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

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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.