We were shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Robert Nudelman. He was only 52 and died suddenly when visiting his elderly father in Tuscon.

Robert Nudelman in the green shirt on the far right facing the others.

Over the years I've spent a lot of my spare time working with a number of non-profit organizations to benefit the film and animation community. I feel it's important to give back to the community that has taken me in and counted me one of them. I noticed that in each non-profit organization, while most of us donate what little time we can, there always seems to be one or two individuals who work tirelessly with scant regard for their own interests. These are the foot soldiers, the boots on the ground. These people are always there when you arrive at an event, and can always be counted upon to be the last to turn out the light after sweeping up.

Robert Nudelman was such a person for the organization Hollywood Heritage. An archivist and historian, his passion was to stop or at least slow down the despoiling of Old Hollywood by developers. He was an integral part of Hollywood Heritage and the LA Conservancy, organizations dedicated to preserving what is left of the original buildings that Cecil B. Demille, Marlena Dietrich and William Powell would have recognized.

I got to know Robert well through HH meetings, parties at the Wattles Mansion, and when we did the Afternoon of Remembrance annual service for the Animation community. Robert was always the one clearing away chairs, setting up microphones, adjusting lights and later locking up. His knowledge of Hollywood history was encyclopedic. For many years he was involved with a project with actress Debbie Reynolds to catalog her huge collection of film memorabilia.

But more than that, Robert was an aggressive champion against encroaching development. He would regularly go downtown to attend longwinded sessions of the L.A. City Council,the Parks Commission, the LA Landmarks Commission and the City Planning Commission. Small wonder several testimonials today are coming from LA City Council Members like Eric Garcetti. He would come back with word of the organization filing suit to save one building, get landmark status for another. He would describe the step by step legal gyrations he witnessed in detail so intricate, he could have James Ellroy shouting "enough already!"

It pained him whenever we lost one, like when the original Brown Derby was demolished. I recall he was furious when Frank Lloyd Wrights' beautiful Bandshell for the Hollywood Bowl was bulldozed in the middle of the night. "Sure they say the new one will have better acoustics and you won't notice the difference" he scowled. " But the fact is, that is NOT the band shell Frank Lloyd Wright built, that Gershwin, Paderewski and Duke Ellington played in! Thats been destroyed forever" He vowed to never go back again. He was even unafraid to go up against the Kennedy Family when they supported the demolition of the Ambassador Hotel, where Senator Bobby Kennedy was shot, to be made into a new neighborhood high school.

That was Robert. Every structure was a battle won or lost. Robert once estimated Hollywood lost a third of it's old structures just in his lifetime. " Tourists who come from Germany or China aren't coming to look at another Starbucks or GAP!"

Robert Nudelman told me he once got to interview Hitler's filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl shortly before she died at age 101. He asked her about her infamous Hollywood tour in 1938, when the only filmmaker who didn't boycott her was Walt Disney. She told him that the reason Walt Disney wanted to meet her was not about politics, but that he was still annoyed that his film Snow White lost out to her Olympia at the Venice Film Festival. Walt wanted to see it, to know why.

He smiled his little sardonic smile when he described how Leni Reifenstahl autographed a glossy B/W photo to him: " To Robert Nudelman, My Favorite Jew."

Yet thanks to the tireless efforts of Robert and the people of Hollywood Heritage and the LA Conservancy, the public now takes seriously the precious antique nature of the central Hollywood, and developers think twice before reaching for that bulldozer. A great international city should have not only modern skyscrapers, but a legacy. The idea of Hollywood is not owned by real estate developers, city officials, and fast food salesmen. Hollywood is an idea that belongs to the world. And it is our duty to keep it for the world.

When the Kodak Center was built on Hollywood and Highland where the Academy Awards are now held, Robert and his friends were looking over their shoulders to make sure the developers kept their promise to restore Graumann's Chinese Theatre and courtyard to it's original 1927 beauty, getting rid of an ugly aluminium box office and marquee added in the 1950s. When the Disney Company bought the old El Capitan Theater, they first wanted to turn it into a 16 screen multiplex. But Robert and the Conservancy convinced them it would be better to go the other way and restore this old 1927 movie palace where Citizen Kane premiered and the first meetings of the Screen Actors Guild were held. Disney caught the restoration-bug and later restored Manhattan's New Amsterdam Theater,where the original Ziegfeld Follies were performed.



