Almanac for August 17

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 17th: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-17-Jonathan-Franzen-B0B8NXCEW

Artist Birthday: Geneva "Gene" Stratton-Porter

The July 5, 1926 South Bend (IN) News-Times

Bummer August 17th

August 17, 1896: Bridget Driscoll, the 45-year-old mother of a teenage daughter, has the dubious distinction of being the first person in Great Britain known to have been killed in a automobile-pedestrian collision. Driscoll, walking near the Crystal Palace in London, was struck by Arthur James Edsall, who was taking the vehicle for a test drive.

August 17, 1920: Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman dies of his injuries after having been hit the previous day by a baseball pitched by New York Yankee Carl Mays. The Indians go on to win the 1920 World Series.

August 17, 1966: English race car driver Ken Miles is killed when the Ford Mk IV he is test-driving crashes at over 200 miles per hour.

August 17, 1997: Antony Wheeler, playing Judas in a Greek production of Jesus Christ Superstar, accidentally dies by hanging during the scene in which his character is supposed to hang himself. 

August 17, 2007: Former NBA basketball player Eddie Griffin, intoxicated, drives his car through a railroad warning barrier and collides with a moving train, killing him instantly. Griffin is 25 years old.

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Aug. 17, 2025: I uploaded this video to YouTube:

Almanac for August 16

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 16: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-16-A-Separate-Peace-F1F411MU4J

Public domain

Artist Birthday: Madonna Louise Ciccone

Bummer August 16

August 16, 1920: New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays throws a fastball at Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians during a baseball game. The pitch strikes Chapman. He dies the following day, becoming the second person in major league baseball history to die from injuries sustained during a Major League game.

August 16, 1948: George Herman “Babe” Ruth dies of a cancerous tumor in his neck near the base of his skull. It’s unclear whether Ruth is ever told that he has cancer. He undergoes chemotherapy, which is still experimental at the time, but his tumor is inoperable, and he dies peacefully in his sleep. 

August 16, 1949: Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell dies in the hospital of injuries she sustained on August 11th. As she and her husband are on their way to see a film version of The Canterbury Tales, Mitchell is struck by a speeding car with an intoxicated driver. The driver is convicted of involuntary manslaughter and serves 11 months in jail.

August 16, 1987: Northwest Airlines Flight 255 crashes shortly after taking off from Detroit Metropolitan Airport. A power interruption causes a stall warning to go unannounced, so the plane isn’t configured properly for takeoff, which in turn causes its rate of climb to be too slow. The plane’s wing strikes a light pole in the parking lot of car rental business, causing the wing to catch fire and disintegrate. The disabled plane then strikes the roof of an airport building, inverts, and falls onto the road, where it strikes a car and breaks apart.

All six crew members, 148 of the 149 passengers, and two people inside the car crushed by the plane are killed. The sole survivor is a 4-year-old girl who is severely injured. Among the dead are Phoenix Suns center Nick Vanos, age 24, and Vanos’s fiancee.

Saturday, August 16, 2003: Doug McKay has recently taken over ownership of Paradise Amusements park in Idaho. The park had a small roller coaster called the Super Loop 2, and its track needed lubrication. Doug decided to climb onto the ride and lubricate the track, unfortunately, while the ride was still in operation. Some part of his body, possibly his hair, became entangled with a passenger car, which dragged him approximately 40 feet before he dropped from the ride. His body hit the ride, then landed on a metal fence. Doug’s grisly sudden death was witnessed by visitors to the park, many of them children. 

On the same day in Las Vegas, Nevada, 39-year-old Becky Longhoffer is electrocuted while crossing Las Vegas Boulevard. Walking across a traffic island, Longhoffer stepped in a puddle. The puddle was hiding a cast iron plate that was part of the traffic signal box. Frayed wiring in the box, the rain water from the puddle, and Longhoffer's open-toed shoes combined to create the electrical tragedy that took her life as she crossed the street while talking to her brother on her cell phone.

Almanac for August 15th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 15th: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-15-Dr-Sax-X8X811LC4I

Artist Birthday: Edna Ferber

East St. Louis (Illinois) Daily Journal, Oct. 18, 1925

Beatles Trivia

August 15, 1965: The Beatles perform at Shea Stadium, home field of the New York Mets, in front of a crowd of 56,000.

