The FReeper Foxhole Profiles Major Glenn Miller

Glenn's mother played the organ, and as soon as their boys were old enough, she and her husband supplied them with musical instruments--a cornet for older brother Deane and a mandolin for Glenn.*[1] Before long Glenn had swapped his instrument for one of the brass variety, and, as his mother once told an interviewer, "He just played on that horn all the time. It got to where Pop and I used to wonder if he'd ever amount to anything."

Sun Valley Serenade: Glenn, Sonja Heinie and John Payne

An outstanding high school athlete, Glenn was an avid basketball player and an all-state football end. His ambition, however, was to become a professional baseball player. A picture from Glenn's high school days shows a rugged, broad-shouldered six-footer with large hands[--a good-looking guy, save for his overlarge head and his long, wide ears].

Glen played trombone in the school band, and although no one seems to have thought of him as an exceptional musician, he took his music more seriously than he did any sport. After graduating in 1921 he delayed going to college in order to take a job in a band organized by a saxophone and clarinet player named Boyd Senter. In January 1923, Miller entered the University of Colorado, where he seems to have spent most of his time playing in a popular campus band. At the year's end, he dropped out of school to set upon the risky career of a full-time musician.

GLENN MILLER- Photo on cover of ROXY Theatre Program

Glenn got his first big break in Los Angeles when he was hired to play in, and arrange for, the Ben Pollack band. A pioneer in expanding the small ensemble (usually of five to seven musicians) characteristic of 1920s jazz into the full-fledged Big Band, Pollack had an ear for good musicians. Over the years he hired not only Miller, but also the fine Chicago cornetist Jimmy McPartland; trumpeter Charlie Spivak, who went on to form his own Big Band in 1940; Benny Goodman; trumpeter Harry James; and a trombone player who was obviously Miller's superior--the bluesy Jack Teagarden from Texas.

Although jazz always remained his first love, Miller himself was never a good enough instrumentalist to be a great jazz musician. Benny Goodman once said that Glenn "was a pedestrian trombone player and he knew it." When Teagarden joined the Pollack band, Glenn saw the handwriting on the wall and determined to concentrate on arranging, an art for which he had a rare talent and which he had been studying with the esteemed teacher Joseph Schillinger.

Glenn Miller, 1939

Certain that his arranging assignments and occasional playing would provide a measure of financial security, he wired Helen Burger, the girl he had met in college, and proposed that she come to New York to marry him. They were wed on October 6, 1928. It was a most successful marriage. Said one of Glenn's friends: "The greatest thing that ever happened to Glenn Miller was Helen Miller."

During the next few years, Miller arranged for Paul Ash, Red Nichols, and several lesser-known band leaders. He also filled in on the trombone with established bands and found himself playing in the orchestra pit for Broadway productions. In 1934 he was the first musician hired, both for his musicianship and his skills as an arranger, by the Dorseys when they formed their first band.

Glenn Receives a Gold Record

Glenn's association with the Dorseys lasted only a few months. Late in 1934 British band leader Ray Noble arrived in the United States to try his hand at wooing American audiences, who had heard and bought recordings that his "orchestra"--in reality an assemblage of musicians from other ensembles--had made in England. Anxious to cash in on the popularity of his records, Noble hired Glenn away from the squabbling brothers and gave him his first experience at organizing a Big Band. The group Miller put together included some of the finest musicians of the day, and for a time the Noble Orchestra drew crowds to the Rainbow Room atop New York's RCA Building.

It was while with the Noble Orchestra that Glenn got his first opportunity to stand before a Big Band as leader. It was an experience he was eager to turn into a permanent situation. So in 1936 he decided to take the chance and begin recruiting musicians for a group of his own. It was a huge gamble, but one to which he brought estimable assets--his solid track record as an arranger and his shrewd commercial sense of what the public would welcome. He was also a very organized person; arranger Rolly Bundock called him "the General MacArthur of the music business."

Miller at the Yale Bowl - 1943

The Glenn Miller Band played its first engagement in May, 1937 at the Hotel New Yorker. The band went to Boston and then to New Orleans, where it was a huge success (though not financially; Miller himself was taking home a little less than six dollars a week). After that, it was all downhill, and the group could not earn enough to cover expenses. To compound Miller's woes, his wife had an operation that made it impossible for her to have children (years later the couple adopted a boy and a girl). Following a New Year's Eve engagement, Glenn broke the news to the band members that he had decided to call it quits. The band played its last date on January 2, 1938.

