While all things are relative and any tragedy is sad, we need to remember that bad things happen all around the world and many dwarf any we have experienced here. In 1786 a landslide dam on the Dadu River created by an earthquake ten days earlier collapsed and killed 100,000 in the Sichuan province of China. In 1829 the first Boat Race between the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge took place on the Thames in London. And in 1854 the US Naval Academy graduated its first class of students.
Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by Dr Robert Smith and Bill Wilson in Akron, Ohio in 1935. The ceasefire between Israel and the Arab nations was signed in 1967 ending the Six-Day War And the Equal Pay Act of 1963 was signed by President Kennedy, with the aim of ending wage disparity based on sex. However, we are still battling that today.
This was the birthdate of Hattie McDaniel,(1895) who won a best supporting actress award for Gone With the Wind. She was the first African American to win that award. There wouldn’t be another for 40 years – till Whoopi Goldberg for the movie Ghost. This date also brought us Judy Garland in 1922 and the future Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburg (1921) late husband of the late Queen Elizabeth II of England.
This was also the birthdate of Canadian-American novelist Saul Bellow (1915), the founder of Dunkin Donuts- William Rosenburg (1916), and American author and illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928) who told us “Where the wild things are”
The great Macedonian general Alexander the Great passed off the world stage in 323 BC. The iconic American actor Spencer Tracy spoke his last lines in 1967. The earth stood still for Micheal Rennie in 1971. The music stopped for Ray Charles in 2004, and the puck stopped for NHL great Gordie Howe in 2016.
This is World Art Nouveau Day.
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