Almanac for July 21st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 21st: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-21-Lady-Chatterlys-Lover-F1F71HQFBW

Artist Birthday: Ernest Hemingway
Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Ernest Hemingway's birthday

Bummer July 21st

July 21, 1796: The poet Robert Burns dies at the age of 37, leaving behind his wife and five children.

July 21, 2023: Vegan influencer Zhanna Samsonova, who posted nutrition content on social media accounts including Instagram and TikTok under the name Zhanna D’Art, dies at age 39 of an apparent infection at a hospital in Phuket, Malaysia. Samsonova’s “raw food” diet included only uncooked plants, leaving her with a very thin body type that may have contributed to her body’s inability to fight off infection.

Almanac for July 20th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 20th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-20-Cedar-Lake-R6R61HQF77

Bummer July 20th

July 20, 1948: Herpetologist Grace Olive Wiley, the first person to successfully breed rattlesnakes in captivity, dies after being bitten by a venomous Indian cobra. Wiley had been posing for a photo with the snake when the camera’s flash startles the animal and it strikes Wiley while she attempts to restrain it. She dies less than three hours later at the hospital, having accidentally broken her only vial of antivenom.

July 20, 1973: 32-year-old Bruce Lee, who has been suffering from cerebral edema since May of that year, takes the painkiller and muscle relaxant Equagesic. He lies down to take a nap and can’t be revived, apparently having had an allergic reaction to the medicine. Lee is declared dead on arrival at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kowloon, Hong Kong.

July 20, 1981: All six crews members and 44 passengers are killed when Somali Airlines Flight 40 crashes shortly after takeoff into the town of Balad. Thunderstorm conditions and, possibly, human error cause the plane to spiral dive and the crew are unable to recover from the dive.

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Almanac for July 19

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 19: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-19-Indiana-Fever-P5P61HQEV9

Bummer July 19

July 19, 1374: Tuscan poet Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) dies on the eve of his 70th birthday.

July 19, 1850: Journalist Margaret Fuller returns, with her husband and child, from assignment as the New York Tribune’s European correspondent aboard the merchant ship Elizabeth. The vessel’s captain has died of smallpox during the 5-week voyage. The Elizabeth, being piloted by her less-experienced first mate, strikes a sandbar off of Fire Island and is run aground. Many of the crew abandon ship and are able to swim to shore, but Fuller and her husband are never found and are presumed to have drowned. Their son’s body is found washed up on the shore.

July 19, 1977: Heavy rains cause six dams in Conemaugh Valley, Pennsylvania to overflow and fail. 84 people were killed in the flooding.

July 19, 2017: Chanson réaliste singer-songwriter-musicologist Barbara Weldens is electrocuted while performing barefoot when her foot comes in contact with faulty electrical wiring. Welden is 35 years old.

Almanac for July 18th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 18th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-18-My-Brothers-Wedding-I3I11HQEQX

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: William Makepeace Thackaray

Beatles Trivia
July 18, 1995, South Bend: I dropped Mom off at work. When I came home, I turned on the tv to see Yoko Ono and beautiful, 19-year-old Sean Lennon [Ono] on the Today show.

Bummer July 18th

July 18, 1817: Jane Austen dies, aged 41. Her death is speculated to have been from Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

July 18, 1954: 18-year-old Dorothy Poore’s decomposing body is found stuffed inside a dresser drawer inside a room at the Claypool Hotel in downtown Indianapolis. Her killer is apprehended in Missouri and brought back to Indiana, where he is convicted and serves more than 25 years before being released on parole. He claimed to have killed the teenager after failing to recruit her as a sex worker.

July 18, 1966: Rock musician Bobby Fuller, whose band The Bobby Fuller Four has recently scored a hit with “I Fought the Law,” is found dead in his car outside his apartment in Hollywood. Fuller is 23 years old. His body has no signs of injury other than some small spots (indicated broken capillaries under the skin) thought to have been caused by the summer heat. No cause of death is ever determined. Strangely, the boxes for both “accident” and “suicide” are checked on the Los Angeles deputy medical examiner’s report.

July 18, 1969: U.S. Senator Edward (“Ted”) Kennedy leaves a cocktail party in his car with a passenger, Mary Joe Kopechne. The impaired senator drives the vehicle into a lake. He manages to escape, but Kopechne drowns. Kennedy fails to report the deadly accident until the following morning. He later pleads guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

July 18, 1975: Influential graffiti-style artist Vaughn Bodē, age 33, is found dead of apparent autoerotic asphyxiation.

