August 17, 2022
QUOTE
I know not whether, in the eyes of the world, a brilliant death is not preferred to an obscure life of rectitude. Most men are remembered as they died, and not as they lived. We gaze with admiration upon the glories of the setting sun, yet scarcely bestow a passing glance upon its noonday splendor.
--Davy Crockett
BIRTHDAYS
1786 – Davy Crockett, soldier and politician
1893 – Mae West, stage and film actress
1920 – Maureen O’Hara, actress and singer
1960 – Sean Penn, American actor, director, and political activist[18]
1969 – Donnie Wahlberg, American singer-songwriter, actor and producer
IN MEMORY
1966 – Ken Miles, race car driver and engineer
1979 – Vivian Vance, Actress and singer
1988 – Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr., American lawyer and politician
1990 – Pearl Bailey, Actress and singer
IN ON THIS DAY
1585 – A first group of colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh under the charge of Ralph Lane lands in the New World to create Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina.
1807 – Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.
1862 – The Dakota War of 1862 begins in Minnesota as Dakota warriors attack white settlements along the Minnesota River.
1943 –The U.S. Eighth Air Force suffers the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission.
1969 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille hits the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing 256 and causing $1.42 billion in damage.
1977 – The Soviet icebreaker Arktika becomes the first surface ship to reach the North Pole.
2008 – American swimmer Michael Phelps becomes the first person to win eight gold medals at one Olympic Games.