54 – Taking the name Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Nero was established as the 5th Emperor of the Roman Empire following the death of Claudius.
I’m sure most of you couldn’t care less, but I always enjoy typing out really long names.
1775 – The Continental Congress authorized construction and administration of the first American naval force – the precursor to the United States Navy.
1792 – The cornerstone was laid for a presidential residence in the newly designated capital city of Washington. The building would eventually become known as the “White House” because its white-gray Virginia freestone contrasted strikingly with the red brick of nearby buildings.
1792 – The first edition of Farmer’s Almanac was published. Forty years later, Robert B. Thomas, founder and editor of the publication, inserted the word “Old” in the title.
To calculate the Almanac’s weather predictions, Thomas studied solar activity, astronomy cycles and weather patterns and used his research to develop a secret forecasting formula, which is still in use today. Other than the Almanac’s prognosticators, few people have seen the formula. It is kept in a black tin box at the Almanac offices in Dublin, New Hampshire.
1812 – During the War of 1812, British and Indian forces under Sir Isaac Brock defeated Americans at the Battle of Queenstown Heights, on the Niagara frontier in Ontario, Canada. The British victory, in which more than 1,000 U.S. troops were killed, wounded, or captured, effectively ended any further U.S. invasion of Canada. Brock, Britain’s most talented general in the war, was killed during the battle.
1843 – B’nai B’rith, the oldest Jewish service organization in the world, was founded in New York City by Henry Jones and 11 others. The fraternal organization went on to become a national leader in charity work and disaster relief, and in 1913 it formed the Anti-Defamation League to combat anti-Semitism. Today, some 500,000 men and women are members of B’nai B’rith.
1845 – A majority of the citizens of the independent Republic of Texas approved a proposed constitution that when accepted by the Congress later that year, made Texas the 28th American state.
1915 – 21-year-old Scottish poet Charles Hamilton Sorley was killed by a German sniper’s bullet during the Battle of Loos. The 37 poems found in his soldier’s kit after his death and published posthumously included one entitled When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead which contained the following powerful lines evoking the war’s ever-mounting death toll:
“…scanning all the overcrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew
Great death has made all this for evermore.”
1943 – With Mussolini deposed from power and the collapse of the fascist government in three months earlier, the government of Italy declared war on its former Axis partner Germany and joined the battle on the side of the Allies.
1943 – 26-year-old poet Robert Lowell – who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for a collection of poems called Lord Weary’s Castles – was sentenced to jail for a year for evading the draft. Lowell refused to be drafted because he objected to saturation bombing in Europe and other Allied tactics.
1945 – Milton S. Hershey, founder of the Hershey Chocolate Company, died of natural causes at the age of 88.
1960 – After landing a boat in Navas Bay (Cuba) to start a guerrilla movement – just a few weeks ahead of the historic Nixon-Kennedy presidential election, and months before the April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion – American Anthony Zarba was captured, given a summary trial which lasted only 20 minutes and was sentenced to death by a Revolutionary Tribunal. His “appeal” (before the same judges) took 20 minutes and hours later, Zarba became the first American to be executed in the new Republic of Cuba.
Three of his fellow Americans – Anthony Salvard, Allen Thompson and Robert Fuller – were given the same brand of Cuban “justice” the next day.
1960 – After game six of the World Series, the New York Yankees had scored 46 runs and the Pittsburgh Pirates only 17, yet the series was tied going into game seven. The final game opened with a home run by Rocky Nelson and was concluded by a historic game-winning home run by Bill Mazeroski, giving the Pirates their first world championship in thirty-five years.
1961 – Howard K. Smith, a TV news icon, parted ways with CBS News. He said that “there was a difference in interpretation of network news policy.”
1962 – Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? premiered at the Billy Rose Theatre on Broadway. It went on to win a Tony Award for Best Play while Arthur Hill and Uta Hagen won Tony Awards for Best Actor and Actress.
A 1966 film adaptation of the play was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards and won five, including a second Academy Award for Best Actress for Elizabeth Taylor and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Sandy Dennis.
1965 – The Who recorded ‘My Generation’ at Pye Studios in London. Guitarist Pete Townshend reportedly wrote the song on a train and is said to have been inspired by the Queen Mother who is alleged to have had Townshend’s 1935 Packard hearse towed off a street in Belgravia because she was offended by the sight of it during her daily drive through the neighborhood.
1967 – The Anaheim Amigos lost to the Oakland Oaks, 134-129, in the inaugural game of the American Basketball Association. In its first season, the ABA included 11 teams: the Pittsburgh Pipers, Minnesota Muskies, Indiana Pacers, Kentucky Colonels and New Jersey Americans played in the Eastern Division, and the New Orleans Buccaneers, Dallas Chaparrals, Denver Rockets, Houston Mavericks, Anaheim Amigos and Oakland Oaks played in the Western.
When the league merged with the NBA in 1976, four ABA teams remained intact: the Americans (who later became the New Jersey Nets), the Spurs, the Nuggets and the Pacers. The others disintegrated, their players absorbed into other teams as free agents.
