June 3

It’s Egg Day and Repeat Day (I said “Repeat Day”)

ON THIS DAY…
1098 The Crusaders, in their conquest of Anatolia, capture the city of Antioch in northern Syria, now Antakya, Turkey, after besieging it for nine months
1539 Hernando De Soto claimed Florida for Spain
1621 The Dutch West India Company received a charter for New Netherlands, now known as New York
1770 Father Junipero Serra founded Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo on the shores of Monterey Bay as a chapel for the new Spanish Presidio of Monterey
1784 The United States Congress created the United States Army
1800 John Adams moved to Washington, DC; he was the first President to live in what later became the capital of the United States (in a tavern – the White House was not yet completed)
1888 The poem “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer was first published in the San Francisco Daily Examiner; the poem was based on a game played in Stockton, CA
1916 The ROTC is established by the US Congress
1916 The National Defense Act is signed into law, increasing the size of the United States National Guard by 450,000 men
1920 Ernest Rutherford speculated on the possible existence and properties of the neutron in his second Bakerian Lecture, London, on “The Nuclear Constitution of Atoms”
1929 Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Joan Crawford are married; they would divorce in 1933
1937 American divorcee Wallis Simpson weds the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII, who had abdicated the British throne to marry her
1940 The Battle of Dunkirk ends with a German victory and with Allied forces in full retreat
1943 A mob of 60 from the Los Angeles Naval Reserve Armory beats up everyone perceived to be Hispanic, starting the week-long Zoot Suit Riots
1946 A Supreme Court decision struck down Virginia’s segregation statute on interstate buses; the case stemmed from the 1944 incident where Irene Morgan was jailed for refusing to give up her bus seat
1947 In Britain, an announcement was made in the House of Commons that India was to be partitioned and that independence would follow
1948 Korczak Ziolkowski, a self-taught sculptor, began blasting a figure of Crazy Horse into rock in the Black Hills of South Dakota under an invitation by the Lakota Sioux
1948 Newfoundland and Labrador voted by a slim margin to relinquish status as a British colony and to become the tenth province of Canada
1948 The Hale telescope, the largest telescope in the world at the time, is dedicated at Mount Palomar Observatory in California
1953 Billy Joe McAllister jumps off the Tallahatchee Bridge, according to the song “Ode to Billy Joe” anyway
1955 Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch opens in US movie theaters
1959 Singapore gains its independence from Britain, becoming a self-governing state in the Commonwealth of Nations
1960 In Gideon v. Wainwright, the United States Supreme Court rules that all accused persons must be given the right to an attorney
1964 T.S. Eliot writes to Groucho Marx: “The picture of you in the newspaper saying that, amongst other reasons, you have come to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit line in the neighborhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the street.”
1965 The first American astronaut to make a spacewalk was Major Edward White II, when he spent 20 minutes outside the Gemini 4 capsule during Earth orbit at an altitude of 120 miles
1968 Valerie Solanas, author of The SCUM Manifesto, attempts to assassinate Andy Warhol by shooting him three times
1982 Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion in Memphis, TN opened as a tourist attraction
1983 WarGames starring Matthew Broderick and Dabney Coleman and Ally Sheedy opens in US movie theaters
1987 George Michael’s “I Want Your Sex” was banned by the BBC
1987 The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted it’s first female artist, Aretha Franklin
1998 An 87-foot memorial to Crazy Horse, sculpted into rock near Custer in the South Dakota Black Hills by Korczak Ziolkowski, was dedicated after 50 years of work
1998 President Clinton announced the renewal of favored nation trade status with China
1999 Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic agrees with NATO leaders on a peace plan that calls for the withdrawal of Yugoslav troops from Kosovo
2006 Montenegro’s parliament declared independence from Serbia, forming Europe’s newest country and dissolving the last vestiges of the former Yugoslavia

