Today is:
August 11
|
Today is:
|
|
|
 August is: |
Children's Vision and
Learning Month National Back-to-School Month National Inventors' Month Science / Medicine / Technology Book Month Spinal Muscular Atrophy Awareness Month |
Alcatraz's Birthday - This island prison in San Francisco Bay received its first
prisoners on this day in 1934.
Annual Medical Check-Up Day - Visit your doctor today for an annual check-up.
Presidential Joke Day - President Reagan tested his mike by saying, "I just signed
legislation outlawing Russia forever. We begin bombing in 5 minutes." His joking
remarks were picked up by live TV cameras.
Explore Your Roots Day - Celebrated on the birthday of author Alex Haley, born on this day
in 1921.
Born on this Day
1635: Thomas Betterton
1817: William H. Odenheimer in Philadelphia. He was Bishop of New Jersey
1859 to 1874, and the first Bishop of Newark.
1823: Novelist Charlotte M. Yonge. He books (The Heir of Radclyffe, The
Daisy Chain) spread the influence of the Oxford Movement.
1833: Author Robert Ingersoll
1837: Methodist prelate and educator Charles H. Fowler. Editor of
Christian Advocate from 1876 to 1880.
1862: Songwriter Carrie Jacobs Bond ("I Love You Truly")
1899: Art collector Joseph Hirshhorn
1902: Actor Lloyd Nolan (The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Airport, Hannah
and Her Sisters, Earthquake, Ice Station Zebra, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Peyton Place,
Julia, Martin Kane, Private Eye)
1912: Actress Jean Parker (Lois Green Zelinska) (Apache Uprising, The
Gunfighter, The Texas Rangers, Little Women [1933])
1921: Author Alex Haley
1925: Former TV talk show host Mike Douglas
1925: Newspaper columnist Carl Rowan
1928: Actress Arlene Dahl
1933: Reverend Jerry Falwell TODAY's BONUS HISTORY FACT
1937: Actress Anna Massey
1946: Country singer John Conlee
1949: Singer Eric Carmen
1949: Actor Ian Charleson ("Chariots of Fire")
1950: Steve Wozniak, cofounded Apple Computer
1953: Wrestler-actor Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea)
1968: Rock guitarist Charlie Sexton
1968: Rhythm-and-blues musician Chris Dave (Mint Condition)
1976: Actor Will Friedle ("Boy Meets World")
1978: Rapper Chris Kelly (Kris Kross)
1241: Death of Ogadai, Mongol KaKhan
1415: Henry V's fleet sets sail for France, at 3:00 pm, on
a Sunday
1456: Death of John Hunyadi, Regent of Hungary
1480: Turks capture the castle of Otranto, in southern
Italy (Naples)
1492: Election of Alexander VI as Pope. He served until
1503. He initiated censorship of books and excommunicated Savonarola for heresy. He set
the line of demarcation, separating Spanish from Portuguese lands in the New World.
1519: Johann Tetzel dies at the age of 54. He was the
first public antagonist of Martin Luther because of his preaching of indulgences. This led
to Luther's publishing of the 95 themes.
1587: Arrival in Virginia of Raleigh's second expedition
of colonists
1722: The Leipzig city council voted unanimously to hire
George Philip Telemann as the city's music director, responsible for performances at the
main churches and the care and feeding of the choir. Telemann would turn the job down.
1760: Philip Embury, the first Methodist clergyman in the
United States, arrives in New York from Ireland. He founded the Wesley Chapel in 1768.
1834: The Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Mass., was
destroyed by fire as part of an anti-Catholic campaign.
1860: The nation's first successful silver mill began
operation near Virginia City, Nevada.
1866: The world's first roller rink opens its doors, in
Newport, R.I.
1874: Harry S. Parmelee of New Haven, CT received a patent
for the sprinkler head.
1877: American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered the two
moons of Mars, which he named Phobos and Deimos.
1884: The national religion of Japan was disestablished
and freedom was given to all other religions.
1896: Harvey Hubbell of Bridgeport, CT, received a patent
for the pull chain electric light socket.
1909: The S-O-S distress signal was first used by an
American ship, the "Arapahoe," off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.
1919: Andrew Carnegie died at his summer home in his
summer home in Lenox, Mass. TODAY's BONUS HISTORY FACT
1924: The first newsreel pictures of U.S. presidential
candidates were taken on this day in Washington, DC.
1926: The Mexican government ordered the seizure of the
property administered by Catholic clergy.
1930: The American Lutheran Church was formed in Toledo,
Ohio by the merger of the synods of Buffalo, Iowa and Ohio.
1934: The first federal prisoners arrived at the island
prison Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
1941: President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister
Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter on a warship in the western Atlantic.
1942: During World War II, Vichy government official
Pierre Laval publicly declared that "the hour of liberation for France is the hour
when Germany wins the war.""
1945: The Allies responded to Japan's offer to surrender
provided Emperor Hirohito retain his sovereignty. The Allies said they would determine the
emperor's future status.
1951: WCBS-TV in New York City televised the first
baseball doubleheader (in color). The Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves were
featured.
1954: A formal peace took hold in Indochina, ending more
than seven years of fighting between the French and Communist Viet Minh.
1956: Abstract artist Jackson Pollock died in an
automobile accident in East Hampton, New York.
1957: Paul Hindemith's opera "The Harmony of the
World" was premiered in Munich. "The Harmony of the World" was based on
Johannes Kepler's planetary motion theories. Hindemith later produced an orchestral piece
from the music of this opera.
