Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
Today's Observance: All Saints Day Artist Birthday: Laura La Plante
Sadly, I lost the Dangerous Innocence audiobook when my laptop crashed earlier this year.
The Watauga (NC) Democrat, April 8, 1926
Beatles Trivia: November 1, 1968: George Harrison releases Wonderwall Music, the first solo album by any of the Beatles.
Public domain in the United States
Bummer November 1st
November 1, 1755: The city of Lisbon, Portugal, is devastated by an earthquake, subsequent fires, and a tsunami. Lisbon is Europe's 4th-largest city at the time. It’s estimated that between 12,000 and 50,000 people die as a result. Among the priceless artifacts destroyed in the disaster were navigator Vasco da Gama's records and original paintings by Peter Paul Rubens and Titian.
May 21, 1703: Under the reign of Queen Anne, novelist and political pamphleteer Daniel Defoe is sent to prison for seditious libel on the basis of his satirical writings. He’ll spend six months in prison before the Earl of Oxford helps get him released in exchange for Defoe supplying the Earl with intelligence about his political rivals.
May 21, 1956: Léo Valentin attempts a dive using a wing suit at an air show in Liverpool. Among the 100,000-person crowd that day are George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and 3-year-old Clive Barker. Valentin’s wing suit malfunctions after it makes contact with the plane as he jumps. He attempts to land using a backup parachute, but it fails, and he falls to the ground to his death.
May 21, 1976: Yuba City (California) High School sends its choir students to a nearby high school for a Friendship Day event aboard a chartered bus. The bus’s air brakes fail. With no ability to brake, the bus strikes a rail, leaves the highway, and falls 21.6 feet. It lands on its roof. One adult faculty advisor and 29 students are killed. All 24 survivors, including the bus driver, are seriously injured.
January 21, 1793: Convicted of treason by the French National Convention, Louis XVI is executed by guillotine.
January 21, 1984: American R&B singer Jackie Wilson dies of complications of pneumonia at age 49. He has been semi-comatose since collapsing on stage while performing in New Jersey on September 29, 1975.
January 21, 2023: A 30-year-old man in Kansas was shot by his own gun as it sat in the rear seat of his pickup truck after the man’s dog stepped on the firearm and inadvertently pulled the trigger.
December 2, 1984: Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, is so poorly maintained it causes the largest industrial disaster in history. The accidental release of methyl isocyanate causes the immediate suffocation deaths of more than 2,000 people, injuries in more than 50,000 people, and an additional gas-related death toll of perhaps another 8,000 people. Although the Indian government charged Union Carbide executives with homicide, the company claimed it was not under Indian jurisdiction and these officials did not appear in court to face these charges.
December 3, 1935: Linguist Milman Parry, 33, an assistant professor at Harvard University whose work introduced the serious study of oral storytelling tradition to academia, travels to Los Angeles with his wife Marian. Marian’s mother, who lived in California, had been the victim of some financial abuses. The Parrys came to help her; Milman packed a revolver in his suitcase, as he’d done on earlier trips to then-Yugoslavia, where he’d collected recordings of Bosnian oral poetry. This time, when the Parrys went to change for dinner in their room in the Palms Hotel, the revolver became entangled in a shirt inside Milman’s suitcase. Its safety catch was not engaged. As Milman reached into the suitcase, the revolver discharged, shooting him through the heart and killing him.
December 4, 1987: Children’s book author and illustrator Arnold Lobel dies of AIDS-related cardiac arrest. He is 54 years old.
December 5, 1931: Poet Vachel Lindsay dies by suicide after intentionally drinking a bottle of lye. His last words are reportedly, “They tried to get me; I got them first!”
