On This Day ...

It’s been a kick back, lay low kind of day. Nothing major goin’ on; no history-making events to report. Well, at least not this year in my neighborhood, but look at what has happened on July 25 in the past. Why do things like this fascinate me?

2009:  Harry Patch died. The 111-year-old former plumber was Britain’s last living World War I veteran. Refusing to talk about the war until he reached the age of 100, he spent 11 years before his death traveling around the world speaking about his experiences.

2008:  Randy Pausch succumbed to pancreatic cancer. A professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he gave an upbeat lecture entitled The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. The book he co-authored on the same theme became a New York Times best-seller. If you haven’t yet read it, you must do so. Inspirational!

2000:  Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde supersonic passenger jet, crashed just after takeoff from Paris. All 109 aboard, as well as 4 people on the ground, were killed. It was the first and only crash in the Concorde’s 31-year history. The Concorde hit a piece of metal dropped from a plane that had taken off earlier, which shred a tire and threw it into one of the engines causing a fire. The high-speed jets, which could fly faster than twice the speed of sound at 1,350 miles per hour, were permanently grounded in 2003. Bummer. No. 72 on my Bucket List was “Fly on the Concorde.”

1999:  Just three years after being diagnosed with testicular cancer, Lance Armstrong won the first of seven consecutive Tour de France victories.

1992:  Barcelona hosted the Olympic Games, the first in three decades without a boycott. Approximately 9,300 athletes participated and represented a record 169 nations.

1990:  Roseanne Barr sang the National Anthem at a San Diego Padres game. Many believe it to be THE worst rendition of The Star Spangled Banner. Ever.

1985:  Rock Hudson, most notable for his role as a leading man in romantic films, publicly announced an AIDS diagnosis. Though he never openly admitted it, he was thought to be gay. He died on October 2 the same year; his death fueled awareness for the disease, which had just started being reported in the early 1980s.

1984:  Russian astronaut Svetlana Savitskaya was the first woman to walk in space while stationed on the Soviet space station Salyut 7.

1978:  Louise Brown, the world’s first test tube (in-vitro fertilization) baby, was delivered by caesarean section in Oldham, England. Drs. Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards developed the process to conceive a child in a laboratory and then implant it in a uterus to develop normally. Though it was controversial at the time, the procedure now is considered mainstream.

1975:  The Broadway musical A Chorus Line premiered. It won 12 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and had a run of 6,137 shows.  It still holds the record for the longest-running musical produced in the U.S.

1969:  Senator Edward Kennedy pled guilty to leaving the scene of a crime, a car accident on the island of Chappaquiddick where Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. He was sentenced to a two-month suspended jail sentence.

1964:  The Beatles’ album A Hard Day’s Night went to No. 1 and stayed at the top of Billboard’s chart for 14 weeks, the longest run of any album that year. You knew I was going to get the Fab Four in here somewhere, didn’t you?

1962:  The House passed a bill requiring equal pay for equal work regardless of sex. We’ve come a long way, baby!

1960:  The U.S. Republican convention nominated Richard Nixon as a presidential candidate. He was not a crook … or was he?

1952:  Puerto Rico became a self-governing U.S. commonwealth.

1953:  The New York City Transit Authority is created and takes over subway operations. Fares were raised from 10 cents to 15 cents and the use of tokens initiated.

1946:  The first bikini was shown at a Paris fashion show. Oo la la!

1946:  The U.S. conducted the first underwater test of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific as part of the Operation Crossroads series of nuclear bomb tests. The bomb, Baker, was detonated 90 feet underwater. Its explosion contaminated the target ships so badly that the Navy had to cancel the one remaining nuclear weapon test called Charlie.

1946:  At Club 500 in Atlantic City, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis staged their first show as a comedy team.

1917:  Exotic dancer and courtesan Mata Hari was sentenced to death for espionage in Paris. Accused of spying for the Germans in World War I, she was executed by firing squad on October 15, 1917.

1909:  France’s Louis Bleriot flew the first airplane across the English Channel. The self-trained pilot made the flight in 37 minutes aboard an aircraft he designed himself.

1871:  The carousel was patented by Iowan Wilhelm Schneider.

1866:  Ulysses S. Grant was named as General of the U.S. Army and the first to hold the rank commonly referred to as “Five-Star General.” Just in case you aren’t up to speed on your U.S. history, he later became the 18th President of the United States. But who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

1788:  Wolfgang Mozart finished Symphony Number 40 in G-Minor. Mozart started composing when he was five years old and created more than 600 works in his lifetime. He is considered one of the most influential classic composers of all time.