Robert, I can't believe you are gone. There were to be some conferences on the Golden Age Movie Moguls on Memorial Day at the Huntington, I fully expected to meet you there and compare notes on Richard Schickel and Neil Gabler.

Adieu, My Friend. You are now stardust, but your work remains- The restored El Capitan Theater, The Restored Graumann's Chinese, The Restored Pig & Whistle Restaurant, The Max Factor Building, the Cinerama Dome, The Restored Egyptian Theater, the landmarked 3400 Cahuenga aka the Hanna & Barbera Building. The Palladium Theater where Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey brought Swing to the West Coast. The Restored Hollywood and Vine. The restored Ravenswood Apartments where Mae West lived.

Johnny Grant may have been the honorary Mayor of Hollywood, but you were it's greatest citizen. Because of you, your unknown and unheralded efforts, People from around the world can still visit, admire and click their cameras at the stately old landmarks of Hollywood.

There is more about Robert on the Hollywood Heritage website on my links page, and here is a link to his LA Times obituary.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-nudelman9-2008may09,0,6704234.story?track=rss
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Quiz: Who were the parents of Robin the Boy Wonder?

Yesterday’s Question: What does the name Mahdi mean?
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History for 5/9/2008
Birthdays: John Brown, James Barrie the creator of Peter Pan, Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum, Glenda Jackson, Billy Joel, Candice Bergen, Mike Wallace is 90, Pancho Gonzales, James L. Brooks, Albert Finney is 72
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To the ancient Romans this was the Lemuria, the Festival of Death . Like the ancient Greek Anthesterion in February the Lemuria was a deal made with the Underworld that the dearly departed were allowed to visit the surface world and you should leave your door open and leave out food for them. This way they won't haunt you and you'll have good luck all year.
At sunset tomorrow the head of the house (Pater Familias) walks through the house hitting a little bronze gong, he throws a handful of black beans over his shoulder and chants 'With These Beans I Redeem Myself and My Family. O Shades of My Ancestors Depart ! Lemuria has Ended!'

1754- THE FIRST NEWSPAPER CARTOON- Ben Franklin in his Pennsylvania Gazette prints a drawing of a segmented snake with each piece named for a colony with the inscription: Join or Die. ( Okay, it's not Calvin and Hobbs but it's a start).

1785 - British inventor Joseph Bramah patents the beer-pump handle. So pull us a dram for a pint of pure.-i.e. I’d like a glass of Guinness Stout, please.

1887- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show did it’s first performance in Europe. In London the English public thrilled to displays of trick riding, wild red Indians, cowboys and little Annie Oakley the trickshooter.

1927- Commander Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett fly over the North Pole in a Fokker monoplane called the Josephine Ford. He beats by two days famed Norwegian explorer Roald Ammundsen who flew over the Pole in a dirigible built by Mussolini. Remember Lindbergh hadn’t flown across the Atlantic yet and it was ten years before the Hindenberg disaster, so a dirigible was considered much safer than an aeroplane. Commander Byrd won the Medal of Honor and became a household name. A modern biography based on his diary now contends he really didn’t go over the Pole as he claimed but turned back 150 miles short. He was too drunk to tell anyway. Although a former World War One pilot by now he had grown terrified of flying.

1932 – London’s Piccadilly Circus first lit by electricity.

1935- The First Belch heard on nationwide radio. Melvin Purvis (the FBI man who killed John Dillinger) was doing an ad for Fleischmann’s Yeast when he committed the offense,dubbed “The Burp Heard Round the World”.

1937- ACTOR’S SHOWDOWN WITH L.B.MAYER- In a dramatic confrontation the heads of the Screen Actor’s Guild Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone go to MGM boss Louis B. Mayer’s beach house during a Sunday garden party. While IATSE-Capone mob gangster Willie Bioff stood by to give Mayer moral support, Montgomery told Mayer he had a 96% strike vote from the actors, so if Mayer didn’t recognize SAG as the sole bargaining agent for actors they would paralyze Hollywood monday morning!
Mayer considered, then gave in. Bioff got from the actors a deal that the IA would back off if the actors would withdraw their support from a rival union to IATSE’s organizing the behind the scene’s technical artists. That night 5600 actors and friends celebrated at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Next morning 200 waited in line to get their SAG cards including Garbo and Jean Harlow.

