Post by farmgal on Oct 3, 2012 11:44:57 GMT -5
October 4 is the 278th day of this leap year in the Gregorian calendar.
There are 88 days remaining until the end of the year.
Days until Election Day, Tuesday November 6, 2012: 33
Countdown until Obama leaves Office www.obamaclock.org/
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1537 - The first complete English-language Bible (the Matthew Bible) is printed, with translations by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
1582 - Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian Calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, October 4 of this year is followed directly by October 15.
1636 - 1st code of law for Plymouth Colony
1648 - Peter Stuyvesant establishes Americas 1st volunteer firemen
1777 - Battle of Germantown: Troops under George Washington are repelled by British troops under Sir William Howe.
1777 - The Battle of Germantown was fought in a morning fog that grew more dense with the smoke of battle, causing great confusion. Americans firing at each other contributed to the loss of the battle. (David Ludlum)
1824 - Mexico adopts a new constitution and becomes a federal republic.
1830 - The first power printing press capable of fine book work was patented by Isaac Adams of Boston, Massachusetts.
1830 - Creation of the state of Belgium after separation from The Netherlands.
1864 - New Orleans Tribune, first black daily newspaper, forms
1869 - A great storm struck New England. The storm reportedly was predicted twelve months in advance by a British officer named Saxby. Heavy rains and high floods plagued all of New England, with strong winds and high tides over New Hampshire and Maine. Canton CT was deluged with 12.35 inches of rain. (David Ludlum)
1876 - Texas A&M University opens as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, becoming the first public institution of higher education in Texas.
1883 - First meeting of the Boys' Brigade in Glasgow, Scotland. interdenominational Christian youth organisation, conceived by William Alexander Smith to combine drill and fun activities with Christian values. Following its inception in Glasgow in 1883, the BB quickly spread across the United Kingdom and became a worldwide organisation by the early 1890s
1895 - The first U.S. Open Men's Golf Championship administered by the United States Golf Association is played at the Newport Country Club in Newport, Rhode Island.
1918 - An explosion kills more than 100 and destroys the T.A. Gillespie Company Shell Loading Plant in Sayreville, New Jersey. Fires and explosions continue for three days forcing massive evacuations and spreading ordnance over a wide area, pieces of which were still being found in 2007.
1931 - The comic strip Dick Tracy by Chester Gould debuts
1937 - Blues singer Bessie Smith, killed in Mississippi car wreck, is buried. Legendary blues singer Bessie Smith is buried near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 4, 1937. Some 7,000 mourners attended her funeral. Smith had been killed a few days before when the old Packard she was driving hit a parked truck near Coahoma, Mississippi, between Clarksdale and Memphis. There is no record of Smith's exact birth date, but she was about 43 years old.
Bessie Smith had been in show business since she was a teenager. In 1912, she joined a traveling vaudeville troupe, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and spent the next decade singing in minstrel shows and cabarets all around the South. (One popular rumor held that blues great Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the leader of the Foots, had kidnapped the talented young singer and dragged her from show to show against her will. This was not true--Rainey was Smith's friend and mentor--but it made for great publicity.)
In 1923, Smith released her first record, "Down-Hearted Blues." It sold nearly 800,000 copies and made her a superstar. In fact, by the end of the 1920s Smith had made more money than any black performer ever had. She performed and recorded with luminaries like Clarence Williams, Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson's band and she starred in the 1929 film "St. Louis Blues." Unfortunately, in the 1930s Smith's career stalled. The Depression, changing musical tastes that favored jazz and swing instead of vaudeville blues and the singer's severe alcoholism made it nearly impossible for her to find work. Toward the end of the decade, though, Smith had begun to record and perform again.
The circumstances surrounding the singer's death are mysterious. We know that Smith was gravely injured--her arm was nearly severed--in the accident. After that, some people say, the doctor at the scene ignored her while he tended to the bumps and scrapes of a white couple that was in a nearby fender-bender. Other sources say that Smith bled to death while her ambulance drove around in search of a hospital that would treat black patients. (Edward Albee based his 1959 play "The Death of Bessie Smith" on this version of events.) While neither one of these scenarios would have been much of a surprise in the Jim Crow South, most historians now agree that the stories are apocryphal: Smith did make it to the hospital, but her injuries were so severe that it made no difference.
In the summer of 1970, shortly before her own death from a heroin overdose, the young singer Janis Joplin had a headstone made for Smith's unmarked grave. It reads, "The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing."
1940 - Adolph Hitler & Benito Mussolini confer at Brenner Pass in the Alps
1941 - Norman Rockwell's Willie Gillis character debuts on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
1943 - World War II: U.S. captures Solomon Islands.
1944 - On this day in 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributes to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that reveals the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat. "[T]he danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces of psychiatric patients...sobbing, trembling, referring shudderingly to 'them shells' and to buddies mutilated or dead, is enough to convince most observers of this fact."
On the basis of this evaluation, as well as firsthand experience, American commanders judged that the average soldier could last about 200 days in combat before suffering serious psychiatric damage. British commanders used a rotation method, pulling soldiers out of combat every 12 days for a four-day rest period. This enabled British soldiers to put in 400 days of combat before being deleteriously affected. The Surgeon General's report went on to lament the fact that a "wound or injury is regarded, not as a misfortune, but a blessing." The war was clearly taking a toll on more than just men's bodies.
1949 - American Contract Bridge League votes 58% to keep blacks out
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1955 - The world's first solar-powered telephone call was made by Bell Telephone.
1955 - Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series at last, beating the New York Yankees 2-0. They’d lost the championship seven times already, and they’d lost five times just to the Yanks--in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953. But in 1955, thanks to nine brilliant innings in the seventh game from 23-year-old lefty pitcher Johnny Podres, they finally managed to beat the Bombers for the first (and last) time.
The Dodgers had lost the first two games of the series at Yankee Stadium--it was the first time in history, in fact, that a team came back to win a seven-game World Series after losing the first two--and then won three in a row at home. The Yanks came back in the sixth, forcing a tiebreaking Game 7 in front of 62,465 fans in the Bronx.
In the fourth inning of the last game, Brooklyn got its first run when catcher Roy Campanella hit a double and Gil Hodges sent him home with a well-placed single. In the sixth, a Yankee error helped the Dodgers load the bases. Even though veteran pitcher Tommy Byrne had only given up three hits, manager Casey Stengel pulled him and sent in right-handed reliever Bob Grim--but that didn’t stop Hodges from knocking a long sacrifice fly to center field. Pee Wee Reese made it safely home, and the Dodgers were winning by 2.
And then, the game’s defining moment. At the bottom of the sixth, Podres walked Billy Martin and Gil McDougald outran a bunt to first, putting two on with nobody out. Then Yogi Berra sliced an outside pitch hard down the left-field foul line--a game-tying double, for sure, until backup outfielder Sandy Amoros came running out of nowhere, stuck out his glove and snagged the ball as he careened toward the stands. He wheeled and threw to shortstop Reese, who tossed it to Hodges at first, who caught McDougald off the bag by inches. The Yanks’ sure thing had soured into a game-killing double play.
The final triumphant out came on an Elston Howard grounder to Reese, the 38-year-old team captain who’d been around for all five of the Dodgers’ losses to their cross-town rivals. Reese scooped up the ball and fired low and wide to first, but somehow--as John Drebinger wrote in the Times the next day, "Gil would have stretched halfway across the Bronx for that one"--Hodges grabbed it in time to send Howard back to the dugout and end the game.
The 1955 series turned out to be the only one the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever win. They lost to the Yanks again the next year. The year after that, the team’s owner decided he’d rather play in a swank stadium in a nicer neighborhood, so he moved the team to California. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won the championship five times. (World Series #52)
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1957 - "Leave It to Beaver," debuts on CBS
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1957 - Space Race: Launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The Soviet Union inaugurates the "Space Age" with its launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite," was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles. Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik's orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.
Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system. However, many Americans feared more sinister uses of the Soviets' new rocket and satellite technology, which was apparently strides ahead of the U.S. space effort. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets heralded the beginning of the "space race."