July 18, 1984: A lone gunman kills 21 people and wounds an additional 19 people at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro*, California. The gunman is subsequently killed by a police sniper.

In her book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, Caroline Fraser offers the theory that the perpetrator suffered from severe heavy metal poisoning as a result of exposure to high levels of cadmium at his workplace, where he was a welder. Outbursts of violent behavior are a documented side effect of cadmium poisoning.

July 18, 1988: Christa Päffgen, the model and singer who performed under the mononym Nico, dies in Ibiza at age 49 from a cerebral hemorrhage suffered from a fall off her bicycle.

July 18, 1989: Actress Rebecca Schaeffer, then the star of the popular sitcom My Sister Sam, is shot in the chest at her home by a 19-year-old obsessed fan who has stalked her over the course of three years. He became enraged when she appeared in a film in which her character is seen in bed with a male character. Schaeffer dies at the hospital.

*San Ysidro, in English, is called Saint Isadore, and he's the patron saint of farmers.

Almanac for July 17th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 17th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-17-ShakeScenes-H2H21HQEBJ

Bummer July 17th

July 17, 1793: Charlotte Corday is executed by guillotine for the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat.

July 17, 1918: The royal family of Russia is executed by Communist revolutionaries. Czar Nicholas II, Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, and their children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei are shot and bayonetted to death in the basement of the Ipatiev House, where they have been imprisoned. 

July 17, 1935: Cudjoe Lewis dies. The formerly enslaved man’s story of being kidnapped from his home in what is now Benin is the subject of Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon. 

July 17, 1944: Munitions (including bombs, mines, and small arms ammunition) being loaded aboard the SS E.A. Bryan in Port Chicago, California, explode. None of the enlisted personnel loading the munitions had been formally trained in safely handling these materials. In the explosion, the E.A. Bryan is destroyed, the Quinault Victory is blown out of the water and torn in half, and a Coast Guard fire boat is blown up the river, where it sinks. The blast and subsequent fires kill all 320 military personnel loading the E.A. Bryan, including all five Coast Guard personnel aboard the fire boat. 

202 of the dead are African-American. Widespread discrimination in the military forced many enlisted men of color in the most dangerous jobs with little hope of advancement and no Black officers in leadership positions to advocate for them.

July 17, 1959: At 3:10 a.m., Billie Holiday passes away under arrest in her hospital bed. Her death comes from heart failure and fluid in her lungs brought about by a failing liver. She’s 44 years old. 

Billie Holiday at Dorothy Surrenders

July 17, 1967: 40-year-old jazz saxophonist John Coltrane dies of liver cancer. Although he has been sober for the last 10 years of his life, earlier struggles with heroin and alcohol use may have contributed to his cancer.

July 17, 1981: The skywalk inside the Hyatt Regency Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, collapses onto a dance happening below. More than 200 people are injured and 114 die. Some of the victims drown when they become trapped under the rubble and unable to escape from water leaking from a broken pipe.

July 17, 1997: 10-year-old Mark Miedema gets ahead of his family while on a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. He’s attacked and killed by a female mountain lion.

Almanac for July 16

Almanac for July 16: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-16-Catcher-in-the-Rye-O4O41HQE3R

Historical Journalist Birthday: Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Southern Horrors Audiobook:

Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/1005794258/Southern-Horrors-Lynch-Law-in-All-Its-Phases

Kobo, Walmart: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/southern-horrors-lynch-law-in-all-its-phases-17?sId=8e64c1be-05eb-4c61-ae4b-fe5bd7d542b8&ssId=mQrpBSS1AdSWdKcwM9AUD&cPos=1

Spotify:

Bummer July 16

July 16, 1945: The world’s first nuclear device is detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

July 16, 1990: More than 1,600 people in the Philippines die in the Luzon earthquake. 

July 16, 1999: John F. Kennedy Jr. crashes the small aircraft he has been flying off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, killing himself, his wife Caroline Bessette-Kennedy, and Caroline’s sister Lauren Bessette. 

July 16, 2003: Dozens of children in the village of Gandaman in Bihar, India become sick after eating a lunch of soy beans and potato curry with rice prepared with oil that had been stored in a container that previously contained pesticides. The children become sickened with vomiting and diarrhea due to the pesticide residue. 23 of the children die.