1958: Elvis Presley received a gold record for the hit
"Hard Headed Woman"
1961: Milwaukee Braves baseball pitcher Warren Spahn got
his 300th victory, beating the Cubs 2-1. He's now a rancher in Oklahoma.
1962: The Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Andrian
Nikolayev on a 94-hour flight.
1965: Twelve-year-old Karen Yvette Muir became the
youngest person to break a world record when she swam the 100-yard backstroke in 8.7
seconds at Blackpool, England.
1965: Rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly
black Watts section of Los Angeles; in the week that followed, 34 people were killed and
more than one-thousand injured.
1970: Jim Bunning of the Philadelphia Phillies became the
first pitcher since Cy Young to win 100 games in each of the two major leagues. Bunning,
who later became a U.S. Senator, when the Phillies defeated Minnesota 6-5.
1971: Republican New York mayor John Lindsay switched from
the GOP to the Democratic party.
1975: The United States vetoed the proposed admission of
North and South Vietnam to the United Nations, following the Security Council's refusal to
consider South Korea's application.
1977: "Pistol" Pete Maravich sign a five-year
basketball contract with the New Orleans Jazz for $3 million.
1983: President Reagan met at the White House with his new
12-member commission on Central America, urging the panel to develop long-range economic
and social reforms for the region.
1984: President Reagan sparked controversy when he joked
during a voice test for a paid political radio address that he had "signed
legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."
1984: Carl Lewis won his fourth gold medal of the 1984
Summer Olympics as he helped the U.S. men's 400-meter relay team to victory.
1985: Toxic gas leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide
plant in Institute, West Virginia, prompting 135 people to seek medical treatment at
hospitals.
1986: American and Soviet delegations met for eight hours
outside Moscow to discuss arms control proposals.
1986: The Monkees first four LPs re-entered Billboard's
top albums chart after almost 20 years.
1986: Baseball umpire Tom Gorman died at the age of 67. He
was buried in his umpire uniform with the ball-strike recorder in his hand, showing 3
balls and 2 strikes.
1987: Britain and France ordered minesweepers to the
Persian Gulf, but said they would not be used in combined operations with the United
States as it escorted reflagged Kuwaiti ships.
1988: The U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Dick
Thornburgh to succeed Edwin Meese III as attorney general by a vote of 85-to-0.
1989: Poland's Solidarity-dominated Senate adopted a
resolution expressing sorrow over Polish participation in the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of
Czechoslovakia.
1990: Egyptian and Moroccan troops arrived in Saudi Arabia
to join U.S. forces helping to protect the desert kingdom from possible Iraqi attack
1991: The space shuttle Atlantis returned safely from a
nine-day journey.
1991: Shiite Muslim kidnappers in Lebanon released two
Western captives: Edward Tracy, an American held nearly five years, and Jerome Leyraud, a
Frenchman who'd been abducted by a rival group three days earlier.
1992: Washington, negotiators for the United States,
Canada and Mexico continued to work out final details of the proposed North American Free
Trade Agreement. The Mall of America, the biggest shopping mall in the US, opened in
Bloomington, Minnesota.
1992: The Mall of America, the biggest shopping mall in
the United States, opened in Bloomington, Minnesota.
1992: An electrical fire in the 62-story John Hancock
office tower forced more than 3,000 workers in Boston's tallest building to flee down
smoky, darkened stairwells.
1993: President Clinton named Army general John
Shalikashvili to be the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, succeeding the retiring
Gen. Colin Powell.
1994: A federal jury awarded more than 10,000 commercial
fishermen $286.8 million for losses suffered as a result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil
spill.
1994: The Tenth International Conference on AIDS concluded
in Yokohama, Japan.
1994: The House of Representatives dismissed a sweeping
$33 billion anti-crime bill.
1994: Major league baseball players went on strike
following the conclusion of the day's games.
1995: President Clinton banned all U.S. nuclear tests,
calling his decision ''the right step as we continue pulling back from the nuclear
precipice.''
1995: A federal criminal investigation was opened into
whether senior FBI officials covered up their approval of ''shoot-on-sight'' orders during
a deadly 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
1996: The Reform Party opened the first part of its
two-stage convention in Long Beach, California, with Ross Perot and Richard Lamm battling
for the presidential nod.
1997: President Clinton made the first use of the historic
line-item veto approved by Congress, rejecting three items in spending and tax bills.
1999: White supremacist Buford O. Furrow, wanted in the
wounding of five people at a Los Angeles Jewish community center and the shooting death of
a mail carrier the day before, turned himself in to the FBI in Las Vegas, and waived
extradition to Los Angeles.
1999: A tornado tore across Salt Lake City, killing one
person.
2000: The National Transportation Safety Board released evidence reports in the October 31st, 1999, crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 off the New England coast; a transcript of the cockpit voice recording showed the chilling details of the pilot's futile struggle to save the Boeing 767 and its 217 occupants.
2000: Pat Buchanan won the Reform Party presidential nomination in a victory bitterly disputed by party founder Ross Perot's supporters, who chose their own nominee, John Hagelin, in a rival convention.
Soul Food for August 11 |
All The Rest for August 11 |
Send Mail to pbower@neo.rr.com
Looking for more quotations?
Past quotes from the Daily
Miscellany can be found here!
I hope you are viewing this page with IE
My favorite Browser