It had been, if nothing else, a learning experience. Jazz has never been the most popular form of music in the United States, and the one thing Glenn liked even more than jazz was success. He had no pretensions of being too artistic to be popular. If he were to start another band, Miller vowed, it would not be for the fans, not the musicians. Too many of his players had been "prima donnas," he felt, who were interested in satisfying their musical souls by blowing far-out riffs whether or not the kids were following them. No, his new band, when it came, would have showmanship and a commercial sweetness. It would have a "sound."

His instincts didn't fail him. The distinctive Miller sound--a clarinet lead supported by four saxophones--had come to him while he was still with the Noble orchestra, but he had not really put it to the test with his first band. Now it would become his signature.

By March 1938 the second Glenn Miller Orchestra was in place. Miller had made some crucial additions--especially vocalists. The mainstays of the band were "girl singer" Marion Hutton, "boy singer" Ray Eberle, Gorden "Tex" Beneke, and a male quartet known as the Modernaires.

The Crew Chiefs.

Hutton, the sister of actress/singer Betty Hutton, was only seventeen when she joined the group. She was not, by her own admission, the greatest of vocalists (saxophonist Al Klink used to joke that "the mike is out of tune tonight"), but she had enormous warmth and appeal.

Eberle, whose older brother, Bob Eberly with a "y," sang for Jimmy Dorsey, was, like Hutton, a performer whose looks surpassed his vocal ability. At first a favorite of Glenn's, he and Miller had a falling out that lead to his leaving the band in 1942. Hired for the band as a tenor saxophonist, Beneke quickly proved himself a valuable singer, ideal for some of the jazzier numbers and novelty tunes. He lent his voice on such songs as "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo" and "Chatanooga Choo Choo."

*[ 1 ] Younger brother Herb eventually took up the trumpet; he became a professional musician and bandleader, too, although a much less successful one.

The Modernaires joined Miller in 1941. One of them, Chuck Goldstein, developed a way of singing a harmony high above the others, giving the group an unmistakable sound. "Some people," he once remarked, "thought we had a girl with us."

Glenn drove his band with a perfectionist zeal that made it--to the exasperation of many of his musicians--by far the most precise, the most rehearsed band of the time. He managed to combine a bit of jazz, a large dose of swing, a healthy dollop of showmanship, and a sprinkling of hokum. And it worked.

In March 1939, Miller contracted to play for the summer season at the celebrated Glen Island Casino in New Rochelle, New York. This was a coveted date--not for the money, but for the exposure over the air waves; the band broadcast from the Casino ten times a week, reaching thousands of listeners. Following that engagement, they went from sellout to sellout. In Hershey, Pennsylvania, it broke the attendance record set by the Guy Lombardo Orchestra eight years before, and in Syracuse, New York, it played for the biggest audience ever gathered for a dance.

Meanwhile, the band made one hit record after another, including "Little Brown Jug," "In the Mood," and "Moonlight Serenade," which became Miller's theme song. In December the band was hired for a thrice weekly CBS national radio program sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes, and its national reputation was solidified. A poll taken in the summer of 1940 put the Glenn Miller band number one by a huge margin, almost doubling the votes of the runner-up, Tommy Dorsey.

Hollywood soon beckoned, and Miller traveled to California to make two movies for Twentieth-Century Fox, Sun Valley Serenade (1941) and Orchestra Wives (1942). As examples of cinematic art, these films are forgettable, but they are priceless as a record of the Miller band in its prime. In numbers like "Chatanooga Choo Choo," "Serenade in Blue," and "I Got a Gal in Kalamazoo," the players demonstrate their showmanship, flapping their mutes, standing for solos, and flashing their choreographed pumping of trombone slides. Miller himself comes off as a credible and likeable actor.

By the time Orchestra Wives was filmed, the United States was at war, and the draft was beginning to siphon off Miller's musicians. At age thirty-eight, he was not subject to being called up, but he thought he could help the war effort. His idea was to reform military music, to update it to a style that the troops would enjoy.

