May 3
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May 3
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Today is:
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Born on this Day
1469: Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli
1874: Perfumemaker Francois Coty
1898: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir
19??: Judy Martin (Martins)
1906: Actress Mary Astor
1913: Fashion critic Mr. Blackwell
1919: Broadway librettist Betty Comden
1919: Folk singer Pete Seeger
1921: Former boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson. Robinson was
middleweight champion 5 times and also welterweight champ. He retired in 1965 with a
record 175-19-6 including 110 knockouts.
1926: Composer-musician Jimmy Cleveland
1928: Country singer Dave Dudley
1933: Singer James Brown
1936: Singer Englebert Humperdinck (Arnold Dorsey)
1937: Singer Frankie Valli
1938: Jazz musician Rudy Jacobs (Rudolf)
1939: Actress Samantha Eggar
1944: Rock musician Pete Staples (The Troggs)
1946: Sports announcer Greg Gumbel
1947: Magician Doug Henning
1950: Singer Peter Gabriel
1950: Singer Mary Hopkin
1951: Singer Christopher Cross
1953: Rock musician Bruce Hall (REO Speedwagon)
1957: Country musician Cactus Moser (Highway 101)
1959: Rock musician David Ball (Soft Cell)
1964: Country singer Wynonna Judd (Christina Claire Ciminella)(only one
source for this date)
1990: Actress Jill Berard ("Hiller and Diller")
0328: Death of St. Helena for the Cross of Christ at
Jerusalem
0425: Pope Gelasius asserts his spiritual power is
superior to the temporal power of the Emperor
1074: Death of St. Theodosius of the Caves
1270: Death of Bela IV, King of Hungary
1324: John of Nottingham and Robert Marshall test their
witchcraft murder plot on an image of Richard de Sowe
1469: Election of Mathias I, King of Hungary, as King of
Bohemia
1481: Death of Sultan Muhammad II
1512: 5th Lateran Council (18th ecumenical council) opens
in Rome
1567: Lady Jean Gordon divorces her husband, Bothwell, for
adultery
1568: The French burn the Spanish fort of San Mateo,
Florida
1580: Thomas Turner, English poet, dies
1616: 2nd Civil War in France is ended by Treaty of Loudun
1649: 1st American law to regulate the practice of
medicine passed in New York.
1654: A bridge in Rowley, Massachusetts, was permitted to
charge a toll for animals, while people crossed for free.
1791: A liberal bill of rights reforming gentry-ruled
Poland and setting up a constitutional monarchy, was signed by King Stanislaw Augustus. It
was only the second written constitution in the world after the United States.
1802: Washington DC was incorporated as a city, with the
mayor appointed by the president, and the council elected by property owners.
1804: The publication, "Elegant World," which
came out in this month wrote: "A crass monster," the magazine said about a
certain symphony. "A hideously writhing wounded dragon that refuses to expire."
The work was Beethoven's Second Symphony, a most delightful symphonies.
1830: 1st regular steam train passenger service starts.
1895: The territories owned by the British South Africa
Company south of Zambesi were given the name of Rhodesia.
1916: Irish nationalist Padraic Pearse and two others were
executed by the British for their roles in the Easter Rising.
1919: America's 1st passenger flight (New York-Atlantic
City)
1921: West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax.
1924: A powerful tone poem premiered, Arthur Honegger's
musical portrait of a steam locomotive, "Pacific 231." Honegger describes the
locomotive, a large American engine used for long hauls, gathering steam, then gathering
speed.
1933: Nellie T. Ross became the first female director of
the US Mint.
1936: Joe DiMaggio played his first major league game. He
got 3 hits in the Yankees' 14-5 win over St. Louis. The "Yankee Clipper" was
elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955.
1937: Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize for her
novel, "Gone With the Wind."
1941: Jockey Eddie Arcaro rode "Whirl-A-Way to the
winner's circle in the Kentucky Derby. He was on the way to racing's Triple Crown (the
Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes).
1943: Pulitzer Prizes were awarded to Thornton Wilder for
his play "The Skin of Our Teeth" and Upton Sinclair for "Dragon's
Teeth.""
1944: US wartime rationing of most grades of meats ended.
1945: Indian forces captured Rangoon, Burma, from the
Japanese.
1945: During World War II, Japanese forces on Okinawa
launched their only major counter-offensive, but failed to break the American lines.
1948: The US Supreme Court ruled that covenants
prohibiting the sale of real estate to blacks and other minorities were legally
unenforceable.
1960: The play "The Fantasticks" opened at the
Sullivan Playhouse in New York. It would become the longest-running off-Broadway play.
1971: National Public Radio broadcast for the first time.
National Public Radio was formed to educate, entertain and inform in ways that were not
available elsewhere.
1971: Anti-war protesters, calling themselves the
"Mayday Tribe," began four days of demonstrations in Washington DC aimed at
shutting down the nation's capital.
