Post by farmgal on Oct 12, 2012 20:12:58 GMT -5
October 13 is the 287th day of this leap year in the Gregorian calendar.
There are 80 days remaining until the end of the year.
Days until Election Day, Tuesday November 6, 2012: 25
Countdown until Obama leaves Office www.obamaclock.org/
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1362 The Chancellor of England for the first time opened Parliament with a speech in English.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancellor_of_England#History
1670 In Virginia, slavery was banned for Negroes who arrived in the American colonies as Christians. (The law was repealed in 1682.)
1775 Continental Congress orders construction of a naval fleet. Congress planned to equip two ships that would operate under the direct authority of Congress to capture British supply transports. This was not carried out until October 13, 1775, when George Washington announced that he had taken command of three armed schooners under Continental authority to intercept any British supply ships near Massachusetts. With the revelation that vessels were already sailing under Continental control, the decision to add two more was made easier the resolution was adopted and October 13 would later become known as the United States Navy's official birthday.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Navy#Origins
Surrender of General Burgoyne by John Trumbull, 1822; This painting hangs in the United States Capitol Rotunda.
1777 After his defeat on October 7, 1777, British General John Burgoyne's Army at The Battles of Saratoga become surrounded by superior numbers, setting the stage for its surrender — which feat of arms inspires the Kingdom of France to enter the American Revolutionary War against the British.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battles_Of_Saratoga
1792 The cornerstone of the White House was laid by George Washington. The building is three stories tall with over 100 rooms, and was designed by James Hoban. In November of 1800, President John Adams and his family moved in. The building was first known as the "Presidential Palace," but acquired the name "White House" about 10 years after its completion.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House#1789.E2.80.931800
1812 War of 1812: Battle of Queenston Heights As part of the Niagara campaign in Ontario, Canada, United States forces under General Stephen Van Rensselaer are repulsed from invading Canada by British and native troops led by Sir Isaac Brock.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Queenston_Heights
1843 B'nai Brith founded in NY founded by Henry Jones and 11 others. B'nai Brith is the oldest and largest Jewish service organization in the world, founded in New York--to provide service to their own people and to humanity at large.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27nai_Brith
1845 A majority of voters in the Republic of Texas approve a proposed constitution, that if accepted by the U.S. Congress, will make Texas a U.S. state. On this day in 1845, a majority of the citizens of the independent Republic of Texas approve a proposed constitution, that when accepted by the Congress, will make Texas the 28th American state.
Despite having fought a war to win their independence from their old colonial master, Mexico, the people of Texas had long been eager to become part of the United States. Under the leadership of the Republic's first president, Sam Houston, Texas had proclaimed its independence from Mexico in 1836, while simultaneously indicating a desire to be annexed to the United States. But while many Americans were willing to see the massive Texan Republic join their nation, Congress refused at the urging of influential northern abolitionists who claimed that Texas was controlled by a "slaveocracy conspiracy" of southerners.
The political climate shifted in the favor of Texas with the presidential election of 1844, when the victory of James K. Polk was widely seen as a mandate from the people to bring Texas into the American fold. But before Polk could take office, President John Tyler beat him to the punch by securing a congressional resolution calling for annexation. With the strong approval of most Texans, Polk signed the legislation making Texas an American state on December 29, 1845. Ominously, the Mexican minister had meanwhile warned the U.S. that his nation would consider annexation an act of war and demanded his passport in preparation for departure. Mexico and the United States would be at war within a year.
[a href="en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Texas"]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Texas[/a][/url]
1846 A great hurricane tracked across Cuba, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The hurricane inflicted major damage along its entire path, which was similar to the path of Hurricane Hazel 108 years later. The hurricane caused great damage at Key West FL, and at Philadelphia PA it was the most destructive storm in thirty years. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Havana_Hurricane_of_1846
1853 The Pennsylvania and LeHigh Zinc Company Mill was erected in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This mill produced the first commercial zinc, which was obtained from calamine ores. Four acres of land was bought by Samuel Wetherill, of Philadelphia. The Lehigh Zinc Company was eventually acquired by the New Jersey Zinc Company.
todayinsci.com/Events/Technology/PennsylvaniaLehighZincCo.htm
1860 The first successful aerial photograph in the U.S. was taken over Boston by James Wallace Black in a balloon, The Queen of the Air with Samuel Archer King as navigator held by a cable 1,200 feet above the city. Eight pictures were exposed, using wet plates prepared in the balloon as needed. One good photograph resulted - Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It, which showed an area bounded by Brattle Street on the north, the harbour on the east, Sumner Street on the south, and Park Street on the west. (Credit for the first aerial photograph goes to French author and artist Felix Tournachon who used the nom de plume Nadar. He captured the first aerial photo from a balloon tethered over the Bievre Valley in 1858, though his work is lost.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wallace_Black
1863 Ohio voters reject Vallandigham. The voters of Ohio send Clement Vallandigham to a resounding defeat in the fall gubernatorial election. As leader of the Copperheads, or antiwar Democrats, Vallandigham was an important and highly visible critic of the Republican's war policy, particularly the emancipation of slaves.
Vallandigham was elected to the House of Representatives in 1858. He was a Democrat and disapproved of slavery, but he admired Southern society and disagreed with starting a war over the issue of slave emancipation. He advocated states rights and generally agreed with most Southern political views. When the war began, he became a vociferous critic of both the method and war aims of the Republicans. As the war turned bloodier and it became clear that a Union victory would take years, Vallandigham began to gather supporters, and he became recognized as the leader of the Peace Democrats, or Copperheads. When the Lincoln administration began to curtail civil liberties, Vallandigham's criticism placed him in increasing jeopardy. In spring 1863, General Ambrose Burnside issued Order No. 38, which stated that public criticism of the war would not be tolerated. Vallandigham defied the order, and he was arrested on May 8. He was tried on charges of "expressing treasonable sympathy" with the enemy, and he was found guilty by a military tribunal in Cincinnati. He was banished to the Confederacy on May 25, 1862.
After a short stay there, Vallandigham relocated to Windsor, Ontario, and, despite his exile, mounted a campaign to become the Ohio governor. Elections were a barometer of the Northern war effort. In 1862, voters expressed dissatisfaction with President Lincoln by sending many Democrats to Congress. However, in 1863, after key Union successes at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the voters increased Republican control of both houses. In Ohio, Vallandigham lost by more than 100,000 votes out of a half million ballots cast. He returned to the United States in 1864 and continued his criticism of "King Lincoln," as he called the president. Lincoln ignored him, but Vallandigham helped write the 1864 Democratic platform. By insisting that a statement be included declaring the war a failure and calling for an immediate end to fighting, Vallandigham helped ensure a Democratic defeat.
After the war, he practiced law and tried to get back into Ohio Democratic politics, but Democratic leaders rejected him as a senatorial candidate. In the early 1870s, he became an advocate of bridging the gap between Democrats and Republicans, a movement that spawned the Liberal Republican Party. Vallandigham died in 1871 when he accidentally killed himself showing a friend how a murder had been committed (he was defending the accused murderer).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Vallandigham
1881 Revival of the Hebrew language as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and friends agree to use Hebrew exclusively in their conversations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda
1884 Greenwich was adopted as the universal meridian. At the behest of the U.S. President, 41 delegates from 25 nations met in Washington, DC, for the International Meridian Conference. At the Conference several important principles were established: a single world meridian passing through the principal Transit Instrument at the Observatory at Greenwich; that all longitude would be calculated both east and west from this meridian up to 180°; a universal day; and studies of the decimal system to the division of time and space. Resolution 2, fixing the Meridian at Greenwich was passed 22-1 (San Domingo voted against, France & Brazil abstained). Greenwich lies on the River Thames, a few miles from central London.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Meridian
1885 The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) is founded in Atlanta, Georgia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Institute_of_Technology
1892 Edward Emerson Barnard discovers D/1892 T1, the first comet discovered by photographic means, on the night of October 13–14.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Emerson_Barnard
1893 The melody for "Happy Birthday To You" (originally published as "Good Morning To All" in Mildred J. and Patty S. Hill's "Song Stories for the Kindergarten") was copyright registered.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
1903 Pirates beats Pilgrims (Red Sox) 5 games to 3 in first World Series. An overworked Deacon Phillippe pitches his 5th complete game of the Series, losing to Bill Dinneen 3-0. Only 7,455, the smallest crowd of the Series, see Boston win the championship. Deacon's five decisions and 44 IP are still World Series records, as are his starting two straight World Series games, twice Hobe Ferriss' 4th inning single drives in the first of two runs in the inning.
