This day in history April 13

[buddyjh]

103rd day of 2009 - 262 remaining

Monday, April 13, 2009
SCRABBLE DAY

For all of you who can spend hour, upon hour, trying to use up all of your letters for the fifty-point bonus while on a triple word score, this day is yours to celebrate. You’ll be celebrating Alfred Butts’ birthday. Alfred was born on this day in 1899. He grew up to become an architect, but lost his job during the Depression. While he wiled away the hours of unemployment, he invented a crossword puzzle word-game. He and his friends had a good time playing the game, but that’s as far as it went ... until one fateful day in 1952. Butts and friends were at a resort (he survived the Depression) and, as fate would have it, a Macy’s department store executive saw them playing their game. The executive took the game back to Macy’s where it became a successful sales item.

It wasn’t long before the game makers of Selchow & Richter caught wind of the habit-forming board game. They offered Butts three cents for every set they manufactured. Butts accepted and Scrabble went on the assembly line. Thirty-five laborers made Scrabble sets by the thousands ... six-thousand sets were coming off the line every week. Scrabble is still one of the best-selling game boards made. Now you can even play it on your computer.

Of his three-cents worth, Butts said, “One third went to taxes. I gave one third away, and the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life.”

Thanks to Alfred Butts, we have had many, many hours of enjoyment. However, we still wish there were more ‘U’ tiles to go with those dastardly ‘Qs’.

Events

April 13
1782 - Washington, North Carolina was incorporated as the first town to be named for -- take a guess -- George Washington. One of these days we’re going to add up all the places, towns and points of interest that are named after the first president of the U.S. Maybe we could have a contest -- the first person with the correct answer wins a set of wooden teeth...

1796 - The first known elephant (like, how would one NOT know it was an elephant?) to arrive in the United States, came to America. The elephant was from Bengal, India and entered the U.S.A. through New York City.

1916 - The first hybrid seed corn was purchased -- for 15-cents a bushel -- by Samuel Ramsay of Jacobsburg, OH.

1940 - A record pole vault of 15 feet was made in Berkeley, CA by Cornelius Warmerdam. Sergei Bubka from the Ukraine doesn’t think much of this record. In 1994, he vaulted himself up and over at a height of 20 feet, 1¾ inches.

1943 - The Thomas Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in Washington, DC. on this, the anniversary of Jefferson’s birth.

1954 - Hank Aaron debuted for the Milwaukee Braves. In his first ever major-league baseball game, Hammerin’ Hank went 0-for-5 against Cincinnati. Aaron’s first major-league homer came 10 days later.

1958 - Van Cliburn of Kilgore, TX earned 1st prize in the Soviet Union’s Tchaikovsky International Piano Contest in Moscow.

1961 - Carnival opened on Broadway at the Imperial Theatre in New York City. Anna Maria Alberghetti starred in the musical which ran for 719 performances.

1963 - Pete Rose got his first major-league hit for the Cincinnati Reds. Twenty one years later to this day, ‘Charlie Hustle’ collected his 4,000th hit. Rose was playing for Montreal when he achieved the feat. (See 1984.)

1964 - The 36th Annual Academy Awards ceremony proved to be a long evening for host Jack Lemmon and his audience at Los Angeles’ Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and those viewing on TV. We don’t know exactly how long the actual ceremonies were, but judging from the length of the films being honored, ‘long’ was the magic word. The five films nominated for Best Picture of 1963 averaged 159 minutes, including the two epics, Cleopatra (243 minutes) and How the West Was Won (165 minutes). Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, producer), which won the top prize, plus Best Director (Tony Richardson) Best Music/Score/Substantially Original (John Addison) and Best Writing/Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (John Osborne)was a mere two hours long. There were, however, a few average-length flicks that featured above-average, Oscar-winning performances: Best Actor: Sidney Poitier (Lilies of the Field); Best Actress: Patricia Neal and Best Supporting Actor: Melvyn Douglas (Hud); Best Supporting Actress: Margaret Rutherford (The V.I.P.s); and Best Music/Song: Call Me Irresponsible, James Van Heusen (music), Sammy Cahn (lyrics) from Papa’s Delicate Condition. Other marathon Oscar-winning movies of 1963: It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (188 minutes); America, America (174 minutes); Irma la Douce (147 minutes).