1937- Burne Hogarth began drawing the Tarzan comic strip. Hal Foster had been in contract negotiations with the syndicate over money and the right to his originals. He had created Prince Valiant as a bargaining chip when the syndicate called his bluff by giving the Tarzan job to Hogarth. Foster went on to greater glory with Valiant.

1955- HAPPY BIRTHDAY KERMIT THE FROG! Washington D.C. station puts on a young Univ of Maryland grad named Jim Henson as filler before the TODAY Show. He antics with his green frog called Kermit, fashioned from fabric from one of his mothers old green coats. The Muppets are born.

1960- Dr. Gregory Pincus introduced the Birth Control Pill Enovid-10, aka The Pill.

1961- John F. Kennedy's newly appointed head of the FCC, Newton Minow, did his first major address to a luncheon of top television executives. In his speech he blasted them for TV’s mindless content and violence and called television: " A Vast Wasteland."
What makes it historic is it's the first time anybody had noticed just how lousy TV is and how badly we are all addicted to it. In the show Gilligan’s Island, the boat they were on was nicknamed the Minnow for Newton Minow.

1970- THE MORATORIUM DAY- Largest of the nationwide youth protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam and Cambodia. President Nixon was obsessed by the protests. He had a bunker command post built under the White House where video monitors observed the “long haired peaceniks” outside. Retired CIA director Bill Gates confessed in his memoirs that as a young operative he took the day off to go protest as well as did a lot of other CIA agents. In Chicago young student and future comic John Belushi was dragged off by friends after being struck in the chest with a fired tear gas shell.

1995-Happy Birthday Ebola! The Center of Disease Control published findings on a new deadly strain of virus appearing near Kinshasha Zaire and called it the Ebola Virus.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: The largest independent militia in Iraq today is the Shiite force called the Mahdi Army. In 1881 British Gen. Gordon fought a Sudanese leader called the Mahdi. What does the name Mahdi mean?

Answer: In Sunni and Shiite Moslem theology the 12 Imam is supposed to be the Mahdi, the Expected one, The Ultimate Savior of Mankind as in the Hebrew Mossiach, or Christ, Messiah.

Congratulations to fellow animator Seth McFarlane, he of Family Guy and American Dad, for making a $100 Million dollar deal with Fox. As one creative to another, I salute any one of us who can start with a pencil and end up making $100 Million bucks!

I feel like the Warner Bros fish who puts a gun to his temple and says" Now, I've seen everything!" BLAM!

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Quiz: The largest independent militia in Iraq today is the Shiite force called the Mahdi Army. In 1885, British Gen. Gordon fought a Sundanese leader called the Mahdi. What does the name Mahdi mean?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: Why does the term quarantine mean isolating people with a contagious disease? If someone has Typhus, you give them 25 cents?
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History for 5/8/2008
Birthdays: Harry Truman, Roberto Rossellini, Leopold Bakhunin, Louis Gottschalk, Oscar Hammerstein, Ted Sorenson, Sonny Liston, Toni Tennille, Ricky Nelson, Peter Benchley, Thomas Pinchon, David Attenborough, Keith Jarrett, Alex Van Halen, Melissa Gilbert is 43, French illustrator Jean Giraud aka Moebius is 69, Enrique Inglesias is 32, Don Rickles is 82

1587- The Roanoke Colony settlers leave England for Virginia (named by Sir Walter Raleigh for Queen Elizabeth, "the Virgin Queen"). When a supply ship reached their colony in 1590 the houses were intact but the colonists had all disappeared, leaving no remains or signs of violence, but only a cryptic message CROTOAN carved on a tree.

1824- Ludwig Von Beethoven performed his Ninth (Choral) Symphony and Missa Solemnis in concert for the first time. Even though he was stone deaf he was still in demand as a conductor. The orchestra trained themselves to ignore the Maestro's baton waving and follow the lead of the concert-master ( first violinist ). It was said when they finished and the audience was cheering poor Beethoven was still flapping his arms about and moaning the melody, unaware of the sound of his own voice.

1878- David Hughes invents the Microphone while trying to get over bronchitis.

1910-Mazeltov! Russian-Jewish immigrant glove salesman Schmuel Gelpfisch married Blanche Lasky, the daughter of vaudeville performer Jesse Lasky. Gelpfisch later changed his name to Goldfish, then Goldwyn. He and his father in law Jesse Lasky went into the new flicker business and started the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company. They moved to Hollywood and in 1915 they merged with Paramount Pictures and Goldwyn merged into Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. Both became top Hollywood producers.

