johnny Weissmuller, Olympian swimmer ( Five gold medals ) turned Tarzan
1941 – Charlie Watts, drummer of the Rolling Stones
1944 – Marvin Hamlisch, composer, pianist, (Chorus Line). He died in 2012
1955 – Dana Carvey, comedian (SNL, Garth-Wayne’s World)
Anniversaries
1886 – 22nd and 24th US President Grover Cleveland (49) weds Frances Folsom (21) in the Blue Room at the White House
1919 – Physicist Albert Einstein (40) weds his cousin Elsa Lowenthal (43)
Deaths
1927 – Lizzie Borden, American, acquitted of murder, dies at 68
Lizzie Borden was a who was tried and acquitted in the 1892 axe murders of her father and stepmother in Fall River, Massachusetts. The case was a cause célèbre throughout the United States. The case was memorialized in a popular skipping-rope rhyme:
Lizzie Borden took an axe,
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.
Folklore says that the rhyme was made up by an anonymous writer as a tune to sell newspapers. Others attribute it to the ubiquitous, but anonymous, “Mother Goose”.
In reality, Lizzie’s stepmother suffered 18 or 19 blows; her father suffered 11 blows.
1941 – Lou Gehrig, First baseman (NY Yankee), dies of ALS in Riverdale NY at 37
1970 – Bruce McLaren, New Zealand car racer, designer, and founder of eponymous race team (b. 1937)
1990 – Robert Noyce, co-inventor (semi-conductor)/founder (Intel) |
