April 23

It’s National Zucchini Bread Day and National Cherry Cheesecake Day and Take a Chance Day and World Laboratory Day

ON THIS DAY…
1597 Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is first performed, with Queen Elizabeth I of England in attendance
1635 The first public school in the US, Boston Latin School, is founded in Boston, MA
1661 King Charles II of England, Scotland and Ireland is crowned in Westminster Abbey
1789 President George Washington and his wife, Martha, move into the first executive mansion, the Franklin House in New York
1867 The Zoetrope was patented by William E. Lincoln of Providence, RI; the device was the first animated picture machine
1896 The first movie shown to a paying theater audience in the US was presented using Thomas Edison’s Vitascope
1908 President Theodore Roosevelt signed an act creating the US Army Reserve
1931 The Public Enemy, starring James Cagney and Jean Harlow, is released in the US
1940 A leak-proof flashlight battery (Ray-o-Vac) was patented in the US by Herman Anthony
1954 Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves hit the first of his record 755 major-league home runs
1960 John Lennon and Paul McCartney perform as a duo at the Fox and Hounds, Caversham, Berkshire, calling themselves the Nerk Twins; Paul’s cousin and her husband, who `let’ the boys perform in exchange for working during the week, ran the pub
1962 The first American satellite to reach the moon surface, the Ranger IV, was launched at 3:50pm from Cape Canaveral, FL
1969 Sirhan Sirhan is sentenced to death for the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy; the sentence is later reduced to life in prison
1981 Artificial skin was first transplanted in the U.S. on patients at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston
1985 The Coca-Cola Company announces that it will change its classic formula for Coke; negative public reaction provokes a return to the old formula
1988 Pink Floyd’s album “Dark Side of the Moon”, after spending the record total of 741 consecutive weeks (over 14 years) on the Billboard 200, left the charts for its first time ever
1990 Namibia becomes the 160th member of the United Nations and the 50th member of the Commonwealth of Nations
1993 Indian Summer, a delightful little film with a terrific ensemble cast, opens in the US
1994 Physicists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory discovered the subatomic particle called the top quark
1997 Doctors in Los Angeles announce that a 63-year-old woman gave birth to a healthy baby girl in late 1996, becoming the oldest woman ever to give birth
1998 A US federal law took effect that banned smoking on flights that were under two hours

BORN:
1564 William Shakespeare, poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s preeminent dramatist; surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems
1791 James Buchanan, 15th President of the United States (1857-1861), elected five times to the House of Representatives; then, after an interlude as Minister to Russia, served for a decade in the Senate; he became President Polk’s Secretary of State and President Pierce’s Minister to Great Britain
1813 Stephen A. Douglas, attorney-general of Illinois (1834), member of the legislature (1835-1839), secretary of state (1840), and judge of the supreme court (1841) and member of the House of Representatives (1847)
1867 Johannes Fibiger, pathologist who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1926 for achieving the first controlled induction of cancer in laboratory animals, a development of profound importance to cancer research
1899 Vladimir Nabokov, novelist and short story writer; he also made significant contributions to entomology and had an interest in chess problems (Lolita, Bend Sinister, Pale Fire)
1910 Simone Simon, actress (The Cat People, Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Josette)
1911 Ronald Neame, CBE, director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer (Blithe Spirit, The Odessa File, Tunes of Glory, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Poseidon Adventure)
1923 Avram Davidson, writer of fantasy fiction, science fiction, and crime fiction (Doctor Eszterhazy series, Virgil Magus series, Limekiller series, Clash of Star-Kings)
1928 Shirley Temple, the most popular and famous child star of all time; later she was US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia (Stand up and Cheer, Baby Take a Bow, Since You Went Away, Fort Apache)
1936 Roy Orbison, influential Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist and a pioneer of rock and roll whose recording career spanned more than four decades (“In Dreams,” “Only the Lonely,” “Oh Pretty Woman”)
1940 Lee Majors, actor (The Big Valley, The Six Million Dollar Man, The Fall Guy, The Brothers Solomon)
1942 Sandra Dee, actress (The Reluctant Debutante, Gidget, A Summer Place, Tammy Tell Me True, The Dunwich Horror)
1943 Hervé Villechaize, actor (Fantasy Island, Forbidden Zone, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight)
1946 Blair Brown, actor (The Paper Chase, Altered States, Continental Divide, Stealing Home, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd)
1954 Michael Moore, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker (Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, Roger & Me)
1955 Judy Davies, actress (My Brilliant Career, A Passage to India, Barton Fink, Naked Lunch, The Ref)
1957 Jan Hooks, actress-comedienne (Saturday Night Lives, Pee Wee’s Big Adventures, 3rd Rock from the Sun, Designing Women, Not Necessarily the News)
1960 Craig Sheffer, actor (One Tree Hill, Hellraiser: Inferno, Fire in the Sky, A River Runs Through It, Nightbreed)
1960 Valerie Bertinelli, actress (Touched by an Angel, One Day at a Time, C.H.O.M.P.S.)
1962 John Hannah, actor (New Street Law, Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Mummy)
1977 Kal Penn, actor (House, M.D., Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Superman Returns, Van Wilder)

DIED:
1616 William Shakespeare dies on his 52nd birthday
1616 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, novelist, poet, and playwright; he is one of the most important and influential people in literature and his magnum opus, Don Quixote, is considered a founding classic of Western literature and regularly figures among the best novels ever written, dies at 68
1975 William Hartnell, actor (Doctor Who, Heavens Above!, The Mouse That Roared, Carry on Sergeant), dies at 67
1975 Peter Ham of the rock band Badfinger commits suicide by hanging himself at 27
1983 Buster Crabbe, Olympic Gold Medal Swimmer and actor (Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Tarzan), dies at 76
1986 Otto Preminger, producer-director (Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, Bunny Lake Is Missing, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell), dies at 79
1986 Harold Arlen, Academy Award-winning composer (“Over the Rainbow”, “That Old Black Magic”, “Accentuate the Positive”), dies at 81
1990 Paulette Goddard, actress (Sins of Jezebel, The Great Dictator, The Cat and the Canary, Modern Times), dies at 79
1995 Howard Cosell, sports journalist whose style of reporting transformed sports broadcasting (ABC’s Wide World of Sports, Monday Night Football), dies at 77
1996 Pamela Lyndon (P.L.) Travers, novelist and journalist (Mary Poppins, What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol and Story), dies at 96
1998 James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr., dies at 70
2005 Sir John Mills, CBE, actor (Gandhi, The Quatermass Conclusion, The Wrong Box, King Rat, Swiss Family Robinson), dies at 97
2007 David Halberstam, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author (The Best and the Brightest, Summer of ’49, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War), dies in a traffic accident at 73
2007 Boris Yeltsin, 1st President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1991-99) and 1st Prime Minister of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1991-2), dies at 76