The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late '60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969
1957 - Two Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory scientists tracking Sputnik found they could determine its orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift of its radio signals during a single pass. They conjectured that if a satellite's position were known and predictable, then the Doppler shift of its signals could be used to locate a receiver on Earth - thus, one could navigate by satellite. A system called Transit, was developed and from 1964 assisted the security of U.S. nuclear deterrent submarines. From 1967, this evolved into a navigation system for all nations, a forerunner of the present Global Positioning System (GPS). Transit also made key contributions to space science and technology, geodesy and health.
1958 - The first trans-Atlantic passenger jetliner service was inaugurated by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) with flights between London Heathrow airport and New York Idlewild (now JFK) airport. G-APDC 'Delta Charlie' set off from London to New York via Gander under the Command of Capt. R. E. Millichap and G-APDB, Commanded by Capt. T. B. Stoney, made the east-bound flight. Because of the prevailing winds the west-bound flight needed to refuel at Gander. The inaugural flight was completed in 8 hours 53 minutes flying time (including stop-over 10 hrs. 5 min.) at an average ground speed of 404 m.p.h. BOAC previously used propeller aircraft on the transatlantic route.
1959 - 1st world series (World Series #56) game played west of St Louis (in LA)
1960 - Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes after a bird strike on takeoff from Boston's Logan International Airport, killing 62 of 72 on board.
1965 - Becoming the first Pope to ever visit the United States of America and the Western hemisphere, Pope Paul VI arrives in New York.
1969 - Denver, CO, received 9.6 inches of snow. October of that year proved to be the coldest and snowiest of record for Denver, with a total snowfall for the month of 31.2 inches. (Weather Channel)
1971 - Borden's opens a turn-of-century ice cream parlor at Disney World
1971 - The mole - the amount of substance (matter) - was adopted as a chemical measurement added to the six base quantities of the SI (International System of scientific units). The decision was made by the Conférence Général des Poids et Mesures (CGPM), the principal executive organization under the Treaty of the Meter. IUPAC's participation was led by M.L. McGlashan. The mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are carbon atoms in 0.012 kg of carbon 12. The elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles, or specified groups of such particles. The agreed symbol for the unit is mol, and the symbol for amount of substance is n.
1976 - Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz resigns due to telling a racial joke.
1978 - Funeral services held for Pope John Paul I
1983 - Richard Noble sets a new land speed record of 633.468 mph (1,019 km/h), driving Thrust 2 at the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.
1984 - US govt closes down due to budget problems
1985 - Free Software Foundation is founded in Massachusetts, United States.
1985 - Shite Muslims claim to have killed hostage William Buckley
1986 - Excessive flooding was reported along the Mississippi River and all over the Midwest, from Ohio to the Milk River in Montana. In some places it was the worst flooding of record. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
1987 - A storm brought record snows to the northeastern U.S. Snowfall totals ranged up to 21 inches at North Springfield VT. It was the earliest snow of record for some locations. The storm claimed 17 lives in central New York State, injured 332 persons, and in Vermont caused seventeen million dollars damage. The six inch snow at Albany NY was their earliest measurable snow in 117 years of records. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data) (The Weather Channel)
1987 - Southern California continued to "shake and bake". An earthquake was reported during the morning, the second in a matter of days, and during the afternoon temperatures soared well above 100 degrees. Highs of 100 degrees at San Francisco, and 108 degrees at Los Angeles and Santa Maria, were October records. San Luis Obispo was the hot spot in the nation with an afternoon high of 111 degrees. (The National Weather Summary).
1988 - U.S. televangelist Jim Bakker is indicted for fraud.
1988 - Temperatures dipped below freezing in the north central U.S. Five cities in North Dakota and Nebraska reported record low temperatures for the date, including Bismarck ND with a reading of 17 degrees above zero. Low pressure brought snow and sleet to parts of Upper Michigan. (The National Weather Summary)
1989 - Unseasonably cold weather continued in the north central U.S., with freezing temperatures reported across much of the area from eastern North Dakota to Michigan and northwest Ohio. Thirteen cities reported record low temperatures for the date, including Saint Cloud MN, which was the cold spot in the nation with a morning low of 19 degrees. (The National Weather Summary)
1991 - The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty is opened for signature.
1997 - The second largest cash robbery in U.S. history occurs at the Charlotte, North Carolina office of Loomis, Fargo and Company. An FBI investigation eventually results in 24 convictions and the recovery of approximately 95% of the $17.3 million in cash which had been taken.
2001 - NATO confirms invocation of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
2003 - Maxim restaurant suicide bombing in Haifa, Israel: 21 Israelis, Jews and Arabs, are killed, and 51 others wounded.
2004 - SpaceShipOne wins Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, by being the first private craft to fly into space.
Births
1822 - Rutherford B Hayes in Delaware, Ohio. (R) 19th president (1877-81) As a child, Hayes attended private schools and went on to study law at Harvard University, though he was not from a wealthy family. In fact, as a young lawyer, he lived in his office for a time to save money while building his practice.
Hayes, a devout, honest and principled man, earned the nickname "Old Granny" for his attention to manners and his tee-totaling lifestyle. He and his family were also ardent abolitionists and temperance reformers. It was assumed that his wife Lucy insisted that he ban all alcohol from the White House--an act that appalled visiting dignitaries and earned her the nickname "Lemonade Lucy." However, it was originally Hayes’ idea to force temperance on White House visitors. Advisors and cabinet members would often join Hayes and his family in twice-daily prayer and in singing hymns. As his presidency followed the notoriously corrupt terms of Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, supporters appreciated Hayes’ sense of fairness and willingness to work with both parties. Detractors and cynics jaded by years of dishonest administrations, however, derided him as a fraud.
Hayes’ presidency was notable for his role in presiding over the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In an effort to please Southern Democrats, he agreed to pull the last federal troops out of the former Confederate states, mistakenly believing that Southern politicians would enforce civil rights for black Americans. Hayes resisted partisan pressure in appointing federal positions and fought legislation aimed at preventing Chinese immigration into the United States. Despite campaigning on a pro-labor platform, Hayes disappointed workers when he used federal troops to quell the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. He served only one term, and left office in 1881.
1841 - Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (d 1924). American physicist and meteorologist, the first to propose the use of a ring pendulum for measuring absolute gravity. From 1889 to 1894 he served both as Director of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and also Superintendent of the U.S. Standard Weights and Measures where he oversaw the shift in the fundamental standards of the U.S. from the English yard and pound to the International Meter and Kilogram. Mendenhall devised a quarter second's pendulum for gravity measurements and instituted improvements in the measurement of base lines with wire tapes, in the construction of instruments for precise leveling and in the methods used in triangulation and gravity work, and developed a comprehensive plan for the study of terrestrial magnetism.
1858 - Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin, Ph.D, LL.D. (d 1935; Serbian Cyrillic: Ìèõà¼ëî Èäâîðñêè Ïóïèí), also known as Michael I. Pupin, was a Serbian physicist and physical chemist, best known for his numerous patents, including a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils (of wire) at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire (known as "pupinization").
1861 - Frederic Remington, in New York, American painter, specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry. (d. 1909) The son of a comfortable, if not wealthy, family, Remington was one of the first students to attend Yale University's new School of Fine Arts. At Yale he became a skilled painter, but he focused his efforts largely on the traditional subjects of high art, not the Wild West. When he was 19, Remington's father died, leaving him a small inheritance that gave him the freedom to indulge his interest in traveling in the West. As with other transplanted upper-class easterners like Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, Remington quickly developed a deep love for the West and its fast disappearing world of cowboys, Indians, and wide-open spaces. Eventually buying a sheep ranch near Kansas City, Remington continued to travel around his adopted western home, endlessly drawing and painting what he saw.
In 1884, Remington sold his first sketches based on his western travels, and two years later his first fully credited picture appeared on the cover of Harper's Weekly. After that, his popularity as an illustrator grew steadily, and he returned to New York in order to be closer to the largely eastern market for his work. Frequent assignments from publishers, though, ensured that Remington was never away long from the West, and gave him the opportunity to closely observe and sketch his favorite subjects: U.S. Cavalry soldiers, cowboys, and Native Americans. Remington's output was enormous, and during the last 20 years of his life he created more than 2,700 paintings and drawings and published illustrations in 142 books and 42 different magazines. Though most of his paintings were created in his studio in New York, Remington continued to base his work on his western travels and prided himself on accuracy and realism-particularly when it came to horses. He even suggested that he would like his epitaph to read: "He Knew the Horse."
