On this date in 1941, a record was set that I don’t think will ever be broken, but I and others have been wrong before. New York Yankees great hitter Joe Dimaggio hit safely in his 56th consecutive game. No one has come closer than the low 40s in the eight decades since. But then they said the Iron Horse Lou Gherigh’s consecutive games played record wouldn’t be broken and yet that was snapped a couple of decades ago.
The first Spanish mission was established in what is now San Diego in 1769 by Father Junipero Serra. And then canonization of St Francis of Assisi was completed in 1228. The first parking meter was installed in Oklahoma City in 1935. And the first successful test of a nuclear weapon, beginning the Atomic Age, in a place called Trinity, in the middle of nowhere New Mexico in 1945 – as depicted in the current film Oppenheimer.
Folks that call this data their birthday include Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy(1821), American journalist and activist Ida B Wells (1862), Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872), aggrieved stand-out baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson (1887) of Field of Dreams fame, and the gal who could do all the dance moves of Fred Astaire, only backwards and in high heels -Ginger Rogers (1911).
The world bide farewell to a few folks on this date: Anne of Cleves (1557) the fourth wife of Henry VIII, who outlived him, all of his other wives, his son, and lived to see his oldest daughter, Mary I, crowned queen. She shared the day with First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln (1882), Ellen G White (1915) co-founder of the Seventh Day Adventists, singer Harry Chapin (1981), and US Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens (2019).
And however you want to think of it today is Guinea Pig Appreciation Day.
Leave a Reply