Glenn first offered his services to the U.S. Navy, but was turned down. So on August 12, 1942 he wrote to Brigadier General Charles D. Young, expressing his desire to "do something concrete in the way of setting up a plan that would enable our music to reach our servicemen here and abroad with some degree of regularity [and thereby] help considerably to ease some of the difficulties of army life." General Young immediately accepted his offer. The band played their last Chesterfield show on September 24, and Glenn reported for induction on October 7, 1942.

Now a captain in the Air Corps, Glenn met resistance from what he called "goddamn idiot officers" who liked the marches of John Philip Sousa just fine and saw no need for swing in the military. Eventually, however, Miller was named Director of Bands Training for the Army Air Forces Technical Training Command and authorized to organize a band at Yale University, which had become a training area for cadets. Miller proceeded to collect as many first-rate musicians as possible; some were from his group, many came from other bands. He also added a string section, getting many players from the country's best symphony orchestras.

The outfit, officially known as the 418th Army Air Forces Band, was activated on March 20, 1943, with permanent station at Yale. The band managed to combine traditional military duties--playing at retreat parades and at review formations on the Yale Green--with performing at dances, open houses, parties, and luncheons, and on radio, over which Miller's musicians broadcast I Sustain the Wings, a series designed to boost Air Force recruitment.

Much was made at the time of the band's use of traditional jazz tunes such as "St. Louis Blues" in march tempo, as a kind of swinging march. The military brass, fearful of scandalizing traditionalists, took pains to point out that such innovation never occurred during retreat or review, but only as the band was marching to and from these ceremonies.

On July 28, Miller's new swinging military band made its debut in the Yale Bowl. Time magazine reported at the time that "Oldtime, long-haired U.S. Army bandmasters had the horrors," but the group was a smash with the troops. It presented an original spectacle: two drummers with full swing band kits and two string bass players--perched atop two jeeps that wheeled along slowly with the marching musicians--provided the rhythm.

Despite the misgivings of traditionalists, the band was a hit. Its appearances at bond drives were so successful that Glenn began to fear that he and his musicians might be kept stateside instead of being sent overseas to boast troop morale.

Finally, in the spring of 1944 the AAF orchestra got its orders to go to England. They arrived in time to experience the German V-I buzz bombs that fell on London, killing almost five thousand people. Feeling responsible for the safety of his men, Miller persuaded the military brass to move his unit to Bedford, a village some fifty miles north of the British capital and out then of the reach of the bombs.*[2] On the day after the men had vacated their London quarters, a buzz bomb fell a few feet from the building, blowing away its entire front and leaving the place in ruins.

Always the organizer, Glenn spun off sub-units from the full band, which was now known as the American Band of the Supreme Allied Command, to perform different types of music on four radio series. Strings With Wings featured a full string section headed by George Ockner; The Swing Shift, a seventeen-piece danceband led by Ray McKinley; Uptown Hall, a seven-piece jazz ensemble under Mel Powell; and A Soldier and a Song, crooner Johnny Desmond accompanied by the full band.*[3]

*[ 2 ] It wasn't long before the Germans unleashed their V-2 bombs, which rendered Bedford as much a target for their strikes as London.

*[ 3 ] Fifth unit two pianos

Additional Sources:

www.glennmiller.org
www.johnnymercer.com
history.acusd.edu
www.stelzriede.com
www.colorado.edu
www.pastperfect.com
www.harrywarrenmusic.com
www.slagthuset.se
www.pbs.org
www.glennmillerorchestra.com
www.arlingtoncemetery.net
www.tuxjunction.net

These units instituted a backbreaking schedule of radio broadcasts and concerts. Miller was on the air thirteen times a week, and his musicians performed seventy-one live concerts during their five-and-a-half month stay in England, leading General Jimmy Doolittle to remark that "Next to a letter from home, Captain Miller, your organization is the greatest morale builder in the [European Theater of Operations]. By the time they returned to the United States and were deactivated in January 1946, the band's members had played an estimated three hundred personal appearances on the continent before more than 600,000 people in slightly less than a year.

Glenn Miller Band at Pacific Square Ball Room in San Diego 6/5/1944

While still in England, much of the band's travel was in their own C-47 air bus. One band member estimated that they spent some six hundred hours in the air, often enduring close calls when pilots had difficulty finding air strips in the dark. Miller, who disliked flying and whose ears would ring in the unpressurized cabin, considered the plane second-rate.

