Galileo was forced to recant his heliocentric view of the universe – that the sun, not the Earth, is the center of the universe by the papacy in 1633. The US Department of Justice was created by the US Congress in 1870. Nazi Germany began Operation Barbossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Pledge of Allegiance was formally adopted by the US Congress in 1942.
President FDR signed into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, otherwise known as the GI Bill, in 1944. And in an environmental oddity, the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland Ohio caught fire in 1969, drawing attention to the problem of water pollution and leading to both the Clean Water Act and the creation of the EPA – Environmental Protection Act.
The man who gave his name to both a Washington city and a British Columbian city, explorer George Vancouver, was born on this date in 1757. German soldier and author Eric Maria Remarque who wrote the anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front (about his experiences in WWI) was born in 1898. The inventor of Masking Tape, American engineer Richard Gurley Drew, was born in 1899.
This was also the birthdate for Senators Dianne Feinstein (1933) and Elizabeth Warren (1949), singers Kris Kristofferson (1936) and Cyndi Lauper (1953), and actors Graham Greene (1952) and Meryl Streep (1949). And Pacific Northwesterners will recall that Portland Trailblazer great Clyde “the Glide” Drexler was born in 1962.
This was the day we bid farewell to American producer and screenwriter Daniel Selznick (1965, Gone With the Wind), Judy Garland (1969), Fred Astaire (1987), George Carlin (2008), and American composer and conductor James Horner (2015 – soundtracks for Alien, Wrath of Khan, Avatar, Titanic, and other “fill the screen” epic motion pictures).
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