When he died in 1909 in Connecticut, from acute appendicitis, Remington left a body of work that was popular with the public but largely ignored by "serious" museums and art collectors. Since then, though, Remington's paintings, drawings, and illustrations have become prized by collectors and curators around the world, and prominent museums like the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (Cody, Wyoming) and the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art (Tulsa, Oklahoma) have created large permanent exhibitions of his work.
1861 - Walter Rauschenbusch (d 1918) Christian theologian and Baptist minister, he was a key figure in the Social Gospel movement in the USA.
1862 - Edward Stratemeyer (d 1930) American publisher and writer of books for children, wrote in excess of 1300 books himself, selling in excess of 500 million copies, and created the well-known fictional book series for juveniles including The Rover Boys (starting in 1899), The Bobbsey Twins (starting in 1904), Tom Swift (starting in 1910), The Hardy Boys (starting in 1927), and the Nancy Drew (starting in 1930) series, among others.
1879 - Edward Murray East (d 1938). American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist, and chemist, who contributed to genetic theory and to the development of hybrid corn (maize) by applying inbred strain breeding. This was a revolutionary method of seed production and improved corn crops around the world. He analyzed the protein and fat content of corn to increase its nutritional value as animal feed. East studied the genetics and breeding not only of corn, but also tobacco and potatoes. He independently discovered the phenomenon later called "multiple factors" that gives a Mendelian interpretation for "blending inheritance." He also made important studies of self-and cross-incompatibility, heterosis, cytoplasmic heredity, and hybridization.«
1880 - Alfred Damon Runyon (d 1946) newspaperman and writer, best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted. He spun humorous tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit," "Benny Southstreet," "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," "Good Time Charley," "Dave the Dude," or "The Seldom Seen Kid." Runyon wrote these stories in a distinctive vernacular style: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions. A passage from "Tobias the Terrible", collected in More than Somewhat (1937) illustrates Runyon's memorable prose.
1889 - John Brendan Kelly, Sr., also known as Jack Kelly, (d 1960) was one of the most accomplished American oarsmen in the history of the sport of rowing. He was a triple Olympic Gold Medal winner, the first to do so in the sport of rowing. He won 126 straight races in the single scull (1x). He was the father of Grace Kelly, actress and Princess of Monaco (thus grandfather of Albert II, Prince of Monaco), and of John B. Kelly, Jr., an accomplished oarsman in his own right.Olympic champion rower/father of Grace Kelly
1890 - Dr. Alan L. Hart (Born Lucille Hart), First known American female to male transsexual (SRS in 1917), radiologist, tuberculosis researcher, writer and novelist. (d. 1962)
1895 - Buster Keaton, American comedian, best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". (d. 1966)
1903 - John Vincent Atanasoff, American computer pioneer, physicist and inventor. The 1973 decision of the patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer. (d. 1995)
1903 - Cyril Stanley Smith (d 1952). British-American metallurgist who in 1943-44 determined the properties and technology of plutonium and uranium, the essential materials in the atomic bombs that were first exploded in 1945. Smith already then had 15 years of experience as a research metallurgist with the American Brass Co., during which time he studied properties of alloys and their microstructure. In WW II, he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory at its inception (1943). The properties and technology of plutonium had to be conducted with extremely limited quantities of available material. Smith and his group found it was unique, with five different allotropic forms with huge density differences between them. Postwar, he organized the Institute for the Study of Metal at the Univ. of Chicago.
1914 - Brendan Gill (d 1997) wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. He also contributed film criticism for Film Comment and wrote a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.
1916 - George Sidney, American film director (d. 2002)
1922 - Malcolm Baldrige, 26th United States Secretary of Commerce (d. 1987)
1923 - Charlton Heston, American actor and former president of the NRA (d. 2008)
1928- Alvin Toffler American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity.
1929 - Scotty Beckett, American child actor, Our Gang comedies (d. 1968)
1929 - Leroy Van Dyke, American country music singer best known for his hits, "The Auctioneer" (1956) and "Walk On By" (1961).
1931 - Richard Rorty, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Stanford University (d. 2007)
1940 - Alberto Vilar, Cuban-American investor and philanthropist, from West Orange, NJ, particularly known as a patron of opera. He was tried and convicted in November 2008 on charges of money laundering, investment advisor fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud, and was sentenced in February 2010 to nine years in prison. The prosecution charged that some of the money stolen from his clients was used to meet his public philanthropic commitments.
1941 - Roy Alton Blount, Jr., American writer, best known as a humorist, Blount is also a reporter, actor, and musician with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band composed entirely of writers. He is also president of the Authors Guild.
1941- Anne Rice (born Howard Allen O'Brien in New Orleans) best-selling American author of gothic, erotic, and religious-themed books from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was married to poet and painter Stan Rice for 41 years until his death from cancer in 2002. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.
Rice, one of four sisters, was christened Howard Allen O'Brien by her parents but insisted on being called Anne when she started first grade. Her father worked in the post office, and her mother was a strict Catholic. Rice wrote her first novel, about aliens coming to Earth, when she was 7. When she was 15, her mother, an alcoholic, died, and the family moved to Texas, where Anne met her future husband, Stan Rice, in a high school journalism class.
The couple married in 1961, and both went to San Francisco State College. Anne Rice studied political science and later took a master's degree in creative writing. Stan later became chairman of the creative writing department at San Francisco State. The couple had a daughter who died of leukemia at age 5. Shattered by the death, Rice turned to writing and produced Interview With the Vampire, published in 1976. Although critically panned, the book was a popular hit, generating more than $1 million in movie and paperback rights before publication. Stung by the reviews, Anne turned to historical novels and wrote The Feast of All Saints, about New Orleans, and Cry to Heaven, about Italian castrati. In 1978, the couple had a son, Christopher.
In 1985, Rice published her second vampire book, The Vampire Lestat, which sold 75,000 copies in hardcover. Her third vampire book, The Queen of the Damned (1988), was so eagerly anticipated that the publisher printed more than 400,000 copies for the first printing. By 1990, her paperback sales totaled $1.3 million. Since that time she has written numerous vampire books.
In 1988, the Rices moved to an antebellum mansion in New Orleans, which became the setting for The Witching Hour, about a family of witches in New Orleans, which was followed by a sequel, Lasher. In addition to more books about the supernatural, she began writing a series of pornographic novels under the name A.N. Roquelaure (which means "cloak"), and contemporary fiction under the name Anne Rampling. After the death of her husband in 2002, Rice left New Orleans eventually moving to California in 2005.
1941 - Robert Wilson, American theatre director
1942 - Karl Wendell Richter (d 1967) officer in the United States Air Force and an accomplished fighter pilot during the Vietnam War. At the age of 23 he was the youngest pilot in that conflict to shoot down a MiG in air-to-air combat. A statue of his likeness stands at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, with the inscription:
"Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Here am I. Send me." (Isaiah 6:8)
1943 - H. Rap Brown, American civil rights activist
1944 - Tony La Russa, American baseball manager
1946 - Charles Timothy "Chuck" Hagel former Republican United States Senator from Nebraska, first elected in 1996 and reelected in 2002. In 2009, he was elected as Chairman of the Atlantic Council.
1946 - Susan Sarandon, American actress and activist
1946 - Michael Mullen, American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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1948 - Linda McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and future Senator from Connecticut.
1957 - Russell Simmons, American entrepreneur
Deaths
1754 - Tanacharison or Tanaghrisson (b c. 1700?) Catawba American Indian leader who played a pivotal role in the beginning of the French and Indian War. He was known to European-Americans as the Half King, a title also used to describe several other historically important American Indian leaders. His name has been spelled in a variety of ways.
