September 20

Birthdays:

1956 ~ Jennifer Tour Chayes, American mathematician.

1956 ~ Gary Cole, American actor.

1948 ~ George Raymond Richard Martin, American author of the Game of Thrones series of fantasy.

1941 ~ Dale Chihuly, American glass artist.  He lost an eye, but that didn’t put a halt to his creativity.

1934 ~ Sophia Loren, Italian actress.

1930 ~ Richard Montague (d. Mar. 7, 1971), American mathematician.  He was killed in an unsolved murder.  He was 40 years old.

1929 ~ Anne Meara (d. May 23, 2015), American actress and comedian.  She was married to Jerry Stiller (b. 1927) and together the two were a comedy team, Stiller and Meara.  She was the mother of comedian and actor Ben Stiller.  She died at age 85.

1917 ~ Arnold Jacob “Red” Auerbach (d. Oct. 28, 2006), American basketball coach of the Boston Celtics.  He died at age 89.

1880 ~ Louise Peete (d. Apr. 11, 1947), Louisiana serial killer.  She led a colorful life, marrying several times, with a number of her husbands “committing suicide.”  She was tried for murder several times, once being sentenced to life in prison, but was released after serving only 19 years.  Following additional murders, she was finally found guilty and sentenced to death, where she was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.  She was 66 years old at the time of her execution.

1878 ~ Upton Sinclair (d. Nov. 25, 1968), American writer, best known for his muckracking novel, The Jungle, which described the deplorable conditions of the meat-packing industry.  The book was instrumental in the passage of laws requiring Federal standards for the distribution of food and drugs.  In 1927, he wrote a book entitled Oil!, which is about the petroleum industry.  That book is as significant today as it was went it was first written.  He died at age 90.

1861 ~ Herbert Putnam (d. Aug. 14, 1955), 8^th Librarian of Congress.  He held this office from 1899 until 1939.  He died at age 93.

1842 ~ Sir James Dewar (d. Mar. 23, 1923), Scottish chemist and physicist.  He is best known for creating the Dewar’s Flask.  He died at age 80.

1833 ~ Ernesto Toedoro Moneta (d. Feb. 10, 1918), Italian pacifist and recipient of the 1907 of the Nobel Peace Prize.  He died at age 84.

1486 ~ Prince Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales (d. Apr. 2, 1502), son of Henry VII of England and Elizabeth of York.  He married Catherine of Aragon, but died before marriage was said to have been consummated.  He died before his father, Henry VII, so his younger brother, Henry ultimately became King Henry VIII, who married Arthur’s widow.  Arthur was 15 years old at the time of his death.

Events that Changed the World:

2011 ~ The United States military ended its “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, thereby allowing gay men and women to serve in the military. 

2007 ~ Protesters marched on Jena, Louisiana in support of six young black students who had been convicted of assaulting a white classmate.

1984 ~ A suicide bomber attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 22 people.

1973 ~ Billy Jean King (b. 1943) beat Bobby Riggs (1918 ~ 1995) in a tennis match dubbed The Battle of the Sexes.  The match was held in the Houston, Texas Astrodome.

1971 ~ Atlantic Ocean Hurricane Irene crossed Nicaragua and regained strength as it entered the Pacific Ocean where it was renamed Hurricane Olivia.  It is the first known hurricane to cross from the Atlantic into the Pacific.

1962 ~ James Meredith (b. 1933), an African-American student, was temporarily barred from entering the University of Mississippi.  He was the first African-American student admitted to the segregated university.

1946 ~ The first annual Cannes International Film Festival was held.  The film festival had originally been planned to begin in September 1939, but was postponed due to the initiation of World War II.

1942 ~ German SS began the two-day massacre of at least 3,000 Jews in Letychiv, Ukraine.

1881 ~ Chester A. Arthur (1829 ~ 1886) was formally inaugurated as the 21^st President of the United States following the assassination of James Garfield (1831 ~ 1881), who had died the day before.

1848 ~ The American Advancement for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was formed.

1633 ~ Galileo Galilei (1564 ~ 1642) was tried before the Congregation of for the Doctrine of Faith for heresy for suggesting that the earth orbits the sun.  He was found guilty and placed under house arrest.  It was not until October 1992, over 300 years later, that he was finally exonerated by Pope John Paul II.

1519 ~ Fernando Magellan (1480 ~ 1521) began his first voyage to circumnavigate the world.  He never completed the voyage because he was killed in the Philippines.  Of the original 237 men who set out on this historic trip, only 19 survived to complete the circling of the world and returned to Spain.  Magellan “discovered” the Strait of Magellan, the body of water at the tip of South America that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

1378 ~ Cardinal Robert of Geneva (1373 ~ 1394) was elected as the Avignon Pope Clement VII, thereby beginning the Papal schism.

1187 ~ Saladin (1137 ~ 1193) began the Siege of Jerusalem.

Good-Byes:

2015 ~ Jack Larson (b. Feb. 8, 1928), American actor and playwright who couldn’t escape his role as Jimmy Olsen from Superman.  He was 87 years old.

2005 ~ Simon Wiesenthal (b. Dec. 31, 1908), Austrian holocaust survivor, author and Nazi hunter.  He died at age 96.

1999 ~ Raisa Gorbachova (b. Jan. 5, 1932), wife of Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.  She died of leukemia at age 67.

1996 ~ Paul Erdős (b. Mar. 26, 1913), Hungarian mathematician.  He died at age 83.

1985 ~ Helen MacInnes (b. Oct. 7, 1907), Scottish-American librarian and author of espionage novels.  She died about 3 weeks before her 78^th birthday.

1975 ~ Saint-John Perse (né Alexis Leger, b. May 31, 1887), French poet and recipient of the 1960 Nobel Prize in Literature.  He died at age 88.

1973 ~ Jim Croce (b. Jan. 10, 1943), American singer and songwriter.  He was killed in a plane crash at age 30 that had taken off from Natchitoches, Louisiana.

1971 ~ Giorgos Seferis (b. Mar. 13, 1900), Greek poet and recipient of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Literature.  His birthday is sometime listed as February 29, because of the calendar in use in Greece at the time of his birth.  He died at age 71.

1957 ~ Jean Sibelius (b. Dec. 8, 1865), Finnish composer.  He died at age 91.

1947 ~ Fiorello La Guardia (b. Dec. 11, 1882), American politician and 99^th Mayor of New York City.  He served as Mayor from January 1934 through December 1945.  One of the airports servicing New York City was named for him.  He died of pancreatic cancer at age 64.

1863 ~ Jacob Grimm (b. Jan. 4, 1785), German attorney and author.  He is best known for his work along with his brother, Wilhelm (1786 ~ 1859), for compiling the Grimm Fairy Tales.  He died at age 78.

1793 ~ Fletcher Christian (b. Sept. 25, 1764), English navy officer and mutineer who seized control of the Bounty from Captain Bligh.  He was killed 5 days before his 29^th birthday.