1939 - Sabotage suspected in crash of 'City of San Francisco'
1941 - Red army evacuates Smolensk
1953 - US President Dwight Eisenhower establishes Government Contract Compliance Committee
1963 - US Customs agents confiscate 21 gold coins from Witte Museum, San Antonio, Texas
1978 - Bomb attack in Beirut, 175 killed
1989 - 2 hot-air balloons crash at Alice Springs, Australia, 13 killed
1721 - Francis Ireland, composer
1819 - George Gabriel Stokes, physicist/mathematician (spectroscope)
1902 - Regis Toomey, Pitts Pa, actor (Burke's Law, Petticoat Junction)
1939 - Saul Steinberg, artist (The Art of Living)
1949 - Bobby Clarke, Manitoba, NHL player/coach (Phila Flyer)
1959 - Tom Niedenfuer, American baseball player
1382 - Eleanor of Aragon, wife of John I of Castile (b. 1358)
1971 - King Curtis, [Curtis Ousley], US musician, murdered at 37
1974 - Hugo Yarnold, cricketer (Umpire in 3 Tests for England), dies
1992 - Clifford Allison, US stock-car racer, dies in an accident
1998 - Julien Green, American novelist (b. 1900)
2000 - Nazia Hassan, Pakistani pop singer (b. 1965)
In 1945 a group of Soviet school children presented a US Ambassador with a carved US Seal as a gesture of friendship. It hung in his office for 7 years before discovering it contained a listening device.
Tsar Peter III of Russia court-martialed and hanged a rat which had chewed the heads off his toy soldiers.
The feeling you get when you say a word over and over until it stops sounding like a real word is called Jamais Vu.
