1 1735 Paul Revere; 1752 Betsy Ross; 1879 E. M. Forster; 1895 J. Edgar Hoover; 1909 Barry Goldwater; 1940 Frank Langella.
• 0404: Last gladiator competition in Rome; replacement spectacle is, "Who Wants to be the Next Christian Fed to Lions?"
1925: Norway's capital Christiania changes its name to Oslo; neighboring towns hiss, "I just knew there was something strange about that place!"
1962: Beatles' unsuccessfully audition for Decca Records.
2 1920 Isaac Asimov.
3 1926 George Martin; 1945 Victoria Principal, Stephen Stills; 1956 Mel Gibson; 1960 Joan Chen; 1967 Helena Bonham Carter.
• 1847: Yerba Buena renamed San Francisco; I Left My Heart in Yerba Buena just doesn't have the same ring to it.
• 1969: John Lennon's 2 Virgins album (with cover photograph of him and Yoko naked), is declared pornographic in New Jersey; elsewhere it's just deemed "icky".
• 1977: Apple Computer iNcorporates.
4 1914 Jane Wyman; 1937 Dyan Cannon; 1941 Maureen Reagan; 1947 Dan Quayle.
• 1762: England declares war on Spain & Naples; okay, Spain we get, but Naples?
5 1931 Robert Duvall; 1942 Charlie Rose; 1946 Diane Keaton; 1950 Michael O'Donoghue.
• 1920: Boston Red Sox sell Babe Ruth to New York Yankees, providing Sox fans 80-plus-years' worth of excuses for their team sucking.
• 1959: Bozo the Clown show premieres.
• 1975: The Wiz premieres.
• 1976: MacNeil-Lehrer Report premieres.
6 1878 Carl Sandburg; 1880 Tom Mix; 1913 Loretta Young; 1914 Danny Thomas; 1915 Alan Watts; 1924 Earl Scruggs; 1925 John DeLorean.
7 1800 Millard Fillmore; 1911 Butterfly McQueen; 1912 Charles Addams; 1938 Paul Revere (the "& the Raiders" one); 1946 Jann Wenner.
• 1622: Germany & Transylvania sign Peace of Nikolsburg, stipulating that all vampires in Germany must return to Transylvania.
• 1967: The Newlywed Game premieres.
8 1904 Peter Arno; 1912 José Ferrer; 1923 Larry Storch; 1926 Soupy Sales; 1931 Bill Graham; 1935 Elvis Aaron Presley; 1947 David Bowie.
• 1951: Thought believed extinct since 1615, a Cahow is rediscovered in Bermuda where it had simply been on vacation the whole time.
• 1992: At a state dinner in Japan, president George H.W. Bush barfs on the Japanese prime minister after finding out he'd been eating day-old sushi.
9 1913 Richard Nixon; 1914 Gypsy Rose Lee; 1935 Bob Denver; 1941 Joan Baez.
• 1956: Dear Abby debuts.
10 1945 Rod Stewart; 1949 George Foreman.
• 1776 Common Sense by Thomas Paine, published.
11 1942 Clarence Clemons.
• 1949: First and (so far) only snowfall recorded in Los Angeles; no word on that day's weather in hell.
12 1856 John Singer Sargent; 1876 Jack London; 1906 Tex Ritter; 1941 Long John Baldry; 1949 Wayne Wang; 1951 Rush Limbaugh; 1954 Howard Stern.
• 1867: Leo Tolstoy's Smert Ioonna Groznogo premieres in St Petersburg. Seriously, that's the name of whatever the hell it was.
• 1966: Batman with Adam West & Burt Ward premieres.
• 1966: LBJ vows to stay in Vietnam until communist aggression ends; the nation's response, "Okay then, call us when you get back" isn't what he was hoping for.
13 1628 Charles Perrault; 1834 Horatio Alger Jr.; 1884 Sophie Tucker; 1931 Charles Nelson Reilly; 1934 Rip Taylor.
• 1957: Wham-O produces the first Frisbee but their dog gets it and it is three days before they can get it back from him and produce a second one.
14 1886 Hugh Lofting; 1892 Hal Roach; 1906 William Bendix; 1919 Andy Rooney; 1925 Yukio Mishima; 1941 Faye Dunaway; 1952 Sydney Biddle Barrows.
• 1954: Marilyn Monroe marries Joe DiMaggio.
• 1990: Simpsons premieres.
15 1908 Edward Teller; 1913 Lloyd Bridges; 1941 Captain Beefheart; 1951 Charo.
• 1973: Gene Shalit joins the Today Show; his moustache, however, holds out for more money, and doesn't appear until late March.
16 1933 Susan Sontag.
• 1974 Jaws by Peter Benchley is published; America spends rest of the year on the edge of its seat in terror.
• 1976 Donny & Marie musical/variety show premieres; America spends rest of the year on the edge of its seat in terror.
17 1922 Betty White; 1925 Rock Hudson; 1927 Eartha Kitt; 1931 James Earl Jones; 1934 Shari Lewis; 1949 Andy Kaufman; 1956 David Caruso; 1962 Jim Carrey.
• 1926: George Burns marries Gracie Allen.
18 1892 Oliver Hardy; 1904 Cary Grant; 1955 Kevin Costner.
• 1644: Bostonians report America's first UFO sighting; the official explanation, "They're Witches" is dismissed by most.
• 1948: Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour begins; it's like American Idol but without the sadism or Simon Cowell.