1972 - The first strike in the history of major-league baseball ended. Players had walked off the field 13 days earlier.

1980 - Broadway’s longest-running musical closed after eight years. Grease ran for 3,388 performances and earned $8 million. Though the-longest running musical on the Great White Way at the time, Grease was also the third longest-running Broadway show. Other shows in the top five included: The Defiant Ones and Life with Father, Oh! Calcutta, A Chorus Line and Fiddler on the Roof.

1981 - Janet Cook won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Things took a strange turn when she later said that her prize-winning story in The Washington Post was a fake. She made up the story and passed it off as truth. Her award was taken away and given instead to Teresa Carpenter of New York’s Village Voice.

1984 - The Montreal Expos welcomed Pete Rose to the team and he repaid the Expos’ faithful with a double against his former teammates, the Philadelphia Phillies. It was Rose’s 4,000th career hit. He is the only National League player to reach this milestone since Ty Cobb got 4,109 total hits with American League teams, Detroit and Philadelphia.

1985 - The Grand Ole Opry, a radio staple from Nashville for 60 years, came to TV. The Nashville Network presented the country music jamboree to some 22-million homes across the U.S.

1986 - Jack Nicklaus won his sixth Masters green jacket with a 9-under-par 279.

Birthdays

April 13
1743 - Thomas Jefferson
3rd U.S. President [1801-1809]; married to Martha Skelton [one son, five daughters]; nickname: Man of the People; died July 4, 1826

1852 - F. W. (Frank Winfield) Woolworth
merchant: created the five and ten cent store [1879 in Lancaster, PA]: headed F.W. Woolworth & Co. with over 1,000 stores, funded NY’s Woolworth Building; died Apr 8, 1919

1899 - Alfred M. Butts
architect, game inventor; died Apr 4, 1993; see Scrabble Day [above]

1906 - Samuel Beckett
author, critic, playwright: Waiting for Godot, The Unnameable, Eleutheria, Malone Dies, Malloy, Endgame; died Dec 22, 1989

1906 - Bud (Lawrence) Freeman
jazz musician: tenor sax: China Boy, Easy to Get, I’ve Found a New Baby, The Eel, Mr. Toad; died Mar 15, 1991

1907 - Harold Stassen
perennial U.S. Presidential candidate; governor of Minnesota; a member of President Eisenhower’s cabinet; one of the founders of the U.N.; died Mar 4, 2001

1909 - Eudora Welty
poet: Delta Wedding, Losing Battles, A Curtain of Green; quote: “The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.”; Computer programmer Steve Dorner (Univ of Illinois,Urbana) created a freeware e-mail program in the late 1980s and dubbed it “Eudora”, which became one of the most popular e-mail readers used around the world, because of Welty’s short story "Why I Live at the P.O." (published in 1941); died July 23, 2001

1919 - Howard Keel (Harry Clifford Leek)
actor: Dallas; singer, actor: Oklahoma, Annie Get Your Gun, Show Boat, Lovely to Look At, Kiss Me Kate, Calamity Jane, Rose-Marie, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Deep in My Heart, Saratoga, No Strings; died Nov 7, 2004

1919 - Madalyn Murray O’Hair
author: Why I Am an Atheist; murdered: missing since Aug 1995, her body was found near Camp Wood TX Jan 28, 2001

1923 - Don Adams (Donald James Yarmy)
Emmy Award-winning actor: Get Smart [1966-1967, 1967-1968]; Back to the Beach, The Nude Bomb; died Sep 25, 2005

1925 - Jules Irving
actor: It Came from Beneath the Sea [aka Monster from Beneath the Sea]; died July 28, 1979

1928 - Teddy Charles (Theodore Charles Cohen)
vibraphonist, songwriter: Blue Greens; group: Teddy Charles Quintet; composer, arranger; worked w/modern jazz artists like Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane

1929 - Marilynn Smith
golf: Univ. of Kansas: Kansas State Amateur champ [1946-1948], national collegiate title [1949]; 22 tournament victories/2 major championships [Titleholders: 1963, 1964]; LPGA founder/charter member, president [1958-1960]

