Instead of the smudged forehead, they will know you by your neon yellow fingers.
March 5, 1954 -
The Classic B movie, Creature from the Black Lagoon, premiered on this date.
Two different stuntmen were used to portray the creature, and therefore, two different suits were used in the movie. Ricou Browning played the creature when it was in the water and wore a lighter suit, Ben Chapman played the creature when it was out of the water with a darker suit.
March 5, 1956 -
Frank Sinatra released his tenth studio album Songs for Swingin' Lovers! on this date.
Sinatra aficionados often rank it his best album and many music critics consider it one of the greatest albums of its era.
March 5, 1959 –
In The Twilight Zone episode The Last Flight, (which originally aired February 5, 1960,) British RFC Flt. Lt. Decker was lost over France on March 5, 1917, and he seemed to have returned on this date, 42 years later.
Writer Richard Matheson explained that the title of this episode and its short story referred to both the protagonist's physical journey as well as his departure from cowardice.
March 5, 1965 -
The Mannish Boys released their second single I Pity The Fool, featuring a young David Bowie, produced by Shel Talmy, (who was also producing the early singles and albums by The Who and The Kinks).
Jimmy Page was Talmy's regular session musician and played the guitar solo on I Pity the Fool.
March 5, 1970 -
Universal released the blockbuster film, Airport, starring just about everyone who was available in Hollywood, on this date.
Trans Global Airlines was the name of the fictional airline for the film. For many years it was not unusual to see props from the movie (with the fictional TGA logo) in other Universal films where airliner interior scenes were shot.
March 5, 1971 -
Led Zeppelin started a 12-date 'Thank You' tour for British fans, appearing at the clubs from their early days and charging the same admission prices as in 1968.
Northern Ireland was a war zone at the time and their first show was at The Ulster Hall, Belfast, Northern Ireland where they played songs from their upcoming fourth album, including the first public performances of Black Dog, Stairway To Heaven, Going To California and Rock And Roll.
March 5, 1978 -
Mae West's final film, Sextette, was released on this date.
There were countless script revisions, but 84-year-old Mae West had thick cataracts which made reading practically impossible. A wireless earpiece was disguised by her wig, and director Ken Hughes watched from a glass booth speaking her lines, which she would then repeat. According to costar Dom DeLuise, West unwittingly uttered a bit of Hughes's direction that was intended for DOP James Crabe. "She laughed more than anyone else as soon as she realized what she had done," DeLuise remarked. As word of this gaffe spread on the set, it snowballed into the persistent rumor that she was repeating police radio transmissions that were picked up by the wireless receiver.
March 5, 1983 -
Michael Jackson's single Billie Jean hits No. #1 on the Billboard Charts and stays there for seven weeks, on this date.
The song is about a girl who claimed Jackson was the father of her child. Jackson based it on a woman who used to stalk him, writing him letters about a son she thought was his. Jackson rarely spoke about this woman, but he had a very hard time dealing with this unwanted attention and became more reclusive as a result. The song was his way of expressing his feelings without addressing her directly.
Don't forget to tune in to The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour today
Today in History:
March 5, 1616 -
Copernican theory was declared “false and erroneous” in a decree written by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine and issued by the Catholic Church and the work was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Roman Catholic Church, on this date. Further, no person was to be permitted to hold or teach the theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
When Galileo later violates the decree, he will be put on trial and held under house arrest for the final eight years of his life.
March 5, 1770 -
British soldiers who had been taunted by a crowd of colonists opened fire, killing five people, on this date, in what would become known as The Boston Massacre. Among the five killed was an African American sailor, Crispus Attucks.
Colonists were already resenting the Townsend Acts, a very early WHO album. Tensions caused by the heavy military presence in Boston, led to brawls between soldiers and civilians and eventually to troops shooting their muskets into a riotous crowd.
March 5, 1933 -
Germany went on a 12 year drinking binge - the Nazi Party won 44 percent of the vote in German parliamentary elections, enabling it to join with the Nationalists to gain a slight majority in the Reichstag.
