January 7

January is: March of Dimes Birth Defects Month

Born on this Day

• 1502: Pope Gregory XIII
  

• 1745: Frenchman Jacques Montgolfier, who, with his brother, invented the hot air balloon
  

• 1800: Millard Fillmore, 13th president of the United States (1850-1853)
  

• 1844: Bernadette Soubirous, who became St. Bernadette.
  

• 1845: Louis III, last King of Bavaria.
  

• 1873: Film executive Adolph Zukor
  

• 1928: Author William Peter Blatty
  

• 1930: Country singer Jack Greene (There Goes My Everything)
  

• 1942: Pop musician Paul Revere
  

• 1946: Magazine publisher Jann Wenner
  

• 1948: Singer Kenny Loggins
  

• 1949: Singer-songwriter Marshall Chapman
  

• 1952: Actor Sammo Hung ("Martial Law")
  

• 1957: "Today" show co-host Katie Couric
  

• 1959: Country singer David Lee Murphy
  

• 1959: Rock musician Kathy Valentine (The Go-Go's)
  

• 1960: Actor David Marciano
  

• 1964: Actor Nicolas Cage
  

• 1970: Actor Doug E. Doug ("Cosby")
  

• 1974: Country singer-musician John Rich (Lonestar)
  

• 1976: Actor Dustin Diamond ("Saved by the Bell: The New Class")       
  

• 1990: Actor Liam Aiken 
  

• 1990: Actress Camryn Grimes
  

• 1991: Actor Max Morrow

Events in History on this day
  

• 0049 BC: Roman Senate declares Cësar a public enemy unless he disbands his army
  

• 0312: Martyrdom of St. Lucian
  

• 1131: Murder of St. Canute Lavard
  

• 1285: Death of Charles I of Anjou, King of Naples and Sicily
  

• 1327: Edward II is deposed. Edward II was the son of the great English Warrior, King Edward I.
  

• 1477: The body of Charles the Bold is found, half eaten by wolves
  

• 1537: Assassination of Alessandro de Medici
  

• 1566: Pope Pius V elected
  

• 1598: Boris Godunov seizes the Russian throne on death of Theodore I
  

• 1598: Death of Czar Theodore of Muscovy
  

• 1610: Galileo, using his primitive telescope, discovered the four major moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.
  

• 1611: Second trial of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, for "satanic terror;" she is found guilty and walled up in her tower
  

• 1618: Francis Bacon appointed Lord Chancellor of England
  

• 1714: The typewriter is patented (It was not built years later)
  

• 1785: The 1st balloon flight across the English Channel was completed. The flight was by balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard. Mr. Blanchard and his passenger had to shed all of their clothes as the wind died and the balloon's airbag cooled too quickly over the sea.
  

• 1789: The first nationwide U.S. presidential election was held. The electors chosen by the voters unanimously picked George Washington as president and John Adams as vice president.
  

• 1809: Beethoven, fresh from the success of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, wrote to his publisher declaring that "nobody in Vienna has more enemies than I do. This is readily comprehended since the state of music here is growing worse and worse."
  

• 1894: One of the earliest motion picture experiments took place at the Thomas Edison studio in West Orange, New Jersey, as comedian Fred Ott was filmed sneezing.
  

• 1901: New York stock exchange trading exceeds two million shares for the first time in history.
  

• 1904: The distress signal, "CQD", was established this day. It didn't last long. Two years later, "SOS" became the radio distress signal because it was more convenient.
  

• 1926: George Burns and Gracie Allen were married by a Justice of the Peace in Cleveland, Ohio.
  

• 1927: Commercial transatlantic telephone service was inaugurated between New York and London.
  

• 1929: Sheffield Farms of New York begins using wax paper cartons instead of glass bottles for milk delivery.
  

• 1929: The comic strip "Buck Rogers 2429 A.D." appeared for the first time in newspapers around the nation. The comic strip title was later changed to: "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century."
  

• 1929: "Tarzan", one of the first adventure comic strips appears.
  

• 1931: As the Great Depression was getting under way, a report to President Hoover estimated that four-million to five-million Americans were out of work.
  

• 1934: The U.S.S.R.’s first ambassador to the U.S. arrives in New York.
  

• 1934: Six-thousand pastors in Berlin defy the Nazis insisting that they will not be muzzled.
  

• 1942: The World War Two siege of Bataan began.
  

• 1944: The U.S. Air Force announces the production of the first jet-fighter, Bell P-59 Airacomet.
  

• 1951: Hostile demonstrations welcome Eisenhower to Paris talks on European defense strategy.
  