1976: Paul McCartney made his first American stage
appearance in ten years, with his "Wings Over America" tour. It opened in Ft.
Worth, Texas.
1978: "Sun Day" fell on a Wednesday as thousands
of people extolling the virtues of solar energy held events across the country.
1979: Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party won the
British general election, making her the first woman prime minister of a major European
nation.
1983: After two years of debate, U.S. Roman Catholic
bishops overwhelmingly approved a pastoral letter that condemned the first use of nuclear
weapons and virtually ruled out their use for retaliation.
1984: Pope John Paul II arrived in Seoul, South Korea, to
begin a tour of Asia and the Pacific.
1985: In Bonn, West Germany, leaders of the world's seven
biggest industrial democracies praised the Reagan administration's approach in nuclear
arms control talks with the Soviet Union.
1986: Horse racing legend Bill Shoemaker became the oldest
jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. "The Shoe" was atop Ferdinand for the win. It
had been 32 years since Shoemaker's first Kentucky Derby victory in 1955.
1986: In NASA's first post-"Challenger" launch,
an unmanned Delta rocket lost power in its main engine shortly after liftoff, forcing
safety officers to destroy it by remote control.
1987: "The Miami Herald," in its Sunday edition,
said its reporters had observed a young woman spending "Friday night and most of
Saturday" at a Washington DC townhouse belonging to Democratic presidential candidate
Gary Hart.
1988: The White House acknowledged that first lady Nancy
Reagan had used astrological advice to help schedule her husband's activities, after a
report about unflattering revelations in an about-to-be published memoir by former chief
of staff Donald Regan.
1989: Chinese leaders rejected students' demands for
democratic reforms as some 100,000 students and workers marched in Beijing.
1989: PLO leader Yasser Arafat, ending a two-day visit to
France, said the PLO charter calling for the destruction of Israel had been
"superseded" by a declaration urging peaceful coexistence of the Jewish state
and a Palestinian state.
1990: The federal government formally approved the use of
the drug AZT to treat children infected with the AIDS virus.
1991: Exxon Corporation and the state of Alaska withdrew from a
$1 billion settlement of the Exxon Valdez oil spill (another settlement was reached
later).
1991: The government reported the nation's civilian unemployment rate fell in April to six-point-six percent.
1991: Author Jerzy Kosinski was found dead in his New York
City apartment, he was 57.
1992: In Los Angeles, soldiers continued to patrol streets
and guard fire-gutted and ransacked stores in the wake of rioting that erupted following
the Rodney King-taped beating acquittals.
1992: Hollywood song-and-dance man-turned-politician
George Murphy died at age 89.
1992: An international conference in Geneva ended 30
months of arduous negotiations over whether to ban land mines with a weak compromise
treaty giving countries nine years to switch to detectable, self-destructive devices.
1993: American sailor Terry M. Helvey confessed to
stomping to death Allen Schindler, a homosexual shipmate, but told his court-martial in
Yokosuka, Japan, that he was drunk and did not plan the killing (Helvey was sentenced to
life in prison).
1994: President Clinton presided over a televised forum
from Atlanta, during which he denied suggestions he'd vacillated on foreign policy, but
said global problems were more difficult than he'd imagined.
1995: The government reported that its Index of Leading
Economic Indicators dropped half a percentage point in March 1995, the biggest tumble in
two years.
1996: An international conference in Geneva ended 30
months of arduous negotiations over whether to ban land mines with a weak compromise
treaty giving countries 9 years to switch to detectable, self-destructive devices.
1997: A group of Texas separatists ended a weeklong
standoff with authorities; however, two armed followers fled into the woods (one was
killed, the other eventually captured).
1997: World chess champion Garry Kasparov won the first
game of his much-anticipated rematch with IBM's Deep Blue computer (however, Kasparov
ended up losing the six-game match).
1997: "Silver Charm" won the 123rd Kentucky
Derby.
1998: Space shuttle Columbia and its crew returned to
Earth, ending two weeks of lab work that advanced brain research.
1998: After a daylong squabble that had stretched past
midnight, European leaders meeting in Brussels, Belgium, agreed on Wim Duisenberg of the
Netherlands as the chief of the new European Central Bank, but with the proviso that he
step down in 2002 to make way for Frenchman Jean-Claude Trichet.
1998: "The Sevres Road," by 18-century landscape
painter Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, was stolen from the Louvre.
1999: The Dow Jones industrial average closed above
11,000, just 24 trading days after passing 10,000.
1999: Tornadoes in Oklahoma and Kansas killed at least
three dozen people.
1999: Japanese Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi met with
President Clinton at the White House during the first official U.S. visit by a Japanese
premier in 12 years.
2000: The trial of two alleged Libyan intelligence agents accused of blowing Pan Am Flight 103 out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 opened in the Netherlands. (Last January, one of the defendants, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, was convicted of murder; the other defendant, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was acquitted.)
2000: The archbishop of New York, Cardinal John O'Connor, died at age 80.
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