1933- When the Rockefellers were building their huge office complex, Rockefeller Center, in New York City they decided to get one of the greatest living Mexican painters, Diego Rivera, to design the murals for the interior of the atrium " Man at the Crossroads ". This despite the fact that Rivera was well known as a radical communist. Soon Nelson Rockefeller noticed Rivera was painting in the center of the mural a huge heroic portrait of Lenin stepping on John D. Rockefeller’s face! Over Rivera’s protests Rockefeller ordered the mural painted over and no record of its existence ever kept. But on the night before the painting was to be destroyed Swiss art student Lucienne Bloch slipped a camera into her shirt. While Frida Kahlo distracted the guards she took the only photos of the mural for posterity.

As a young art student I heard about the Lenin mural, but scoured Rockefeller Center in vain trying to find it.

1943-Tex Avery's "Red Hot Riding Hood"- Ooohh Wolfy !

1954-DIEN BIEN PHU- The Communist Viet Minh guerrillas decisively defeat the French in Indochina. The French strategy was to place a forward base in the heart of the guerrilla infested jungle to lure the Vietnamese into the open and defeat them. Instead they got a modern version of the Little Big Horn with the French Legionairies going down under endless waves of attacking Vietnamese. The guerrilla forces had carried large howitzers in small pieces up mountaintops and assembled them to rain shells down on the French.

1962-"A Funny thing Happened to Me on the Way to the Forum" opened on Broadway.

1962- Director Joe Mankiewicz shot the climactic spectacle scene of Cleopatra –Elizabeth Taylor, entering Rome through the Arch of Titus on a mobile sphinx surrounded by thousands of extras. The shot had been delayed six months after a stunt woman fell off an elephant and then the light in the Forum had not been right. When she appeared in the scene the thousands of Italian extras were supposed to shout "Hail Cleopatra!" but instead they shouted "Liz! Liz!"

1978-In court, postman David Berkowitz, confessed to being "Son-of-Sam" or the "44 caliber killer", the serial killer who terrorized New York City by shooting to death teenage couples at random and toying with letters to journalist Pete Hamill. Berkowitz said he received his orders to shoot people from his neighbor's dog "Sam". His reign of terror had the normally blase' city so upset that in a scene out of Fritz Lang’s "M", godfather John Gotti pledged the services of the Mafia to catch the maniac. Police finally caught Berkowitz when they found his Volkswagen Beetle illegally parked and noticed the infamous 44 handgun sticking out of a paper bag on the front seat. In Attica prison, Berkowitz made friends with Mark David Chapman, the murderer of John Lennon.

1991- President Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, propositioned waitress Paula Jones at the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock. With her legal bills financed by the Clinton-hating Neo-Cons, her case went as far as a Supreme Court. They decided to allow her to sue a President while in office. Clinton’s attorney didn’t help things with statements like :" Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park and who knows who you’ll turn up". She got a lot of publicity, an $850,000 settlement and a nude spread in Penthouse Magazine.

1996- South Africa adopted its first post-apartheid constitution.

1998- The impotence drug Viagra gains national prominence when retired senator and Presidential Candidate Bob Dole confessed on the Larry King talk show that he participated in the drugs test trials and the had "thoroughly enjoyed himself."
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Why does the term quarantine mean isolating people with a contagious disease? If someone has Typhus, you give them 25 cents?

Answer: Quarantine comes from the French number 40- Quarante. Medieval justice decreed that when plague broke out in a town, the way to keep it from spreading was to draw a line around it and not let anyone in or out for 40 days. Others say it was invented in Venice- quaranti giorni, to isolate for 40 days a plague ship coming into harbor.

Quiz: Why does the term quarantine mean isolating people with a contagious disease? If someone has Typhus, you give them 25 cents?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: What was Saint Paul's real name?
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History for 5/7/2008
Birthday: Johannes Brahms, Peter Ilyich Tschaikowsky *, Gary Cooper**, Gabby Hayes, Robert Browning, Marcus Loew of Loews Theater chain, Darin McGavin, Edward Land (inventor of the Polaroid lens and camera), Bob Clampett, Amy Heckerling, Traci Lords

*It's ironic that Brahms and Tschaikowsky had the same birthday because they couldn't stand one other. Tschaikowsky referred in his diary "What an unharmonious German bastard!" The only way they'd stay at a party was if Anton Dvorak was there too.

