June 13

It’s Blame Someone Else Day and Sewing Machine Day and National Juggling Day and National Lobster Day

ON THIS DAY…
1525 Martin Luther marries Katharina von Bora, against the celibacy doctrine decreed by the Roman Catholic Church on priests and nuns
1774 Rhode Island becomes the first of Britain’s North American colonies to ban the importation of slaves
1777 Marquis de Lafayette lands near Charleston, South Carolina, in order to help the Continental Congress to train its army
1798 Mission San Luis Rey de Francia is founded
1805 Lewis and Clark Expedition: Scouting ahead of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four companions sight the Great Falls of the Missouri River
1816 The first US public building to use gas lighting was the Peale Museum in Baltimore, MD
1842 Queen Victoria took her first train journey, lasting 25 minutes
1844 A door lock was patented by Linus Yale
1848 Samuel F. B. Morse obtained a reissued patent for Morse code
1850 Alfred Lord Tennyson and Emily Sellwood were married
1877 Louis Pasteur began his quest to develop an anthrax vaccine by visiting the slaughterhouses of Chartres to take blood samples from corpses of farm animals that have died of anthrax
1893 Grover Cleveland undergoes secret, successful surgery to remove a large, cancerous portion of his jaw; operation not revealed to US public until 1917, nine years after the president’s death
1898 Yukon Territory is formed, with Dawson chosen as its capital
1900 The Boxer Uprising by supporters of the Society of Harmonious Fists begins in China, in opposition to the growth of European influence there
1912 The first successful parachute jump from an airplane in the US was made by Captain Albert Berry in Jefferson, MS
1920 Victor Fleming’s The Mollycoddle starring Douglas Fairbanks and Wallace Beery opens in US movie theaters
1920 The United States Postal Service rules that children may not be sent via parcel post
1925 The first telecast in the US of objects in motion was invented by Charles Jenkins who called it “visions by radio”; the first mechanical TV system broadcast used 48 scanning lines and showed a model of Dutch windmill with its blades turning
1927 A ticker-tape parade is held for aviator Charles Lindbergh down 5th Avenue in New York City
1934 Adolf Hitler and Mussolini meet in Venice, Italy; Mussolini later describes the German dictator as “a silly little monkey”
1935 In one of the biggest upsets in championship boxing, the 10 to 1 underdog James J. Braddock defeated Max Baer in Long Island City, New York, and became the heavyweight champion of the world
1942 The United States opens its Office of War Information, a center for production of propaganda
1944 The first German V1 flying bomb hit London, England
1944 Several patents for the wire recorder were issued to Marvin Camras; wire recorders were the precursor of much easier to use magnetic tape recorders
1958 Frank Zappa graduated from Antelope Valley High in Lancaster, CA
1966 The United States Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.
1967 The James Bond thriller You Only Live Twice starring Sean Connery opens in US movie theaters
1967 Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall is nominated as the first African American justice of the United States Supreme Court
1970 “The Long and Winding Road” becomes The Beatles’ last Number 1 song
1971 The New York Times publishes the Pentagon Papers, an internal government report on the Vietnam War that had been leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department official
1977 Convicted Martin Luther King assassin James Earl Ray is recaptured after escaping from prison three days before
1979 Sioux Indians were awarded $105 million in compensation for the US seizure in 1877 of their Black Hills in South Dakota
1981 At the Trooping the Colour ceremony in London, a teenager fires six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II
1983 Space probe vehicle Pioneer 10 crossed the orbit of Neptune and became the first man-made object to leave our Solar System
1992 The Orlando Predators of the Arena Football League logged the first (and, to date, only) shutout in league history, defeating the San Antonio Force, 50-0
1994 A jury in Anchorage, Alaska, blames recklessness by Exxon and Captain Joseph Hazelwood for the Exxon Valdez disaster, allowing victims of the oil spill to seek $15 billion in damages
1995 French president Jacques Chirac announces the resumption of nuclear tests in French Polynesia
1996 An 81-day standoff between the Freemen and FBI agents ends with their surrender in Montana
2000 President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea meets Kim Jong-il, ruler of North Korea, for the beginning of the first ever inter-Korea summit, in the northern capital of Pyongyang
2000 Italy pardons Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turkish gunman who tried to kill Pope John Paul II in 1981
2005 A jury in Santa Maria, California acquits pop singer Michael Jackson of molesting 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo at his Neverland Ranch
2008 The Incredible Hulk starring Edward Norton opens in US movie theaters