Adolf 'Evil Bastard' Hitler had become chairman of the Nazi party in 1921, and two years later he tried to topple the German republican government in the "beer-hall putsch." Nazi storm troopers surrounded government officials during a meeting at a beer hall in Munich. The troopers forced the officials to swear allegiance to the Nazi revolution. But the coup was defeated and Hitler fled, then he was captured and imprisoned. While in prison, Hitler dictated his autobiography Mein Kampf (or, in English, I'm Crazy and I'm Gonna Kill You or How I Intend to Enslave or Kill Millions of People Immediately Upon My Release) to a sympathetic scribe, and the book became important to Nazism.
The following week, March 5, 1933, the Nazi Party won a slight majority in the elections. Within three weeks, the Nazi-dominated Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which gave Hitler dictatorial powers and ended the Weimar Republic in Germany.
If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: beer, Bavarians and the ballot do not mix.
It was on this date in 1946, in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, that Winston Churchill made his famous observation that, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent."
The speech was not well received at first, as the people of Fulton weren't sure which continent he was talking about and they didn't care what sort of drapes were fashionable in foreign parts.
Bizarre ironies of History -
On March 1, 1953, after an all-night dinner with interior minister Lavrenty Beria and future premiers Georgi Malenkov, Nikolai Bulganin and Nikita Khrushchev, Josif Stalin, truly Evil Bastard, did not emerge from his room the next day, having probably suffered a stroke that paralyzed the right side of his body.
Although his guards thought it odd that he did not rise at his usual time, the next day they were under orders not to disturb him and he was not discovered until that evening. He died four days later, on March 5, 1953, at the age of 74, and was buried on March 9. His daughter Svetlana recalls the scene as she stood by his death bed "He suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance. Then something incomprehensible and awesome happened. He suddenly lifted his left hand as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse upon all of us. The next moment after a final effort the spirit wrenched its self free of the flesh."
Officially, the cause of death was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after the stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him", and then, when Stalin showed signs of consciousness, dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat.
His body was preserved in Lenin's Mausoleum until October 31, 1961, when his body was removed from the Mausoleum and buried next to the Kremlin walls as part of the process of de-Stalinization.
The famed Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev lived in dread fear of getting on the wrong side of Stalin. Always looking to appease the Evil Bastard, he died at the age of 61 from a cerebral hemorrhage on March 5, 1953 (the same day and even hour and cause that Communist Party leader Joseph Stalin died.)
Prokofiev had lived near the Red Square and for three days the throngs gathered to mourn Stalin made it impossible to carry Prokofiev's body out for the funeral service at the headquarters of the Soviet Composer's Union. Paper flowers and a taped recording of the funeral march from his Romeo and Juliet had to be used, as all real flowers and musicians were reserved for Stalin's funeral.
Herman J. Mankiewicz, producer and alcoholic screenwriter, best known for his collaboration with Orson Welles on the screenplay of Citizen Kane, for which they both won an Academy Award and famously clashed over credit,
died of uremia poisoning in Hollywood, CA on March 5, 1953, the same day as Joseph Stalin and Sergei Prokofiev.
March 5, 1963 -
There's less violence in the world when people are using Hula-Hoops. - Mikey Way
March 5, 1963 -
Virginia Patterson Hensley (Patsy Cline), country music singer has an unfortunate close encounter with an airplane on this date.
What was it with singers and small planes in the early 60s
March 5, 1977 -
Walter Cronkite and Jimmy Carter went on the air for a call-in radio program where ordinary citizens could call and ask the president anything they liked.
Over 9 million callers tried to get through, and the questions ranged from Carter's pardoning the draft dodgers to why he sent his daughter to public school.
March 5, 1982 -
John Belushi was found dead at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood from a cocaine and heroin overdose on this date. A sketchy woman, Cathy Smith, was later charged with administering the fatal injections.
Sorry but there was really nothing funny about that - it was just a waste.
March 5, 1989 -
Darwin Award nominee Michael Anderson Godwin, previously on death row for murder but with sentence commuted to life imprisonment, died in a toilet-related accident at the Central Correctional Institution in South Carolina on this date. Godwin, sitting on a stainless steel toilet, bit into headphone wires that were connected to his television. He was immediately electrocuted.
[Moral: use a porcelain toilet. And eat more fiber.]
And so it goes.
the Townsend Acts, a very early WHO album, indeed
ReplyDelete