Quiz: June Foray (1917-2017) was a famous voice actress who voiced Rocky the Flying Squirrel for Jay Ward and Witchy Hazel for Chuck Jones. But she did a voice in a Disney film as well. What was it?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: What does it mean to be hoisted on your own petard?
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History for 8/19/2022
B-Days: Roman Emperor Probus (232AD), Orville Wright, Ring Lardner, Ogden Nash, Alfred Lunt, George Enesco, jockey Willie Shoemaker, Malcolm Forbes, Tipper Gore, Gene Roddenberry, Colleen Moore the It Girl, Jill St. John, Ginger Baker, Dawn Steel, John Stamos, Peter Gallagher is 66, Kyra Sedgwick is 57, Matthew Perry, Jonathan Frakes is 70, Bill Clinton is 76

480 B.C. THERMOPYLAE- The Spartan King Leonidas had gone on ahead of other Greek allies to try and slow down the gigantic Persian invasion force of Xerxes The Great King. He chose to stop them at a narrow mountain pass in Thessaly called Thermopylae or Hot Gates. He had only 300 Spartans of his royal guard and 7,000 other Greek allies to fight off 200,000 Persians.
After repulsing several assaults, this night spies told Leonidas a Greek traitor named Ephialtes had shown Xerxes a way behind his position. If he did not retreat, he would be surrounded. Their priest Meistias saw in the sacrificial entrails nothing but death.
But Leonidas decided the best way to gain time, and create an example for all Greece to rally, was to stay and fight to the last man. He allowed his allies to withdraw, but 1500 warriors including his 300 Spartans stayed with him. Meistias sent away his only son to be saved, but he stayed to fight.
This night before the last battle the Spartans spent most of their time combing and oiling their hair and beards, for they did not want to enter the next world looking shabby. One Spartan warrior named Dieneces, was told when the Persian army fire their arrows, they black out the sun. Dieneces replied: “Good, then we can fight them in the shade.”

14 A.D.- Elderly Emperor Augustus died after ruling the Roman Empire for 44 years. The Empress Livia had ordered the imperial villa surrounded with troops so no one but her saw his end. She said his last words were:" Have I played my part well in this great comedy called life?" But the historian Tacitus suspected Livia might have aided his shuffling off this mortal coil before he had second thoughts about leaving the empire to his stepson Tiberius, He may have said something more like: " Honey, I don't feel so good. What did you put in these figs?"

1274- King Edward I Longshanks and his Queen Eleanor of Castile crowned at Westminster Abbey. Edward was called Long-Legs because he was over 6 foot, and his constant wars and blood conquest earned him nicknames like The Hammer of the Scots, and the Great Plantagenet after his family name.

1399 - King Richard II of England surrendered his throne to his cousin Henry Bollingbroke, who became King Henry IV. Richard II is not remembered for much else, but the Shakespeare play and inventing the pocket-handkerchief.

1561 - Mary Queen of Scots arrives in Leith Scotland to assume her throne after spending 13 years in France. She was raised at the extremely Catholic court of Queen Catherine de Medici and had little in common with her increasingly Presbyterian Scots subjects.

1599- Spanish conquistadors capture Acoma pueblo in New Mexico, east of modern Albuquerque. The Indian village on the sheer tabletop mountain reminded the Spaniards of attacking castles back in Europe. After their victory they enslaved the population and burned the Indian chief at the stake as a heretic. According to monk Bartolomeo de Las Casas, as the chief was roasting, Las Casas started to feel guilty, so he urged the chief at his last moments to accept baptism. The chief called out through the flames:" No thank you, because then I would go to the Christian Heaven and meet even MORE of you people!"

1692- Salem Mass, The pilgrims executed four people as witches. One was a senile old woman who just looked scary like a witch, and another was a Caribbean servant named Tituba who liked to tell children ghost stories. Another hanged, Rev George Burroughs, was a distant ancestor of Walt Disney.

1745- THE GATHERING OF THE CLANS- At Glenfinnin in the Scottish Highlands, to the thunder of drums and the skirl of massed bagpipes, Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his banner of revolt and called all Scottish clans to rally to him. Some clans stayed aloof but Clan MacDonald and Cameron wholeheartedly swelled his ranks, as did his family clan the Stuarts. His men were paid in oatmeal.

1781- George Washington started his Continental army marching from Yonkers, New York to attack Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown Virginia. At Dobbs Ferry he started ferrying his troops across the Great Northern River, as the Hudson River was known then. He was amazed that the British army was only twenty miles away in New York City, yet they never tried to stop him.

1787 – British astronomer W. Herschel discovers Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. Herschel also discovered Uranus and other celestial bodies.

1812- OLD IRONSIDES- During the war of 1812 The USS Constitution pounded it out with the frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia. The British captain complained his cannonballs bounced harmlessly off the Constitutions heavy New Hampshire oak hull as though it was made of iron. The nickname stuck and today Old Ironsides is the oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy. In 2012, the same USS Constitution was taken out for a cruise around Boston Harbor.

