Happy Birthday to a Great American

Here's your Today in History:

August 15 1057 -


Macbeth is killed in the Battle of Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire. He had been king of Scotland for 17 years.

August 15 1935 -
Will Rogers, the most famous man in America, dies near Barrow, Alaska when his sea plane plunges into a lagoon. At the time, he and one-eyed aviator Wiley Post were surveying possible flight paths between Seattle and the Soviet Union.



Remember kids, let this be a lesson to you - don't take a flight with a drunken, one eyed pilot.

August 15,1945 -
Though Harry Truman, still getting over the drunken bender he was on, still not quite believing that he was President and got to drop not one but two atomic bombs, had announced the Japanese surrender the day before, it was on this day in 1945 that the Allies officially declared V-J Day.



August 15, 1961 -
Two days after sealing off free passage between East and West Berlin with barbed wire, East German authorities begin taking Robert Frost a little to literally and built a wall--the Berlin Wall--to permanently close off access to the West. For the next 28 years, the heavily fortified Berlin Wall stood as the most tangible symbol of the Cold War--a literal "iron curtain" dividing Europe.

August 15, 1965 -
The Beatles play to nearly 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York City, marking the birth of stadium rock.



August 15 1969 -
The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair began on this date in 1969, on Max Yasger's farm in upstate New York. The greatest gathering of marketing and advertising professionals in American history, the festival featured the musical artists behind some of today's hottest commercial jingles.



August 15 1994 -


International terrorist Carlos the Jackal is jailed in France. The assassin was turned over by the Sudanese government after he checked into a Khartoum hospital for varicose vein surgery on one of his testicles. Sometimes this stuff just writes itself.

Today is the birthday of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769), Jim Webb (1946), Rose Marie (1925), Oscar Peterson (1925), Phyllis Schlafly (1924), Edna Ferber (1887), Sir Walter Scott (1771) and for my money, one to the greatest Americans,



Julia Child, American Spy and Chef (1912).

Oh, and Liz (but it would be impolite to say which year)

And so it goes.