• 1996: Lisa Marie Presley files for divorce from Michael Jackson; apparently, her belief in Scientology really creeped him out.
19 1807 Robert E. Lee; 1809 Edgar Allan Poe; 1839 Paul Cézanne; 1921 Patricia Highsmith; 1923 Jean Stapleton; 1935 Tippi Hedren; 1938 Phil Everly; 1942 Shelly Fabares; 1943 Janis Joplin; 1954 Katey Sagal.
• 1939: Ernest Hausen of Wisconsin sets chicken-plucking record at 4.4 seconds; the second-place finisher cries fowl.
20 1889 "Leadbelly"; 1896 George Burns; 1920 Federico Fellini, DeForest Kelley; 1926 Patricia Neal; 1929 Arte Johnson; 1956 Bill Maher; 1970 Skeet Ulrich.
• 1949: J. Edgar Hoover gives Shirley Temple a tear gas fountain pen; she eventually uses to fend off Mr.-Grabby-Hands Darryl F. Zanuck at a post-Oscar party.
• 1964: Meet The Beatles album released in U.S.
• 1971: John Lennon meets Yoko Ono's parents in Japan; I'm sure that wasn't at all awkward.
21 1924 Benny Hill; 1926 Steve Reeves; 1939 Wolfman Jack; 1940 Jack Nicklaus; 1941 Placido Domingo.
• 1962: Snow falls in San Francisco; Jerry Garcia freaks out thinking his stash of coke has somehow got blown outside.
22 1875 D.W. Griffith; 1907 Marie Dressler; 1909 Ann Sothern; 1931 Sam Cooke; 1932 Piper Laurie; 1934 Bill Bixby, Graham Kerr; 1937 Joseph Wambaugh; 1959 Linda Blair; 1963 Diane Lane.
• 1938 Our Town performed publicly for first time; has been either performed or rehearsed continuously since then at high schools nationwide.
• 1951: Pitcher Fidel Castro ejected from a Winter League game after beaning a batter; his argument with the umpire lasts seven hours.
23 1898 Sergei Eisenstein; 1898 Randolph Scott; 1899 Humphrey Bogart; 1906 Bob Steele; 1907 Dan Duryea; 1910 Django Reinhardt; 1919 Ernie Kovacs; 1928 Jeanne Moreau; 1933 Chita Rivera; 1944 Rutger Hauer.
• 1975 Barney Miller premieres.
24 1915 Ernest Borgnine; 1941 Neil Diamond, Aaron Neville; 1948 Elliott Abrams; 1949 John Belushi; 1960 Nastassja Kinski; 1968 Mary Lou Retton.
• 1848: Gold discovered at Sutter's Mill in California.
• 1908: Baden-Powell starts Boy-Scouts.
25 1931 Dean Jones; 1933 Corazón Aquino.
• 1870: Soda fountain patented.
• 1890: Nellie Bly circles the globe in 72 days, beating Phileas Fogg's around-the-world record by eight; when she's told that Fogg is a fictional character and his whole trip was made up, the look on her face is just priceless.
• 1919: League of Nations founded.
• 1985: We are the World recorded.
26 1925 Paul Newman; 1928 Philip José Farmer, Eartha Kitt, Roger Vadim; 1929 Jules Feiffer; 1935 Bob Uecker; 1942 Scott Glenn; 1946 Gene Siskel; 1950 David Strathairn; 1953 Lucinda Williams; 1957 Eddie Van Halen; 1958 Ellen DeGeneres.
• 1962: Bishop Burke of the Buffalo, New York diocese declares Chubby Checker's Twist impure & bans it from all Catholic schools; when the Batusi is introduced in 1965, he throws himself off a bell tower.
• 1979: The Dukes of Hazzard premieres; TV's vast wasteland gets just that much vaster.
27 1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; 1832 Lewis Carroll; 1850 Samuel Gompers; 1885 Jerome Kern; 1918 Skitch Henderson; 1936 Troy Donahue; 1957 Frank Miller; 1959 Keith Olbermann; 1964 Bridget Fonda.
• 1961 Sing Along with Mitch premieres.
28 1912 Jackson Pollock; 1929 Claes Oldenburg; 1936 Alan Alda; 1981 Elijah Wood.
29 1737 Thomas Paine; 1843 William McKinley; 1878 Barney Oldfield; 1880 W.C. Fields; 1908 Adam Clayton Powell; 1911 Bernard Herrmann; 1912 Professor Irwin Corey; 1942 Katharine Ross; 1945 Tom Selleck; 1952 Tommy Ramone; 1954 Oprah Winfrey; 1975 Sara Gilbert.
• 1839: Practicing what he preaches about natural selection, Charles Darwin marries Emma Wedgwood.
• 1958: Paul Newman & Joanne Woodward wed.
30 1882 Franklin Delano Roosevelt; 1931 Gene Hackman; 1933 Louis Rukeyser; 1935 Richard Brautigan; 1941 Dick Cheney; 1951 Phil Collins; 1958 Brett Butler.
31 1903 Tallulah Bankhead; 1923 Norman Mailer; 1937 Philip Glass, Suzanne Pleshette; 1959 Anthony LaPaglia, Kelly Lynch.
• 1957: Liz Taylor's second divorce (Michael Wilding).
• 1958: Jackpot Bowling, hosted by Leo Durocher, premieres. We swear we are not making this up.