Almanac for July 15

Almanac for July 15: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-15-Rembrandt-E1E31HQDWQ

Bummer July 15

July 15, 1940: Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in recorded history, who stood 8 feet, eleven inches tall, dies at age 22. Wadlow needed metal braces on his legs in able to walk. He’d made a public appearance at which one of the metal braces broke his skin, the wound became infected, and the infection spread throughout his body. He died in his sleep of the infection, complicated by an autoimmune disorder. 

July 15, 1974: During a live broadcast of the digest news program on which she appeared, 29-year-old journalist Christine Chubbuck pulls a loaded handgun from her purse, places it behind her left ear, and shoots herself in the head. She dies at Sarasota (Florida) Memorial Hospital fourteen hours later. Her family gets a court order to keep the tape of the broadcast from ever being aired again. 

Almanac for July 14

Almanac for July 14: https://ko-fi.com/Post/June-4-Poltergeist-O4O31G1GD6

Bummer July 14

July 14, 1908: According to his grave marker, an unknown man in Goldfield, Nevada, died from eating library paste (flour, alum, and water) on this date. It’s not entirely clear whether this is an actual historical incident or a local prank.

July 14, 2017: Stunt performer John Bernecker dies from injuries he sustained the previous day. While filming stunt footage for the TV show The Walking Dead, Bernecker had fallen 20 feet off a balcony onto a concrete floor.

Almanac for July 13

Almanac for July 13: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-13-I-Married-My-Best-Friend-E1E11HQD8B

Happy anniversary, Tit Elingtin!

Bummer July 13

July 13, 1793: 24-year-old royalist Charlotte Corday assassinates radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub with a knife she has concealed in her corset.

July 13, 1990: An earthquake and avalanche at Lenin Peak in the Trans-Alay mountains on the border of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (still part of the USSR in 1990) kill 43 mountaineers.

Jacques-Louis David, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Almanac for July 12

Almanac for July 12: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-12-Serpent-Mound-U7U71HQD2L

Artist Birthday: Henry David Thoreau

99 cents at Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobook/civil-disobedience-68?sId=4528426b-43a6-4592-941c-610fe6ed1226&ssId=pl1MMVd2lG_MxicsX0ZsR&cPos=1

Civil Disobedience at Everand (Scribd): https://www.everand.com/audiobook/625856267/Walden-and-On-the-Duty-of-Civil-Disobedience

Bummer July 12 

July 12, 1979: Singer Minnie Riperton dies of breast cancer. She’s 31 years old.

Riperton's daughter Maya Rudolph was six years old when Riperton passed away. In addition to her successful tv and film career, Rudolph is also a singer. Her band Princess is a tribute band in honor of Prince Rogers Nelson. 

July 12, 1996: Multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Melvoin, at the time touring with the Smashing Pumpkins as a keyboardist, dies of a heroin overdose. He’s 34 years old.

This song is about him:

July 12, 2007: In an incident caught on video, U.S. military forces in Iraq kill at least 12 civilians and wound two children. Military personal can be seen on the video laughing about the deaths and wishing for excuses to kill more people. The video is leaked to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning in 2010. Manning is arrested for leaking military property and imprisoned until her sentence is commuted in 2017.

Almanac for July 11

Almanac for July 11: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-11-Seven-and-Jerry-W7W01HQCVL

Bummer July 11

July 11, 1906: Pregnant, 20-year-old Grace Brown, a worker in the Gillette Skirt Factory, is intentionally drowned and murdered by her boyfriend Chester Gillette, nephew of the factory owner. Gillette is subsequently executed in the electric chair.

The murder inspires Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which in turn inspires the 1951 film A Place In the Sun. The character based on Brown is played by Shelley Winters.

July 11, 1937: George Gershwin, age 38, dies of a brain tumor.

But if you don't want George Gershwin to die, you can listen to this fictional audiobook in which he doesn't.

Almanac for July 10th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 10th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-10-Tea-Time-O5O61HQCPI

Artist Birthday: Giorgio de Chirico

Bummer July 10th

July 10, 1861: After asking for a cup of coffee, Frances “Fanny” Appleton Longfellow dies of burn injuries she sustained the day before. Fanny’s dress caught on fire when either a spark or hot wax made contact with her dress as she melted sealing wax to seal an envelope containing locks of her children’s hair. 

Her husband, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, is napping when he hears her screams and attempts to smother the flames with a rug. Longfellow also sustains burns to his arms and face to the extent that he is too injured to attend Fanny’s funeral. He wears a beard for the rest of his life to conceal his facial scars.

July 10, 1873: French poet Paul Verlaine shoots his inappropriately younger lover/fellow poet Arthur Rimbaud in the wrist, wounding him, although the injury is not serious. 