Author Julie K. Howlin post of the day: Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes

Bummer August 15th

August 15, 1868: In what is believed to be a racist and anti-Semitic hate crime probably carried out by the Ku Klux Klan, a group of masked men break into a store belonging to a Jewish man, Samuel A. Bierfield. The men shoot and kill Bierfield and his Black store clerk, Laurence Bowman. No one is ever charged with the crime.

August 15, 1914: Julian Carlton, a servant who worked in the household of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, sets Wright’s Taliesin house in Spring Green, Wisconsin, on fire, then murders seven people inside the house with a hatchet. Wright is not inside the home at the time, but the victims include Wright’s lover Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her two children, gardener David Lindblom, worker Thomas Brunker, draftsman Emil Brodelle, and the son of another worker. Carlton will drink hydrochloric acid in a suicide attempt but, despite severely damaging his esophagus, will live another seven weeks.

August 15, 2021: 30-year-old Ellen Chung, her husband Jonathan Gerrish (age 45), their year-old daughter Aurelia (known as Miju), and the family’s Akita mix dog Oski embark on a day hike in California’s Sierra National Forest. Although they try to reach help via cell phone, service in the mountainous region is spotty. With the temperature reaching 107 to 109 degrees along some parts of the hiking trail, especially in those parts that receive full sunlight with no shade, all four succumb to hyperthermia and dehydration. Their bodies are found on August 17th.

Almanac for August 14

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 14: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-14-Mendoza-y-Pacheco-L4L411LBN5

August 14, 2017: Sequana Joi Harris, a motorcycle racer and stunt performer, dies at the scene of a motorcycle crash in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada while performing as a stunt double for Zazie Beetz on the set of Deadpool 2. Harris’s motorcycle hits a curb; Harris is thrown off the motorcycle and into an exterior wall of Shaw Tower. She was 40 years old.

Almanac for August 13

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 13: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-13-V7V011LB3A

Affiliate link: https://amzn.to/4oIJJyw

Artist Birthday: Alfred Hitchcock

Happy 1-year publishing anniversary to Art and the Bronco by O. Henry and Northern Drinking.

Bummer August 13

August 13, 1521: Hernán Cortés and his small army of Spanish conquistadores conquer the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán after an extended siege that began in 1519. 

August 13, 1944: Lucien Carr, friend of Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, stabs and kills his acquaintance David Kammerer. Carr will serve two years in prison for manslaughter, then go on to father children who include novelist Caleb Carr.

Almanac for August 12th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 12th: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-12-U7U61126T2

Bummer August 12th

August 12, 1964: Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, dies of a heart attack.

August 12, 1982: Japan Airlines Flight 123 crashes into a mountain after the pilots lose the ability to steer the plane. Of the 509 passengers and 15 crew members, only three passengers and one crew member survive. Rescue operations are delayed due to darkness and mountainous terrain, which means many people who may have initially had non-fatal injuries died of exposure, blood loss, and other conditions. 

August 12, 1988: Haitian-American Neo-Expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is pronounced dead at the hospital after being found unresponsive at his home in Manhattan. His cause of death is heroin overdose. Basquiat is 27 years old.

August 12, 2022: Indian-British author Salman Rushdie is stabbed ten times at an event in Chautauqua, New York, allegedly by a 24-year-old man from New Jersey. Rushdie suffers nerve damage to one arm, one eye, and his liver. The attacker was apparently motivated by a late Iranian religious leader’s description of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses as blasphemous since it depicted the prophet Muhammad as a fictional character. 

Rushdie is an atheist. The attacker had not read The Satanic Verses.

Almanac for August 11

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for August 11th: https://ko-fi.com/post/August-11-J3J81125JX

Happy 1-year anniversary to the publication of this audiobook by Aphra Behn. 

Bummer August 11

August 11, 1956: Painter Jackson Pollock dies in a single-car accident while driving drunk. 

GraceBrown2498, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

August 11, 1978: British medical photographer Janet Parker dies of smallpox, which she’s accidentally been exposed to while working in a hospital. She is the last recorded person to die of smallpox before the disease is declared eradicated.

August 11, 2000: Saudi Arabian musician Talal Maddah collapses and dies suddenly in front of his fans near the start of a concert televised on Saudi TV.

August 11, 2022: A 42-year-old man who participated in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection attempts to break into the FBI field office in Cincinnati, Ohio, after posting on social media that he wanted to kill FBI agents. Armed with a nail gun and a rifle, the man tried unsuccessfully to pass the building’s lobby and fled when confronted. After being chased by police in his vehicle, the middle-aged man raised his weapon at police and was shot to death.