Promoted to major in August 1944, Glenn, was becoming restless; he wanted to get his band to France so they could play for the men marching on Germany. With his health poor and his morale low, he seemed to be developing a touch of fatalism, at one point saying that he believed that he would never see his wife and child again.*[4] "I've had a feeling for a long time now," he said, "that one of those buzz bombs has my name on it." Then, on November 15, he got the go-ahead he wanted to take his musicians to the continent.

Norseman

At first, band manager Don Haynes was scheduled to fly to Paris ahead of the musicians to make preparations, but at the last minute Miller, characteristically impatient, decided to go himself. On December 13, one day before his planned departure, the weather was so bad that no military aircraft were making the channel crossing. The following day, however, Haynes ran into a friend, Lieutenant Colonel Norman F. Baesell, who was going to Paris on December 15 in a general's private plane. He invited Miller along.

As takeoff time approached, rain, poor visibility, and a low ceiling continued to hamper flight schedules. Word was, however, that the weather was clearing over the continent and the plane would be allowed to leave England. As Miller looked at the nine-passenger C-64 Norseman, he was dubious. First, he noted that there was only one motor; Baesell countered that one had been enough for Charles Lindbergh when he flew the Atlantic alone in 1927. Then, after he took his seat he said, "Hey, where the hell are the parachutes?" To which Baesell retorted, "What's the matter, Miller, do you want to live forever?"

When the band arrived in Paris three days later, Miller was not there to meet them. Obviously something had gone wrong. For days the musicians hoped that Miller would somehow turn up, but eventually the truth had to be faced. Glenn was officially reported missing on December 23.

For years afterward, speculation about Miller's fate centered on the bad weather and the plane's lack of de-icing equipment. In late December 1985, however, two former members of a Royal Air Force bomber crew came forward with a story that provides the likeliest explanation of the accident that will probably ever surface. They had been aboard one of some 150 Lancaster bombers returning from an aborted raid on Germany on December 15, 1944. Following standard procedure, the crew jettisoned their bombs near Beachy Head on the southern coast of England. But as the bombs exploded, the gunner reportedly saw a Norseman below them fall into the sea, apparently downed by the shock waves. A check of the records at Britain's Ministry of Defense subsequently confirmed the aborted raid and the return of the Lancasters. Miller, in other words, may have been a victim of that grim military occurrence, "friendly fire."

Mark Postlethwaite's illustration of the Norseman carrying Major Glenn Miller as it allegedly flew through bombs being dropped by RAF planes over the Channel on its return to Great Britain on Dec. 15, 1944.

Shortly before his death, Glenn had outlined his postwar plans. He would mark his return to the United States with a concert at New York's Paramount Theater and then work only six months out of the year, spending the rest of the time raising oranges at his California ranch, "Tuxedo Junction."

Miller had no way of knowing it, but the Big Band Era was quickly drawing to a close. A strike by the musicians' union against the record companies that lasted from August 1942 until September 1943 kept the bands out of the recording studios. Although the union eventually got what it wanted, the strike dealt a severe blow to the Big Bands. Singers, who had been able to record with choral backup, had gained popularity and were in demand for radio performances. The new vogue for romantic singers, initiated by Frank Sinatra after he left the Tommy Dorsey band in 1943, brought vocalists like Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, and Jo Stafford to the fore.

By the end of 1946, eight of the nation's top bands had dissolved. As big-band veteran John Best once recalled, "I was on the road with Benny Goodman, and he was guaranteed $3,000 a night. Tommy Dorsey was getting $4,000. Suddenly one night, the total take was just $700."

Radio disk jockeys were proliferating, rendering it unnecessary for stations to air live music. Also, a wartime twenty-percent amusement tax on nightclub checks continued into peacetime, with a predictable decline in business. Most crucial of all, tastes changed. As jazz moved into the era of bebop, fans rarely turned to Big Bands to hear their kind of music.

And yet Miller's music survived. It weathered the period of neglect, and even aversion, that inevitably envelops the recently fashionable. But now you can hear it in television commercials or dance to it in clubs and at weddings. Even fifty years after Miller's death, to listen to his band's biggest hits is to be struck by their huge familiarity. These were not just songs of their day, but of the century. They are an indispensable part of American popular music.

