December 31
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December 31
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December is:
Church Library Month
Born on this Day
1491: French explorer Jacques Cartier (some sources 1499)
1514: Vesalius
1720: Charles Edward Stuart, son of James II, known as the Young
Pretender and Bonnie Prince Charlie.
1869: Henri Matisse, French artist best known for his paintings Woman with a
Hat and The Red Studio.
1880: George Marshall (U.S. Secretary of State 1947. He was the designer
of Marshall Plan
1889: George Catlett Marshall, Chief of Staff who led the U.S. Army to
victory in World War II and later became Secretary of State for President Harry Truman.
Won Nobel Peace Prize for the Marshall Plan.
1908: Simon
Wiesenthal, survivor of the Nazi Holocaust who dedicated his life to tracking down
former Nazis.
1908: Musician and trumpeter Jonah (Robert) Jones (he played with Cab
Calloway)
1914: Actor Pat Brady (Roy Rodgers Show)
1921: Boxer Rocky Graziano (Middlewgt champ).
1924: Entertainer Rex Allen ('The Arizona Cowboy)
1930: Folk-blues singer (Holmes Felious Gordon) Odetta (Music, Give Me
Your Hand, Got to be Me)
1932: T-V producer George Schlatter is 65.
1937: Actor Sir
Anthony Hopkins (Elephant Man, QB VII, Magic, Bounty, Shadowlands)
1941: Actress Sarah Miles (Ryan's Daughter, Dynasty, Queenie)
1942: Rock musician Andy Summers
1943: Singer and songwriter John (Deutschendorf) Denver (Leavin' on a
Jet Plane; singer: Take Me Home Country Roads, Sunshine on my Shoulders, Annie's Song,
Rocky Mountain High, Fly Away, Calypso, Thank God I'm a Country Boy)
1943: Actor Ben Kingsley (Gandhi, Betrayal, Maurice)
1944: Producer-director Taylor Hackford
1946: Fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg
1947: Actor Tim Matheson (Animal House, Fletch, Up the Creek)
1947: Pop singer Burton Cummings (The Guess Who)
1948: Singer Donna (LaDonna Gaines) Summer (Love to Love You Baby, On
the Radio)
1948: Actor Joe Dallesandra
1951: Rock musician Tom Hamilton (Aerosmith)
1953: Actor James Remar ("Total Security")
1958: Actress Bebe Neuwirth
1959: Actor Val Kilmer.
1959: Singer Paul Westerberg
1963: Rock musician Scott Ian (Anthrax)
1972: Pop singer Joe McIntyre (New Kids on the Block)
0192: Commodus, Roman emperor, strangled by a professional
wrestler
0335: Death of St. Sylvester I, Pope
0406: Vandals, Alans and Sueves invade Roman Gaul
1097: Darak fails to break the Crusaders' Siege of Antioch
1384: Death of Wycliffe, at Lutterworth, England
1492: Jews are expelled from Sicily.
1502: Caesare Borgia executes Oliverotto da Fermo and
Vitellozzo Vitelli
1539: Henry VIII, King of England, meets Anne of Cleves,
his 4th wife
1600: British East India Company chartered
1775: The British repulsed an attack by Continental Army
generals Richard Montgomery and Benedict Arnold at Quebec; Montgomery was killed.
1775: George Washington orders recruiting officers to
accept free blacks into the army.
1841: The State of Alabama enacted the first dental
legislation in the United States.
1852: Richest year of the gold rush ends, with $81.3
million in gold produced.
1857: Britain's Queen Victoria decided to make Ottawa the
capital of Canada.
1862: President Lincoln signed an act admitting West
Virginia to the Union.
1862: The USS Monitor sinks off Cape Hatteras, NC., losing
sixteen.
1865: Verdi had occasion to comment on the talents of his
contemporary Wagner. "I have heard the overture to Tannhauser," said Verdi.
"He's mad!"
1877: President Rutherford B. Hayes became the first U.S.
President to celebrate his 25th silver wedding anniversary in the White House. The
President and his wife reenacted their marriage ceremony.
1879: Thomas Edison first publicly demonstrated his
electric incandescent light in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
1890: Ellis Island (NYC) opens as a US immigration depot
1897: Brooklyn, New York, spent its last day as a separate
entity before becoming part of New York City.
1915: The Germans torpedo the British liner Persia without
any warning; 335 are dead.
1923: The Sahara is crossed by an automobile for the first
time.
1930: Brewery heir Adolphus Busch is kidnapped.
1946: President Truman officially proclaimed the end of
hostilities in World War Two.
1947: Roy Rogers, 'the King of the Cowboys', and Dale
Evans were married.
1955: General Motors became the first U.S. corporation to
earn more than one billion dollars in a single year. The company's annual report to
stockholders listed a net income of $1,189,477,082 in revenues.