**The great cowboy-actor from Montana who's original name was Frank James Cooper and his first ambition was to be a cartoonist for the Helena Times.

Happy Birthday, Coop! Being a movie star was fun, being rich and making love to lots of beautiful women, but I'm sure you would have rather drawn cartoons...

Happy Norwegian National Day. ’Huff Da!

Greek Festival of the Birth of Apollo.

401 B.C. SOCRATES DIED. Contrary to modern perception not everyone in ancient Greece loved philosophy. The Greeks had the same conflicts we have now between faith, tradition and rational thought and science. The scientist Anaxagoras was run out of town for saying that the Sun wasn’t Phoebus in a chariot but a burning rock floating in space. Euripides the playwright was also in trouble for doubting the Gods existence. But Socrates pushed the argument to its most extreme conclusion. The Athenian conservatives convicted Socrates of blasphemy and subverting the public morals. All hoped Socrates would just pay a fine and shut up, but Socrates unrepentant stance forced the law to go all the way to the death penalty. He was ordered to commit suicide by being given a cup of Hemlock. Actually it wasn’t a cup., the poison was held in a leaf of Romaine Lettuce, then called Lettuce of the Isle of Cos. His friend Crito said “You don’t deserve to die!” To which he replied: “You weep because you would rather I did deserve death? ”Socrates students like Plato and Xenophon continued on and became great writers on their own. My favorite story was that Socrates wife Xantippe was always yelling at him for wasting his time philosophizing when he should be working at his real job as a stone-cutter. After one loud tirade she dumped a pisspot's contents on his head. Socrates looked at his friends and replied:" After thunder one should expect some rain."

1863- Hard-fighting Confederate major general Earl 'Buck' Van Dorn was killed, but not in battle. A Tennessee doctor named J.G. Peters made an appointment with the general, went up behind him while he was at his desk and shot him in the back of the head. Peters then calmly got back into his carriage and rode to Union lines. Peters wasn't a Yankee assassin. He was expressing his disapproval of the fact that the handsome Van Dorn was having an affair with his wife.

1914-Paramount Pictures formed by a consortium led by Jesse Lasky and Cecil B. Demille.

1915- THE LUSITANIA- The Civilian oceanliner Luisitania was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-20. 1,198 drowned, including many Americans. The Kaiser later gave a medal to the U-boat Captain Walter Schweige. These acts outraged American opinion and led us into World War I, despite many pro-German immigrants. It was revealed later that the reason Lusitania sank so quickly, just 18 minutes - even Captain Schweige was surprised- was that it's cargo hold was full of explosives. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill fought the German U-boat blockade by covertly transporting purchased American weapons on hospital ships, civilian ocean liners and let some British freighters illegally fly the flags of neutral countries. The German government knew that the Lusitania had been classified by the British admiralty a military cruiser. The German government apologized to the American government and stopped the unrestricted U-boat campaign for two years, but the Lusitania shifted neutral U.S. public sympathy irrevocably to the Franco-English side. Winsor McCay later did the animated film about the incident.



1926- Gangster Al Capone killed 3 men with a baseball bat over dinner.

1937-Nobel Prize winning writer William Faulkner hired by MGM Studios, earning $500 a week. He celebrated by going on a two week long drinking binge. When MGM's Head of Writing Sam Marx had him tracked down to an Oakie migrant camp in the Imperial Valley, he was dragged off boozily whining: " Ah only wanna write for Mickey Mouse !!"

1941-Glen Miller records the "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" for RCA. the first gold record million seller.

1942- Battle of the Coral Sea-The U.S. Navy, suffering only defeats up 'til then, stops a Japanese task force. This is the first engagement in which the two fleets never saw each other, but fought long distance with carrier launched airplanes. Veterans commented that one of the sadder losses was when the aircraft carrier USS Lexington went down, she took the fleet's supply of 6 Bugs Bunny cartoons with her. War is Hell.

1945- V.E. Day. Grand Admiral Doenitz, the successor to Adolph Hitler, officially surrendered the Third Reich to the allies. They repeat the ceremony to the Russians next day. There was a fear after the fall of Berlin that the remaining Nazis would form a 'National Redoubt" in the Bavarian Alps or that a "werewolf army" of young fanatics would continue to fight on as guerrillas with poison gas. But that threat failed to materialize. Admiral Doenitz said after the signing:" I feel we shall not see our flag fly over a prosperous Germany in our lifetime." Well, not in your lifetime, Karl....