1852 - James Whitcomb (b 1795) Democratic United States Senator from and the eighth Governor of Indiana. As governor during the Mexican-American War, he oversaw the formation and deployment of the state's levies. He led the movement to replace the state constitution and played an important role at the convention to institute a law that prevented the government from taking loans in response the current fiscal crisis in Indiana. By skillfully guiding the state through its bankruptcy, Whitcomb is usually credited as being one of the most successful of Indiana's governors. He was elected to the United States Senate after his term as governor but died of kidney disease only two years later.
1867 - Francis Xavier Seelos German-American Roman Catholic priest and Redemptionist missionary (b. 1819)
1890 - Catherine Booth, the Mother of The Salvation Army, died at age 61 in Clacton-on-Sea at Crossley house; subsequently the house was donated to people with learning disabilities, and provided many summer holidays, until being sold to property developers in 2005. The Booths had rented a small villa in sight of the sea that she loved, and on 4 October 1890 she died in her husband's arms with her family around her. She is interred with her husband in Abney Park Cemetery, London. (b. 1829)
1904 - Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (b 1834, Colmar, Haut-Rhin) French sculptor who is remembered mainly for designing the Statue of Liberty.
1944 - Alfred Emanuel "Al" Smith, American politician, elected the 42nd Governor of New York four times, and was the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928. He was the first Roman Catholic to run for President as a major party nominee. (b. 1873)
1946 - Barney Oldfield, American automobile pioneer (b. 1878)
1946 - Gifford Pinchot (b 1865) American forester, who as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service popularized the conservation of natural resources. He became chief of the new Forest Service in 1905 when the management of the forest reserves was transferred to the Dept. of Agriculture from the Dept. of the Interior. At that time, the nation had 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres. In his five years in office, by 1910 those numbers increased to 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. He is regarded as a father of American conservation because of his great and unrelenting concern for the protection of the American forests. His efforts were supported by President Theodore Roosevelt, but not by his successor, President Taft, who replaced Pinchot in Jan 1910.«
1951 - Willie Moretti, American gangster, underboss of the Genovese crime family and a cousin of family boss Frank Costello. (b. 1894)
1951 - Henrietta Lacks, African–American woman who was the unwitting donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. This is now known as the HeLa cell line. (b. 1920)
1961 - Metropolitan Benjamin (Fedchenkov), Orthodox missionary and writer, Exarch of Russian Church in North America (b. 1880)
1970 - Janis Joplin, American singer (b. 1943)
1974 - Anne Sexton, American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression, and various intimate details from her own private life, including her relationship with her husband and children. (b. 1928)
1975 - Joan Whitney Payson (b 1903)American heiress, businesswoman, philanthropist, patron of the arts and art collector, and a member of the prominent Whitney family. She was also co-founder and majority owner of Major League Baseball's National League's New York Mets baseball franchise, and was the first woman to own a major-league team in North America without inheriting it.
1989 - Secretariat, American race superhorse (b. 1970)
1989 - Ross Franco Nigrelli (b 1903) American marine biologist who made notable discoveries in disease among marine organisms and factors influencing their health, including pollution, changes in salinity, and alterations in water temperature. Among the first to study poisons discharged by marine organisms, he investigated blooms of plankton, such as so-called red tides that decimated fish along Florida's Gulf Coast in the 1940s. He also found marine species could be sources of drugs. For example, a secretion of sea cucumbers while fatal to fish in minute quantities will also slow growth of tumors in mice. He also identified a certain secretion of sea sponges that has antibacterial properties and determined that blood poisoning in man can be detected by using blood of horseshoe crabs.
1991 - Leonard C Odell wrote 7,000 Burma Shave poems, dies at 83
1994 - Danny Gatton, American guitar virtuoso (b. 1945)
1995 - Edward H. Lowe (b 1920) American inventor of Kitty Litter. After Navy duty (1941-45), Lowe joined his father's company in Cassopolis, Mich., selling industrial absorbents, including sawdust and an absorbent clay called Fuller's Earth. In 1947, Lowe suggested the use of the clay instead of ashes for his neighbor's cat's box to avoid sooty paw prints. It worked well and Lowe thought other cat owners would use this new cat-box filler. He filled ten brown bags with clay, wrote the name "Kitty Litter" on them and began selling it through the local pet store. By 1990, his marketing effort had grown into a clay mining and consumer product business, the largest U.S. producer of cat-box filler, now improved, 99% dust free, and sanitized against odor-causing bacteria. He held 67 US and foreign patents.
1996 - Larry Gene Bell, American child murderer (executed by electric chair) (b. 1949)
2001 - Rabbi Ahron (Aaron) Soloveichik (b 1917) renowned scholar of Talmud, Halakha and a Rosh Yeshiva; known especially within circles of Orthodox Judaism.
2003 - Sidney Sanders McMath (b 1912) decorated U.S. Marine, attorney and the 34th Governor of Arkansas (1949–1953) who, in defiance of his state's political establishment, championed rapid rural electrification, massive highway and school construction, the building of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, strict bank and utility regulation, repeal of the poll tax, open and honest elections and broad expansion of opportunity for black citizens in the decade following World War II.
2004 - Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., also known as Gordo Cooper, (b 1927) engineer and American astronaut. Cooper was one of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first manned space effort by the United States. He was the first American to sleep in orbit, had flown the longest spaceflight of the Mercury project, and was the last American to be launched alone into Earth orbit and conduct an entire solo orbital mission.
2005 - Stanley Knapp Hathaway (b 1924) served as 27th Governor of Wyoming from 1967—1975, and as United States Secretary of the Interior under President Gerald R. Ford.
Christian Feast Day
Amun
Francis of Assisi
Petronius of Bologna.
October 4 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Saints
Hieromartyr Hierotheus of Athens, bishop (1st century)
St. Theodore the Wonderworker, bishop of Tamassos, Cyprus (2nd century)
Martyr Peter of Capetolis, bishop of Bostra in Arabia (4th century)
Martyrs Domnina and her daughters Berenice and Prosdoce of Syria (4th century)
Martyrs Adauctus and his daughter Callisthene of Ephesus (305, 313)
Saints Ammon and Paul the Simple of Egypt (350)
Martyrs Gaius, Faustus, Eusebius, and Chaeremon of Alexandria (3rd century)
Saint Vladimir Yaroslavich, prince of Novgorod, and his mother Saint Anna (1052)
Saint Helladius, Onesimus, and Ammon of the Kiev Caves Monastery (12th-13th centuries
Saint Stephen Stiljianovitch, despot of Srem, Serbia (1540) and his wife, St. Helen (Elizabeth in monasticism) (ca. 1543)
Saint John Lampadistus of Cyprus (10th century)
Blessed Elizabeth of Serbia
Sts. Jonah and Nectarius, monks of Kazan (16th century)
Hieromartyr Evdemoz, catholicos of Georgia (country)Georgia (1642)
Other commemorations
Uncovering of the relics (1595) of Saints Gurias (1563), first archbishop of Kazan, and Barsanuphius, bishop of Tver (1576)
Repose of the righteous youth Peter Michurin of Kuznetsk (Siberia) (1820)
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_4_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)
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www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sputnik-launched
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There are 88 days remaining until the end of the year.
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1537 - The first complete English-language Bible (the Matthew Bible) is printed, with translations by William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale.
1582 - Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian Calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, October 4 of this year is followed directly by October 15.
1636 - 1st code of law for Plymouth Colony
1648 - Peter Stuyvesant establishes Americas 1st volunteer firemen
1777 - Battle of Germantown: Troops under George Washington are repelled by British troops under Sir William Howe.
1777 - The Battle of Germantown was fought in a morning fog that grew more dense with the smoke of battle, causing great confusion. Americans firing at each other contributed to the loss of the battle. (David Ludlum)
1824 - Mexico adopts a new constitution and becomes a federal republic.
1830 - The first power printing press capable of fine book work was patented by Isaac Adams of Boston, Massachusetts.
1830 - Creation of the state of Belgium after separation from The Netherlands.
1864 - New Orleans Tribune, first black daily newspaper, forms
1869 - A great storm struck New England. The storm reportedly was predicted twelve months in advance by a British officer named Saxby. Heavy rains and high floods plagued all of New England, with strong winds and high tides over New Hampshire and Maine. Canton CT was deluged with 12.35 inches of rain. (David Ludlum)
1876 - Texas A&M University opens as the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, becoming the first public institution of higher education in Texas.
