This Day Trivia - february 23d

Holidays

Feast Day of Saint Damian See Deaths below.

Events

1987 Supernova SN1987a The light from this supernova reaches the Earth. It was 164,000 light years away. The near simultaneous arrival of neutrinos and antineutrinos from the supernova provided the first empirical evidence that matter, antimatter, and photons all react similarly to gravity.

1987 Supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud is sighted by Ian Shelton.

1974 The Lord's Prayer: Sister Janet Mead's musical recording of the famous prayer makes it onto Billboard Top 100. It charted for 13 weeks, reaching #4 and going gold.

1954 Inoculation of children with the Salk anti-polio vaccine begins in Pittsburgh.

1945 World War II The American flag is raised on Iwo Jima by U.S. Marines. The Pulitzer-winning photo of this event was taken by Joe Rosenthal.

1915 Nevada passes its "easy" divorce bill requiring only six months residence.

1874 Tennis The game is patented by its inventor Major Walter C. Wingfield of Great Britain.

1861 Civil War Texas becomes the 7th state to secede from the Union.

Births

1944 Johnny Winter American albino blues guitarist. Music: Silver Train (1973).

1939 Peter Fonda American actor. Film: Easy Rider (1969).

1929 Elston Gene Howard d. 1980 American baseball player, American League 1963 MVP and the first to use a baseball bat with a weight on the end to warm up in the on-deck circle (1969).

1884 Casimir Funk d. 1967 Polish-born American chemist. He discovered vitamins (1912) and coined the word "vitamin."

1883 Victor Fleming d. 1949 American director. Film: The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone With the Wind (1939, Oscar).

1883 Karl Jaspers d. 1969 German philosopher, promoter of the philosophy of existentialism.

1868 William Edward Burghardt DuBois d. 1963 American educator, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP, 1909). He was the first black to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard (1895).

1850 Cesar Ritz d. 1918 Swiss hotelkeeper, founded the world famous hotels in London, Paris, New York, etc.

1685 George Frederick Handel d. 1759 German composer. Music: The Messiah (1742). Source: An Almanac of the Christian Church

1680 Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville d. 1767 French governor of Louisiana (1701-13, 1718-26, 1733-43) and founder of New Orleans (1717).

Deaths

1998 Philip Abbott b. 1923 actor. TV: The FBI (Arthur Ward).

1995 James Herriot b. 1916 (James Alfred Wight), Scottish veterinarian. His book All Creatures Great and Small (1972) was the basis for the popular BBC series.

1965 Stan Laurel b. 1890 (Arthur Stanley Jefferson), British-born American comedian, actor. He made over 200 films with his partner Oliver Hardy.

1957 John F. Mahoney b. 1889 American physician. He developed penicillin treatment for syphilis (1943). This virtualy eliminated tertiary syphilis of the brain, once a leading cause of insanity throughout the world.

1934 Sir Edward Elgar b. 1857 English composer, famous for his "Pomp and Circumstance" marches.

1855 Karl Friedrich Gauss b. 1777 German mathematician, astronomer. The magnetic unit of flux density "Gauss" is named for him. He also devised the method of least squares used in statistics.

1848 John Quincy Adams b. 1767 6th U.S. President (1825-29), son of the 2nd president John Adams.

1821 John Keats b. 1795 English poet. Writings: Endymion (1818) and Eve of St. Agnes (1820).

1730 Benedict XIII b. 1649 religious leader, 245th Pope (1724-30).

1447 Eugene IV b. ???? Italian religious leader, 207th Pope (1431-47).

1072 Saint Peter Damian b. 1007 Italian Roman Catholic cardinal, patron saint of doctors. Know as a reformer, he opposed the sale of Church sacraments and marriage of clergy.