BORN:
1761 Henry Shrapnel, soldier and inventor of the Shrapnel shell, a spherical case designed to explode in midair, spreading its content of small lead musket balls to injure enemy soldiers over a wide area
1808 Jefferson Davis, politician, 23rd United States Secretary of War (1853-1857), President of the Confederate States of America for its entire history (1861-1865) during the Civil War
1864 Ransom E. Olds, inventor and automobile manufacturer, designer of the three-horsepower, curved-dash Oldsmobile, the first commercially successful American-made automobile and the first to use a progressive assembly system, which foreshadowed modern mass-production methods
1865 George V, the first British monarch belonging to the House of Windsor, which he created from the British branch of the German House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha; as well as being King of the United Kingdom and the other Commonwealth Realms, he was the Emperor of India and the first King of the Irish Free State
1868 Aristides Agramonte y Simoni, physician, pathologist, and bacteriologist, a member of the Reed Yellow Fever Board of the US Army that discovered the role of the mosquito in the transmission of yellow fever
1879 Raymond Pearl, zoologist, one of the founders of biometry, the application of statistics to biology and medicine
1899 Georg von Békésy, physicist and physiologist who received the 1961 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the physical mechanism of stimulation within the cochlea by which sound is analyzed and communicated in the cochlea, a portion of the inner ear
1901 Maurice Evans, Emmy Award-winning actor (Macbeth, Bewitched, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary’s Baby)
1904 Charles Richard Drew, physician and surgeon who was an authority on the preservation of human blood for transfusion; he organized and directed the blood-plasma programs of the United States and Great Britain in the early years of World War II, while also agitating the authorities to stop excluding the blood of blacks from plasma-supply networks
1906 Josephine Baker, entertainer and singer who is noted for being the first woman of African descent to star in a major motion picture, to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world famous entertainer
1911 Paulette Goddard, actress (Modern Times, The Great Dictator, An Ideal Husband, Sins of Jezebel)
1917 Leo Gorcey, actor best remembered for his work with the Dead End Kids and The Bowery Boys
1917 Lily St. Cyr, Burlesque performer, actress (Son of Sinbad, The Naked and the Dead, Runaway Girl)
1918 Patrick Cargill, actor (Help!, The Prisoner, Inspector Clouseau, Father Dear Father)
1925 Tony Curtis, actor (Houdini, Trapeze, The Defiant Ones, The Great Race, The Persuaders!, Vega$)
1926 Allen Ginsberg, poet who is best known for the poem Howl, celebrating his friends of the Beat Generation
1929 Chuck Barris, producer, writer, game show host (The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, The Gong Show, The $1.98 Beauty Show)
1930 Marion Zimmer Bradley, fantasy novelist and cofounder of the Society for Creative Anachronism (The Mists of Avalon, the Darkover series, the Colin McLaren series)
1931 John Norman (John Frederick Lange, Jr.), professor of philosophy and author who is best known as the author of the Gor series
1936 Larry McMurtry, novelist, screenwriter essayist and Academy Award winner for Best Adapted Screenplay for Brokeback Mountain who is most known for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove
1946 Penelope Wilton, actress (Shaun of the Dead, Doctor Who, Bob & Rose, Carrington, Ever Decreasing Circles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman)
1947 John Dykstra, Emmy Award and 2-time Academy Award-winning Visual Effects Designer (Spider-Man 2, Star Wars, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Battlestar Galactica)
1948 Too Slim (Fred Labour), musician, singer and actor with the musical trio Riders in the Sky, with whom in their first 25 years, have performed in over 5200 live performances, almost 300 national television appearances, over 200 public radio shows, 700 Grand Ole Opry appearances, three television series (including a 1991-92 CBS Saturday morning show), an appearance on a Duck Dodgers cartoon on the Cartoon Network and more than 30 albums
1950 Melissa Mathison, scriptwriter (E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Black Stallion, The Indian in the Cupboard)
1957 Clive Mantle, actor (Robin of Sherwood, The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, Alien³, Casualty)
1964 James Purefoy, actor (Sharpe’s Sword, Mansfield Park, A Knight’s Tale, Rome, Solomon Kane, The Saint)

DIED:
1657 William Harvey, physician and discoverer of the true nature of the circulation of the blood and of the function of the heart as a pump, dies at 79
1841 Nicolas Appert, chef, confectioner, and distiller who invented the method of preserving food by enclosing it in hermetically sealed containers, dies at 91
1861 Stephen A. Douglas, politician from the western state of Illinois and was the Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860 (which he lost to Abraham Lincoln), dies at 48
1899 Johann Strauss II, composer known especially for his waltzes, such as “The Blue Danube.” dies at 73
1924 Franz Kafka, unique and influential 20th century author (The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, Amerika), dies at 40
1955 Barbara Graham, criminal and convicted murderer, was executed in California’s gas chamber at 32
1963 Pope John XXIII (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), 261st Pope of the Roman Catholic Church and sovereign of Vatican City, dies at 81
1975 Ozzie Nelson, actor, bandleader, radio personality, producer, director (The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Here Come the Nelsons), dies at 69
1989 Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, Iranian politician, a senior Muslim scholar, philosopher, writer, and the political leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution which saw the overthrow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran (Persia), dies at 86
1990 Robert Noyce, engineer and coinventor (1959), with Jack Kilby, of the integrated circuit, a system of interconnected transistors on a single silicon microchip; he held sixteen patents for semiconductor devices, methods, and structures, dies at 62
1992 Robert Morley, actor (The African Queen, Beau Brummell, Take Her, She’s Mine, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Cromwell), dies at 84
1992 William Gaines, publisher of Mad magazine, dies at 70
1995 J. Presper Eckert, Jr., engineer and coinventor of the first general-purpose electronic computer, a digital machine that was the prototype for most computers in use today, dies at 76
2001 Anthony Quinn, 2-time Academy Award-winning actor (Viva Zapata!, Lust for Life, Road to Morocco, The Guns of Navarone, Jesus of Nazareth), dies at 86