1903 "Babes in Toyland" entertained youngsters of all ages in NYC. "Babes in Toyland" was a 1903 operetta by Victor Herbert, which wove together various characters from Mother Goose nursery rhymes into a musical--mainly because librettist Glen MacDonough wanted to cash in on the Wizard of Oz phenomena sweeping Broadway that year. It features some of Herbert's most famous songs - among them "Toyland", "March of the Toys", "Go To Sleep, Slumber Deep", and "I Can't Do The Sum."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babes_in_Toyland_(operetta)
1914 Garrett Morgan invented and patented a gas mask, a breathing device consisting of a canvas hood placed over the head. A double tube extended from the hood and merged into a single tube at the back. The open end held a sponge soaked with water to filter out smoke and to cool incoming air. On 25 Jul 1916, Morgan made national news for using the gas mask to recover several men trapped after an explosion in a new waterworks tunnel beneath Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio. After the rescue, Morgan's company received requests from fire departments around the country who wished to purchase the new masks. The Morgan gas mask was later refined for use by U.S. Army during World War I. One of Morgan's other inventions was an early traffic signal (patented in 1923).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Morgan
1918 Mehmed Talat Pasha and the Young Turk (C.U.P.) ministry resign and sign an armistice, ending Ottoman participation in World War I.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_Talat_Pasha
1939 Harry James and his band featuring Frank Sinatra recorded "On a Little Street in Singapore". In 1939 the wife of bandleader and trumpet player Harry James heard Sinatra on the radio. James, who Sinatra had been trying to contact via photos and letters sent, hired Sinatra on a salary of $75 a week and the two recorded together for the first time on July 13, 1939. Although the Harry James Orchestra never met with a huge amount of success, they were generally well received and Sinatra, who recorded ten songs with the group for Brunswick and Columbia, gained a great deal of experience with the group. At the end of the year he left James to join the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, where he rose to fame as a ballad singer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sinatra
1943 World War II: The new government of Italy sides with the Allies and declares war on Germany.
1943 Poet Robert Lowell sentenced to prison. On this day in 1943, 26-year-old poet Robert Lowell is sentenced to jail for a year for evading the draft. Lowell refused to be drafted because he objected to saturation bombing in Europe and other Allied tactics. He served the term in New York's West Street jail.
Lowell was born to a venerable Boston family whose members included an ambassador to England, a president of Harvard, and a prominent Boston minister who founded St. Mark's School, which Lowell attended. Lowell rejected the family tradition and history, dropped out of Harvard after two years, and went to Kenyon College in Ohio. There, he studied with poet John Crowe Ransom and joined the Roman Catholic Church. He married novelist Jean Stafford in the 40s and in 1946 published a collection of poems called Lord Weary's Castle, which won a Pulitzer Prize. The poems included The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.
In 1948, Lowell divorced his first wife and married writer Elizabeth Hardwick. Plagued by mental illness, he suffered a breakdown in the 1950s. Lowell and Hardwick lived abroad for several years and returned to Boston in 1954. In the late 1950s, Lowell heard readings by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets and incorporated their open, confessional style into his own more formal poetry. He wrote about his breakdown, his struggle with mental instability, and the unraveling of his marriages, and released Life Studies (1959), which won the National Book Award. In the 1960s, Lowell became a champion of civil rights and a protester against Vietnam. Believing that the poet had a public responsibility, he was one of a group of writers who led a march to the Pentagon in 1967. He released numerous books throughout his career. He was divorced from Hardwick in 1972, leaving her and their daughter and marrying Lady Caroline Blackwood. For a while, he divided his time between England and Boston. He later returned to Hardwick and remained with her until he died of a heart attack in 1977.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowell#Imprisonment
1944 World War II: Riga, the capital of Latvia is seized by the Red Army.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga#World_War_II_and_the_Soviet_Union
1947 "Kukla, Fran & Ollie" premieres. "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" is unique in the history of television: a live, daily, ad-libbed puppet show that was watched by more adults than children. Burr Tillstrom was the creator and only puppeteer on the show, which premiered as the hourlong Junior Jamboree locally on WBKB in Chicago on October 13, 1947. The program was renamed Kukla, Fran and Ollie (KFO) and transferred to WNBQ (the predecessor of Chicago's WMAQ-TV) on November 29, 1948. The first NBC network broadcast of the show took place on January 12, 1949. It aired from 6-6:30 p.m. Central Time Monday through Friday.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukla,_Fran_and_Ollie
1950 Jimmy Stewart stars in Harvey. On this day in 1950, the actor James Stewart stars in Harvey, a drama about an eccentric man whose best friend is a giant invisible rabbit. Directed by Henry Koster and based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Mary Chase, Harvey earned Stewart the fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination of his career. Considered one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest leading men, Stewart appeared in some 80 movies during his career, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story and It’s a Wonderful Life, and was best known for his portrayals of decent, idealistic men.
Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania. At Princeton University, he performed in musical comedies with the Triangle Club before graduating in 1932 with a degree in architecture. There wasn’t a great demand for architects in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, so Stewart turned to acting, landing his first big role on Broadway in 1934 in Yellow Jack. The following year he signed a contract with MGM and made his big-screen debut in The Murder Man, starring Spencer Tracy. He went on to appear in such movies as You Can’t Take It With You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which his performance as an idealistic senator catapulted him to stardom and earned him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination; Destry Rides Again (1939), in which he played a marshal opposite Marlene Dietrich; and The Philadelphia Story (1940), in which he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. In 1941, at the age of 33, Stewart joined the military as a pilot. Before he returned home in 1945, he reportedly flew 20 bombing missions over Germany.
In 1946, Stewart starred in the director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. According to Stewart’s 1997 obituary in the New York Times: “His archetypal role (and his own favorite) was that of George Bailey, the small-town banker in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ Frank Capra’s moralistic fantasy in which the hero is rescued from suicide by a pixieish angel who shows him how much meaner life would have been in his hometown without him. The 1946 feature-length Christmas card was a failure among audiences, who dismissed it as overly sentimental, but in later decades it became one of the most popular movies ever made and a holiday staple on television.”
After Stewart’s acclaimed performance in Harvey, he appeared in such films as The Glenn Miller Story (1954), in which he played the popular big-band leader; Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), in which he played a wheelchair-bound voyeur photographer; The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); and The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), which featured Stewart as the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. His films during the 1950s also include Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), in which he starred as a retired detective opposite Kim Novak; and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), for which he earned his fifth Oscar nomination. During the 1960s, Stewart’s movie credits included The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Shootist (1976).
His final movie was the 1991 animated feature An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, in which he voiced the character of Wylie. Stewart died in Beverly Hills, California on July 2, 1997, at the age of 89.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Stewart
1951 "Because of You" by Tony Bennett topped the charts. Bennett got a break when Bob Hope saw him performing with Pearl Bailey in Greenwich Village and put him into his stage show, also suggesting a name change to Tony Bennett. In 1950, Columbia Records A&R director Mitch Miller heard his demonstration recording of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and signed him to the label. Bennett's first hit, "Because of You," topped the charts in September 1951, succeeded at number one by his cover of Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart." Following another five chart entries over the next two years, he returned to number one in November 1953 with "Rags to Riches."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bennett
1953 World's first traveling art museum opens in Virginia[/b]The world's first art museum on wheels—an "inspiration for the nation," says a representative from the Smithsonian--opens today in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was called the Artmobile. At the dedication ceremony, the state's governor declared that the project "initiates something new in the cultural and spiritual life of the Commonwealth which has never been done before anywhere."
