Quiz: Another holiday question: Why reindeer? Why not eight tiny horses?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Who decided the official theme for the US President should be the song:” Hail to the Chief”?
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history for 12/21/2007
Birthdays: Benjamin Disraeli, Josh Gibson- the Home Run King of the Negro Baseball Leagues, Pat Weaver-TV exec who created the Today Show and father of Sigourney Weaver, Frank Zappa, Jane Fonda is 69 , Paul Winchell, Keifer Sutherland is 41 ( I had him listed on Dec 18th, oops!) , Samuel L. Jackson is 59, Dr. Kurt Waldheim, Florence Griffith Joyner-FloJo, Chris Evert, Joe Paterno, Phil Roman, Jane Kasczmaryk, Ray Romano is 49, Jeffrey Katzenberg is 57.

1375- The writer Boccaccio died, not of the plague, and not during a party like in his book the Decameron.

1376- END OF THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY- After a lot of lobbying from St. Catherine of Siena and Saint Brigid of Sweden, Pope Gregory XI moved the Vatican back to Rome from Avignon. Gregory mysteriously died shortly after he arrived. Roman mobs, angry at the poverty caused by the absence of the Holy See, attacked the mostly French cardinals selecting the next pope. They crowded around their building shouting: "Death or an Italian Pope!' and threw javelins at the ceiling knowing the points would pop out of the floor and prick their feet. The terrified cardinals dragged any old bishop out of the Vatican library, made him an Archbishop, then Cardinal, then Pope, then ran for the hills. The librarian became Pope Urban VIII, the "Beast of Naples". Gee, They never told me this stuff in Catholic School...

1776-American diplomats Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane arrive in Paris to negotiate an alliance for the rebellious colonies with France, Holland and Spain. Their secretary, William Bancroft, was a British spy.

1909- The first Junior High School or Middle School set up in the US in Berkeley Cal.

1913-THE BIRTHDAY OF THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE-The first Crossword Puzzle appeared in the New York World.

1914- The premiere of the first feature length film comedy- Tilly’s Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and young Charlie Chaplin.

1919-THE PALMER RAIDS- THE RED SCARE- American businessmen watched the growing Communist regime in Russia with fear. Soviet groups were also moving to take over Germany, Hungary and Austria." Bolshevism is worse than war.”-Herbert Hoover Could such things happen in the Good Old US of A ? Under emergency wartime sedition legislation (even though World War One had been over for a year) U.S. marshals raids newspaper and union offices and deports 249 Russian immigrants including radical women's rights advocate Emma Goldman. The raids were organized by a young executive in the treasury dept. named J. Edgar Hoover.

1925- Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece Battleship Potemkin premiered in Moscow. The films pioneering use of montage and allegorical imagery intercut inspired a generation of filmmakers.

1933- Twentieth Century Fox signed 5 year old Shirley Temple to a seven year contract.

1937-Walt Disney's " Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" premiered. The first feature length American cartoon, it becomes the box office champ of 1938.

1937- Ted Healy, former vaudeville partner and founder of the Three Stooges, was killed in a barfight. The careers of the Three Stooges take off afterwards. One legend has it that actor Wallace Beery and some gangsters did the fatal pounding. Another rumor is one of the gangsters was young Albert Cubby Broccoli, who forty years later would produce the James Bond movies and win an Irving Thalberg Award at the 1982 Oscars.

1940- Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (44) dropped dead of a heart attack at Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham's house. She had just left the house to buy him some candy. His last words were 'Hershey bars will be fine..."

1953- Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the Atomic Bomb, is accused of being a Communist. When he was asked in 1940 to head the Manhattan Project the government knew he was a Berkeley eccentric who had joined every leftist group in town, but he was brilliant. This act is now viewed more as the government revenge for his flat refusal to help Edmund Teller in developing the Hydrogen Bomb.

1969- Famed football coach Vince Lombardi coached his last game- Dallas beat Washington 20-10.

1971- Richard William's animated TV special "A Christmas Carol"

1972- 14 members of an Uruguayan rugby team were found alive on an Andes mountain peak after their plane crashed. They survived the harsh conditions by turning cannibal and eating the dead. Umm..Goalie Empanadas!

1975- International terrorist Carlos the Jackal attacked an OPEC oil meeting in Vienna and took 11 ministers hostage. He escaped to Algeria and wasn’t finally caught until 1994 while trying to get an operation for a vein on his testicle.

1982- Thom Riley, one of the stars of the TV cop show ChiPS was busted for driving stoned on quaaludes.

1989- Vice President Dan Quayle sent out 30,000 official Christmas cards with the word beacon misspelled- beakon.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who decided the official theme for the US President should be the song:” Hail to the Chief”?

Answer: President James K. Polk (1795-1849) was such a runty little man that when he came into a White House party in progress, nobody noticed. So his wife Sara ordered the band to always play the 1810 song Hail to the Chief really loud whenever Polk entered a room. She got the idea from the former first lady Julia Tyler, who’s husband Pres. John Tyler was also often ignored. It remained a custom until made official in 1954.