December 24

Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors. 

– Proverbs 8:34

December is:

Church Library Month

Born on this Day

• 0003BC: Servius Sulpicius Galba, 6th Roman Emperor
  

• 0877: St. Odo
  

• 1167: John I "Lackland," King of England
  

• 1167: English King John I
  

• 1737: American diplomat Silas Deane
  

• 1745: Physician and chemist Benjamin Rush (‘father of psychiatry’ the 1st American to recognize alcoholism as a disease; signer of America’s Declaration of Independence)
  

• 1809: Frontiersman Kit (Christopher) Carson
  

• 1818: Physicist James Joule (Joule’s Law)
  

• 1822: Poet and essayist Matthew Arnold
  

• 1893: Composer (Salvatore Guaragna) Harry Warren (Best Song Oscars: Lullaby of Broadway [1935], You’ll Never Know [1943], On the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fe [w/Johnny Mercer-1946])
  

• 1905: Industrialist Howard Hughes
  

• 1907: Journalist I.F. (Isidor Feinstein) Stone
  

• 1922: Songwriter-bandleader Dave Bartholomew
  

• 1922: Actress (Lucy Johnson) Ava Gardner (The Barefoot Contessa, Earthquake, The Long Hot Summer, The Night of the Iguana; once married to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra)
  

• 1930: Choreographer Robert (Khan) Joffrey (The Joffrey Ballet)
  

• 1931: Actress Jill Bennett (For Your Eyes Only, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Sheltering Sky)
  

• 1931: Pianist and composer Ray Bryant ( Slow Freight, Little Susie, Cubano Chant, The Madison Time, Sack of Woe, After Hours)
  

• 1940: Federal health administrator Anthony S. Fauci
  

• 1944: Recording company executive Mike Curb
  

• 1945: Playwright and director Nicholas Meyer ( Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country, Company Business, Time After Time, Sommersby, Start Trek 4: The Voyage Home, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan)
  

• 1945: Rock singer and musician (Ian Kilmister) Lemmy (Motorhead)
  

• 1946: Actress Sharon Farrell
  

• 1946: Football player ‘Mean’ Joe Green
  

• 1955: Actor Clarence Gilyard ("Walker, Texas Ranger")
  

• 1956: Actress Stephanie Hodge
  

• 1957: Rock musician Ian Burden (The Human League)
  

• 1963: Rock singer Mary Ramsey (10,000 Maniacs)
  

• 1966: Actor Diedrich Bader ("The Drew Carey Show")
  

• 1971: Singer Ricky Martin   

Events in History on this day
  

• 0562: Justinian, Emperor of Byzantium, dedicates Hagia Sophia's new dome
  

• 0640: Election of Pope John IV
  

• 0820: Assassination of Leo V "the Armenian," Eastern Roman Emperor
  

• 1144: Edessa captured by Zangi, Atabeg of Mosul This action inspires the 2nd Crusade.
  

• 1453: The British composer (and astronomer) John Dunstable died.
  

• 1473: Death of St. John of Kanti
  

• 1524: Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama -- who had discovered a sea route around Africa to India -- died in Cochin, India.
  

• 1566: Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, pardons the murderers of Riccio
  

• 1814: The War of 1812 officially ended as the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium.
  

• 1818: Franz Gruber of Oberndorf, Germany composed the music for "Silent Night" to words written by Josef Mohr. The traditional song was sung for the first time during Midnight Mass this night.
  

• 1832: The London Philharmonic gave its premiere of Beethoven's Ninth. The orchestra commissioned the work but Beethoven let it be played in Vienna first in violation of the contract.
  

• 1851: The Library of Congress and part of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., were destroyed by fire.( about 35,000 volumes of books were destroyed)
  

• 1865: Several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan.
  

• 1871: Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Aida" had its world premiere in Cairo, Egypt, to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal.
  

• 1889: Daniel Stover and William Hance, of Freeport, Illinois, patented the back pedal brake for bicycles. It would later be known as the safety brake and became a standard feature on most brands of bikes.
  

• 1906: Canadian physicist Reginald A. Fessenden became the first person to broadcast a music program over radio, from Brant Rock, Massachusetts.
  

• 1920: Enrico Caruso gave his last public performance, singing in Jacques Halevy's "La Juive" at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
  

• 1924: Notre Dame football coach (1918-1930) Knute Rockne said he opposed elimination of the forward pass since it has helped "to curb the brutality of football."
  