It took the staff of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts almost five years to get the Artmobile up and running. The Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs paid its operating expenses, about $11,000 per year, while Richmond department store Miller & Rhodes paid for the Artmobile itself: a $20,000, 34-foot-long air-conditioned trailer with museum-quality lighting and walls that hinged out to create a lean-to-esque exhibition space around the vehicle. The trailer was pulled around the state behind an enormous blue truck; at the wheel was William Gaines, the retired registrar of the Virginia Museum.
Visitors entered the Artmobile in small groups and were free to look at the art on display for as long as they liked. (Admission was free for schoolchildren and members of local women's clubs; everyone else paid 25 cents to get in.) Meanwhile, a 15-minute mini-lecture explaining the significance of the works in the exhibition looped in the background. The lecture was very informal and was usually narrated by a local radio personality, so most visitors felt right at home.
For its first tour through the state, the Artmobile carried sixteen paintings by 15th- and 16th-century Dutch and Flemish "Little Masters": Bosch, Brueghel, Cuyp, Jordaens, van Rhysdael and Terborsch. The museum had borrowed the paintings, worth about $500,000, from the collection of Walter P. Chrysler Jr. (Chrysler, an art collector and theater producer whose father founded the Chrysler Corporation, had an estate near Warrenton, Virginia.) In all, the Little Masters traveled 20,000 miles in their first 53 weeks on the road and had 60,000 visitors, mostly students who had never been to the brick-and-mortar museum in Richmond.
The Artmobile was so successful that other states began to plan similar projects. By 1965, there were four Artmobiles in Virginia and a handful of others in places like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Today, there are dozens of Artmobile-inspired museums on wheels in cities and towns across the United States and around the world.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-traveling-art-museum-opens-in-virginia
1953 The first U.S. patent for a burglar alarm operated by ultrasonic sound was issued to Samuel Bagno of New York City (No. 2,655,645) on a system for movement detection in a confined space by intruders or fire. It was manufactured as the Alertronic and first sold in Jun 1950. A sound source produced waves of 19,000 hertz, a frequency too high for normal human hearing. An intruder could be detected by the alarm by a difference in frequency of the reflected waves from the moving body (the Doppler effect). The device would then sound an alarm.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burglar_alarm
illumin.usc.edu/165/motion-sensors/
1956 "Hound Dog/Don't Be Cruel" by Elvis Presley topped the charts. Elvis recorded 28 takes of Hound Dog before pronouncing himself satisfied. It was released as a single with "Don't Be Cruel," it was #1 in the US for 11 weeks, a record that was not broken until 1992 by "End Of The Road" by Boyz II Men. Chart position at the time was based on sales, so both songs share the same position. It is the only single in history to have both sides reach #1 in the US.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound_Dog_(song)
1957 Two superstars introduced a new car on CBS-TV. The Edsel Show was an hour-long television special broadcast live on CBS in the United States on October 13, 1957, intended to promote Ford Motor Company's new Edsel cars. It was a milestone in Bing Crosby's career, and was notable as the first full-length television program to use the new technology of videotape. The show starred Bing Crosby and featured Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, Lindsay Crosby and The Four Preps. It also featured an appearance by a "mystery guest" who turned out to be Bob Hope. The show replaced the Ed Sullivan Show in CBS's Sunday lineup and was one of the year's most successful programs, although its popularity did not transfer to the Edsel cars.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edsel_Show
1958 "Tea for Two Cha Cha" by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra made the pop chart. This day was musically memorable as Warren Covington conducted the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra for what would be the last big band tune to climb the pop charts. "Tea for Two Cha Cha" made it into the Top 10, peaking at #7.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Dorsey
1961 Kookie with a coat and tie? For the first time since "77 Sunset Strip" debuted (Oct. 10, 1958), viewers saw Gerald Lloyd "Kookie" Kookson III (Edd Byrnes) wearing a coat and tie. It was "the ginchiest." Kookie, Kookie, lend us your comb.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edd_Byrnes
1962 "Sherry" by the Four Seasons topped the charts.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_(song)
Storm trajectory compared to two other important storms hitting the Pacific Northwest in 1981 and 1995
1962 The Pacific Northwest experiences a cyclone the equal of a Cat 3 hurricane. Winds measured above 150 mph at several locations; 46 people died.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962
1963 "Beatlemania" is coined after the Beatles appear at the Palladium
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatlemania
1967 The first game in the history of the American Basketball Association is played as the Anaheim Amigos lose to the Oakland Oaks 134-129 in Oakland, California.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Basketball_Association
1971 Donny Osmond earned a gold record for "Go Away Little Girl". In the mid-Sixties, the Osmonds (now with Donny) also did TV shows with Jerry Lewis and toured with Pat Boone and Phyllis Diller. By the time the boys began recording, they'd all learned to play instruments, and through diligent touring had become a mammoth MOR attraction. Their 1971 debut LP went gold, as did Donny's million-selling debut single, "Sweet and Innocent" (#7). Earlier that year, the brothers scored a gold hit with the Jackson 5-style "One Bad Apple" (#1). Other 1971 hit singles for the Osmonds included "Double Lovin'" (#14), "I Can't Stop" (#96), and the million-selling "Yo-Yo" (#3); Donny hit gold again with "Go Away Little Girl" (#1).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_Osmond
1971 First World Series night game (Pittsburgh 4-Baltimore 3)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_World_Series
1973 The Rolling Stones’ "Goat’s Head Soup" was number one album in the U.S
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones
1973 "Half-Breed" by Cher topped the charts. Cher's early 1970s material, solo or with Sonny, had a more adult point of view and personality. "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" and the later number one solo hits "Half-Breed" and "Dark Lady" were dramatic, highly intense performances, almost as much "acted" as sung, and very different from her 1960s output.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cher
1975 Singer Charlie Rich protests John Denver's big win at the CMA Awards. In a 35-year career that ran from the rockabilly genius of "Lonely Weekends" (1960) to the Countrypolitan splendor of "Behind Closed Doors" (1973), the versatile and soulful Charlie Rich earned eleven #1 hits on the Country charts and one crossover smash with the #1 pop hit "The Most Beautiful Girl" (1973). The man they called the Silver Fox displayed a natural talent for pleasing many different audiences, but his non-singing performance before one particular audience in 1975 did significant damage to the remainder of his career. On this day in 1975, the man voted Entertainer of the Year for by the Country Music Association of America one year earlier stood onstage at the CMA awards show to announce that year's winner of the Association's biggest award. But a funny thing happened when he opened the envelope and saw what was written inside. Instead of merely reading the name "John Denver" and stepping back from the podium, Charlie Rich reached into his pocket for a cigarette lighter and set the envelope on fire, right there onstage. Though the display shocked the live audience in attendance, John Denver himself was present only via satellite linkup, and he offered a gracious acceptance speech with no idea what had occurred.
In the aftermath of the incident, Charlie Rich was blacklisted from the CMA awards show for the rest of his career. But what point was he trying to make, exactly? It was widely assumed at the time that Rich was taking a stand on the side of country traditionalists upset at a notable incursion of pop dabblers into country music at the time (Olivia Newton-John, for instance, had won the Most Promising Female Vocalist award in 1973, for instance). But Rich himself was often accused of being "not country enough," so that may not have been his intent. While it made better newspaper copy to suggest that he specifically resented John Denver's win, Rich was also, by his own admission, on a combination of prescription pain medication and gin-and-tonics that night.