Aug 19, 1814- THE ASSAULT ON WASHINGTON BEGAN. A huge British battle fleet of 14 Ships of the Line landed an invasion force at the town of Benedict on the Pautuxent River in Maryland. Admiral Cockburn’s intent was to march on Washington D.C., and “give the Americans a Good Drubbing!” The soldiers were all hardened British regulars, fresh from defeating Napoleon in Spain. The Duke of Wellington had turned down the American expedition. He called it " Fruitless, and a waste of time".
Most of the American armies were on the frontier or north trying to invade Canada. To defend the American capitol were only some Maryland militia and a few Marines from two armed schooners hiding in the shallows of the Chesapeake.
U.S. Secretary of War Armstrong was convinced the British were faking, and their real target was Baltimore. President James Madison sent contradicting orders to Armstrong and the field commanders. Secretary of State James Monroe, a veteran of the Revolution, personally galloped about alone under British fire bringing the only reliable scouting reports.

1848- The New York Herald published a story that President Polk confirmed that gold had indeed been discovered in California.

1886- Joseph Conrad got his British citizenship. The author of Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim was born in Poland as Jozef Konrad Korzenieowski, but he went into exile when his patriot father was arrested by the Czars police and sent to Siberia.

1891 - William Huggins described the astronomical application of the spectrum.

1895- John Wesley Hardin was one of the more famous gunfighters of the Old West. His business card read J. Wesley Hardin, Shootist. He once shot a man for snoring. Hardin did 17 years in prison for murder, got released and studied law. This day in El Paso, lawman John Selman came up behind Hardin and shot him in the back of the head. After he collapsed on the floor he pumped a few more rounds into him to make sure he was dead. John Wesley Hardin was 42.

1909- The Brickyard is born. The first Indianapolis 500 autorace.

1929- The Amos & Andy show premiered on radio.

1942- The Dieppe Raid- Allied commanders were under pressure from Stalin to prove that they were doing something to open a second front in the west to take the pressure off Russia. So they sent a Canadian division in what amounted to the largest commando operation of World War II. These Canadians had to attack a large U-Boat base on the channel and ram a destroyer full of explosives into the dry docks. The Germans were waiting and it became a suicide mission. The Canadians suffered over 60% casualties.

1945- Four days after the Japanese surrender, in IndoChina, Ho Chi Minh declared the Republic of Vietnam. Uncle Ho had been supported by the CIA’s forerunner the OSS in his struggle against the Japanese. This day Ho ordered a reading aloud of his declaration, inspired from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Even though FDR's personal representative Avril Harriman advised that the U.S. recognize Ho's government, we decided to support the French and British in trying to keep their tottering colonial empires. The British flew in French paratroops, and the stage is set for the Vietnam wars of the next 30 years.

1953- Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown and Shah Reza II Pahlevi assumed absolute power. All with the cooperation of the American CIA. The popular Mossadegh was trying to steer Iran into a nonaligned status between the cold war superpowers and had nationalized the Iranian oil industry. So, to Washington he was a threat. Eisenhower advisor Allen Foster Dulles considered Mossadegh a dangerous lunatic for not wanting American support. The Shah Reza Pahlevi II ruled for the next 25 years until overthrown by the Moslem fundamentalists under the Ayatollah Khomeni. The CIA did not admit their role in this until 2011.

1953- The Israeli Knesset voted to create a huge memorial to Jews killed in the Holocaust called Yad Vashem.

1955 - WINS radio, announces it would not play "copy" white cover versions of black R&B. DJs must play Fats Domino's "Ain't It A Shame," not Pat Boone's. In 1957 Little Richards “Tuttie-Fruitie” never got higher than 17th in the Billboard Charts, while Pat Boones version, by his own admission awful, went to number one.

1957- The NY Giants baseball team voted to move to San Francisco.

1960- The Russians launched a Sputnik capsule into space with two dogs- Belka and Strelka, 2 rats and 40 mice. They recovered this orbiting zoo the next day. The first sending of life into space and returning them safely.

1973 - Kris Kristofferson wed Rita Coolidge.

1977- Groucho Marx, the last surviving Marx Brother, died at age 86. In his final years Groucho had rewrote his will in favor of his young personal secretary Erin Fleming. This spawned a furious legal battle between Fleming and the Marx family.

1988- The Iran-Iraq war ended after 8 bloody years.

1989- The Polish Communist regime resigned and turned over power to the Solidarity trade union movement. Poland is the first Communist Warsaw Pact government to collapse.

1991-THE AUGUST COUP. Communist hardliners in a final attempt to stop the fall of the Soviet Union, try to overthrow leader Mikhail Gorbachev. They try to do it the way they did it to Nikita Khruschev in 1964, arresting Gorbachev while he was at his vacation dacha or cottage. The coup failed several days later when Russian Republic President Boris Yeltsin climbed on top of a tank and called for a "people-power" style rising to support the democratic elements of the government.

2000- Scientists report water at the North Pole for the first time in 50 million years.

2004- Google stock first went public on the stock market.

2012- Director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Days of Thunder) jumped to his death off a bridge in Los Angeles. He was 68.

2335 – According to Star Trek the Next Generation, this is the birthday of William T Riker, in Valdez Alaska, first officer of the Enterprise.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What does it mean to be hoisted on your own petard?

Answer: In the late Middle Ages a petard was a rigged explosive device that was jammed against the door of a castle and set off. To be hoisted was slang for blown up. So hoisted on your own petard was to be blown up by your own bomb.