1945- In a top secret test at Los Alamos, the Manhattan Project scientists detonated, in the desert, a single blast 100,000 pounds of TNT. This was to measure the effect of a blast that big and provide a control to gauge the effectiveness of the Atomic Bomb. 100,000 pounds of TNT became known as one Kiloton. The Hiroshima A-Bomb was 20 kilotons, the largest thermonuclear device was 50 kilotons.

1966- “Monday Monday” by the Mamas and the Papas becomes #1 in the pop charts.

1996- Comedian Martin Lawrence went berserk and ran down a main intersection in Van Nuys Cal. raving and waving a pistol. When asked to explain himself, Lawrence blamed it on “Dehydration.”

1998- Apple Computers introduced the iMac.
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Yesterday’s Question: What was Saint Paul's real name?

Answer: He was originally a Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus. He became known as Paul, the Greek version of his name, since that was the common second tongue of the ancient Middle East.

Quiz: What was St. Paul’s real name?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What does DC comics stand for?
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History for 5/6/2008
Birthdays: Maximillien Robespierre, Sigmund Freud, Rudolph Valentino, Orson Welles, Robert Peary, Willie Mays, Stewart Granger*, Bob Seger, Toots Schoor, Andriana Caselotti- the voice of Snow White,Tony Blair, Anne Parillaud- Nikita in La Femme Nikita, , George Clooney is 48,

*English actor Stewart Granger had to change his name to get into Hollywood movies. His real name was Jimmy Stewart.

1527- THE SACK OF ROME- Pope Clement VII "the Medici Fox" played the diplomatic tango with the world powers a bit too clumsily and Emperor Charles V of Spain, Holland and Germany launched an army at Rome. Charles gave his general Charles De Bourbon a hangman's noose dipped in gold, a "Golden Rope to Hang the Pope" The Vatican armies were led by the late Pope Julius's bastard son Maria Della Rovere who didn't like Clement so he kept his army out of the whole war. The city of Rome’s defense was organized by the artist Benevenuto Cellini. He managed to get off one shot before escaping out the back door and that shot killed Charles de Bourbon, so now a loot crazed mercenary army with no commander was let loose in the richest city in Europe. The troops pillaged for months, only the plague drove them out. Many of the troops were newly converted Protestants, so they looked forward to despoiling the Great Whore of Rome. They entered the orphanage of Santo Spirito and slaughtered all the patients, then ran into St. Peters and massacred all the harmless people who sought sanctuary there. They dressed a donkey in cardinals robes, proclaimed Martin Luther pope and made campfires in the Sistine chapel-which is why the fresco was darkened by smoke. Pope Clement escaped the golden rope, but the Vatican never regained the power it once had and popes actually started to concentrate on spiritual stuff!

1793- American artist Gilbert Stuart arrived back home after a stay in Europe dead broke. In the Age of Gainsborough, Romney and West, Stuart didn’t do so well. He left America because he was tired of being pestered to do copies of his famous portrait of George Washington, the one that is currently on our dollar bill.

1862- Henry David Thoreau dies at age 44. When his sister asked him :"Have you made your peace with God?" Thoreau replied:" I was unaware that we had ever quarreled."

1903-A bronze plaque was attached to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. On it was a poem The New Colossus by a young Jewish immigrant woman named Emma Lazarus. She was disturbed by the Anti-Semitic violence in Russia and wrote this inspired by the symbol of the Statue. “Give Me your Tired, Your Poor..” The French creators had intended the Statue of Liberty to symbolize political liberty but Lazarus’s poem had confirmed the Statue as“ The Mother of Exiles ”.

1915-Babe Ruth hits his first home run. He was a Boston Red Sox pitcher at the time. He will finish his career with 714 home runs, a record that held for decades until Hank Aaron.

1919- Seattle dockworkers go on strike refusing to load weapons destined to fight fellow workers in the Russian Revolution.

1919- Wizard of Oz creator L.Frank Baum died of heart disease at 62. He was trying at the time to buy real estate in Los Angeles for an Oz- theme amusement park.

