1916: Ken Curtis was born in Lamar, Colorado. He sang with the Tommy Dorsey band and the Sons of the Pioneers, but was probably best known as Festus Haggen on Gunsmoke. He died at age 74 in 1991.
1932: James Gamble died in Cincinnati. As a partner in Procter & Gamble, he developed Ivory, the first floating soap.
1955: ABC Television premiered "The Lawrence Welk Show," featuring a 24-piece band and "Champagne Lady" Alice Lon. The show lasted 27 years.
1956: At a studio in Manhattan, Elvis Presley recorded "Don’t Be Cruel" and "(You Ain’t Nothin’ But A) Hound Dog."
1969: Consumer crusader Ralph Nader warned that loud rock music threatened to create a generation of hearing-impaired people.
1970: Lyman Dickinson in Albany, New York, rolled a 299, the highest score ever by a bowler on two artificial legs.
1982: Larry Walters flew a lawn chair to 16,000 feet over San Pedro, California. He had tied 42 helium-filled weather balloons to the chair. He even made it back down safely.
1985: General Motors announced it was installing electronic road maps as an option on some of its higher priced cars. The system used a dashboard computer and maps stored on cassette tapes. Almost nobody was interested.
1988: Rick Krause became the world champion cherry pit spitter in Eau Claire, Michigan, with a record spit of 72 feet 7.5 inches.
1992: The one-millionth Chevrolet Corvette rolled off the assembly line.
2001: Robert Tools received the world's first self-contained artificial heart in Louisville, Kentucky. He lived 151 days with the device.
2002: American adventurer Steve Fossett became the first person to fly a balloon solo around the world as he returned to western Australia.
2003: Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Winter Olympics.
2004: Medical reports showed one n six U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq was showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.