As his son, Charlie Rich, Jr., has written of the incident, "He used bad judgment. He was human after all. I know the last thing my father would have wanted to do was set himself up as judge of another musician."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Rich#Career_peak_in_the_1970s
1976 The first electron micrograph of an Ebola viral particle was obtained by Dr. F.A. Murphy, now at U.C. Davis, who was then working at the C.D.C.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease
1977 Four Palestinians hijack Lufthansa Flight 181 to Somalia and demand release of 11 members of the Red Army Faction. Four Palestinians hijack a Lufthansa airliner and demand the release of 11 imprisoned members of Germany's Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, also known as the Red Army Faction. The Red Army Faction was a group of ultra-left revolutionaries who terrorized Germany for three decades, assassinating more than 30 corporate, military, and government leaders in an effort to topple capitalism in their homeland.
The Palestinian hijackers took the plane on a six-country odyssey, eventually landing at Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 17, after shooting one of the plane's pilots. Early the next morning, a German special forces team stormed the aircraft, releasing 86 hostages and killing three of the four hijackers. Only one of the German commandos was wounded. The Red Army Faction's imprisoned leaders responded to the news later that day by committing suicide in their jail cell, in Stammheim, Germany.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_181
1978 Tiros N, US's first 3rd generation weather satellite (Television Infrared Observation Satellite), is launched. TIROS-N was an experimental satellite which carried an Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) to provide day and night cloud top and sea surface temperatures, as well as ice and snow conditions; an atmospheric sounding system to provide vertical profiles of temperature and water vapor from the Earth's surface to the top of the atmosphere; and a solar proton monitor to detect the arrival of energetic particles for use in solar storm prediction.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Infrared_Observation_Satellite
1982 IOC restores 2 gold medals from 1912 Olympics to Jim Thorpe. During the summers of 1909 and 1910, Thorpe was paid - reports have him earning from $2 a game to $35 a week - for playing for Rocky Mountain in Fayetteville in the Class D Eastern Carolina League. He naively used his real name, unlike other collegians who adopted pseudonyms to foil amateur rules. Pleas to have Thorpe's good name restored to Olympic rolls persisted. They were based on a rule, in effect in 1912, which said officials had 30 days to contest an athlete's amateur status. Thorpe's standing did not come into question until six months after the Games. It was not until October 13, 1982, that the International Olympic Committee finally agreed to restore Thorpe's gold medals.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe
1983 Ameritech Mobile Communications (now AT&T) launched the first US cellular network in Chicago, Illinois.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ameritech_Mobile_Communications
1984 John Henry becomes first thoroughbred to win $6 million
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(horse)
1984 "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder topped the charts. Wonder had moved to a much more Adult Contemporary sound when he released this. His early hits like "Superstition" and "Higher Ground" were often funky and original. In the '80s, songs like this and "Part-Time Lover[/i]" were big hits, but vastly different from his earlier work.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Just_Called_to_Say_I_Love_You
1985 At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, the first observation was made of proton-antiproton collisions by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) with 1.6 TeV center-of-mass energy. In all, 23 of collisions were detected in Oct 1985. The Tevatron, four miles in circumference (originally named the Energy Doubler), is the world's highest-energy particle accelerator. Its low-temperature cooling system was the largest ever built when it was placed in operation in 1983. Its 1,000 superconducting magnets are cooled by liquid helium to -268 deg C (-450 deg F). Fermilab (originally named the National Accelerator Laboratory) was commissioned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in a bill signed by President Johnson on 21 Nov 1967.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_National_Accelerator_Laboratory
1986 Four tornadoes struck southeastern Virginia late in the night causing three million dollars damage. Tornadoes at Falls Church VA caused a million dollars damage. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders)
1987 First military use of trained dolphins (US Navy in Persian Gulf). n 1987 to 1988 dolphin teams were deployed to Manama Harbor in Bahrain to protect the Navy's Sixth Fleet flagship, the USS LaSalle, which was helping direct Kuwaiti tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, a channel that had been mined by Iraq during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dolphin
1987 - Fifteen cities in the eastern U.S. reported record low temperatures for the date. Record lows included 34 degrees at Meridian MS, 28 degrees at Paducah KY, and 26 degrees at Beckley WV. Another surge of arctic air entered the north central U.S. bringing snow to parts of Wyoming and Colorado. (The National Weather Summary)
1988 - A total of forty-three cities in the eastern U.S. and the Upper Midwest reported record low temperatures for the date, including Elkins WV and Marquette MI where the mercury dipped to 18 degrees. (The National Weather Summary)
1989 - Sixteen cities reported record high temperatures for the date as readings warmed into the 80s and low 90s from the Southern and Central Plains to the Southern and Middle Atlantic Coast. Evansville IND and North Platte NE reported record highs of 91 degrees. (The National Weather Summary)
1990 "Praying for Time" by George Michael topped the charts. As songwriter and lead singer of Wham!, Michael gradually overshadowed the group, and by the time they split, he was ready for a massively successful solo career. This began with the 1987 album Faith, which featured a series of chart-topping hit singles and sold more than seven million copies. That Michael had not achieved a similar critical success was evident from the title of his follow-up album, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, which must be considered a major commercial disappointment even though it sold a million copies, included two Top Ten hits, and hit number two.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praying_for_Time
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1994 Netscape Communications Corporation announced that it was offering its new Netscape Navigator free to users via the Internet.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communications_Corporation
1999 The United States Senate rejects ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Test_Ban_Treaty#US_ratification_of_the_CTBT
1999 Grand jury dismissed in JonBenet Ramsey murder case. The Colorado grand jury investigating the case of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, who was murdered in December 1996, is dismissed and the Boulder County district attorney announces no indictments will be made due to insufficient evidence.
On the morning of December 26, 1996, Patsy Ramsey discovered her 6-year-old daughter was missing after finding a ransom note in the family’s Boulder home. Patsy, a former Miss West Virginia, and her husband John, a wealthy business executive, called police and JonBenet’s body was discovered in the basement later that day. The coroner determined the girl had died of asphyxia strangulation and an autopsy later revealed she had been bound and struck violently in the head, causing bleeding and an 8.5-inch fracture to her skull.
Police questioned various people, including a man who had played Santa Claus at the Ramsey home several days before the murder; however, John and Patsy Ramsey eventually emerged as the primary suspects in the case. After being formally interviewed by investigators on April 30, 1997, the couple held a news conference the next day proclaiming their innocence. They believed the murder was committed by an intruder. The case generated an enormous media frenzy but no arrests and the Boulder police and prosecutors received criticism for their handling of the investigation. In September 1998, a grand jury was convened to investigate the murder. The following year, on October 13, 1999, Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter announced that the grand jury had been dismissed and no indictments would be made due to lack of evidence.
John and Patsy Ramsey continued to face intense public scrutiny. In March 2000, the couple released a book about the case titled The Death of Innocence. On June 24, 2006, Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer at age 49. In August of that year, U.S. law enforcement officials in Thailand arrested 41-year-old John Mark Karr, an American schoolteacher, in connection with child pornography charges in California. Karr stated he was with JonBenet Ramsey when she was killed but her death had been an accident. He was charged with murder, kidnapping and sexual assault on a child. However, on August 28, 2006, all charges against Karr were dropped after DNA tests failed to link him to the crime. To date, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey remains unsolved.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JonBen%C3%A9t_Ramsey
2010 The 2010 Copiapó mining accident in Copiapó, Chile comes to an end as all 33 miners arrive at the surface after surviving a record 69 days underground awaiting rescue.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiap%C3%B3_mining_accident
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akaCG
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_13
www.scopesys.com/cgi-bin/today2.cgi
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/white-house-cornerstone-laid
www.amug.org/~jpaul/oct13.html
daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.todayinsci.com/10/10_13.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_13_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)
There are 80 days remaining until the end of the year.