1931 - Dan Gurney
auto racer: Indianapolis Speedway Hall of Famer; 1st driver to win all 4 major categories: Formula One, Indy Cars, NASCAR stock and sports cars; team owner: builds All-American Eagle

1935 - Lyle Waggoner
actor: The Carol Burnett Show, The Jimmie Rodgers Show, Wonder Woman, Dead Women in Lingerie

1937 - Edward Fox
actor: Gulliver’s Travels, The Dresser, Gandhi, The Mirror Crack’d, Force 10 from Navarone, The Big Sleep, A Bridge Too Far, The Day of the Jackal, Portrait of a Lady

1939 - Paul Sorvino
actor: Law and Order, Reds, Oh! God, The Day of the Dolphin, **** Tracy, Goodfellas, A Touch of Class

1940 - Jose Napoles
Internatinal Boxing Hall of Famer: welterweight champ [1969, 1970]

1940 - Lester Chambers
singer, musician: harmonica: group: The Chambers Brothers: Time Has Come Today

1942 - Bill Conti
Academy Award-winning composer of scores: The Right Stuff [1983]; Dynasty, Falcon Crest, Inside Edition

1944 - Jack Casady
musician: bass: groups: KBC Band, Hot Tuna; Jefferson Airplane: It’s No Secret, Runnin’ Round this World, Somebody to Love, White Rabbit

1944 - Brian Pendleton
musician: guitar: group: The Pretty Things; died May 25, 2001

1945 - Tony Dow
actor: Leave It to Beaver, Back to the Beach, High School U.S.A., Death Scream

1946 - Al Green
singer, songwriter: Tired of Being Alone, Let’s Stay Together, You Ought to be with Me, Here I Am, Call Me

1950 - Ron Perlman
actor: Fluke, Double Exposure, Beauty and the Beast series, The Name of the Rose

1951 - Max Weinberg
musician: drummer: E Street Band; bandleader: The Max Weinberg 7 [Late Night with Conan O’Brien]

1951 - Peabo Bryson
singer: Underground Music, I Can Make It Better, Just Another Day, Do It with Feeling, Tonight I Celebrate My Love, If You’re Ever in My arms Again

1954 - Jimmy Destri
musician: Farfisa organ; group: Blondie: Picture This, Hanging on the Telephone, Sunday Girl, Heart of Glass, Call Me, The Tide is High, Rapture

1957 - Saundra Santiago
actress: Miami Vice, Beat Street

1963 - Garry Kasparov
World Chess Champion: international grand master

1970 - Rick Schroder
actor: NYPD Blue, Crimson Tide, Texas, Lonesome Dove, Hansel and Gretel, Earthling, The Champ, Silver Spoons

Chart Toppers

April 13
1951If - Perry Como
Mockingbird Hill -Patti Page
Be My Love - Mario Lanza
The Rhumba Boogie - Hank Snow

1959Come Softly to Me - The Fleetwoods
Pink Shoe Laces - Dodie Stevens
(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such as I - Elvis Presley
White Lightning - George Jones

1967Happy Together - The Turtles
Somethin’ Stupid - Nancy Sinatra & Frank Sinatra
Bernadette - Four Tops
Walk Through This World with Me - George Jones

1975Philadelphia Freedom - The Elton John Band
Poetry Man - Phoebe Snow
(Hey Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song
- B.J. Thomas
Always Wanting You - Merle Haggard

1983Billy Jean - Michael Jackson
Do You Really Want to Hurt Me - Culture Club
Hungry like the Wolf - Duran Duran
We’ve Got Tonight - Kenny Rogers & Sheena Easton

1991I’ve Been Thinking About You - Londonbeat
You’re in Love - Wilson Phillips
Hold You Tight - Tara Kemp
Down Home - Alabama

Number 1 April 13 1967....Bernadette-Four Tops

03 - Bernadette.zip

[marty napier]

Think you buddyjh

[Victor Hugo]

Thanks for the information Buddy, that is awesome.

[fossil112]

thanks buddy!

[MOE23]

Thanks buddy!!!!

[Biged]

Thanks my friend learn something every day

[Bud_Alcor]

As always great info to read.