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.