1937-The Giant Zeppelin Graf HINDENBURG EXPLODED while landing in Lakehurst New Jersey. Despite the horrible film images 63 of the 90 passengers and crew escaped.
People to this day aren’t sure what happened, from an igniting from static electricity to an anti-nazi saboteur firing a flare gun into the hydrogen gas bags. The explosion originated behind the large swastika on the tail. The previous year a visit from a German luxury liner the S.S. Bremen caused a riot on the New York City docks as demonstrators fought police to tear the hated Nazi flag down. It was possible at that time to fly a dirigible with non flammable helium, but it was much more expensive than hydrogen and the worlds chief supplier of helium, the United States, was reluctant to sell Hitler that much of the strategic chemical. The American ground crew wanted to give a gift to the German captain who was dying of 3rd degree burns, so they presented him with an engraved cigarette lighter! (tacky) My grandparents told me they drove out to see the wreckage with a huge crowd. Even though it was still smoldering people were prying chunks off it for souvenirs.
Zeppelins were once supposed to be moored to the top of the Empire State Building but that never came about. By 1939 Goring ordered all remaining zeppelins and hangers scrapped for their valuable materials.

1937- THE FLEISCHER STRIKE-Cartoonists vote to strike Max Fleischers Studio after Max fires 13 animators for union activity and complaining about the 6 day work week.
The strike was settled several weeks later when parent company Paramount forced Max to concede. Strikers sang "We're Popeye the Union Man! We're Popeye the Union Man! We'll Fight to the Finish, Cause We Can't Live on Spinach ! We're Popeye...etc."

1937- The Society of Motion Picture Art Directors formed.

1941- A friend of Bob Hope who was now in the military suggested the comedian come and entertain troops on their army post. Hope takes the suggestion and it becomes his signature event. Into his eighties he entertained servicemen around the world in five wars.

1949-EDSAC invented in England. The first computer that could store data in it’s memory.

1954- Oxford student Roger Bannister ran the first Four Minute Mile. His time was 3:59.04.

1994- The Channel Tunnel or Chunnel opened between Folkestone England and Calais France.

2001- Variety reported that the Walt Disney Company in promoting their upcoming summer film Pearl Harbor, had canceled plans for Pearl Harbor Happy Meals at MacDonalds, as being in bad taste. Hmmm…do ya think..?

2003- A giant tornado destroyed the factory in Jackson, Tennessee that produced most of the world’s supply of Pringles Potato Chips.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What does DC comics stand for?

Answer: Detective Comics. Founded in 1934 as National Allied Publications, they began publishing detective comics and action comics in 1936. Superman and Batman first came out as Action and Detective comics respectively.

Quiz: What does DC comics stand for?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: Who was the first Superhero?
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History for 05/05/08
Birthdays: Tyrone Power, Karl Marx, Elizabeth Cochrane called Nellie Bly, Soren Kierkegard, Alice Faye, James Beard, Michael Palin, Pat Carroll, Patrick Ewing, John Rhys Davies, Lance Henriksen, Pat Carrol the original Ursula the Sea Witch is 81.

National Teacher's Day.

National Cartoonist's Day.

2349BC- According to Flemish Bishop Ussher, a XVI Century cleric who tried to calculate a date for every event in the Bible, today is the day Noah’s Ark struck dry ground on Mount Ararat.

840- Louis the German, a son of Charlemagne, died of fright after witnessing a total eclipse of the sun.

1504 -Sir Anton of Burgundy, known as The Great Bastard, dies at 82. We don’t know much about this knight but you gotta wonder how he got that nickname!

1800- Shortly after winning his Federalist parties nod to run for re-election President John Adams was told by his wife Abigail Adams” Tis a pity that politicians would sacrifice all that Good men hold dear and Sacred just to win an election.” Of course, that doesn’t happen today, now does it?

1821"...le Armee'......Josephine....." Napoleon Bonaparte died on the island of St.Helena at age 52. Recent radioactive analysis of his hair samples reveal that in his last 18 months the arsenic level in his body went up 150%. Did he die of stomach cancer like his father or was he poisoned as he stated in his memoirs ? Was there too many bits of mercury and arsenic in his prescribed medicines or the wallpaper ? The debate continues to this day.
When the news reached England King George IV was in the middle of trying to get divorced from his estranged wife Queen Caroline so he could marry his mistress. When an aide announced to him :"Sire! Your Majesty's greatest enemy has died !" George replied: " She is-? Oh, Thank the Lord !"