December 5, 2016: A 28-year-old man from North Carolina arrives at Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant armed with a rifle and two additional firearms. The man, who had been reading completely falsified conspiracy theories that the restaurant served as a front for child abuse by D.C. elites, threatened staff with the weapons and fired the rifle in the restaurant’s kitchen, apparently a “warning shot” not directed at anyone. He is arrested before anyone inside the pizza place is hurt. In March 2017, the man pleads guilty to federal weapons charges and judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (not yet an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) sentences him to four years in prison. He is released from prison in 2020.
December 7, 1941: A surprise attack on U.S. territory by the Japanese military at 8 a.m. on this Sunday morning kills 2,403 Americans (2,335 military personnel and 68 civilians) and wounds 1,143. The attack on the U.S. naval base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu was intended to incapacitate the Pacific Fleet of the American Navy, even though the U.S. was officially neutral in World War II at this time.
Among the wounded was my paternal grandfather Bill, 17 years old at the time. He was blown off his ship (the USS West Virginia) and knocked, unconscious, into the water, awakening in the base hospital with a shoulder injury. He recovered and was reassigned from pharmacist’s assistant to EMT so he could help care for the more seriously wounded sailors.
December 7, 2010: Kim Tinkham, age 36, dies of what was most likely metastatic breast cancer. Tinkham had appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2008 to talk about the then-popular book The Secret. Tinkham claimed her Stage 3 breast cancer had been successfully treated with alternative medicine. The doctor who appeared with Tinkham on that show and backed up her claim, Robert Oldham Young, was arrested in 2014 and convicted in 2016 for theft and practicing medicine without a license.
Young’s claim was that cancers are caused by an imbalance of the body’s pH and that an “alkaline diet” can treat and prevent cancer. Little to no scientific research supports this claim.
December 8, 1980: John Lennon is murdered by handgun outside his apartment building in New York City.
December 9, 1977: In the NBA, the L.A. Lakers play the Houston Rockets. At the beginning of the second half of the game, Laker Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Rocket Kevin Kunnert scuffle over a rebound. In the scuffle, Kunnert elbows Abdul-Jabbar’s teammate Kermit Washington. Washington punches Kunnert in the head.
Kunnert’s teammate Rudy Tomjanovich runs over, intending to help break up the fight. Washington takes a swing at Tomjanovich, striking him in just such a way that fractures his skull. Tomjanovich falls to the court, unconscious and bleeding, although he quickly recovers and, apparently due to a rush of adrenaline, walks around the court in a seemingly aggressive manner. Tomjanovich doesn’t know it yet, but in addition to a broken jaw and nose, he has a fracture near the base of his skull leaking cerebrospinal fluid. He has to be rushed to the emergency room and given emergency surgery, since this is a life-threatening skull fracture. Tomjanovich requires five months of physical recovery before he can play again.
December 9, 1995: American author Toni Cade Bambara dies of colorectal cancer at the age of 56.
December 10, 1816: The body of Harriet Westbrook Shelley, the estranged wife of Percy Shelley and the mother of his son and daughter, is discovered in the Serpentine River. She is pregnant and has apparently died by suicide. She is only 21 years old.
December 10, 1929: Poet, publisher, and World War I veteran Harry Crosby kills his mistress, Josephine Noyes Rotch, and himself inside a friend’s apartment. Crosby’s wife Caresse becomes worried about her husband’s whereabouts when he fails to show up for a dinner party with the poet Hart Crane. Crane will also die by suicide two years later.
December 11, 2021: Anne Rice dies at the age of 80 of complications from a stroke.
December 12, 1999: Satirical novelist Joseph Heller dies of a heart attack at the age of 76.
December 13, 2011: Gianluca Casseri, a far-right author, Germanic neo-Pagan, devotee of American fascist Ezra Pound, and historian of J.R.R. Tolkien goes on an anti-immigrant shooting spree in Piazza Dalmazia, Florence, Italy. He shoots five street vendors who are all immigrants from Senegal, wounding three and killing two. Casseri then kills himself.