*[ 4 ] He never did see his second adopted child

February 21, 2005

News Bulletin

Read:
Deuteronomy 7:6-16

He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. -Deuteronomy 7:10

Bible In One Year: Numbers 15-17

cover The news bulletin commanded attention. Several inmates had escaped from a penitentiary. They were armed and considered extremely dangerous. A police spokesman stressed to the community the importance of caution. He said, "These men are desperate. They have nothing to lose. They have killed and could kill again."

Deuteronomy 7 contains a far more serious warning. Overall, the passage is a positive expression of blessing. It shows the willingness of God to help those who trust Him. But that's not the whole picture. Did you catch the "news bulletin" in verse 10? The Lord alerted Israel to be on the lookout-not for bad men roaming the streets but for a good God who will destroy all those who hate Him.

It's true. Evil men are not the only ones to be feared. We are also to fear our good God. Even though He is merciful and full of compassion, His awesome holiness makes all other kinds of fear look mild by comparison.

We might not like to face this sobering truth. But God will not always be patient with those people who have no love or respect for Him. That's a news bulletin we can't afford to miss. -Mart De Haan

You've heard the news-there's no escape-
The Lord is coming to make right
The wrongs in this dark world of hate;
So make your choice-come to the Light. -Hess

Live today as if you will stand before God tomorrow.

FOR FURTHER STUDY
Just Before Heaven

On this Day In History

Birthdates which occurred on February 21:
1484 Joachim I Nestor elector (Brandenburg, Constitution)
1728 Peter III Kiel Germany, Russian tsar (1761-62), husband of Catherine
1794 Antonio López de Santa Anna President of México (1833-36)
1800 John Henry Winder Brigadier General (Confederate Army), died in 1865
1801 John Henry Newman England, cardinal/churchman/author (Dream of Gerontius)
1802 George Douglas Ramsey Brevet Major General (Union Army), died in 1882
1817 José Zorrilla y Moral Vallodolid Spain, poet/dramatist (El rey Loco)
1821 Charles Scribner US, music publisher (Scribner Catalog)
1829 Johnson Hagood Brigadier General (Confederate Army), died in 1898
1875 Jeanne Louise Calment France, world's oldest woman (died at 122)
1893 Andrés Segovia Linares Spain, classical guitarist
1903 Thomas Yawkey baseball owner (Boston Red Sox)
1920 Robert S. Johnson, American World War II fighter ace who shot down 27 German planes
1922 Murray "the K" Kaufman NYC DJ (5th Beatle)
1924 Robert G Mugabe Premier/President of Zimbabwe
1925 Sam Peckinpah Fresno CA, film director (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs)
1927 Erma Bombeck Dayton OH, humorist (The Grass is Always Greener...)
1931 Larry Hagman TV actor (I Dream of Jeannie, Dallas)
1932 Harald V King of Norway (1991- )
1933 Nina Simone [Eunice Waymon], Tyron NC, singer/pianist ("I Loves You Porgy")
1936 Barbara Jordan Houston TX, (Representative-D-TX, 1972-78)
1937 Gary Lockwood Van Nuys CA, actor (2001, Survival Zone, Lieutenant)
1943 David Geffen Brooklyn NY, record producer (Geffen, Asylum)
1946 Tricia Nixon Cox Richard Milhaus Nixon's daughter
1946 Tyne Daly Madison WI, actress (Cagney & Lacey, Angel Unchained)
1947 Olympia J Snowe (Representative-Rino-ME, 1979- )
1958 Jake Steinfeld exercise expert (Body by Jake)
1958 Alan Trammell Garden Grove CA, infielder (Detroit Tigers)
1958 Mary-Chapin Carpenter Princeton NJ, country singer
1964 Mark E Kelly Orange NJ, Lieutenant USN/astronaut
1979 Jennifer Love Hewitt Waco TX, actress (Party of Five, Time of Your Life, The Audrey Hepburn Story, I Know What You Did Last Summer)

Deaths which occurred on February 21:
0556 Maximianus van Ravenna bishop (Basilica S Stefano), dies
1109 Anselm of Canterbury, 76, priest and theologian.
1513 Julius II [Giuliano dellea Rovere], Pope (1503-13), dies at 69
1554 Hieronymus Bock German doctor (founder of modern botany), dies
1595 Robert Southwell English Jesuit/poet, hanged
1730 Benedict XIII [Pietro F Orsini], Pope (1724-30), dies at 81
1803 Edward Despard (last person drawn & quartered in England.)
1852 Nikolai Gogol Russian playwright (Dead Souls), dies
1864 Jeffery Forrest US Confederate Brigadier-General, dies in battle
1919 Habib Ullah Chan emir of Afghanistan (1901-19), murdered at 46
1938 George Ellery Hale astronomer, dies