BORN:
1865 William Butler Yeats, poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature; in 1923, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as “inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation;” and he was the first Irishman so honored
1884 Gerald Gardner, civil servant, amateur anthropologist, writer, and occultist who published some of the definitive texts for Wicca, which he was instrumental in founding
1892 Basil Rathbone, actor (Captain Blood, The Hound of the Baskervilles, We’re No Angels, The Comedy of Terrors)
1893 Dorothy L. Sayers, author who is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey
1910 Mary Whitehouse, CBE, British campaigner for of the values of morality and decency derived from her Christian religious beliefs who focused her efforts on the broadcast media, which she regarded as highly influential, where she felt these values were particularly lacking
1910 Mary Wickes, wisecracking character actress (Private Buckaroo, White Christmas, The Music Man, The Trouble with Angels, Father Dowling Mysteries, Sister Act)
1913 Ralph Edwards, TV personality and producer (This is Your Life)
1920 Rex Everhart, actor and singer (The Seven-Ups, Superman, Friday the 13th, Family Business, Beauty and the Beast)
1926 Paul Lynde, actor and comedian (Hollywood Squares, Bewitched, The Red Buttons Show, Bye Bye Birdie, Beach Blanket Bingo, Charlotte’s Web)
1926 Jerome Lejeune, geneticist who discovered the first human chromosomal anomaly, the trisomy 21, the chromosome that causes Down syndrome
1929 Ralph McQuarrie, conceptual artist and Academy Award-winning visual effects designer (Cocoon, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind)
1943 Malcolm McDowell, actor (Royal Flash, Blue Thunder, Tank Girl, Our Friends in the North, Fantasy Island)
1945 Whitley Strieber, writer best known for his horror novels The Wolfen and The Hunger and for Communion, a non-fiction description of his experiences with non-human entities
1949 Simon Callow, actor (A Room with a View, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Jefferson in Paris, James and the Giant Peach, Shakespeare in Love)
1951 Richard Thomas, actor (The Waltons, Stephen King’s It, Wonder Boys, Just Cause, Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King)
1953 Tim Allen, actor (Home Improvement, Toy Story, Galaxy Quest, Wild Hogs)
1962 Ally Sheedy, actress (The Breakfast Club, Short Circuit, Betsy’s Wedding, WarGames)
1964 Kathy Burke, actress (Sid and Nancy, Absolutely Fabulous, Nil by Mouth, Elizabeth, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme)
1978 Ethan Embry, actor (That Thing You Do!, Dutch, Disturbing Behavior, FreakyLinks, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle)
1981 Chris Evans, actor (Cellular, The Fantastic Four, Not Another Teen Movie, The Nanny Diaries)
1986 Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, actresses and businesswomen (Full House, Two of a Kind)

DIED:
1931 Kitasato Shibasaburo, bacteriologist who, with Alexandre Yersin, co-discovered the infectious agent of bubonic plague, Pasteurella pestis (now called Yersinia pestis), during an epidemic in Hong Kong (1894), dies at 78
1972 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, dies at 73
1979 Darla Hood, actress whose best remembered as one of the “Our Gang” kids, dies at 47
1986 Benny Goodman, jazz musician, clarinetist and bandleader, known as “King of Swing”, “Patriarch of the Clarinet”, “The Professor”, and “Swing’s Senior Statesman”, dies at 77
1987 Geraldine Page, Academy Award-winning actress (The Trip to Bountiful, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Hondo, The Bride), dies at 62
1993 Deke Slayton, one of the original “Mercury Seven” NASA astronauts, he was initially grounded by a heart condition and would serve as NASA’s Director of Flight Crew Operations, dies at 69
1994 James B. Pollack, astrophysicist who was a NASA researcher and who helped develop the theory that atomic war would result in a “nuclear winter” as a world-renowned expert in the study of planetary atmospheres and particulates using nongrey radiative transfer techniques, dies at 55
2003 Robert A. Good, surgeon, a pioneer of modern immunology who performed the world’s first successful human bone marrow transplant (1968) from his sister to a 4-month-old baby boy with an inherited immune disorder, dies at 80
2005 Lane Smith, character actor (Rooster Cogburn, Network, Frances, V, My Cousin Vinny, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman), dies at 69 of Lou Gehrig’s disease