1883 - First meeting of the Boys' Brigade in Glasgow, Scotland. interdenominational Christian youth organisation, conceived by William Alexander Smith to combine drill and fun activities with Christian values. Following its inception in Glasgow in 1883, the BB quickly spread across the United Kingdom and became a worldwide organisation by the early 1890s
1895 - The first U.S. Open Men's Golf Championship administered by the United States Golf Association is played at the Newport Country Club in Newport, Rhode Island.
1918 - An explosion kills more than 100 and destroys the T.A. Gillespie Company Shell Loading Plant in Sayreville, New Jersey. Fires and explosions continue for three days forcing massive evacuations and spreading ordnance over a wide area, pieces of which were still being found in 2007.
1931 - The comic strip Dick Tracy by Chester Gould debuts
1937 - Blues singer Bessie Smith, killed in Mississippi car wreck, is buried. Legendary blues singer Bessie Smith is buried near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 4, 1937. Some 7,000 mourners attended her funeral. Smith had been killed a few days before when the old Packard she was driving hit a parked truck near Coahoma, Mississippi, between Clarksdale and Memphis. There is no record of Smith's exact birth date, but she was about 43 years old.
Bessie Smith had been in show business since she was a teenager. In 1912, she joined a traveling vaudeville troupe, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and spent the next decade singing in minstrel shows and cabarets all around the South. (One popular rumor held that blues great Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, the leader of the Foots, had kidnapped the talented young singer and dragged her from show to show against her will. This was not true--Rainey was Smith's friend and mentor--but it made for great publicity.)
In 1923, Smith released her first record, "Down-Hearted Blues." It sold nearly 800,000 copies and made her a superstar. In fact, by the end of the 1920s Smith had made more money than any black performer ever had. She performed and recorded with luminaries like Clarence Williams, Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson's band and she starred in the 1929 film "St. Louis Blues." Unfortunately, in the 1930s Smith's career stalled. The Depression, changing musical tastes that favored jazz and swing instead of vaudeville blues and the singer's severe alcoholism made it nearly impossible for her to find work. Toward the end of the decade, though, Smith had begun to record and perform again.
The circumstances surrounding the singer's death are mysterious. We know that Smith was gravely injured--her arm was nearly severed--in the accident. After that, some people say, the doctor at the scene ignored her while he tended to the bumps and scrapes of a white couple that was in a nearby fender-bender. Other sources say that Smith bled to death while her ambulance drove around in search of a hospital that would treat black patients. (Edward Albee based his 1959 play "The Death of Bessie Smith" on this version of events.) While neither one of these scenarios would have been much of a surprise in the Jim Crow South, most historians now agree that the stories are apocryphal: Smith did make it to the hospital, but her injuries were so severe that it made no difference.
In the summer of 1970, shortly before her own death from a heroin overdose, the young singer Janis Joplin had a headstone made for Smith's unmarked grave. It reads, "The Greatest Blues Singer in the World Will Never Stop Singing."
1940 - Adolph Hitler & Benito Mussolini confer at Brenner Pass in the Alps
1941 - Norman Rockwell's Willie Gillis character debuts on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.
1943 - World War II: U.S. captures Solomon Islands.
1944 - On this day in 1944, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower distributes to his combat units a report by the U.S. Surgeon General that reveals the hazards of prolonged exposure to combat. "[T]he danger of being killed or maimed imposes a strain so great that it causes men to break down. One look at the shrunken, apathetic faces of psychiatric patients...sobbing, trembling, referring shudderingly to 'them shells' and to buddies mutilated or dead, is enough to convince most observers of this fact."
On the basis of this evaluation, as well as firsthand experience, American commanders judged that the average soldier could last about 200 days in combat before suffering serious psychiatric damage. British commanders used a rotation method, pulling soldiers out of combat every 12 days for a four-day rest period. This enabled British soldiers to put in 400 days of combat before being deleteriously affected. The Surgeon General's report went on to lament the fact that a "wound or injury is regarded, not as a misfortune, but a blessing." The war was clearly taking a toll on more than just men's bodies.
1949 - American Contract Bridge League votes 58% to keep blacks out
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1955 - The world's first solar-powered telephone call was made by Bell Telephone.
1955 - Brooklyn Dodgers win the World Series at last, beating the New York Yankees 2-0. They’d lost the championship seven times already, and they’d lost five times just to the Yanks--in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953. But in 1955, thanks to nine brilliant innings in the seventh game from 23-year-old lefty pitcher Johnny Podres, they finally managed to beat the Bombers for the first (and last) time.
The Dodgers had lost the first two games of the series at Yankee Stadium--it was the first time in history, in fact, that a team came back to win a seven-game World Series after losing the first two--and then won three in a row at home. The Yanks came back in the sixth, forcing a tiebreaking Game 7 in front of 62,465 fans in the Bronx.
In the fourth inning of the last game, Brooklyn got its first run when catcher Roy Campanella hit a double and Gil Hodges sent him home with a well-placed single. In the sixth, a Yankee error helped the Dodgers load the bases. Even though veteran pitcher Tommy Byrne had only given up three hits, manager Casey Stengel pulled him and sent in right-handed reliever Bob Grim--but that didn’t stop Hodges from knocking a long sacrifice fly to center field. Pee Wee Reese made it safely home, and the Dodgers were winning by 2.
And then, the game’s defining moment. At the bottom of the sixth, Podres walked Billy Martin and Gil McDougald outran a bunt to first, putting two on with nobody out. Then Yogi Berra sliced an outside pitch hard down the left-field foul line--a game-tying double, for sure, until backup outfielder Sandy Amoros came running out of nowhere, stuck out his glove and snagged the ball as he careened toward the stands. He wheeled and threw to shortstop Reese, who tossed it to Hodges at first, who caught McDougald off the bag by inches. The Yanks’ sure thing had soured into a game-killing double play.
The final triumphant out came on an Elston Howard grounder to Reese, the 38-year-old team captain who’d been around for all five of the Dodgers’ losses to their cross-town rivals. Reese scooped up the ball and fired low and wide to first, but somehow--as John Drebinger wrote in the Times the next day, "Gil would have stretched halfway across the Bronx for that one"--Hodges grabbed it in time to send Howard back to the dugout and end the game.
The 1955 series turned out to be the only one the Brooklyn Dodgers would ever win. They lost to the Yanks again the next year. The year after that, the team’s owner decided he’d rather play in a swank stadium in a nicer neighborhood, so he moved the team to California. The Los Angeles Dodgers have won the championship five times. (World Series #52)
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1957 - "Leave It to Beaver," debuts on CBS
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1957 - Space Race: Launch of Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. The Soviet Union inaugurates the "Space Age" with its launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. The spacecraft, named Sputnik after the Russian word for "satellite," was launched at 10:29 p.m. Moscow time from the Tyuratam launch base in the Kazakh Republic. Sputnik had a diameter of 22 inches and weighed 184 pounds and circled Earth once every hour and 36 minutes. Traveling at 18,000 miles an hour, its elliptical orbit had an apogee (farthest point from Earth) of 584 miles and a perigee (nearest point) of 143 miles. Visible with binoculars before sunrise or after sunset, Sputnik transmitted radio signals back to Earth strong enough to be picked up by amateur radio operators. Those in the United States with access to such equipment tuned in and listened in awe as the beeping Soviet spacecraft passed over America several times a day. In January 1958, Sputnik's orbit deteriorated, as expected, and the spacecraft burned up in the atmosphere.
Officially, Sputnik was launched to correspond with the International Geophysical Year, a solar period that the International Council of Scientific Unions declared would be ideal for the launching of artificial satellites to study Earth and the solar system. However, many Americans feared more sinister uses of the Soviets' new rocket and satellite technology, which was apparently strides ahead of the U.S. space effort. Sputnik was some 10 times the size of the first planned U.S. satellite, which was not scheduled to be launched until the next year. The U.S. government, military, and scientific community were caught off guard by the Soviet technological achievement, and their united efforts to catch up with the Soviets heralded the beginning of the "space race."