December 14, 1920: George “The Gipper” Gipp, legendary Notre Dame football player, dies of strep throat and pneumonia in St. Joseph Hospital (then in South Bend, now located in Mishawaka). He is 25 years old.
George Gipp is buried in his native Michigan, but an often-told legend around the Notre Dame campus is that Gipp's ghost haunts the old theater building, Washington Hall. According to the legend, when Gipp missed curfew and got locked out of his dorm building, he would sleep outside Washington Hall.
December 14, 1944: Golden Age of Hollywood actress Lupe Vélez dies by suicide, taking 75 barbiturate pills with a glass of brandy. Her secretary found her body lying in Vélez’s bed and not, as urban legend has it, drowned in her toilet.
December 14, 1995: 28-year-old professional skydiver Rob Harris dies while filming a Mountain Dew commercial. The commercial, a James Bond spoof in which a Bond-like figure snowboards out of an exploding plane, is aired featuring previous takes, but none of the footage from Harris’s final jump, contrary to urban legend. Harris’s fatal fall is triggered by tangled lines and a backup chute that fails to deploy in time.
December 16, 1913: Ambrose Bierce writes to his literary secretary, “I am going to Mexico with a pretty definite purpose which is not at present discloseable. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that’s a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico–ah, that is euthanasia!” Neither Bierce’s literary secretary nor any of his other acquaintances ever hear from him again after this letter. He’s presumed to have died in Mexico, perhaps in an early example of “suicide by cop,” or in this case, suicide by revolutionary.
December 16, 1988: Disco singer Sylvester James dies at his home in San Francisco from AIDS-related illness. He’s 41 years old.
December 17, 2021: Visual artist, classic album cover designer, and novelist Eve Babitz dies at age 78 from Huntington’s disease, the same hereditary neurodegenerative disease that killed Woody Guthrie.
December 18, 1966: Tara Browne, the heir to the Guinness stout fortune, dies in the hospital one day after crashing his Lotus Elan sports car into a parked truck. Browne had been driving at over 100 miles per hour through London and sped through a red traffic light before crashing. Browne’s passenger, model Suki Potier, was not injured in the accident.
In popular cultural, Browne is remembered as the man who “blew his mind out in a car” in the Beatles song “A Day in the Life.” Browne and Paul McCartney and John Lennon were acquaintances.
December 18, 2015: A fire at Mzuzu University Library in Mzuzu, Malawi, destroys an estimated 45,000 pieces of media.
December 19, 1848: 30-year-old Emily Brontë dies of tuberculosis.
December 19, 1991: Musician Henry Rollins and roadie Dennis Cole return home from a Hole concert at the Whiskey a Go Go nightclub when they are held up by a pair of men with guns. The men demand money, and when they discover that Rollins and Cole only have $50 of cash between them, the men order Rollins to go inside the home (which Rollins and Cole share) to get more. Rollins escapes and calls the police. Cole is shot in the face by the robbers and dies. The assailants have never been identified or arrested.
December 20, 1882: Swiss Romantic poet Alice de Chambrier dies at age 21 from complications of diabetes.
December 21, 1940: Heavy-drinking author F. Scott Fitzgerald dies of a heart attack, leaving his novel The Last Tycoon unfinished.
December 22, 1940: The day after F. Scott Fitzgerald dies, author Nathanael West runs a stop sign while driving home to Los Angeles from a trip to Mexico. He and his wife Eileen McKenney are both killed.
December 22, 1995: Retired dancer and Gone With the Wind actor Butterfly McQueen, then 84 years old, dies at the hospital from burn wounds she suffers when she attempts to heat her home using a kerosene heater that malfunctions.
December 23, 1888: Vincent Van Gogh, suffering from a severe bout of depression, cuts off a piece of his own left ear with a razor.
December 24, 1851: A fire at the U.S. Library of Congress destroys 55,000 books, or approximately two-thirds of its collection at the time, including most of the books donated by Thomas Jefferson that made up the library’s original collection.