• 1935: Alban Berg died, he was 51. Berg died without completing his 12-tone opera "Lulu." Berg's music did fairly well in the years immediately after his death, because his compositions are more expressive.
  

• 1942: Adm. Jean Louis Darlan, the French administrator of North Africa, was assassinated as a sympathizer of the French Vichy regime.
  

• 1943: President Roosevelt appointed General Dwight D. Eisenhower supreme commander of Allied forces as part of Operation "Overlord."
  

• 1944: The Andrews Sisters starred in the debut of "The Andrews Sisters’ Eight-To-The-Bar-Ranch" on ABC Radio. Patty, Maxene and LaVerne ran a fictional dude ranch. George ‘Gabby’ Hayes was a regular guest along with Vic Schoen’s Orchestra. The program aired until 1946.
  

• 1951: Gian Carlo Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors," the first opera written specifically for television, was first broadcast by NBC TV.
  

• 1953: "Dragnet", starring Jack Webb as Detective Joe Friday, became the first network program to be sponsored.
  

• 1955: The lovely Lennon Sisters debuted as featured vocalists on "The Lawrence Welk Show" on ABC. They became regulars with Welk within a month and stayed on the show until 1968.
  

• 1968: The "Apollo Eight" astronauts (Lovell, Anders and Borman), orbiting the moon 250,000 miles from home, were reading verses from their bible and transmitting a message to all mankind calling for "peace on earth."
  

• 1968: The crew of the U.S. Navy ship, "Pueblo", were released by North Korea. The Captain of the "Pueblo", Commander Lloyd M. Bucher, and 82 of his crew had been held for 11 months after the ship was seized by North Korea.
  

• 1980: Americans remembered the US hostages in Iran by burning candles or shining lights for 417 seconds -- one second for each day of captivity.
  

• 1987: In Lebanon, the kidnappers of Terry Anderson released a videotape in which the Associated Press correspondent told his family he was in good health, and said to President Reagan, "Surely by now you know what must be done and how you can do it." (Anderson was freed nearly four years later.)
  

• 1988: President-elect Bush nominated Elizabeth H. Dole, onetime transportation secretary, to be his secretary of labor.
  

• 1989: Ousted Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega, who had succeeded in eluding US forces, took refuge at the Vatican's diplomatic mission in Panama City.
  

• 1990: With three weeks left before the United Nations deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, hundreds of thousands of U-S troops marked Christmas Eve with muted celebrations and a heightened state of alert. 
  

• 1992: President Bush pardoned former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and five others in the Iran-Contra scandal.
  

• 1992: President-elect Clinton appointed Bruce Babbitt interior secretary, Mike Espy agriculture secretary and Federico Pena transportation secretary; Clinton also chose Zoe Baird to be attorney general, but the nomination fell apart over Baird's hiring of illegal aliens as domestic workers.
  

• 1993: The Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, who had blended Christian and psychiatric principles into a message of "positive thinking," died in Pawling, New York, at age 95.
  

• 1994: Armed Islamic fundamentalists hijacked an Air France Airbus A-300 carrying 227 passengers at the Algiers airport; three passengers were killed during the siege before the hijackers were killed by French commandos in Marseille two days later.
  

• 1994: British playwright John Osborne ("Look Back in Anger") died at age 65.
  

• 1995: In a Christmas message to U-S troops in Bosnia, President Clinton praised their peace mission to a land exhausted by war. 
  

• 1995: Fire broke out at the Philadelphia Zoo, killing 23 rare gorillas, orangutans, gibbons and lemurs. 
  

• 1996: The streets of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, turned violent as demonstrators traded blows with supporters of President Slobodan Milosevic, and then were clubbed by riot police.
  

• 1997: Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the aging revolutionary known as "Carlos the Jackal," was sentenced by a French court to life in prison for the 1975 murders of two French investigators and a Lebanese national.
  

• 1997: Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune died in suburban Tokyo at age 77.
  

• 1998: Most of California's citrus crop was considered ruined after three straight nights of freezing cold.
  

• 1998: Ignoring NATO warnings, Serb tanks and troops struck an ethnic Albanian stronghold in Kosovo
  

• 1999: Five hijackers seized an Indian Airlines jet with 189 people aboard, forcing the aircraft on a journey across South Asia and into the Middle East. (The eight-day ordeal resulted in the death of one passenger and India's release of three jailed pro-Kashmir militants in exchange for the rest of the hostages.)        

Send Mail to pbower@neo.rr.com

Looking for more quotations?
Past quotes from the Daily Miscellany can be found here!