The first U.S. satellite, Explorer, was launched on January 31, 1958. By then, the Soviets had already achieved another ideological victory when they launched a dog into orbit aboard Sputnik 2. The Soviet space program went on to achieve a series of other space firsts in the late 1950s and early 1960s: first man in space, first woman, first three men, first space walk, first spacecraft to impact the moon, first to orbit the moon, first to impact Venus, and first craft to soft-land on the moon. However, the United States took a giant leap ahead in the space race in the late '60s with the Apollo lunar-landing program, which successfully landed two Apollo 11 astronauts on the surface of the moon in July 1969
1957 - Two Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory scientists tracking Sputnik found they could determine its orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift of its radio signals during a single pass. They conjectured that if a satellite's position were known and predictable, then the Doppler shift of its signals could be used to locate a receiver on Earth - thus, one could navigate by satellite. A system called Transit, was developed and from 1964 assisted the security of U.S. nuclear deterrent submarines. From 1967, this evolved into a navigation system for all nations, a forerunner of the present Global Positioning System (GPS). Transit also made key contributions to space science and technology, geodesy and health.
1958 - The first trans-Atlantic passenger jetliner service was inaugurated by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) with flights between London Heathrow airport and New York Idlewild (now JFK) airport. G-APDC 'Delta Charlie' set off from London to New York via Gander under the Command of Capt. R. E. Millichap and G-APDB, Commanded by Capt. T. B. Stoney, made the east-bound flight. Because of the prevailing winds the west-bound flight needed to refuel at Gander. The inaugural flight was completed in 8 hours 53 minutes flying time (including stop-over 10 hrs. 5 min.) at an average ground speed of 404 m.p.h. BOAC previously used propeller aircraft on the transatlantic route.
1959 - 1st world series (World Series #56) game played west of St Louis (in LA)
1960 - Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes after a bird strike on takeoff from Boston's Logan International Airport, killing 62 of 72 on board.
1965 - Becoming the first Pope to ever visit the United States of America and the Western hemisphere, Pope Paul VI arrives in New York.
1969 - Denver, CO, received 9.6 inches of snow. October of that year proved to be the coldest and snowiest of record for Denver, with a total snowfall for the month of 31.2 inches. (Weather Channel)
1971 - Borden's opens a turn-of-century ice cream parlor at Disney World
1971 - The mole - the amount of substance (matter) - was adopted as a chemical measurement added to the six base quantities of the SI (International System of scientific units). The decision was made by the Conférence Général des Poids et Mesures (CGPM), the principal executive organization under the Treaty of the Meter. IUPAC's participation was led by M.L. McGlashan. The mole is the amount of substance of a system which contains as many elementary entities as there are carbon atoms in 0.012 kg of carbon 12. The elementary entities must be specified and may be atoms, molecules, ions, electrons, other particles, or specified groups of such particles. The agreed symbol for the unit is mol, and the symbol for amount of substance is n.
1976 - Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz resigns due to telling a racial joke.
1978 - Funeral services held for Pope John Paul I
1983 - Richard Noble sets a new land speed record of 633.468 mph (1,019 km/h), driving Thrust 2 at the Black Rock Desert of Nevada.
1984 - US govt closes down due to budget problems
1985 - Free Software Foundation is founded in Massachusetts, United States.
1985 - Shite Muslims claim to have killed hostage William Buckley
1986 - Excessive flooding was reported along the Mississippi River and all over the Midwest, from Ohio to the Milk River in Montana. In some places it was the worst flooding of record. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
1987 - A storm brought record snows to the northeastern U.S. Snowfall totals ranged up to 21 inches at North Springfield VT. It was the earliest snow of record for some locations. The storm claimed 17 lives in central New York State, injured 332 persons, and in Vermont caused seventeen million dollars damage. The six inch snow at Albany NY was their earliest measurable snow in 117 years of records. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data) (The Weather Channel)
1987 - Southern California continued to "shake and bake". An earthquake was reported during the morning, the second in a matter of days, and during the afternoon temperatures soared well above 100 degrees. Highs of 100 degrees at San Francisco, and 108 degrees at Los Angeles and Santa Maria, were October records. San Luis Obispo was the hot spot in the nation with an afternoon high of 111 degrees. (The National Weather Summary).
1988 - U.S. televangelist Jim Bakker is indicted for fraud.
1988 - Temperatures dipped below freezing in the north central U.S. Five cities in North Dakota and Nebraska reported record low temperatures for the date, including Bismarck ND with a reading of 17 degrees above zero. Low pressure brought snow and sleet to parts of Upper Michigan. (The National Weather Summary)
1989 - Unseasonably cold weather continued in the north central U.S., with freezing temperatures reported across much of the area from eastern North Dakota to Michigan and northwest Ohio. Thirteen cities reported record low temperatures for the date, including Saint Cloud MN, which was the cold spot in the nation with a morning low of 19 degrees. (The National Weather Summary)
1991 - The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty is opened for signature.
1997 - The second largest cash robbery in U.S. history occurs at the Charlotte, North Carolina office of Loomis, Fargo and Company. An FBI investigation eventually results in 24 convictions and the recovery of approximately 95% of the $17.3 million in cash which had been taken.
2001 - NATO confirms invocation of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
2003 - Maxim restaurant suicide bombing in Haifa, Israel: 21 Israelis, Jews and Arabs, are killed, and 51 others wounded.
2004 - SpaceShipOne wins Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight, by being the first private craft to fly into space.
Births
1822 - Rutherford B Hayes in Delaware, Ohio. (R) 19th president (1877-81) As a child, Hayes attended private schools and went on to study law at Harvard University, though he was not from a wealthy family. In fact, as a young lawyer, he lived in his office for a time to save money while building his practice.
Hayes, a devout, honest and principled man, earned the nickname "Old Granny" for his attention to manners and his tee-totaling lifestyle. He and his family were also ardent abolitionists and temperance reformers. It was assumed that his wife Lucy insisted that he ban all alcohol from the White House--an act that appalled visiting dignitaries and earned her the nickname "Lemonade Lucy." However, it was originally Hayes’ idea to force temperance on White House visitors. Advisors and cabinet members would often join Hayes and his family in twice-daily prayer and in singing hymns. As his presidency followed the notoriously corrupt terms of Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant, supporters appreciated Hayes’ sense of fairness and willingness to work with both parties. Detractors and cynics jaded by years of dishonest administrations, however, derided him as a fraud.
Hayes’ presidency was notable for his role in presiding over the end of post-Civil War Reconstruction. In an effort to please Southern Democrats, he agreed to pull the last federal troops out of the former Confederate states, mistakenly believing that Southern politicians would enforce civil rights for black Americans. Hayes resisted partisan pressure in appointing federal positions and fought legislation aimed at preventing Chinese immigration into the United States. Despite campaigning on a pro-labor platform, Hayes disappointed workers when he used federal troops to quell the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. He served only one term, and left office in 1881.
1841 - Thomas Corwin Mendenhall (d 1924). American physicist and meteorologist, the first to propose the use of a ring pendulum for measuring absolute gravity. From 1889 to 1894 he served both as Director of the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and also Superintendent of the U.S. Standard Weights and Measures where he oversaw the shift in the fundamental standards of the U.S. from the English yard and pound to the International Meter and Kilogram. Mendenhall devised a quarter second's pendulum for gravity measurements and instituted improvements in the measurement of base lines with wire tapes, in the construction of instruments for precise leveling and in the methods used in triangulation and gravity work, and developed a comprehensive plan for the study of terrestrial magnetism.
1858 - Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin, Ph.D, LL.D. (d 1935; Serbian Cyrillic: Ìèõà¼ëî Èäâîðñêè Ïóïèí), also known as Michael I. Pupin, was a Serbian physicist and physical chemist, best known for his numerous patents, including a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils (of wire) at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire (known as "pupinization").
1861 - Frederic Remington, in New York, American painter, specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U.S. Cavalry. (d. 1909) The son of a comfortable, if not wealthy, family, Remington was one of the first students to attend Yale University's new School of Fine Arts. At Yale he became a skilled painter, but he focused his efforts largely on the traditional subjects of high art, not the Wild West. When he was 19, Remington's father died, leaving him a small inheritance that gave him the freedom to indulge his interest in traveling in the West. As with other transplanted upper-class easterners like Theodore Roosevelt and Owen Wister, Remington quickly developed a deep love for the West and its fast disappearing world of cowboys, Indians, and wide-open spaces. Eventually buying a sheep ranch near Kansas City, Remington continued to travel around his adopted western home, endlessly drawing and painting what he saw.
