Chief Writing Wolf

1789 – The first Presidential Inaugural Ball was held in New York City.

1833 – Composer Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany.

1840 – Composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Russia.

1901 – Actor Gary Cooper was born in Helena, MT.

1912 – Columbia University approved final plans for awarding the Pulitzer Prize in several categories.

1912 – The first airplane equipped with a machine gun flew over College Park, MD.

1915 – On its return trip from New York to Liverpool, England, the British ocean liner, Lusitania, was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 lives people.

1919 – Eva (Evita) Peron, Argentina’s spiritual leader and wife of former president Juan Peron, was born in Buenos Aires.

1960 – Leonid Brezhnev was selected president of the Soviet Union.

1994 – Almost 3 months after it was stolen from an Oslo museum, police recovered Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

1851 – Dr. John Gorrie of Apalachicola FL, patented the mechanical refrigerator.

1851 – Linus Yale of Newport, NY became well known for his patent of the clock-type lock.

1856 – Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud was born in Frieberg, Germany.

1856 – Robert E. Peary, first person to reach the North Pole, was born in Cresson, PA.

1895 – Silent film screen star Rudolph Valentino was born Rodolfo Alfonso di Valentina D’Antonguolla in Puglia, Italy.

1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

1937 – The German airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built, exploded as it arrived at Lakehurst, NJ.

1940 – John Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath.

1941 – Joseph Stalin became the premier of Russia.

1942 – Lte. Gen. Jonathan Wainwright surrendered all American troops in the Philippines to the Japanese.

1954 – Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in Oxford, England with a time of 3:59.4 seconds.

1957 – Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his book Profiles in Courage.

1959 – Pablo Picasso’s painting of a Dutch girl was sold for $154,000 in London, the highest price paid at the time for a painting by a living artist.

1994 – A rail tunnel beneath the English Channel joining Great Britain with France, called the “Chunnel,” officially opened.