Days until Election Day, Tuesday November 6, 2012: 25
Countdown until Obama leaves Office www.obamaclock.org/
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
1362 The Chancellor of England for the first time opened Parliament with a speech in English.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancellor_of_England#History
1670 In Virginia, slavery was banned for Negroes who arrived in the American colonies as Christians. (The law was repealed in 1682.)
1775 Continental Congress orders construction of a naval fleet. Congress planned to equip two ships that would operate under the direct authority of Congress to capture British supply transports. This was not carried out until October 13, 1775, when George Washington announced that he had taken command of three armed schooners under Continental authority to intercept any British supply ships near Massachusetts. With the revelation that vessels were already sailing under Continental control, the decision to add two more was made easier the resolution was adopted and October 13 would later become known as the United States Navy's official birthday.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Navy#Origins
Surrender of General Burgoyne by John Trumbull, 1822; This painting hangs in the United States Capitol Rotunda.
1777 After his defeat on October 7, 1777, British General John Burgoyne's Army at The Battles of Saratoga become surrounded by superior numbers, setting the stage for its surrender — which feat of arms inspires the Kingdom of France to enter the American Revolutionary War against the British.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battles_Of_Saratoga
1792 The cornerstone of the White House was laid by George Washington. The building is three stories tall with over 100 rooms, and was designed by James Hoban. In November of 1800, President John Adams and his family moved in. The building was first known as the "Presidential Palace," but acquired the name "White House" about 10 years after its completion.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House#1789.E2.80.931800
1812 War of 1812: Battle of Queenston Heights As part of the Niagara campaign in Ontario, Canada, United States forces under General Stephen Van Rensselaer are repulsed from invading Canada by British and native troops led by Sir Isaac Brock.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Queenston_Heights
1843 B'nai Brith founded in NY founded by Henry Jones and 11 others. B'nai Brith is the oldest and largest Jewish service organization in the world, founded in New York--to provide service to their own people and to humanity at large.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%27nai_Brith
1845 A majority of voters in the Republic of Texas approve a proposed constitution, that if accepted by the U.S. Congress, will make Texas a U.S. state. On this day in 1845, a majority of the citizens of the independent Republic of Texas approve a proposed constitution, that when accepted by the Congress, will make Texas the 28th American state.
Despite having fought a war to win their independence from their old colonial master, Mexico, the people of Texas had long been eager to become part of the United States. Under the leadership of the Republic's first president, Sam Houston, Texas had proclaimed its independence from Mexico in 1836, while simultaneously indicating a desire to be annexed to the United States. But while many Americans were willing to see the massive Texan Republic join their nation, Congress refused at the urging of influential northern abolitionists who claimed that Texas was controlled by a "slaveocracy conspiracy" of southerners.
The political climate shifted in the favor of Texas with the presidential election of 1844, when the victory of James K. Polk was widely seen as a mandate from the people to bring Texas into the American fold. But before Polk could take office, President John Tyler beat him to the punch by securing a congressional resolution calling for annexation. With the strong approval of most Texans, Polk signed the legislation making Texas an American state on December 29, 1845. Ominously, the Mexican minister had meanwhile warned the U.S. that his nation would consider annexation an act of war and demanded his passport in preparation for departure. Mexico and the United States would be at war within a year.
[a href="en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Texas"]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Texas[/a][/url]
1846 A great hurricane tracked across Cuba, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The hurricane inflicted major damage along its entire path, which was similar to the path of Hurricane Hazel 108 years later. The hurricane caused great damage at Key West FL, and at Philadelphia PA it was the most destructive storm in thirty years. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Havana_Hurricane_of_1846
1853 The Pennsylvania and LeHigh Zinc Company Mill was erected in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This mill produced the first commercial zinc, which was obtained from calamine ores. Four acres of land was bought by Samuel Wetherill, of Philadelphia. The Lehigh Zinc Company was eventually acquired by the New Jersey Zinc Company.
todayinsci.com/Events/Technology/PennsylvaniaLehighZincCo.htm
1860 The first successful aerial photograph in the U.S. was taken over Boston by James Wallace Black in a balloon, The Queen of the Air with Samuel Archer King as navigator held by a cable 1,200 feet above the city. Eight pictures were exposed, using wet plates prepared in the balloon as needed. One good photograph resulted - Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It, which showed an area bounded by Brattle Street on the north, the harbour on the east, Sumner Street on the south, and Park Street on the west. (Credit for the first aerial photograph goes to French author and artist Felix Tournachon who used the nom de plume Nadar. He captured the first aerial photo from a balloon tethered over the Bievre Valley in 1858, though his work is lost.)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Wallace_Black
1863 Ohio voters reject Vallandigham. The voters of Ohio send Clement Vallandigham to a resounding defeat in the fall gubernatorial election. As leader of the Copperheads, or antiwar Democrats, Vallandigham was an important and highly visible critic of the Republican's war policy, particularly the emancipation of slaves.
Vallandigham was elected to the House of Representatives in 1858. He was a Democrat and disapproved of slavery, but he admired Southern society and disagreed with starting a war over the issue of slave emancipation. He advocated states rights and generally agreed with most Southern political views. When the war began, he became a vociferous critic of both the method and war aims of the Republicans. As the war turned bloodier and it became clear that a Union victory would take years, Vallandigham began to gather supporters, and he became recognized as the leader of the Peace Democrats, or Copperheads. When the Lincoln administration began to curtail civil liberties, Vallandigham's criticism placed him in increasing jeopardy. In spring 1863, General Ambrose Burnside issued Order No. 38, which stated that public criticism of the war would not be tolerated. Vallandigham defied the order, and he was arrested on May 8. He was tried on charges of "expressing treasonable sympathy" with the enemy, and he was found guilty by a military tribunal in Cincinnati. He was banished to the Confederacy on May 25, 1862.
After a short stay there, Vallandigham relocated to Windsor, Ontario, and, despite his exile, mounted a campaign to become the Ohio governor. Elections were a barometer of the Northern war effort. In 1862, voters expressed dissatisfaction with President Lincoln by sending many Democrats to Congress. However, in 1863, after key Union successes at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the voters increased Republican control of both houses. In Ohio, Vallandigham lost by more than 100,000 votes out of a half million ballots cast. He returned to the United States in 1864 and continued his criticism of "King Lincoln," as he called the president. Lincoln ignored him, but Vallandigham helped write the 1864 Democratic platform. By insisting that a statement be included declaring the war a failure and calling for an immediate end to fighting, Vallandigham helped ensure a Democratic defeat.
After the war, he practiced law and tried to get back into Ohio Democratic politics, but Democratic leaders rejected him as a senatorial candidate. In the early 1870s, he became an advocate of bridging the gap between Democrats and Republicans, a movement that spawned the Liberal Republican Party. Vallandigham died in 1871 when he accidentally killed himself showing a friend how a murder had been committed (he was defending the accused murderer).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Vallandigham
1881 Revival of the Hebrew language as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and friends agree to use Hebrew exclusively in their conversations.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Ben-Yehuda
1884 Greenwich was adopted as the universal meridian. At the behest of the U.S. President, 41 delegates from 25 nations met in Washington, DC, for the International Meridian Conference. At the Conference several important principles were established: a single world meridian passing through the principal Transit Instrument at the Observatory at Greenwich; that all longitude would be calculated both east and west from this meridian up to 180°; a universal day; and studies of the decimal system to the division of time and space. Resolution 2, fixing the Meridian at Greenwich was passed 22-1 (San Domingo voted against, France & Brazil abstained). Greenwich lies on the River Thames, a few miles from central London.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwich_Meridian
1885 The Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) is founded in Atlanta, Georgia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Institute_of_Technology
1892 Edward Emerson Barnard discovers D/1892 T1, the first comet discovered by photographic means, on the night of October 13–14.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Emerson_Barnard
1893 The melody for "Happy Birthday To You" (originally published as "Good Morning To All" in Mildred J. and Patty S. Hill's "Song Stories for the Kindergarten") was copyright registered.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You
1903 Pirates beats Pilgrims (Red Sox) 5 games to 3 in first World Series. An overworked Deacon Phillippe pitches his 5th complete game of the Series, losing to Bill Dinneen 3-0. Only 7,455, the smallest crowd of the Series, see Boston win the championship. Deacon's five decisions and 44 IP are still World Series records, as are his starting two straight World Series games, twice Hobe Ferriss' 4th inning single drives in the first of two runs in the inning.