In 1884, Remington sold his first sketches based on his western travels, and two years later his first fully credited picture appeared on the cover of Harper's Weekly. After that, his popularity as an illustrator grew steadily, and he returned to New York in order to be closer to the largely eastern market for his work. Frequent assignments from publishers, though, ensured that Remington was never away long from the West, and gave him the opportunity to closely observe and sketch his favorite subjects: U.S. Cavalry soldiers, cowboys, and Native Americans. Remington's output was enormous, and during the last 20 years of his life he created more than 2,700 paintings and drawings and published illustrations in 142 books and 42 different magazines. Though most of his paintings were created in his studio in New York, Remington continued to base his work on his western travels and prided himself on accuracy and realism-particularly when it came to horses. He even suggested that he would like his epitaph to read: "He Knew the Horse."
When he died in 1909 in Connecticut, from acute appendicitis, Remington left a body of work that was popular with the public but largely ignored by "serious" museums and art collectors. Since then, though, Remington's paintings, drawings, and illustrations have become prized by collectors and curators around the world, and prominent museums like the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (Cody, Wyoming) and the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art (Tulsa, Oklahoma) have created large permanent exhibitions of his work.
1861 - Walter Rauschenbusch (d 1918) Christian theologian and Baptist minister, he was a key figure in the Social Gospel movement in the USA.
1862 - Edward Stratemeyer (d 1930) American publisher and writer of books for children, wrote in excess of 1300 books himself, selling in excess of 500 million copies, and created the well-known fictional book series for juveniles including The Rover Boys (starting in 1899), The Bobbsey Twins (starting in 1904), Tom Swift (starting in 1910), The Hardy Boys (starting in 1927), and the Nancy Drew (starting in 1930) series, among others.
1879 - Edward Murray East (d 1938). American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist, and chemist, who contributed to genetic theory and to the development of hybrid corn (maize) by applying inbred strain breeding. This was a revolutionary method of seed production and improved corn crops around the world. He analyzed the protein and fat content of corn to increase its nutritional value as animal feed. East studied the genetics and breeding not only of corn, but also tobacco and potatoes. He independently discovered the phenomenon later called "multiple factors" that gives a Mendelian interpretation for "blending inheritance." He also made important studies of self-and cross-incompatibility, heterosis, cytoplasmic heredity, and hybridization.«
1880 - Alfred Damon Runyon (d 1946) newspaperman and writer, best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted. He spun humorous tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit," "Benny Southstreet," "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," "Good Time Charley," "Dave the Dude," or "The Seldom Seen Kid." Runyon wrote these stories in a distinctive vernacular style: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions. A passage from "Tobias the Terrible", collected in More than Somewhat (1937) illustrates Runyon's memorable prose.
1889 - John Brendan Kelly, Sr., also known as Jack Kelly, (d 1960) was one of the most accomplished American oarsmen in the history of the sport of rowing. He was a triple Olympic Gold Medal winner, the first to do so in the sport of rowing. He won 126 straight races in the single scull (1x). He was the father of Grace Kelly, actress and Princess of Monaco (thus grandfather of Albert II, Prince of Monaco), and of John B. Kelly, Jr., an accomplished oarsman in his own right.Olympic champion rower/father of Grace Kelly
1890 - Dr. Alan L. Hart (Born Lucille Hart), First known American female to male transsexual (SRS in 1917), radiologist, tuberculosis researcher, writer and novelist. (d. 1962)
1895 - Buster Keaton, American comedian, best known for his silent films, in which his trademark was physical comedy with a consistently stoic, deadpan expression, earning him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". (d. 1966)
1903 - John Vincent Atanasoff, American computer pioneer, physicist and inventor. The 1973 decision of the patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer. (d. 1995)
1903 - Cyril Stanley Smith (d 1952). British-American metallurgist who in 1943-44 determined the properties and technology of plutonium and uranium, the essential materials in the atomic bombs that were first exploded in 1945. Smith already then had 15 years of experience as a research metallurgist with the American Brass Co., during which time he studied properties of alloys and their microstructure. In WW II, he joined the Los Alamos Laboratory at its inception (1943). The properties and technology of plutonium had to be conducted with extremely limited quantities of available material. Smith and his group found it was unique, with five different allotropic forms with huge density differences between them. Postwar, he organized the Institute for the Study of Metal at the Univ. of Chicago.
1914 - Brendan Gill (d 1997) wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. He also contributed film criticism for Film Comment and wrote a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.
1916 - George Sidney, American film director (d. 2002)
1922 - Malcolm Baldrige, 26th United States Secretary of Commerce (d. 1987)
1923 - Charlton Heston, American actor and former president of the NRA (d. 2008)
1928- Alvin Toffler American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing the digital revolution, communication revolution, corporate revolution and technological singularity.
1929 - Scotty Beckett, American child actor, Our Gang comedies (d. 1968)
1929 - Leroy Van Dyke, American country music singer best known for his hits, "The Auctioneer" (1956) and "Walk On By" (1961).
1931 - Richard Rorty, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Stanford University (d. 2007)
1940 - Alberto Vilar, Cuban-American investor and philanthropist, from West Orange, NJ, particularly known as a patron of opera. He was tried and convicted in November 2008 on charges of money laundering, investment advisor fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud, and was sentenced in February 2010 to nine years in prison. The prosecution charged that some of the money stolen from his clients was used to meet his public philanthropic commitments.
1941 - Roy Alton Blount, Jr., American writer, best known as a humorist, Blount is also a reporter, actor, and musician with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band composed entirely of writers. He is also president of the Authors Guild.
1941- Anne Rice (born Howard Allen O'Brien in New Orleans) best-selling American author of gothic, erotic, and religious-themed books from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was married to poet and painter Stan Rice for 41 years until his death from cancer in 2002. Her books have sold nearly 100 million copies, making her one of the most widely read authors in modern history.
Rice, one of four sisters, was christened Howard Allen O'Brien by her parents but insisted on being called Anne when she started first grade. Her father worked in the post office, and her mother was a strict Catholic. Rice wrote her first novel, about aliens coming to Earth, when she was 7. When she was 15, her mother, an alcoholic, died, and the family moved to Texas, where Anne met her future husband, Stan Rice, in a high school journalism class.
The couple married in 1961, and both went to San Francisco State College. Anne Rice studied political science and later took a master's degree in creative writing. Stan later became chairman of the creative writing department at San Francisco State. The couple had a daughter who died of leukemia at age 5. Shattered by the death, Rice turned to writing and produced Interview With the Vampire, published in 1976. Although critically panned, the book was a popular hit, generating more than $1 million in movie and paperback rights before publication. Stung by the reviews, Anne turned to historical novels and wrote The Feast of All Saints, about New Orleans, and Cry to Heaven, about Italian castrati. In 1978, the couple had a son, Christopher.
In 1985, Rice published her second vampire book, The Vampire Lestat, which sold 75,000 copies in hardcover. Her third vampire book, The Queen of the Damned (1988), was so eagerly anticipated that the publisher printed more than 400,000 copies for the first printing. By 1990, her paperback sales totaled $1.3 million. Since that time she has written numerous vampire books.
In 1988, the Rices moved to an antebellum mansion in New Orleans, which became the setting for The Witching Hour, about a family of witches in New Orleans, which was followed by a sequel, Lasher. In addition to more books about the supernatural, she began writing a series of pornographic novels under the name A.N. Roquelaure (which means "cloak"), and contemporary fiction under the name Anne Rampling. After the death of her husband in 2002, Rice left New Orleans eventually moving to California in 2005.
