Quiz: What cities’ nickname is The Jaw?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: What is an amphora?
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History for 2/13/2024
Birthdays: Giambattista Piazzetta, Bess Truman, Grant Wood, Lord Randolph Churchill, Fyodor Chaliapin, Peter Tork, Oliver Reed, Chuck Yeager, Woody Hayes, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Carol Lynley, Kim Novak is 91, George Segal, Peter Gabriel, Jerry Springer, Stockard Channing is 80, Kelly Hu, Mena Suvari

Happy International Radio Day!

1503- This day during the endless wars of the Italian Renaissance, outside the town of Barletta things were interrupted by a unique event. Angered by a French captain who said that Italians were all sissy-girlie-men, thirteen Italian knights challenged thirteen French knights to mano-a-mano single combat. Both armies lined up and cheered like a sporting event. The knights fought until all thirteen Frenchmen were down.

1542- Catherine Howard, the 5th wife of Henry VIII was beheaded. The execution was held on the exact spot where wife Number 2 Anne Boleyn was beheaded six years before.

1635- The Boston Public School for Boys opened. The first public school America.

1692- THE GLENCOE MASSACRE. Pro-English Scottish forces tried to make the Highlands accept King William of Orange, and renounce allegiance to the Stuart dynasty by singling out a particularly rowdy clan for annihilation. The MacDonalds of Glencoe were smaller than the MacDonalds of Keppoch, so they were to be the example. Ironically the leader of the clan was trying to get King James in exile to release him from his oath of obedience, when the soldiers of Clan Argyll and Campbell came visiting.
The soldiers used the highland tradition of hospitality to gain entrance into the MacDonald hall, then started slaughtering everyone just when their hosts were bringing out the wine. This blatant betrayal of hospitality and the magnitude of the massacre backfired on the perpetrators and made Glencoe a bitter symbol of Scottish Nationalism.

1693- The Virginia College William & Mary founded.

1742- After governing for 20 years, the first English Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, stepped down when his Tory government lost its majority.

1765- Dr. Benjamin Franklin stood up in the British House of Commons and argued the justice of the American protest of the Royal Stamp Act, against all the government MP’s. He won and the hated Act was repealed. This probably delayed the American Revolution for a decade.

1820- Five years after Waterloo, and twenty-five after the French Revolution guillotined his great uncle, the Duc de Berry, the heir apparent of France was assassinated outside of the Paris Opera by a republican terrorist. The Bourbon family’s survival would now depend on the minor branch, the House of Orleans.
In the meantime, Napoleon was sitting in exile on the equatorial island of St. Helena. If you are a fan of the "Napoleon was poisoned theory", modern scientists doing radioactive analysis of hair samples noted that after this incident the arsenic content in Napoleon's body goes up 150%.

1863- President Lincoln hosted a wedding reception at the White House for P.T. Barnum star attraction General Tom Thumb and his bride. Lincoln was heavily criticized by his political opponents for having such a frivolous party during the depths of the Civil War.

1866-The first daylight bank job. In Missouri, the Clay County Savings Bank is robbed of $60,000 by a young ex confederate guerrilla named Jesse James.

1867- The Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss Jr premiered in Vienna. Brahms was a personal friend of Strauss. An anecdote from the time is that Strauss's stepdaughter approached Brahms with a customary request that he autograph her fan. Brahms inscribed a few measures from the "Blue Danube," and then wrote beneath it: "Unfortunately, NOT by Johannes Brahms."

1886- Artist Thomas Eakins resigned in disgust his professorship at the Philadelphia Academy of Art when he was criticized for allowing women students in his class drawing male nudes. At that time the men still were not fully nude but wore a kind of thong with a pouch covering their junk.

1914- ASCAP founded.

1917- Beautiful spy Mata Hari was arrested in Paris. Known in Berlin as agent H-21.

1926- Walt Disney and his young crew move into their new studio at Hyperion and Griffith Park Ave. They’d call it the Hyperion Studio. They worked there until 1939 when they moved to Burbank.

1932- Free Eats, the first Our Gang short comedy to feature George “Spanky” MacFarland.

1933- comic strip character Blondie married Dagwood Bumstead.

1939- Producer David O. Selznick replaced directors on Gone With the Wind. George Cukor was out, Victor Fleming was in after completing The Wizard of Oz. Vivien Leigh liked Cukor who was known for directing women, but Clark Gable convinced the producers that the film needed an action director. About 15 minutes of George Cukor’s work remains in the picture. Victor Fleming loved Gable, but didn't get along with Vivien Leigh and came to hate the controlling Selznick. David O. brought in Sam Wood to direct second unit when Fleming fell behind schedule.
At the end Victor Fleming blew his stack when Selznick proposed giving Wood and Cukor equal co- screen credit. This was all before DGA contract credits were established. Today, Victor Fleming is recognized the director of record. Yet despite it all, Gone with the Wind became a box office smash. For many years critics and polls declared it the greatest Hollywood movie ever made. A decade after its release, Clark Gable went up to David O. Selznick at a party and said: "Maybe I'm wrong about disliking you David, 'Gone With the Wind' keeps getting re-released and keeps me a star."

1935- German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptman found guilty of the kidnap-murder of the Lindbergh baby and electrocuted. Up until the end he kept declaring his innocence. The chief of police in the town of Bergen New Jersey where the murder occurred was the father of Desert Storm General Norman Schwarzkopf.

1937- Hal Foster's comic book hero Prince Valiant first appeared.

1945- THE FIREBOMBING OF DRESDEN. Some experts say the annihilation of this militarily defenseless city was an act of revenge for Rotterdam and Coventry, the fact was at the Yalta conference several days earlier Stalin had asked that the major German cities on his eastern front be bombed by his Anglo-American Allies to delay Nazi divisions withdrawn from Norway and Holland to be used to slow the Red Army 's advance. Dresden was to be a major assembly point for these new reinforcements. Still, it's a legacy the Allies find troubling.
On this day in the early evening, 845 British bombers followed by 700 American dropped thousands of tons of incendiary bombs in a pattern calculated to cause a firestorm. The temperature reached 800f degrees, the church bells melted, and the oxygen was literally sucked out of the air by cyclonic winds. By conservative estimate 35,000-100,000 people were killed. Young American P.O.W. Kurt Vonnengut was in a group made to help dig out bodies. The experience changed his life, and he later wrote his accounts in the classic anti-war novel "Slaughterhouse-5"

1959 -Happy Birthday BARBIE! Mattel introduced the plastic nymph, from a German doll named 'Bild Lilli" based on a character in a comic strip by Reinhard Beuthin. Mattel co-owner Ruth Handler had it re-designed and changed to 'Barbie" after the nickname of her daughter Barbara.

1964- The Invention of Cool Whip.

1972-“ Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome….” The movie Cabaret with Liza Minelli and Joel Grey opened in theaters.

1976- While working on The Rescuers, famed Disney animator John Lounsbery suddenly passed away. He was 64.

1996- The off-Broadway musical Rent by John Lawson premiered. Lawson spent years working as a waiter, living in poverty in a cold water flat in lower New York. Hoping for his big break. 36 year old John Lawson died of an aneurism just three months before Rent opened. It made him world famous, earned Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize, and made $250 million. His story was told in the 2022 Lin Manuel Miranda film tik-tik-Boom.

2016- Disney’s Zootopia premiered in Brussels. Directed by Rich Moore and Byron Howard. It opened in the U.S. on March 4.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is an amphora?

Answer: A clay jug used for stacking, storing and transporting liquids and grain in the Ancient Greek world. The ancient equivalent of a storage barrel. Plural- amphorae.