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.

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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.