1941 - Robert Wilson, American theatre director
1942 - Karl Wendell Richter (d 1967) officer in the United States Air Force and an accomplished fighter pilot during the Vietnam War. At the age of 23 he was the youngest pilot in that conflict to shoot down a MiG in air-to-air combat. A statue of his likeness stands at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, with the inscription:
"Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Here am I. Send me." (Isaiah 6:8)
1943 - H. Rap Brown, American civil rights activist
1944 - Tony La Russa, American baseball manager
1946 - Charles Timothy "Chuck" Hagel former Republican United States Senator from Nebraska, first elected in 1996 and reelected in 2002. In 2009, he was elected as Chairman of the Atlantic Council.
1946 - Susan Sarandon, American actress and activist
1946 - Michael Mullen, American Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
1948 - Linda McMahon, CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and future Senator from Connecticut.
1957 - Russell Simmons, American entrepreneur
Deaths
1754 - Tanacharison or Tanaghrisson (b c. 1700?) Catawba American Indian leader who played a pivotal role in the beginning of the French and Indian War. He was known to European-Americans as the Half King, a title also used to describe several other historically important American Indian leaders. His name has been spelled in a variety of ways.
1852 - James Whitcomb (b 1795) Democratic United States Senator from and the eighth Governor of Indiana. As governor during the Mexican-American War, he oversaw the formation and deployment of the state's levies. He led the movement to replace the state constitution and played an important role at the convention to institute a law that prevented the government from taking loans in response the current fiscal crisis in Indiana. By skillfully guiding the state through its bankruptcy, Whitcomb is usually credited as being one of the most successful of Indiana's governors. He was elected to the United States Senate after his term as governor but died of kidney disease only two years later.
1867 - Francis Xavier Seelos German-American Roman Catholic priest and Redemptionist missionary (b. 1819)
1890 - Catherine Booth, the Mother of The Salvation Army, died at age 61 in Clacton-on-Sea at Crossley house; subsequently the house was donated to people with learning disabilities, and provided many summer holidays, until being sold to property developers in 2005. The Booths had rented a small villa in sight of the sea that she loved, and on 4 October 1890 she died in her husband's arms with her family around her. She is interred with her husband in Abney Park Cemetery, London. (b. 1829)
1904 - Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (b 1834, Colmar, Haut-Rhin) French sculptor who is remembered mainly for designing the Statue of Liberty.
1944 - Alfred Emanuel "Al" Smith, American politician, elected the 42nd Governor of New York four times, and was the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928. He was the first Roman Catholic to run for President as a major party nominee. (b. 1873)
1946 - Barney Oldfield, American automobile pioneer (b. 1878)
1946 - Gifford Pinchot (b 1865) American forester, who as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service popularized the conservation of natural resources. He became chief of the new Forest Service in 1905 when the management of the forest reserves was transferred to the Dept. of Agriculture from the Dept. of the Interior. At that time, the nation had 60 forest reserves covering 56 million acres. In his five years in office, by 1910 those numbers increased to 150 national forests covering 172 million acres. He is regarded as a father of American conservation because of his great and unrelenting concern for the protection of the American forests. His efforts were supported by President Theodore Roosevelt, but not by his successor, President Taft, who replaced Pinchot in Jan 1910.«
1951 - Willie Moretti, American gangster, underboss of the Genovese crime family and a cousin of family boss Frank Costello. (b. 1894)
1951 - Henrietta Lacks, African–American woman who was the unwitting donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. This is now known as the HeLa cell line. (b. 1920)
1961 - Metropolitan Benjamin (Fedchenkov), Orthodox missionary and writer, Exarch of Russian Church in North America (b. 1880)
1970 - Janis Joplin, American singer (b. 1943)
1974 - Anne Sexton, American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression, and various intimate details from her own private life, including her relationship with her husband and children. (b. 1928)
1975 - Joan Whitney Payson (b 1903)American heiress, businesswoman, philanthropist, patron of the arts and art collector, and a member of the prominent Whitney family. She was also co-founder and majority owner of Major League Baseball's National League's New York Mets baseball franchise, and was the first woman to own a major-league team in North America without inheriting it.
1989 - Secretariat, American race superhorse (b. 1970)
1989 - Ross Franco Nigrelli (b 1903) American marine biologist who made notable discoveries in disease among marine organisms and factors influencing their health, including pollution, changes in salinity, and alterations in water temperature. Among the first to study poisons discharged by marine organisms, he investigated blooms of plankton, such as so-called red tides that decimated fish along Florida's Gulf Coast in the 1940s. He also found marine species could be sources of drugs. For example, a secretion of sea cucumbers while fatal to fish in minute quantities will also slow growth of tumors in mice. He also identified a certain secretion of sea sponges that has antibacterial properties and determined that blood poisoning in man can be detected by using blood of horseshoe crabs.
1991 - Leonard C Odell wrote 7,000 Burma Shave poems, dies at 83
1994 - Danny Gatton, American guitar virtuoso (b. 1945)
1995 - Edward H. Lowe (b 1920) American inventor of Kitty Litter. After Navy duty (1941-45), Lowe joined his father's company in Cassopolis, Mich., selling industrial absorbents, including sawdust and an absorbent clay called Fuller's Earth. In 1947, Lowe suggested the use of the clay instead of ashes for his neighbor's cat's box to avoid sooty paw prints. It worked well and Lowe thought other cat owners would use this new cat-box filler. He filled ten brown bags with clay, wrote the name "Kitty Litter" on them and began selling it through the local pet store. By 1990, his marketing effort had grown into a clay mining and consumer product business, the largest U.S. producer of cat-box filler, now improved, 99% dust free, and sanitized against odor-causing bacteria. He held 67 US and foreign patents.
1996 - Larry Gene Bell, American child murderer (executed by electric chair) (b. 1949)
2001 - Rabbi Ahron (Aaron) Soloveichik (b 1917) renowned scholar of Talmud, Halakha and a Rosh Yeshiva; known especially within circles of Orthodox Judaism.
2003 - Sidney Sanders McMath (b 1912) decorated U.S. Marine, attorney and the 34th Governor of Arkansas (1949–1953) who, in defiance of his state's political establishment, championed rapid rural electrification, massive highway and school construction, the building of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, strict bank and utility regulation, repeal of the poll tax, open and honest elections and broad expansion of opportunity for black citizens in the decade following World War II.
2004 - Leroy Gordon Cooper, Jr., also known as Gordo Cooper, (b 1927) engineer and American astronaut. Cooper was one of the seven original astronauts in Project Mercury, the first manned space effort by the United States. He was the first American to sleep in orbit, had flown the longest spaceflight of the Mercury project, and was the last American to be launched alone into Earth orbit and conduct an entire solo orbital mission.
2005 - Stanley Knapp Hathaway (b 1924) served as 27th Governor of Wyoming from 1967—1975, and as United States Secretary of the Interior under President Gerald R. Ford.
Christian Feast Day
Amun
Francis of Assisi
Petronius of Bologna.
October 4 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Saints
Hieromartyr Hierotheus of Athens, bishop (1st century)
St. Theodore the Wonderworker, bishop of Tamassos, Cyprus (2nd century)
Martyr Peter of Capetolis, bishop of Bostra in Arabia (4th century)
Martyrs Domnina and her daughters Berenice and Prosdoce of Syria (4th century)
Martyrs Adauctus and his daughter Callisthene of Ephesus (305, 313)
Saints Ammon and Paul the Simple of Egypt (350)
Martyrs Gaius, Faustus, Eusebius, and Chaeremon of Alexandria (3rd century)
Saint Vladimir Yaroslavich, prince of Novgorod, and his mother Saint Anna (1052)
Saint Helladius, Onesimus, and Ammon of the Kiev Caves Monastery (12th-13th centuries
Saint Stephen Stiljianovitch, despot of Srem, Serbia (1540) and his wife, St. Helen (Elizabeth in monasticism) (ca. 1543)
Saint John Lampadistus of Cyprus (10th century)
Blessed Elizabeth of Serbia
Sts. Jonah and Nectarius, monks of Kazan (16th century)
Hieromartyr Evdemoz, catholicos of Georgia (country)Georgia (1642)
Other commemorations
Uncovering of the relics (1595) of Saints Gurias (1563), first archbishop of Kazan, and Barsanuphius, bishop of Tver (1576)
Repose of the righteous youth Peter Michurin of Kuznetsk (Siberia) (1820)
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_4
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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_4_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)
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www.history.com/this-day-in-history/sputnik-launched
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