Chief Writing Wolf

64 – According to legend, Rome’s Emperor Nero decided to target Christians by starting a series of fires.

The Torches of Nero, by Henryk Siemiradzki.

1811 – Author William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair, Pendennis) was born in Calcutta, India.

1913 – Actor – comedian Red Skelton (The Red Skelton Show) was born in Vincennes, Indiana.

1936 – The Spanish Civil War began as a revolt by right-wing Spanish military officials in Morocco spread to mainland Spain.

1940 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for a third term in office at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

1976 – Nadia Comaneci, a 14-year-old Romanian girl, became the first gymnast to score a perfect ‘10’ in Olympic competition at the Summer Games in Montréal.  Nadia went on to collect seven perfect scores; winning three gold medals, a silver and a bronze.

1986 – Close-up videotape images of the Titanic wreckage were released to the public.

1862 – The U.S. government authorized national cemeteries to bury those who died in battle, other war veterans, U.S. Presidents and government leaders.

1867 – The Harvard School of Dental Medicine was established in Boston, MA, becoming the first dental school in America.

1889 – Author Erle Stanley Gardner (Perry Mason) was born in Malden, MA.

1901 – Dr. Willis Carrier installed a commercial air conditioning system at a Brooklyn, NY printing plant.  The system was the first to provide man-made control over temperature, humidity, ventilation and air quality.  It was originally installed to help maintain quality at the printing plant and for the first two decades of the 20^th Century, Carrier’s invention was used primarily to cool machines, not people.

1955 – Disneyland opened the gates to “The Happiest Place on Earth” in Anaheim, California.

1981 – Two skywalks suspended from the ceiling over the atrium lobby at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, MO, collapsed, killing 114 people.  Five years later, two design engineers were convicted of gross negligence.

1996 – TWA (Trans World Airlines) flight 800, carrying 230 people, including four cockpit crew members and 14 flight attendants, exploded, falling into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island, New York.  The Boeing 747 had lifted off from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport at 8:19 p.m. bound for Paris, France.  After a 16-month probe, the FBI announced it had found no evidence of a criminal act or a missile; concluding the crash was caused by electrical arcing in the plane’s center fuel tank igniting fuel vapors.

1998 – After a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in West Sepik, Papua New Guinea, three tsunami waves reaching heights of 45 feet, struck; followed by two smaller waves.  The waves killed more than 2,000 people and left some 10,000 left homeless.