July 10, 1985: Aeroflot Flight 7425 crashes near Uchkuduk, Uzbekistan, at the time part of the USSR. All nine crew members and 191 passengers are killed. A fatigued crew and pilot error contribute to the accident. 

***

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Almanac for July 9th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 9th: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-9-Radcliffe-B0B21HQCGE

Bummer July 9th

July 9, 1850: The 12th U.S. president, Zachary Taylor, dies of acute gastroenteritis while in office. Several other members of his cabinet also become ill with gastrointestinal symptoms. Taylor is the second U.S. president to die in office after William Henry Harrison, both of natural causes.

July 9, 1937: Artist David Hockney is born in the West Riding of Yorkshire, U.K. He just passed away on June 11, 2026.

The same day Hockney is born, a fire at a warehouse in Little Ferry, New Jersey, destroys the silent film archives of the Fox Film Corporation and other studios.

July 9, 1942: 13-year-old Anne Frank and her family are forced to go into hiding to avoid Nazi persecution.

Almanac for July 8th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 8th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-8-Mona-Lisa-W7W21HQCA4

Percy Shelley is a contributor. https://amzn.to/3XHzDlM

Bummer July 8th

July 8, 1822: Poet Percy Shelley drowns while out sailing, along with his friend Edward Ellerker Williams. They are each 29 years old.

July 8, 1917: Canadian painter Thomas John Thomson accidentally drowns while canoeing in Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park in Ontario. He is 39 years old.

July 8, 1918: Ernest Hemingway is wounded while serving as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I. 

July 8, 1965: Veteran stunt pilot Paul Mantz is killed while filming the movie The Flight of the Phoenix. Mantz’s plane, specially built for the film, struck a small hill, then broke apart and hit the ground as Mantz tried to recover from the error.

July 8, 1974: 18-year-old park employee Deborah Gail Stone is crushed to death between a stationary wall and a rotating wall that are part of the America Sings attraction at Disneyland in Anaheim, California.

July 8, 1998: Police find the body of screenwriter Gary DeVore inside DeVore’s Ford Explorer submerged in an aqueduct in Palmdale, California. DeVore had last been seen by his wife a year earlier when he left their home near Santa Barbara, California, to work on a screenplay at his office in Santa Fe, New Mexico. 

Police do not believe DeVore’s death could have been an accident, since there were no signs that the Explorer had struck the aqueduct, the vehicle’s lights were switched off, and DeVore’s laptop and gun were missing. Further, the hands of the deceased man were missing. The death is officially unsolved. Some have speculated that something in DeVore’s screenplay was threatening to someone, possibly someone inside the U.S. government, and that he was murdered to stop the screenplay from getting out the public.

Read more about Gary DeVore here.

July 8, 2020: Actor Naya Rivera, age 33, rents a boat on Lake Piru in California and takes it out around 1 p.m. with her 4-year-old son Josey. The pair is expected to return to dock by 4 p.m. When the boat fails to appear by 5 p.m., a search begins. Searchers find Josey asleep on the boat, wearing a life jacket but alone. The boy tells the Sheriff’s Department that he and his mother jumped off the boat and into the lake to swim together, but that his mother had trouble climbing back into the boat and that he saw her go under the water. 

Rivera’s body is found in the lake on July 13th. It appears that she drowned after becoming caught in a rip current, having enough strength to push her son back onto the boat but then not enough strength to lift herself from the current. Rivera was an experienced boater and a strong swimmer, and neither alcohol nor drugs are thought to have been factors in her death.

Almanac for July 7

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 7th: https://ko-fi.com/post/July-7-Tanabata-J3J81HQC4G

Artist Birthday: Ringo Starr

Bummer July 7th

July 7, 1535: Sir Thomas More is beheaded for refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as the head of the Church. More remains loyal to the Pope.

July 7, 1930: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dies of a heart attack at age 71. Reportedly, his last words were to his wife Jean: “You are wonderful.”

July 7, 1973: 50-year-old actress Veronica Lake dies of cirrhosis following years of heavy alcohol use.

July 7, 2002: Retired NBA player Bison Dele, his girlfriend Serena Karlan, and boat captain Bertrand Saldo are presumed to have been murdered by Dele’s older brother Miles Dabord aboard Dele’s boat near Tahiti, French Polynesia. After the 8th of July, only Dabord is ever heard from again. Arrested for forging his brother’s signature and trying to use Dele’s passport, Dabord gives himself a lethal dose of insulin and dies in the hospital, so the exact circumstances of the incident will never be known.

