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. 

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.

This is an affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4s9ImLF

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.