December 24, 1936: Stage and early silent film actress Irene Fenwick dies at age 49 due to complications of an eating disorder. Her husband Lionel Barrymore (great-uncle of Drew Barrymore), who famously plays Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio every Christmas, is forced to turn the role over his brother John (great-grandfather of Drew Barrymore).
December 26, 2002: Photographer Herb Ritts dies of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of 50.
December 27, 1974: Ned Maddrell dies at the age of 97. He was the last fluent speaker of Manx, a Celtic language of the Isle of Man.
December 27, 2016: Actress and author Carrie Fisher dies during her fourth day in the intensive care unit of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. She has suffered from respiratory failure while aboard a flight on December 23rd. Her exact cause of death could not be determined, but artery disease, sleep apnea, and use of cocaine and opiates are all thought to be contributing factors. Fisher is 60 years old.
December 29, 1170: Knights loyal to King Henry II assassinate Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, inside Becket’s cathedral.
December 29, 2003: Maria Sergina, the last fluent native speaker of the Akkala Sámi language, dies and the language goes extinct. Akkala Sámi was spoken by the indigenous Sámi people of the Kola Peninsula in Russia.
December 30, 1903: The Iroquois Theatre in Chicago hosts a performance of Mr. Blue Beard before an audience filled with women and children out making a day of after-Christmas shopping. A faulty arc light causes the background scenery to catch fire. A number of inadequate fire safety precautions, including too few exits, lead to a disastrous fire that kills more than 600 people.
December 30, 1999: Former Beatle George Harrison, his wife Olivia, and their son Dhani are asleep in their home, Friar Park, outside London at around 3 a.m. local time. George and Olivia hear glass breaking. George goes downstairs to investigate, only to find a 33-year-old man screaming. The stranger had broken into the home by breaking a window with a bit of lawn statuary. The man has a knife and stabs George repeatedly in the chest until Olivia comes down and hits the man with a fireplace poker. The intruder then tries to strangle Olivia with the cord of a lamp. Olivia manages to fight off the attacker.
George survives but has to have part of a lung removed. The attacker, who is experiencing serious mental illness, is found to be not criminally liable for his actions because of his mental state and is admitted to a secured mental health hospital, where he stays until after George’s death in 2001 from cancer.
As you'll surely recall from Part 1, I've had a tremendous amount to say about Ernest Hemingway and Bob Dylan. Same deal with the Beatles, so they get their own post.
A 1964 photo of Harrison, McCartney, and Lennon in the Netherlands. Public domain.
Almanac Entries:
January 9 January 9, 1968: Look Magazine publishes Richard Avedon’s photographs of The Beatles.
January 12 January 12, 1963: The Beatles release their second single, “Please Please Me,” which goes on to be their first #1 single in the U.K. My Baby Boomer parents are each 10 years old on this date.
January 19 January 19, 1971: During Charles Manson’s murder trial, Manson’s defense attorneys introduce the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter” into evidence. According to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi, one of Manson’s delusion beliefs was that the song, written by Paul McCartney, referred to a coming race war. In reality, the lyrics refer to the literal meaning of a helter skelter, an English amusement ride consisting of a tower with a slide curling around it.
January 21 Friday, January 21, 1966: George Harrison and Pattie Boyd get married.
January 30 January 30, 1969: The Beatles perform a 42-minute concert on the roof of their Apple Corporation record company building in London, as documented in the concert film Let It Be. It will be their last public performance together.
January 31 January 31, 1967: On Johnny Rotten’s 11th birthday, John Lennon is shopping at an antiques store in Sevenoaks in the English county of Kent. He finds and purchases a vintage circus poster, the text of which becomes the basis for the Beatles song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite.”
February 1 February 1, 1964: The #1 single in the U.S. is The Beatles’s “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
February 9 February 9, 1964: The Beatles play five songs on The Ed Sullivan Show.