July 7, 2026: Erin O'Riordan is disappointed to learn that Daniel Brühl is voicing Voldemort in the German-language audiobook recordings of the Harry Potter series. Oh Daniel, I thought we all agreed we don't want the bad wizard lady to earn any more money (she doesn't need it) since she's only going to use her platform to scapegoat and try to pry human rights away from transgender people.

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Almanac for July 6th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 6th: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-6-Fire-and-Ice-S6S61HQBRG

Bummer July 6th

July 6, 1819: Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to pilot a hot air balloon as a professional balloonist, dies in a hot air ballooning accident. Performing balloon ascents for a crowd at Tivoli Gardens, the Parisian amusement park, she included fireworks in her show. The fireworks ignited the helium in her balloon. Blanchard became entangled in the balloon’s net and subsequently falls to her death.

July 6, 1944: A fire at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, kills an estimated 167 people.

July 6, 1962: Author William Faulkner dies of a heart attack.

July 6, 1971: Louis Armstrong dies of a heart attack.

July 6, 1983: Model/actor Tammy Lynn Leppert, 18 years old at the time, is seen for the last confirmed time getting out of a friend’s car in a parking lot in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The friend confirms he and Leppert argued and that he dropped her off in a parking lot; Leppert has never contacted her friends or family since then. Leppert appears briefly in the movie Scarface. 

July 6, 1988: An explosion on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland kills 165 oil workers and two rescue workers. Although no one from the platform’s owner,  Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Limited, was ever charged with a crime, neglected maintenance and inadequate safety procedures contributed to the disaster. 

The platform collapses and sinks. 61 survivors are rescued. 

Almanac for July 5th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 5th: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-5-Union-Pier-I2I41HQBMI

Bowman Gum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Bummer July 5th

July 5, 1909: 38-year-old Isola Kennedy and 10-year-old Earl Wilson are bitten by a rabid mountain lion. Both will die of rabies.

July 5, 1932: Z. Smith Reynolds, an heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, dies of a gunshot wound. Three other people are inside the house with Reynolds at the time: Reynolds’s wife Libby Holman (a noted Broadway singer/actor), Holman’s personal assistant Ab Walker, and friend Blanche Yurka. A party has taken place at the home earlier and all of the witnesses are drunk when the shooting occurs. It’s unclear if Reynolds died by suicide, accident, or murder. Holman maintains she was too drunk to remember what happened that night. She and Walker are indicted on murder charges, but the Reynolds family insists that the charges be dropped.

July 5, 2002: Retired Boston Red Sox star Ted Williams dies of congestive heart failure at the age of 83. His son John-Henry and daughter Claudia choose to have his remains cryogenically frozen, although their sister Bobby-Jo does not agree with this decision. 

Almanac for July 4th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 4th: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-4-I-Think-It-Was-The-4th-of-July-W7W21HQBBR

Today's Observance: United States Independence Day

The July 4, 1926 Milwaukee Leader

Artist Birthday: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Bummer 4th of July

July 4, 1911: An extreme heat wave strikes the northwestern U.S., killing hundreds of people and horses, mostly due to heat stroke. Philadelphia reports 159 dead and New York City reports another 211. The heat wave breaks on July 15, when a thunderstorm strikes the northwest. The storm kills an additional five Americans.

July 4, 1934: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Marie Skłodowska–Curie, who pioneered the study of radioactivity, dies of aplastic anemia, a form of blood cancer believed to have been caused by her long-term exposure to radioactive materials. She is 66 years old.

Almanac for July 3rd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 3rd: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-3-Danville-F2F11HQB6I

July 3, 1926 review of Edith Wharton's Here and Beyond, Milwaukee Leader

Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Back to the Future
Artist Birthday: Patrick Wilson

Bummer July 3rd

July 3, 1918: As a 4-year-old child, actor Alan Ladd accidentally burns down his family’s home in Arkansas while playing with matches.

July 3, 1969: 27-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, heavily intoxicated, is found dead in his swimming pool, the apparent victim of an accidental drowning.

July 3, 1971: 27-year-old Doors lead singer/songwriter Jim Morrison is found dead, apparently having mixed alcohol with his asthma medication after being advised by his doctor not to do so. Morrison was severely alcoholic and was also known to have had severe asthma since childhood.

July 3, 1988: Mistaking the commercial aircraft for a hostile military plane, the USS Vincennes missile cruiser shoots down Iran Air Flight 655, killing 290 civilians. Sixty-six of the passengers were children. Although the U.S. eventually pays Iran a monetary settlement, the U.S. never admits fault or apologizes.