1945 Eric Liddell Scottish runner (Olympics-gold 1924), dies at 43

1965 Malcolm X [Little], black Moslem leader, assassinated in New York NY at 39
1991 Dame Margot Fonteyn ballerina, dies of cancer at 71
1992 Roberto D'Aubuisson El Salvadorian founder (ARENA), dies
1996 Horace Leonard Gold science fiction writer/editor, dies at 81
1996 Terence Edward Armstrong polar geographer, dies at 75

Reported: MISSING in ACTION

1967 BORJA DOMINGO R.---SAN FRANCISCO CA.
1967 WRIGHT ARTHUR---LANSING MI.

POW / MIA Data & Bios supplied by
the P.O.W. NETWORK. Skidmore, MO. USA.

On this day...
1173 Pope Alexander III canonizes Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury
1431 England begins trial against Joan of Arc
1564 Philip II routes cardinal Granvelle to Franche-Comté
1574 Spanish garrison of Middelburg Netherlands surrenders
1583 Groningen Netherlands begins using Gregorian calendar
1598 Boris Godunov crowned tsar
1613 Michael Romanov, son of the Patriarch of Moscow, elected Russian tsar
1775 As troubles with Great Britain increase, colonists in Massachusetts vote to buy military equipment for 15,000 men
1782 US congress resolves the establishment of a US mint
1792 Congress passes Presidential Succession Act
1795 Freedom of worship established in France under constitution
1828 1st American Indian newspaper in US, Cherokee Phoenix (weekly), Georgia
1842 1st known sewing machine patented in US, John Greenough, Washington DC
1846 1st US woman telegrapher, Sarah G Bagley, Lowell MA
1853 US authorizes minting of $3 gold pieces
1857 US issues flying eagle cents
1857 Congress outlaws foreign currency as legal tender in US
1858 Edwin T Holmes installs 1st electric burglar alarm (Boston MA)
1862 Texas Rangers win Confederate victory at Battle of Val Verde, New Mexico
1862 Confederate Constitution & Presidency are declared permanent
1864 1st US Catholic parish church for blacks dedicated, Baltimore MD
1864 Battle at Okolonam MS
1866 Lucy B Hobbs (Taylor) becomes 1st US woman to earn a DDS degree
1874 Benjamin Disraeli replaces William Gladstone as English premier
1878 1st telephone directory (with 50 names) issued (New Haven CT)
1885 Washington Monument dedicated (Washington DC)
1887 Oregon becomes 1st US state to make Labor Day a holiday
1887 1st US bacteriology laboratory opens (Brooklyn)
1895 North Carolina Legislature, adjourns for day to mark death of Frederick Douglass
1902 Dr Harvey Cushing, 1st US brain surgeon, does his 1st brain operation
1903 Cornerstone laid for US army war college, Washington DC
1904 National Ski Association formed, Ishpeming MI
1911 Gustav Mahler conducts his last concerto (Berceuse élégique)
1916 Battle of Verdun (WWI) begins (1 million casualties)
1918 Australians chase Turkish troop out of Jericho Palestine
1922 Airship Rome explodes at Hampton Roads Virginia; 34 die
1922 Great Britain grants Egypt independence
1925 1st issue of "New Yorker" magazine published
1931 Alka Seltzer introduced
1931 Chicago White Sox & New York Giants play 1st exhibition night game
1932 Camera exposure meter patented, WN Goodwin
1934 Nicaraguan patriot Augusto Cesar Sandino assassinated by National Guard
1941 US Senate accepts Omar Bradley's demotion to Brigadier-General
1943 Dutch Roman Catholic bishops protest against persecution of Jews
1946 Anti-British demonstrations in Egypt
1947 1st instant developing camera demonstrated in NYC, by E H Land
1947 1st broadcast of 1st US TV soap opera "A Woman to Remember"
1947 Whipper Billy Watson beats Bill Longson, to become wrestling champion
1952 Dick Button performs 1st figure skating triple jump in competition
1952 Liz Taylor's 2nd marriage (Michael Wilding)
1953 F Crick & J Watson discover structure of DNA-molecule
1958 Egypt-Syria as UAR elect Nasser President (99.9% vote)
1961 Mercury-Atlas 2 reentry test reaches 172 km
1964 UK flies 24,000 rolls of Beatle wallpaper to US
1968 Baseball announces a minimum annual salary of $10,000
1968 150,000 demonstrate against leftist students in West-Berlin
1970 Jackson 5 make TV debut on "American Bandstand"
1971 Series of tornadoes cuts through Mississippi & Louisiana killing 117