February 12 February 12, 1964: The Beatles perform a sold-out concert at Carnegie Hall.
“I saw nothing was permanent. You don’t want to possess anything that is dear to you because you might lose it.” - Yoko Ono
February 18, 1971: For her 38th birthday, John Lennon Ono gifts his wife a snow-white Steinway piano.
February 20 February 20, 1994, South Bend: My brother and I went to the Main Library. I checked out some books I needed for a research project, and also some Beatles CDs.
February 26 Sunday, February 26, 1995, South Bend: I went to the Morris Performing Arts Center and saw 1964: The Tribute, a Beatles tribute band. I recognized three people in the audience: a pair of sisters who went to the same grade school as me, and Mr. Thomas Gerencher.
February 26, 1997: At the 39th Annual Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden, The Beatles won a Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal Grammy for “Free As a Bird.” Other winners included Tony Bennett, Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, the Dave Matthews Band, and The Smashing Pumpkins.
February 29 February 29, 1968: At the 10th annual Grammy Awards, the Beatles win Album of the Year for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The Beatles are not in attendance in Los Angeles that evening, as they are in India learning at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, along with Mia Farrow, her sister Prudence, Scottish folk singer Donovan Leitch, and Mike Love of The Beach Boys.
March 5 March 5, 1963: The Beatles record “From Me to You” at Abbey Road.
Sunday, March 5, 1995, South Bend: Having read The Plague, I turned to a library book titled The Worst Rock and Roll Records Ever Made: A Fan's Guide to the Stuff You Love to Hate by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell [ISBN 0806512318 9780806512310].
Here’s a list of some of the songs and bands Guterman and O’Donnell love to hate: 1. “Dancing in the Street” by Mick Jagger and David Bowie 2. “Eve of Destruction” 3. “American Pie” 4. The Doors 5. Mick Jagger’s brother Chris 6. The U2 album The Unforgettable Fire (which includes “Pride (In the Name of Love);” see April 4) 7. Ringo Starr’s albums Stop and Smell the Roses and Old Wave 8. Really anything done by Ringo Starr and (especially) Paul McCartney after the Beatles 9. The 1981 live Rolling Stones album Still Life 10. Duran Duran
March 11 March 11, 1997: Paul McCartney becomes Sir Paul McCartney when he is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
March 13 March 13, 1965: “Eight Days A Week” by The Beatles hits #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
March 20 March 20, 1969: As chronicled in “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” John Lennon and Yoko Ono get married in the then-British territory of Gibraltar, near Spain.
March 29 March 29, 1994, South Bend: I drove my neighbors Jay and Ryan to school this morning. We heard Aerosmith’s “Come Together” on the radio. They knew the Beatles original but had never heard the Aerosmith cover before.
March 30 March 30, 1967: The Beatles photograph the album cover photo of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Artists Jann Haworth and Peter Blake have designed the image, which portrays the group in colorful pseudo-military uniforms, surrounded by wax sculptures of themselves and numerous cardboard cutouts of famous people. Among those depicted by the cutouts are Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Stephen Crane, Bob Dylan, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Carl Jung, Marilyn Monroe, Edgar Allan Poe, Dylan Thomas, H.G. Wells, Mae West, and Oscar Wilde.
April 2 April 2, 1974: Barbra Streisand wins an Oscar for her song “The Way We Were,” beating out Paul McCartney’s James Bond theme “Live and Let Die.”
April 8 April 8, 1963: John and Cynthia Lennon’s son John Charles Julian Lennon is born in Liverpool, U.K.
April 9 April 9, 1965: The Beatles release “Ticket to Ride” as a single.
April 9, 1969: Bob Dylan releases his Nashville Skyline album, featuring Johnny Cash on “Girl From the North Country.” On the same day, Bruce McBroom photographs the Beatles in their second-to-last photo shoot as a group.