1960: After playing California nightclubs as The
Pendletones, Kenny and the Cadets and Carl and the Passions, a new group emerged this day:
The Beach Boys.
1961: The Marshall Plan expired after distributing more
than $12 billion in foreign aid.
1962: Governor Edmund G. Brown, of California, announced
that his state was now the most populous of the 50 United States. New York's governor,
Nelson Rockefeller, disagreed and refused to concede.
1965: California becomes the largest state in population.
1966: Monkee's "I'm a Believer" hits #1 &
stays there for 7 weeks.
1970: Paul McCartney files a lawsuit to disolve the
Beatles.
1977: Ted Bundy escapes from jail in Colorado
1974: Private US citizens were allowed to buy and own gold
for the first time in more than 40 years.
1978: Taiwanese diplomats struck their colors for the
final time from the embassy flagpole in Washington, marking the end of diplomatic
relations with the US.
1983: The court-ordered breakup of the American Telephone
and Telegraph company took effect at midnight.
1984: The nation's first mandatory seat belt law went into
effect in New York state at midnight.
1985: Singer Rick Nelson, 45, and six other people were
killed when fire broke out aboard a DC-3 that was taking the group to a New Year's Eve
performance in Dallas.
1986: Ninety-seven people were killed, more than 140
injured, when fire broke out in the Dupont Plaza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico. (Three
hotel workers later pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the blaze.)
1986: The State of Florida passed Illinois to become the
fifth most populous state in the country. In the lead: California, New York, Texas, and
Pennsylvania.
1987: Robert Mugabe was sworn in as Zimbabwe's first
executive president.
1987: One second is added to the year to compensate for
precession of earth’s axis.
1988: President Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev exchanged New Year's messages in which both leaders expressed optimism about
future superpower relations.
1989: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir fired Science
Minister Ezer Weizman, accusing him of meeting with officials of the Palestine Liberation
Organization.
1990: The Sci-Fi Channel on cable TV begins transmitting.
1990: Vice President Dan Quayle, visiting US troops in the Persian Gulf region, told them he shared their frustration with Saddam Hussein's refusal to withdraw from Kuwait.
1990: Football coach George Allen died in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, at age 72.
1992: President Bush visited Somalia, where he saw
firsthand the famine racking the east African nation, and praised US troops who were
providing relief to the starving population.
1992: UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali was
jeered by Bosnians during a visit to Sarajevo.
1993: Entertainer Barbra Streisand performed her first
paid concert in 22 years, singing to a sellout crowd at the M-G-M Grand Garden in Las
Vegas.
1993: Joshua Bell recorded the two Prokofiev violin
concertos for Decca. He's backed up by Charles Dutoit and the Montreal Symphony.
1993: Former IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson died in
Greenwich, Connecticut, at age 79.
1994: Bosnian government officials and Bosnian Serb
leaders signed a UN-brokered cease-fire agreement. Russian ground forces launched a
ferocious assault on the Chechen capital of Grozny.
1995: US tank platoons crossed a just-completed pontoon bridge from Croatia to their peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.
1996: Leftist rebels in Peru released two diplomats,
leaving 81 hostages in the besieged Japanese embassy residence in Lima.
1997: In Sorocaba, Brazil, riot troops stormed a prison
where inmates were holding hundreds of hostages, quickly ending a three-day rebellion
without any deaths.
1997: Michael Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert
Kennedy, died from massive injuries to the head and neck in a New Year's Eve skiing
accident. Kennedy, 39, died on Aspen Mountain in Colorado after he hit a tree while skiing
on the last run of the day. Kennedy, the focus of controversy in 1997 over an alleged
affair with his children's teen-age baby-sitter, was skiing with family members, including
his three children, when the accident occurred.
1997: Bulldozers went to work in Florida's Everglades in a
bid to save the Cape Sable seaside sparrow, one of the endangered species that calls the
river of grass home. Heavy equipment crews began to carve a 1,000-foot gap in an
embankment in the Everglades west of Miami, part of an effort to lower water levels and
save an important nesting spot for the seaside sparrow. It is believed there are only a
few thousand of the sparrows left in the world, almost all of them nesting in the
Everglades.
1997: Pianist Floyd Cramer died in Nashville, Tennessee,
at age 64.
1998: Europe's leaders proclaimed a new era as eleven
nations merged currencies to create the euro, a shared money they said would boost
business, underpin unity and strengthen their role in world affairs.
1999: People around the world celebrated the arrival of the year
2000, mistakenly thinking that it was the end of the millennium.
1999: Russian President Boris Yeltsin announced his resignation.
1999: The eight-day hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane in Afghanistan ended peacefully.
1999: The United States prepared to hand over the Panama Canal to Panama at the stroke of midnight.
1999: Former Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson died in Boston at age 79.
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