1969 – After compiling a 97-65 record (and winning a division championship), Billy Martin was fired by the Minnesota Twins. His dismissal had nothing to with his team’s record. It was an August fight with two of his players in an alley outside a bar in Detroit that ultimately cost him his job.
After knocking out outfielder Bob Allison with one punch, Martin knocked out 20-game winner Dave Boswell, giving him a cut that required 20 stitches. By the way, Martin was 5-11 and weighed 160 pounds. Allison and Boswell were both 6-3 and outweighed their manager by 35 pounds.
It was not the only time Martin would lose his job. The Detroit Tigers fired him in 1973. The Texas Rangers fired him in 1975. He resigned as manager of the New York Yankees in 1978, but returned the next year only to be fired. The Oakland As fired him in 1982, and the New York Yankees brought him back three more times between 1983 and 1988 … firing him all three times.
1969 – Angela Davis, a 26-year-old black militant who had been hunted for nearly two months on murder and kidnapping charges – and only the third woman to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitive List – was arrested at a Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in midtown Manhattan by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Davis was subsequently tried and an all-white jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Her experience as a prisoner in the U.S. played a key role in persuading her to fight against the prison-industrial complex in the United States.
1974 – Ed Sullivan (hosted The Toast Of The Town – usually remembered under its second name, The Ed Sullivan Show – for 23 years) died of esophageal cancer at the age of 73.
1975 – Charlie Rich, the man voted Entertainer of the Year for by the Country Music Association of America one year earlier, stood onstage at the CMA awards show to announce that year’s winner of the Association’s biggest award. But after opening the envelope and seeing what was written inside, he had a strange reaction.
Instead of merely reading the name “John Denver” and stepping back from the podium, an obviously drunk Rich reached into his pocket for a cigarette lighter and set the envelope on fire. Though the display shocked the live audience in attendance, John Denver himself was present only via satellite linkup, and he offered a gracious acceptance speech with no idea what had occurred.
In the aftermath of the incident, Rich was blacklisted from the CMA awards show for the rest of his career.
1977 – Four Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa airliner and demanded the release of 11 imprisoned members of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, also known as the Red Army Faction. The group of ultra-left revolutionaries who terrorized Germany for three decades, assassinated more than 30 corporate, military, and government leaders in an effort to topple capitalism in their homeland.
The hijackers took the plane on a six-country odyssey, eventually landing at Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 17, after shooting Juergen Schumann, one of the plane’s pilots. Early the next morning, a German Special Forces team stormed the aircraft, releasing 86 hostages and killing three of the four hijackers. Only one of the German commandos was wounded. The Red Army Faction’s imprisoned leaders responded to the news later that day by committing suicide in their jail cell, in Stammheim, Germany.
1977 – Shirley Brickley (The Orlons – ‘South Street’) died at 32 after being shot by an intruder who was never caught.
1980 – George Jones won Single of the Year at the Country Music Association awards for ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’, starting a career resurgence for the country legend. The song, which also earned Jones the Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance, was a tune Jones thought would be a colossal flop when he recorded it. He thought it was “too long, too sad, too depressing and nobody will ever play it.”
‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ has consistently been voted as the best country song of all-time throughout the years. Not bad for a song Jones once called a “morbid son of a bitch.”
1987 – George Harrison released ‘Got My Mind Set On You’. Harrison had been the first former Beatle to have a solo #1 single (‘My Sweet Lord in 1970) and with ‘Got My Mind Set On You’, he became the last one to hit the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
1988 – A radiocarbon dating test was performed on small samples of the Shroud of Turin. The laboratories at the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology concurred that the samples they tested dated from the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1390.
1998 – Craig ‘Butch’ Atkinson (drummer with The Count Five – ‘Psychotic Reaction’) died at 52 of complications following surgery.
1999 – The Colorado grand jury investigating the case of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, who was murdered in December 1996, was dismissed and the Boulder County district attorney announced no indictments would be made due to insufficient evidence.
However, on October 25, 2013, previously sealed court documents were released, showing that the Colorado grand jury had voted in 1999 to indict John and Patricia Ramsey on charges of child abuse resulting in death and being accessories to a crime. However, then-District Attorney Alex Hunter decided not to sign the indictment, saying the evidence was insufficient.
Patsy Ramsey died at age 49 on June 24, 2006, following a battle with ovarian cancer. On July 21, 2011, John Ramsey married fashion designer Jan Rousseaux.
The murder of JonBenet Ramsey remains unsolved.
2001 – Peter Doyle (guitarist/singer with The New Seekers – ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’) died at 52 of cancer.
2009 – Al Martino (‘I Love You Because’, ‘Spanish Eyes’ and ‘Mary In The Morning’ and played the role of Johnny Fontaine in The Godfather films) died at 82 of natural causes.
2010 – General Norman Johnson (lead singer/songwriter with Chairmen Of The Board – ‘Give Me Just A Little More Time’) died at 69 of lung cancer.
2010 – The last of 33 miners trapped nearly half a mile underground for more than two months at a caved-in mine in northern Chile, were rescued. The miners survived longer than anyone else trapped underground in recorded history.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2015 RayLemire.com. All Rights Reserved.