April 11 April 11, 1964: The Beatles have 14 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart hits, including “Can’t Buy Me Love” at #1 and “Twist & Shout” at #2.
April 14 April 14, 1963: The Beatles and the Rolling Stones meet for the first time. The Beatles are in Richmond, England, to film a TV appearance. The Rolling Stones are performing at a Richmond club; the two groups meet backstage.
April 16 April 16, 1971: Ringo Starr releases his single “It Don’t Come Easy.”
April 16, 1973: ABC broadcasts the tv special James Paul McCartney, on which McCartney debuts “Live and Let Die.”
April 19 April 19, 1998, South Bend: Mom, Stephanie, and I saw City of Angels at University Park Mall. I liked it because it was a celebration of why it’s good to be human. Afterward we went to Denny’s and had pie and coffee. Later, sitting in my room reading a People magazine with Tammy Wynette on the cover, I heard on the radio that Linda McCartney had died. She and Paul had been together for the past 30 years.
April 26 Sunday, April 26, 1998, St. Mary’s College: I spent most of the day writing papers and working on a Sculpture project. In the evening I saw the 200th Simpsons episode, “Trash of the Titans” (production code 5F09). Bart and Homer crashed a U2 concert; best guest voices ever. The episode was dedicated to another previous guest voice, Linda McCartney.
May 9 May 9, 1964: Louis Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly” becomes the #1 song on the U.S. popular music charts, ending the Beatles’ 14-week streak of having the #1 single. Three Beatles songs (“Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “She Loves You”) contributed to the streak.
May 13 May 13, 1970: The Beatles documentary Let It Be, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, premieres in New York.
May 14 May 14, 1968: John Lennon and Paul McCartney appear on The Tonight Show to talk about the newly-formed Apple business venture. While Johnny Carson is on vacation, the show is co-hosted by Tallulah Bankhead and pro baseball catcher-turned-tv personality Joe Garagiola. (Neat guy, Joe Garagiola. He was an honorary member of the Akimel O’otham tribal community because he helped bring badly-needed resources to the deeply impoverished Gila River Indian Reservation.)
May 22 May 22, 1965: The Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride” hits #1 on the singles chart.
May 27 May 27, 1967: Tit Elingtin is born in Pontiac, Michigan, one day after the Beatles had released their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (in the U.K.; its U.S. release date was June 2nd).
June 4 June 4, 1969: The Beatles release “The Ballad of John and Yoko” in the U.S. In the U.K. it came out on May 30th.
June 16, 2001, South Bend: Once upon a time, South Bend had a summer festival called the Ethnic Festival. Tit and I, living in a downtown apartment near where the festival took place, visited it both yesterday and today. On this day we ate lunch while listening to a reggae band named Indika.
We went home for a while, but came back out after dinner to have a funnel cake and listen to a Beatles tribute band. They wore the full Beatles suits and wigs even in the heat. They played many lesser-known songs such as “Boys” and “Taxman.” For a free concert on a beautiful night in the park, it was great. We watched the fireworks afterward.
June 17 June 17, 1974: John Lennon is in a New York recording studio working on his album Walls and Bridges when Elton John pays him a visit. Elton John hears the potential in the track “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” and agrees to play piano on the song.
June 18 June 18, 1942: Paul McCartney and Roger Ebert are born.
June 18, 1973: John Lennon-Ono and Yoko Ono-Lennon attend the Watergate court hearings and hear John Dean testify. They sit beside Nixon adviser Elvin Bell in the second row, behind Dean’s wife Maureen.
July 1 July 1, 1968: John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s collaborative art exhibit You Are Here (To Yoko from John Lennon, With Love) opens in London.
July 18 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 on the Today show.
I had stuffed crust pizza for supper. Ringo Starr stars in those commercials. He says, “I’d do it in a second. The fans will dig it. They’ve been waiting long enough. I think I can convince them. I’ll say, ‘Lads, the time has come...to eat our pizza crust-first!” And then The Monkees show up and Ringo says, “Wrong lads.”