1903 "Babes in Toyland" entertained youngsters of all ages in NYC. "Babes in Toyland" was a 1903 operetta by Victor Herbert, which wove together various characters from Mother Goose nursery rhymes into a musical--mainly because librettist Glen MacDonough wanted to cash in on the Wizard of Oz phenomena sweeping Broadway that year. It features some of Herbert's most famous songs - among them "Toyland", "March of the Toys", "Go To Sleep, Slumber Deep", and "I Can't Do The Sum."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babes_in_Toyland_(operetta)
1914 Garrett Morgan invented and patented a gas mask, a breathing device consisting of a canvas hood placed over the head. A double tube extended from the hood and merged into a single tube at the back. The open end held a sponge soaked with water to filter out smoke and to cool incoming air. On 25 Jul 1916, Morgan made national news for using the gas mask to recover several men trapped after an explosion in a new waterworks tunnel beneath Lake Erie at Cleveland, Ohio. After the rescue, Morgan's company received requests from fire departments around the country who wished to purchase the new masks. The Morgan gas mask was later refined for use by U.S. Army during World War I. One of Morgan's other inventions was an early traffic signal (patented in 1923).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garrett_Morgan
1918 Mehmed Talat Pasha and the Young Turk (C.U.P.) ministry resign and sign an armistice, ending Ottoman participation in World War I.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehmed_Talat_Pasha
1939 Harry James and his band featuring Frank Sinatra recorded "On a Little Street in Singapore". In 1939 the wife of bandleader and trumpet player Harry James heard Sinatra on the radio. James, who Sinatra had been trying to contact via photos and letters sent, hired Sinatra on a salary of $75 a week and the two recorded together for the first time on July 13, 1939. Although the Harry James Orchestra never met with a huge amount of success, they were generally well received and Sinatra, who recorded ten songs with the group for Brunswick and Columbia, gained a great deal of experience with the group. At the end of the year he left James to join the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, where he rose to fame as a ballad singer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Sinatra
1943 World War II: The new government of Italy sides with the Allies and declares war on Germany.
1943 Poet Robert Lowell sentenced to prison. On this day in 1943, 26-year-old poet Robert Lowell is sentenced to jail for a year for evading the draft. Lowell refused to be drafted because he objected to saturation bombing in Europe and other Allied tactics. He served the term in New York's West Street jail.
Lowell was born to a venerable Boston family whose members included an ambassador to England, a president of Harvard, and a prominent Boston minister who founded St. Mark's School, which Lowell attended. Lowell rejected the family tradition and history, dropped out of Harvard after two years, and went to Kenyon College in Ohio. There, he studied with poet John Crowe Ransom and joined the Roman Catholic Church. He married novelist Jean Stafford in the 40s and in 1946 published a collection of poems called Lord Weary's Castle, which won a Pulitzer Prize. The poems included The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.
In 1948, Lowell divorced his first wife and married writer Elizabeth Hardwick. Plagued by mental illness, he suffered a breakdown in the 1950s. Lowell and Hardwick lived abroad for several years and returned to Boston in 1954. In the late 1950s, Lowell heard readings by Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets and incorporated their open, confessional style into his own more formal poetry. He wrote about his breakdown, his struggle with mental instability, and the unraveling of his marriages, and released Life Studies (1959), which won the National Book Award. In the 1960s, Lowell became a champion of civil rights and a protester against Vietnam. Believing that the poet had a public responsibility, he was one of a group of writers who led a march to the Pentagon in 1967. He released numerous books throughout his career. He was divorced from Hardwick in 1972, leaving her and their daughter and marrying Lady Caroline Blackwood. For a while, he divided his time between England and Boston. He later returned to Hardwick and remained with her until he died of a heart attack in 1977.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowell#Imprisonment
1944 World War II: Riga, the capital of Latvia is seized by the Red Army.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riga#World_War_II_and_the_Soviet_Union
1947 "Kukla, Fran & Ollie" premieres. "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" is unique in the history of television: a live, daily, ad-libbed puppet show that was watched by more adults than children. Burr Tillstrom was the creator and only puppeteer on the show, which premiered as the hourlong Junior Jamboree locally on WBKB in Chicago on October 13, 1947. The program was renamed Kukla, Fran and Ollie (KFO) and transferred to WNBQ (the predecessor of Chicago's WMAQ-TV) on November 29, 1948. The first NBC network broadcast of the show took place on January 12, 1949. It aired from 6-6:30 p.m. Central Time Monday through Friday.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukla,_Fran_and_Ollie
1950 Jimmy Stewart stars in Harvey. On this day in 1950, the actor James Stewart stars in Harvey, a drama about an eccentric man whose best friend is a giant invisible rabbit. Directed by Henry Koster and based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Mary Chase, Harvey earned Stewart the fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination of his career. Considered one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest leading men, Stewart appeared in some 80 movies during his career, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story and It’s a Wonderful Life, and was best known for his portrayals of decent, idealistic men.
Stewart was born on May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pennsylvania. At Princeton University, he performed in musical comedies with the Triangle Club before graduating in 1932 with a degree in architecture. There wasn’t a great demand for architects in the early 1930s, during the Great Depression, so Stewart turned to acting, landing his first big role on Broadway in 1934 in Yellow Jack. The following year he signed a contract with MGM and made his big-screen debut in The Murder Man, starring Spencer Tracy. He went on to appear in such movies as You Can’t Take It With You (1938); Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), in which his performance as an idealistic senator catapulted him to stardom and earned him his first Best Actor Oscar nomination; Destry Rides Again (1939), in which he played a marshal opposite Marlene Dietrich; and The Philadelphia Story (1940), in which he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. In 1941, at the age of 33, Stewart joined the military as a pilot. Before he returned home in 1945, he reportedly flew 20 bombing missions over Germany.
In 1946, Stewart starred in the director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. According to Stewart’s 1997 obituary in the New York Times: “His archetypal role (and his own favorite) was that of George Bailey, the small-town banker in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’ Frank Capra’s moralistic fantasy in which the hero is rescued from suicide by a pixieish angel who shows him how much meaner life would have been in his hometown without him. The 1946 feature-length Christmas card was a failure among audiences, who dismissed it as overly sentimental, but in later decades it became one of the most popular movies ever made and a holiday staple on television.”
After Stewart’s acclaimed performance in Harvey, he appeared in such films as The Glenn Miller Story (1954), in which he played the popular big-band leader; Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), in which he played a wheelchair-bound voyeur photographer; The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956); and The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), which featured Stewart as the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. His films during the 1950s also include Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), in which he starred as a retired detective opposite Kim Novak; and Anatomy of a Murder (1959), for which he earned his fifth Oscar nomination. During the 1960s, Stewart’s movie credits included The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and The Shootist (1976).
His final movie was the 1991 animated feature An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, in which he voiced the character of Wylie. Stewart died in Beverly Hills, California on July 2, 1997, at the age of 89.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Stewart
1951 "Because of You" by Tony Bennett topped the charts. Bennett got a break when Bob Hope saw him performing with Pearl Bailey in Greenwich Village and put him into his stage show, also suggesting a name change to Tony Bennett. In 1950, Columbia Records A&R director Mitch Miller heard his demonstration recording of "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and signed him to the label. Bennett's first hit, "Because of You," topped the charts in September 1951, succeeded at number one by his cover of Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold Heart." Following another five chart entries over the next two years, he returned to number one in November 1953 with "Rags to Riches."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Bennett
1953 World's first traveling art museum opens in Virginia[/b]The world's first art museum on wheels—an "inspiration for the nation," says a representative from the Smithsonian--opens today in Fredericksburg, Virginia. It was called the Artmobile. At the dedication ceremony, the state's governor declared that the project "initiates something new in the cultural and spiritual life of the Commonwealth which has never been done before anywhere."