1972 Richard Nixon becomes 1st US President to visit China

1974 Israeli forces leave western Suez
1975 John Mitchell, H R Haldeman & John D Ehrlichman sentenced to 2½-8 years
1979 2 Iowa girls High School basketball teams play 4 scoreless quarters; the game was won 4-2 in the 4th overtime period
1981 NASA launches Comstar D-4
1981 "Yorkshire Ripper" Peter Sutcliffe, murderer of 13 women, captured
1985 Largest NBA crowd to date 44,970 (Atlanta at Detroit)
1986 AIDS patient Ryan White returns to classes at Western Middle School
1987 Syrian army marches into Beirut
1989 Pete Rose meets with Commissioner Ueberroth to discuss his gambling
1992 Kristi Yamaguchi of US wins Olympics gold medal in women's fig skating
1994 Longtime CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames and his wife were arrested and charged with selling
information to the Soviet Union and Russia.
1995 Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Leader, Saskatchewan,Canada.
2001 The investigation into the last-minute presidential pardons granted by Bill Clinton widened with word that Clinton's brother-in-law had been paid to lobby (successfully) for the pardons of two convicted felons and that Clinton's half-brother, Roger -- himself the recipient of a presidential pardon -- had sought pardons for six other people.
2001 The Supreme Court ruled that state workers cannot use an important federal disability-rights law to win money damages for on-the-job discrimination.
2002 It was acknowledged that WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl was dead after a video was received that showed an assailant slash his throat. On May 30, Pearl’s wife in Paris gave birth to a baby boy, Adam D. Pearl

Holidays
Note: Some Holidays are only applicable on a given "day of the week"

Bangladesh : Bangladesh Martyrs Day/National Mourning Day (1952)
US : Engineers Week (Day 2)
US : Wine Appreciation Week (Day 2)
World : Friendship Week (Day 2)
US : Condom Week Ends
US : I've Got Your Number Day

Humpback Whale Awareness Month

Religious Observances
Christian : Feast of Bl Noel
Roman Catholic : Commemoration of St Peter Damian, bishop of Ostia, confessor/doctor
Roman Catholic : Commemoration of St Robert Southwell, English Jesuit, martyr

Religious History
1109 Death of Anselm of Canterbury, 76, priest and theologian. Best remembered for his 1099 classic, "Cur Deus Homo" ("Why God Became Man"), Anselm is regarded as the most original thinker in the Catholic Church since Augustine. His most often quoted saying was: 'I believe, in order that I may understand.'
1173 Pope Alexander III canonized Thomas Becket (1118-70). As Archbishop of Canterbury, Becket had been martyred three years earlier on orders of English King Henry II a former friend until Becket was elevated to Archbishop in 1162.
1795 Freedom of worship was established in France under the constitution that came out of the French Revolution of 1789.

1945 Death of Eric Liddell, 43, Scottish Olympic champion runner. Later a missionary to China, Liddell was captured by the Japanese during WWII and died of a brain tumor while still imprisoned. (His college running days were portrayed in the 1981 British film, "Chariots of Fire.")

1988 During a live TV broadcast, televangelist Jimmy Swaggert, 52, admitted to visiting a prostitute, then announced he would be leaving his ministry for an unspecified length of time. (Defrocked in April by the Assemblies of God, he was ordered to stay off TV for a year, but returned after only three months.)

Source: William D. Blake. ALMANAC OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1987.

Thought for the day :
"Eat right, exercise regularly, die anyway."

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News Bulletin

Read:Deuteronomy 7:6-16

He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. -Deuteronomy 7:10

Bible In One Year: Numbers 15-17

Read:
Deuteronomy 7:6-16