1862-HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO- Battle of Puebla-Mexican Juaristas under a daring young general named Porfirio Diaz defeated a French invasion force. After Benito Juarez’s presidency Porfirio Diaz made himself dictator and reigned until being ousted in the Mexican Revolution in 1910.

1889- THE PARIS WORLD EXHIBITION opened. This exposition was what the Eiffel Tower was built for: it was the centerpiece of this World's Fair. At the time, it was the world's tallest free-standing metal structure, and hailed as a marvel - and now as an enduring symbol - of the Industrial Revolution. Yet it is still almost a hundred feet shorter than the largest building ever constructed (presumably by mass of construction materials!), the
Great Pyramid at Giza, which is 500 feet tall; only six feet short of Seattle's Space Needle! Americans remembered it as the event where American painting first stood out on the world stage, despite being given a small gallery space between Bosnia and Denmark. The judging of the artwork was controversial. Here they are trying to show the world the uniqueness of American painting yet with not a single Copley, Bierstadt, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer or Mary Cassatt was accepted. James McNeill Whistler considered himself American although he lived most of the time in London. When the show was announced he patriotically entered a dozen paintings but the American judges rejected them all. He angrily re-submitted them as a British artist and won a gold medal.

1891-Carnegie Hall in New York opens. One old musician told me the acoustics are so perfect that you can fart in the trumpet section and you'll be heard in the second balcony.

1953- Broadway Director Jerome Robbins was riding high after directing hits like On the Town and King & I when he was labeled a Communist by Ed Sullivan. To save his career, this day he testified before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee HUAC and named names. One actress he finked on Jack Gilford's wife-Margaret Lee said” I’ve just been stabbed by a wicked fairy”. Ironically Robbins went on to direct two of his biggest hits “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and the Fiddler on the Roof using blacklisted actors like Zero Mostel, Bea Arthur and Jack Gilford, who all hated him.

1960- Soviet Premier Khruschev announces to the world press the shooting down of an American U-2 spy plane over Russia. President Eisenhower vigorously denied anything of the sort until Khruschev in a world media news conference produced the planes wreckage and pilot Lt. Francis Gary Powers. The incident not only deepened the Cold War, but for the first time in modern history a U.S. President was caught lying his head off. For the most recent time, uh, what’s in the news today?

1961- Alan Shepard became the first American in space on board Friendship VII. The rocket took him 115 miles into space but not high enough to achieve an orbit. That was done one year later by John Glenn. Shepard was kept on the ground in his capsule for so long he had to pee in his suit. In the upside down position the fluid ran up his back and puddles in his helmet behind his head. Ick.

1968- Albert Dekker, star of monster movies like Dr. Cyclops, was found hanged in his bathroom, handcuffed, and wearing ladies lingerie. A narcotics needle was sticking in his arm. The police declared it an 'auto-erotic episode that had gone wrong."

hey, so I like to party in my own way. Don't go all Hollywood Babylon on me!

1975- Anne Rice’s novel The Interview With The Vampire first published.

1985- President Ronald Reagan started a firestorm of controversy among WWII veterans when he laid a wreath in Germany at a cemetery in Bitburg that contained graves of 49 Nazi Waffen-SS soldiers. Some of them may have participated in the infamous Malmedy Massacre of US prisoners. When looking for a place for Reagan to stay the State Department scouted around for a German host who was conservative but had no Nazi connections. Finally they found a Baron who was born in 1942. So Reagan stayed at his castle. Once there the Baron revealed even though his father was not in the Nazi party, his godfather was Adolf Hitler! Doh!

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Quiz: Who was the first Superhero?

Answer: The problem is to define where the concept of Superhero, a fictional character with superhuman powers, differs from a Hero of Legend, like Hector, Achilles, Theseus, Robin Hood, Siegfried, Mushashi Miyamoto. In this definition then the first superhero was the Sumerian King Gilgamesh, the hero warrior of the epic story of 2600BC, who was “ two thirds god and one third man”.

You could argue the first superhero of American literature was Natty Bumppo called Hawkeye. In the James Fennimore Cooper novels like The Last of the Mohicans (1826) he was the super-frontiersman- drawn out of stories of real life heroes Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett. This form later adapted to the Western cowboy, making a fictional hero out of real scout Buffalo Bill Cody, then into the Industrial Age with Tarzan the Apeman in 1910. In modern comics the supra-human superhero began with 1938’s Superman, and from then on it was Up, Up and Awaaayyy!!