It took the staff of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts almost five years to get the Artmobile up and running. The Virginia Federation of Women's Clubs paid its operating expenses, about $11,000 per year, while Richmond department store Miller & Rhodes paid for the Artmobile itself: a $20,000, 34-foot-long air-conditioned trailer with museum-quality lighting and walls that hinged out to create a lean-to-esque exhibition space around the vehicle. The trailer was pulled around the state behind an enormous blue truck; at the wheel was William Gaines, the retired registrar of the Virginia Museum.
Visitors entered the Artmobile in small groups and were free to look at the art on display for as long as they liked. (Admission was free for schoolchildren and members of local women's clubs; everyone else paid 25 cents to get in.) Meanwhile, a 15-minute mini-lecture explaining the significance of the works in the exhibition looped in the background. The lecture was very informal and was usually narrated by a local radio personality, so most visitors felt right at home.
For its first tour through the state, the Artmobile carried sixteen paintings by 15th- and 16th-century Dutch and Flemish "Little Masters": Bosch, Brueghel, Cuyp, Jordaens, van Rhysdael and Terborsch. The museum had borrowed the paintings, worth about $500,000, from the collection of Walter P. Chrysler Jr. (Chrysler, an art collector and theater producer whose father founded the Chrysler Corporation, had an estate near Warrenton, Virginia.) In all, the Little Masters traveled 20,000 miles in their first 53 weeks on the road and had 60,000 visitors, mostly students who had never been to the brick-and-mortar museum in Richmond.
The Artmobile was so successful that other states began to plan similar projects. By 1965, there were four Artmobiles in Virginia and a handful of others in places like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Today, there are dozens of Artmobile-inspired museums on wheels in cities and towns across the United States and around the world.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-traveling-art-museum-opens-in-virginia
1953 The first U.S. patent for a burglar alarm operated by ultrasonic sound was issued to Samuel Bagno of New York City (No. 2,655,645) on a system for movement detection in a confined space by intruders or fire. It was manufactured as the Alertronic and first sold in Jun 1950. A sound source produced waves of 19,000 hertz, a frequency too high for normal human hearing. An intruder could be detected by the alarm by a difference in frequency of the reflected waves from the moving body (the Doppler effect). The device would then sound an alarm.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burglar_alarm
illumin.usc.edu/165/motion-sensors/
1956 "Hound Dog/Don't Be Cruel" by Elvis Presley topped the charts. Elvis recorded 28 takes of Hound Dog before pronouncing himself satisfied. It was released as a single with "Don't Be Cruel," it was #1 in the US for 11 weeks, a record that was not broken until 1992 by "End Of The Road" by Boyz II Men. Chart position at the time was based on sales, so both songs share the same position. It is the only single in history to have both sides reach #1 in the US.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound_Dog_(song)
1957 Two superstars introduced a new car on CBS-TV. The Edsel Show was an hour-long television special broadcast live on CBS in the United States on October 13, 1957, intended to promote Ford Motor Company's new Edsel cars. It was a milestone in Bing Crosby's career, and was notable as the first full-length television program to use the new technology of videotape. The show starred Bing Crosby and featured Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, Lindsay Crosby and The Four Preps. It also featured an appearance by a "mystery guest" who turned out to be Bob Hope. The show replaced the Ed Sullivan Show in CBS's Sunday lineup and was one of the year's most successful programs, although its popularity did not transfer to the Edsel cars.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edsel_Show
1958 "Tea for Two Cha Cha" by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra made the pop chart. This day was musically memorable as Warren Covington conducted the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra for what would be the last big band tune to climb the pop charts. "Tea for Two Cha Cha" made it into the Top 10, peaking at #7.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Dorsey
1961 Kookie with a coat and tie? For the first time since "77 Sunset Strip" debuted (Oct. 10, 1958), viewers saw Gerald Lloyd "Kookie" Kookson III (Edd Byrnes) wearing a coat and tie. It was "the ginchiest." Kookie, Kookie, lend us your comb.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edd_Byrnes
1962 "Sherry" by the Four Seasons topped the charts.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherry_(song)
Storm trajectory compared to two other important storms hitting the Pacific Northwest in 1981 and 1995
1962 The Pacific Northwest experiences a cyclone the equal of a Cat 3 hurricane. Winds measured above 150 mph at several locations; 46 people died.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day_Storm_of_1962
1963 "Beatlemania" is coined after the Beatles appear at the Palladium
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatlemania
1967 The first game in the history of the American Basketball Association is played as the Anaheim Amigos lose to the Oakland Oaks 134-129 in Oakland, California.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Basketball_Association
1971 Donny Osmond earned a gold record for "Go Away Little Girl". In the mid-Sixties, the Osmonds (now with Donny) also did TV shows with Jerry Lewis and toured with Pat Boone and Phyllis Diller. By the time the boys began recording, they'd all learned to play instruments, and through diligent touring had become a mammoth MOR attraction. Their 1971 debut LP went gold, as did Donny's million-selling debut single, "Sweet and Innocent" (#7). Earlier that year, the brothers scored a gold hit with the Jackson 5-style "One Bad Apple" (#1). Other 1971 hit singles for the Osmonds included "Double Lovin'" (#14), "I Can't Stop" (#96), and the million-selling "Yo-Yo" (#3); Donny hit gold again with "Go Away Little Girl" (#1).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donny_Osmond
1971 First World Series night game (Pittsburgh 4-Baltimore 3)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_World_Series
1973 The Rolling Stones’ "Goat’s Head Soup" was number one album in the U.S
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones
1973 "Half-Breed" by Cher topped the charts. Cher's early 1970s material, solo or with Sonny, had a more adult point of view and personality. "Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves" and the later number one solo hits "Half-Breed" and "Dark Lady" were dramatic, highly intense performances, almost as much "acted" as sung, and very different from her 1960s output.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cher
1975 Singer Charlie Rich protests John Denver's big win at the CMA Awards. In a 35-year career that ran from the rockabilly genius of "Lonely Weekends" (1960) to the Countrypolitan splendor of "Behind Closed Doors" (1973), the versatile and soulful Charlie Rich earned eleven #1 hits on the Country charts and one crossover smash with the #1 pop hit "The Most Beautiful Girl" (1973). The man they called the Silver Fox displayed a natural talent for pleasing many different audiences, but his non-singing performance before one particular audience in 1975 did significant damage to the remainder of his career. On this day in 1975, the man voted Entertainer of the Year for by the Country Music Association of America one year earlier stood onstage at the CMA awards show to announce that year's winner of the Association's biggest award. But a funny thing happened when he opened the envelope and saw what was written inside. Instead of merely reading the name "John Denver" and stepping back from the podium, Charlie Rich reached into his pocket for a cigarette lighter and set the envelope on fire, right there onstage. Though the display shocked the live audience in attendance, John Denver himself was present only via satellite linkup, and he offered a gracious acceptance speech with no idea what had occurred.
In the aftermath of the incident, Charlie Rich was blacklisted from the CMA awards show for the rest of his career. But what point was he trying to make, exactly? It was widely assumed at the time that Rich was taking a stand on the side of country traditionalists upset at a notable incursion of pop dabblers into country music at the time (Olivia Newton-John, for instance, had won the Most Promising Female Vocalist award in 1973, for instance). But Rich himself was often accused of being "not country enough," so that may not have been his intent. While it made better newspaper copy to suggest that he specifically resented John Denver's win, Rich was also, by his own admission, on a combination of prescription pain medication and gin-and-tonics that night.
