Birthdays: King James II Stuart, John Locke, Ingres, Charlie Parker would have been 86, Preston Sturges, Ingrid Bergman, William Friedkin, Dinah Washington, George Montgomery, Slobodan Milosevic, Robin Leach, Richard Attenborough is 84, Donald O’Connor, Elliot Gould, Rebecca DeMornay is 48, Joel Schumacher, choreographer Mark Morris, Charles Kettering inventor of the automobile ignition,Sen. John McCain is 71, Michael Jackson The King of Pop is 49.

1885 - Boxing's 1st heavyweight title fight with regulation 3-oz gloves & 3-minute rounds was fought between John L Sullivan & Dominick McCaffrey. Before this, bareknuckle fights could go on for 75 rounds and only be stopped when one of the other opponent was too bloody to continue.

1893- Whitcomb Judson invented the zipper.

1896- Chop Suey invented in New York City.

1908 - NY gives a parade to returning US Olympians from London. Wall Street brokers come up with the idea of throwing shredded stock ticker tape out the windows. The first ticker tape parade.

1925 - After a night on the town, Babe Ruth shows up late for batting practice Yankee manager Miller Huggins suspended Ruth & slapped a $5,000 fine on him. Whenever the Yankees were on the road and were safely winning a game Ruth would take himself out of the lineup early so he could scout out a good bar for the team to go to later.

1929- New York City was having competitions between builders for who could build the tallest office building. The Chrysler Building had recently surpassed the Bank of Manhattan Building. On this day William Ratzengauer and former Presidential candidate Al Smith announced they would build a monster building, much higher than any other. It would be on the site of the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel and they would call it the Empire State Building.

1953-Warner's "Cat Tails for Two" introduces Speedy Gonzales. Years ago I met an old animator named Frank Gonzales who claimed the character was named for him. Warners had a drawing quota for assistants and Frank was always first done and out of his chair to go flirt with the ink & paint girls. The other guys would say:" There goes "Speedy" Gonzales again.When Chuck Jones & designer Hawley Pratt were thinking of new characters, the rest as they say, was history.

1954 – San Francisco International Airport (SFO) opened.

1958 - George Harrison joins the Quarrymen -Lennon-McCartney and Sutcliffe. The later rename themselves the Beatles.

1962- The Kennedy State Department sent poet laureate Robert Frost on a goodwill tour of Soviet Russia.

1967- Final Episode of the television series "The Fugitive". Dr. Richard Kimble catches the one-armed-man and clears his name.

1974- THE RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE- Prizefighter Mohammed Ali wins back his heavyweight crown from George Foreman in a wild showbiz event set up in Kinshasa, Zaire. While the African government was trying to use the press attention to highlight the modern society they had developed, Ali was making jokes about witchdoctors, missionaries in stewpots and other cliches. "Tonight they'll be a thousand guys named Mohammed out there rooting for me, and another thousand guys named Ali rooting for me, but their won't be anybody else out there named George Foreman!" Foreman left boxing, became a minister, then returned in his 40’s to win the heavyweight crown and a fortune when most athletes are retired.

1976 - Anissa Jones, the child actress who played Buffy on the television show Family Affair), died of a drug overdose at age 18.

1989 -Hotel millionaire Leona Helmsley had said : "Only little people pay taxes". This day she was sentenced to four years in prison and fined two million dollars for 33 counts of income tax evasion. According to a London newspaper one servant under oath admitted he hated The Queen of Mean so much that whenever he had to bring her a Perrier, he would unzip his fly and use a rather unique stirrer for her drink. Leona died in 2007 and left the bulk of her estate to her dog.

2002- Peep-O-Rama, Times Square’s last remaining peep show, closed.

2005- HURRICANE KATRINA destroyed the cities of New Orleans, Gulfport and Biloxi, Mississippi. Tidal surges up to 30 feet collapsed levees, sending walls of water across the Big Easy. Thousands died, 800,000 homeless and billions of dollars in damage. The tragedy proved to the world that for all the talk about preparedness after 9-11, America was woefully unprepared in a real crisis. While people drowned in their attics waiting for rescue and critical care patients were abandoned on the sidewalks to die, government fumbled for almost a week. Mounties from Canada arrived before the US authorities. Long lines of ambulances were kept waiting outside the city with no permission to move in. Meanwhile President Bush played air guitar at a Navy base in San Diego and compared himself to Franklin Roosevelt, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff attended a Bird Flu seminar and FEMA head David Brown was sending e-mails to friends like “Did you see me on camera with my new tie? -Fabulous!”