• 1953: President Truman announced in his State of the Union address that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb.
  

• 1955: Marian Anderson became the first African-American to sing at New York's Metropolitan Opera. She sang Ulrica in Verdi's "The Masked Ball." Marian Anderson was 53 before she got this opportunity.
  

• 1959: The United States recognized Fidel Castro's new government in Cuba.
  

• 1963: First Class postage raised from 4 cents to 5 cents.
  

• 1968: First Class postage raised from 5 cents to 6 cents.
  

• 1972: Lewis F. Powell Junior and William H. Rehnquist were sworn in as the 99th and 100th members of the US Supreme Court.
  

• 1979: Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge government.
  

• 1985: Vietnam seizes Khmer National Liberation Front headquarters near the Thai border.
  

• 1985: Yul Brynner returned to the Broadway stage as "The King and I" returned to where Yul first began his reign, 33 years before. Through his career to that date, Brynner appeared in 4,434 shows without missing a single performance.
  

• 1987: Assassins using a remote-controlled car bomb tried but failed to assassinate former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun. Four other people, however, were killed.
  

• 1988: Secretary of State George P. Shultz, seeking to smooth a rift caused by a United Nations vote, told reporters that overall American support for Israel remained "unshakable."
  

• 1988: British actor Trevor Howard died in Bushey, England, at age 71.
  

• 1989: Emperor Hirohito of Japan died at age 87; he was succeeded by Crown Prince Akihito.
  

• 1990: The president of El Salvador, Alfredo Cristiani, said in a nationally broadcast address that military men had carried out the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter the previous November.
  

• 1991: Pete Rose left an Illinois federal prison camp and checked into a halfway house in Cincinnati to complete his sentence for cheating on his taxes.
  

• 1991: Loyalist troops in Haiti crushed a coup attempt that had threatened the transition of power to the country's first freely elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 
  

• 1991: Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled plans to purchase the A-12 stealth attack plane for the Navy. 
  

• 1992: President George Bush arrived in Japan on a tough-talk trade mission.
  

• 1992: Serb forces shot down a European Community helicopter in Croatia, killing five truce observers.
  

• 1992: Pitchers Tom Seaver and Rollie Fingers were elected to baseball's Hall of Fame.
  

• 1993: US forces in Somalia unleashed tank, helicopter and rocket fire on two clan camps in Mogadishu where snipers had been taking potshots at the troops.
  

• 1993: A preliminary report prepared for the European Community said about 20,000 women in Bosnia-Herzegovina might have been raped by Serb fighters.
  

• 1994: The government reported the unemployment rate fell to a three-year low of 6.4 percent in December 1993.
  

• 1994: Nancy Kerrigan withdrew from the US Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, a day after her right leg was severely bruised in an attack following a practice session.
  

• 1995: Major General Viktor Vorobyov, a senior commander leading Russian troops in their advance on the secessionist capital of Chechnya, was killed by a mortar shell.
  

• 1996: One of the biggest blizzards in U.S. history paralyzed the East. (More than 100 deaths were later blamed on the severe weather.) 
  

• 1996: Republicans rejected President Clinton's budget plan and warned they would close government programs they didn't like if there were no agreement on a budget plan in the next few weeks.
  

• 1997: Newt Gingrich overcame dissension in the G-O-P ranks to become the first Republican re-elected House speaker in 68 years.
  

• 1998: Convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols escaped the death penalty when a jury deadlocked over his punishment.
  

• 1998: The government of Canada apologized for past acts of oppression against the country's native peoples.
  

• 1998: A U.S. Customs agent died from injuries sustained while helping protect President Clinton in the U.S. Virgin Islands the previous week. Senior Special Agent Manuel Zurita, a 12-year veteran based in Puerto Rico, died while being treated for a punctured lung and other internal injuries. He was one of three customs agents injured when their boat hit a rock off St. Thomas, following an assignment assisting the Secret Service during the landing of Air Force One.
  

• 1998: Hundreds of villagers packed belongings and fled their homes in remote mountains in western Algeria after at least 600 men, women and children were massacred there the previous week.
  

• 1999: For only the second time in history, an impeached American president went on trial before the Senate.
  

• 2000: US Representative Dan Burton (Republican, Indiana), subpoenaed Elian Gonzalez to testify before Congress, a bid to keep Elian in the United States for at least another month while courts decided whether the six-year-old should be returned to Cuba. (Elian never actually testified.)
  

• 2004: President Bush proposed legal status — at least temporarily — for millions of illegal immigrants working in the U.S. 
   
  

Send Mail to pbower@neo.rr.com