As his son, Charlie Rich, Jr., has written of the incident, "He used bad judgment. He was human after all. I know the last thing my father would have wanted to do was set himself up as judge of another musician."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Rich#Career_peak_in_the_1970s
1976 The first electron micrograph of an Ebola viral particle was obtained by Dr. F.A. Murphy, now at U.C. Davis, who was then working at the C.D.C.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_virus_disease
1977 Four Palestinians hijack Lufthansa Flight 181 to Somalia and demand release of 11 members of the Red Army Faction. Four Palestinians hijack a Lufthansa airliner and demand the release of 11 imprisoned members of Germany's Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, also known as the Red Army Faction. The Red Army Faction was a group of ultra-left revolutionaries who terrorized Germany for three decades, assassinating more than 30 corporate, military, and government leaders in an effort to topple capitalism in their homeland.
The Palestinian hijackers took the plane on a six-country odyssey, eventually landing at Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 17, after shooting one of the plane's pilots. Early the next morning, a German special forces team stormed the aircraft, releasing 86 hostages and killing three of the four hijackers. Only one of the German commandos was wounded. The Red Army Faction's imprisoned leaders responded to the news later that day by committing suicide in their jail cell, in Stammheim, Germany.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lufthansa_Flight_181
1978 Tiros N, US's first 3rd generation weather satellite (Television Infrared Observation Satellite), is launched. TIROS-N was an experimental satellite which carried an Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) to provide day and night cloud top and sea surface temperatures, as well as ice and snow conditions; an atmospheric sounding system to provide vertical profiles of temperature and water vapor from the Earth's surface to the top of the atmosphere; and a solar proton monitor to detect the arrival of energetic particles for use in solar storm prediction.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Infrared_Observation_Satellite
1982 IOC restores 2 gold medals from 1912 Olympics to Jim Thorpe. During the summers of 1909 and 1910, Thorpe was paid - reports have him earning from $2 a game to $35 a week - for playing for Rocky Mountain in Fayetteville in the Class D Eastern Carolina League. He naively used his real name, unlike other collegians who adopted pseudonyms to foil amateur rules. Pleas to have Thorpe's good name restored to Olympic rolls persisted. They were based on a rule, in effect in 1912, which said officials had 30 days to contest an athlete's amateur status. Thorpe's standing did not come into question until six months after the Games. It was not until October 13, 1982, that the International Olympic Committee finally agreed to restore Thorpe's gold medals.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Thorpe
1983 Ameritech Mobile Communications (now AT&T) launched the first US cellular network in Chicago, Illinois.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ameritech_Mobile_Communications
1984 John Henry becomes first thoroughbred to win $6 million
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(horse)
1984 "I Just Called to Say I Love You" by Stevie Wonder topped the charts. Wonder had moved to a much more Adult Contemporary sound when he released this. His early hits like "Superstition" and "Higher Ground" were often funky and original. In the '80s, songs like this and "Part-Time Lover[/i]" were big hits, but vastly different from his earlier work.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Just_Called_to_Say_I_Love_You
1985 At the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, the first observation was made of proton-antiproton collisions by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) with 1.6 TeV center-of-mass energy. In all, 23 of collisions were detected in Oct 1985. The Tevatron, four miles in circumference (originally named the Energy Doubler), is the world's highest-energy particle accelerator. Its low-temperature cooling system was the largest ever built when it was placed in operation in 1983. Its 1,000 superconducting magnets are cooled by liquid helium to -268 deg C (-450 deg F). Fermilab (originally named the National Accelerator Laboratory) was commissioned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in a bill signed by President Johnson on 21 Nov 1967.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_National_Accelerator_Laboratory
1986 Four tornadoes struck southeastern Virginia late in the night causing three million dollars damage. Tornadoes at Falls Church VA caused a million dollars damage. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders)
1987 First military use of trained dolphins (US Navy in Persian Gulf). n 1987 to 1988 dolphin teams were deployed to Manama Harbor in Bahrain to protect the Navy's Sixth Fleet flagship, the USS LaSalle, which was helping direct Kuwaiti tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, a channel that had been mined by Iraq during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dolphin
1987 - Fifteen cities in the eastern U.S. reported record low temperatures for the date. Record lows included 34 degrees at Meridian MS, 28 degrees at Paducah KY, and 26 degrees at Beckley WV. Another surge of arctic air entered the north central U.S. bringing snow to parts of Wyoming and Colorado. (The National Weather Summary)
1988 - A total of forty-three cities in the eastern U.S. and the Upper Midwest reported record low temperatures for the date, including Elkins WV and Marquette MI where the mercury dipped to 18 degrees. (The National Weather Summary)
1989 - Sixteen cities reported record high temperatures for the date as readings warmed into the 80s and low 90s from the Southern and Central Plains to the Southern and Middle Atlantic Coast. Evansville IND and North Platte NE reported record highs of 91 degrees. (The National Weather Summary)
1990 "Praying for Time" by George Michael topped the charts. As songwriter and lead singer of Wham!, Michael gradually overshadowed the group, and by the time they split, he was ready for a massively successful solo career. This began with the 1987 album Faith, which featured a series of chart-topping hit singles and sold more than seven million copies. That Michael had not achieved a similar critical success was evident from the title of his follow-up album, Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1, which must be considered a major commercial disappointment even though it sold a million copies, included two Top Ten hits, and hit number two.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praying_for_Time
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1994 Netscape Communications Corporation announced that it was offering its new Netscape Navigator free to users via the Internet.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Communications_Corporation
1999 The United States Senate rejects ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Test_Ban_Treaty#US_ratification_of_the_CTBT
1999 Grand jury dismissed in JonBenet Ramsey murder case. The Colorado grand jury investigating the case of child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey, who was murdered in December 1996, is dismissed and the Boulder County district attorney announces no indictments will be made due to insufficient evidence.
On the morning of December 26, 1996, Patsy Ramsey discovered her 6-year-old daughter was missing after finding a ransom note in the family’s Boulder home. Patsy, a former Miss West Virginia, and her husband John, a wealthy business executive, called police and JonBenet’s body was discovered in the basement later that day. The coroner determined the girl had died of asphyxia strangulation and an autopsy later revealed she had been bound and struck violently in the head, causing bleeding and an 8.5-inch fracture to her skull.
Police questioned various people, including a man who had played Santa Claus at the Ramsey home several days before the murder; however, John and Patsy Ramsey eventually emerged as the primary suspects in the case. After being formally interviewed by investigators on April 30, 1997, the couple held a news conference the next day proclaiming their innocence. They believed the murder was committed by an intruder. The case generated an enormous media frenzy but no arrests and the Boulder police and prosecutors received criticism for their handling of the investigation. In September 1998, a grand jury was convened to investigate the murder. The following year, on October 13, 1999, Boulder County District Attorney Alex Hunter announced that the grand jury had been dismissed and no indictments would be made due to lack of evidence.
John and Patsy Ramsey continued to face intense public scrutiny. In March 2000, the couple released a book about the case titled The Death of Innocence. On June 24, 2006, Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer at age 49. In August of that year, U.S. law enforcement officials in Thailand arrested 41-year-old John Mark Karr, an American schoolteacher, in connection with child pornography charges in California. Karr stated he was with JonBenet Ramsey when she was killed but her death had been an accident. He was charged with murder, kidnapping and sexual assault on a child. However, on August 28, 2006, all charges against Karr were dropped after DNA tests failed to link him to the crime. To date, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey remains unsolved.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JonBen%C3%A9t_Ramsey
2010 The 2010 Copiapó mining accident in Copiapó, Chile comes to an end as all 33 miners arrive at the surface after surviving a record 69 days underground awaiting rescue.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiap%C3%B3_mining_accident
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akaCG
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_13
www.scopesys.com/cgi-bin/today2.cgi
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/white-house-cornerstone-laid
www.amug.org/~jpaul/oct13.html
daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.todayinsci.com/10/10_13.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_13_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)