July 3, 1999: Musician/artist Mark Sandman, perhaps best known as a member of the band Morphine, collapses while playing a Morphine show in Palestrina, Lazio, Italy. He is pronounced dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The 46-year-old’s fatal heart attack is thought to have been triggered, in part, by the extreme heat of the day.

Almanac for July 2nd

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 2nd: https://ko-fi.com/Post/July-2nd-She-Bop-I2I81HQ80Q

Well, at least they're union-made. From the July 2, 1926 Newark [Ohio] Leader.

Bummer July 2nd

July 2, 1881: U.S. President James Garfield is shot twice by Charles Guiteau, who believed Arthur owed him a political appointment. Garfield will only die of infections stemming from his wounds after a long, agonizing convalescence. 

July 2, 1937: The U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca receives the last-known transmission from Amelia Earhart as the pilot and her navigator attempt to fly around the world. The transmission is unsuccessful and neither Earhart nor her plane can be found again.

July 2, 1951: 67-year-old Mary Reeser is found in her apartment in St. Petersburg, Florida, the apparent victim of a fire. The physical evidence of the fire and of Reeser’s body are highly unusual. The body has been almost entirely reduced to ashes aside from one foot, still wearing a slipper, Reeser’s skull, and the bones of her spine. Objects made of the plastic located some distance from Mrs. Reeser’s body were melted out of shape, but nothing else in the apartment appeared to have burned. This case is sometimes cited as evidence of spontaneous human combustion, although Reeser was known to smoke cigarettes.

July 2, 1961: Ernest Hemingway dies by suicide at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. 

July 2, 2005: As a family rode home from a wedding in a limousine, a 24-year-old man with a blood alcohol level of more than three times the legal limit hit the limo head on going over 70 miles per hour. The collision forced the engine of the limo practically on top of the driver, killing him instantly. 

All four adults and 5-year-old Grace, riding in the limo, were injured; Grace’s 7-year-old sister Katie was decapitated by her own seatbelt as a result of the accident. Katie’s mother Jennifer emerges from the vehicle carrying Katie’s head, which she will hold onto for about half an hour, in a state of shock and unwilling to let go of her daughter. Jennifer’s uncle, a police lieutenant who has coincidentally been called to the accident scene, finally convinces Jennifer to let go of Katie’s remains and allow herself to be taken to the hospital.

Almanac for July 1st

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for July 1st: https://ko-fi.com/Post/1st-of-July-L3L11HQ7XO

Artist Birthday: Andre Braugher
French Republican Calendar Day Name (13 Messidor): Clove

Beatles Trivia

July 1, 1968: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s collaborative art exhibit You Are Here (To Yoko from John Lennon, With Love) opens in London.

Bummer July 1st

July 1, 1955: Actor Isabel Bonner collapses and dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while performing in the play The Shrike, written by her husband, in Los Angeles.

July 1, 1976: 23-year-old West German woman Anneliese Michel dies of malnutrition at her home. Over the last year of her life, Michel has been cared for by her parents and priests from the Roman Catholic Church, who performed rites of exorcism under the belief that Michel was possessed by demons. Michel had previously been diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy and major depressive disorder, but was not being seen by health care professionals at the time of her death. Her parents and several members of the Catholic Church are tried and convicted for negligent homicide.

July 1, 1996: Model/actor Margaux Hemingway, the granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, is found dead inside her home in Santa Monica, California. She has died by suicide after overdosing on the barbiturate medication Luminal.

July 1, 2002: 71 people die when passenger jet BAL Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 and a DHL Cargo ship collide in midair near the border between Germany and Switzerland. The Russian passenger jet carried nine crew members and 60 passengers, many of whom were gifted children on a UNESCO cultural exchange trip to Barcelona. The DHL cargo flight carried two crew members. 

The crew of the Russian jet received contradictory instructions from TCAS automated guidance system and from Swiss air traffic control. At the time, Russian pilots didn’t have a clear set of instructions on whether TCAS should override verbal commands from air traffic control or vice versa. (Now, pilots are told to prioritize TCAS, which gathers more data at a quicker rate than a human being on the ground.) Air traffic controller Peter Nielsen, who was the only person on duty at that time and therefore had to monitor two air traffic control work stations at the same time, set the Russian jet on a course that caused it to directly collide with the cargo plane.

Margaux Hemingway in 1976. Publicity photo, unknown author, public domain.