August 15 August 15, 1965: The Beatles perform at Shea Stadium, home field of the New York Mets, in front of a crowd of 56,000.
August 26 August 26, 1968: The Beatles release their single “Hey Jude” in the United States. The B-side track is “Revolution.” Between September and November 1968, it will be the #1 single in the U.S. for nine straight weeks.
August 29 August 29, 1966: The Beatles play their last public performance together at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.
August 30 August 30, 1968: The Beatles single with “Hey Jude” on one side and “Revolution” on the reverse is released in the U.K.
September 9 September 9, 1971: John Lennon releases the single “Imagine” in the U.S.
September 20 September 20, 1974: David Bowie and John Lennon meet for the first time at Dean Martin’s 21st birthday party for Martin’s son Ricci. Ringo Starr, Elton John, and Elizabeth Taylor are also there.
September 24 September 24, 1941: Linda McCartney is born, as Linda Eastman, in Scarsdale, New York. Her Jewish family’s name is Epstein before her father Anglicizes it to Eastman, but she’s not related to Beatles manager Brian Epstein. It’s entirely coincidental that the eventual Sir Paul marries this beautiful, talented photographer who happens to be an Epstein. She was the first woman to shoot the cover photograph for Rolling Stone magazine.
September 26 September 26, 1969: The Beatles release Abbey Road.
September 27 September 27, 1967: George Martin oversees the recording of the orchestral score of The Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.” The Mike Sammes Singers record their backing vocals for the track.
October 9 October 9, 1940: John Winston Lennon is born in Liverpool, England, U.K. at Liverpool Maternity Hospital.
October 9, 1971: On her husband’s 31st birthday, Yoko Ono Lennon’s solo art exhibition This Is Not Here opens in New York City. Among the guests who attend opening night is Allen Ginsberg.
October 24 October 24, 1975: Apple Records releases Shaved Fish, a compilation album by John Lennon with the Plastic Ono Band, in the U.S.
October 31 October 31, 1994, South Bend: I went to school dressed all in black. In the hall before classes, Kristen gave me a lemon Pez from a witch Pez dispenser. In Media we began learning about the Beatles. After school, I watched a lot of TV, including the Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode (7F04), with “The Raven” read by James Earl Jones.
November 1 November 1, 1968: George Harrison releases Wonderwall Music, the first solo album by any of the Beatles.
November 2 November 2, 1994, South Bend: In our continuing exploration of the Beatles in Media, I learned that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is not about LSD at all, but rather about a drawing that Julian Lennon drew when he was quite small.
November 2, 1973: John Lennon releases his fourth solo album, Mind Games, and Ringo Starr releases (in the U.S.) his third solo album, Ringo. Ringo features songs written with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison. Studio musicians on Ringo include Marc Bolan and Billy Preston.
November 2, 1987: George Harrison releases his final album, Cloud Nine.
November 16 November 16, 1974: The #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart is “Whatever Gets You Through the Night” from John Lennon’s fifth solo album, Walls and Bridges.
November 17, 1980: Yoko Ono and John Lennon Ono release their Double Fantasy album, the second album ever released on Geffen Records.
November 24 November 24, 1993, South Bend: American Literature class began with one of classmates (Jessica or Nicole) asking Mr. Gerencher “Who is the other Beatle in this picture with John Lennon?” It was Yoko Ono. We then got around to discussing Edgar Allan Poe.
December 10, 1995, St. Mary’s: I read three stories from my soon-to-be-returned literature book: Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” Donald Barthelme’s “The Sandman,” and Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilých.”
At 8 p.m. I went to Lessons and Carols in the Church of Loretto. Sister Jean read “Christmas Calls a Community,” which was Lesson #8. I liked it, because the music was great and it had dancing. This is a Roman Catholic community, so we don’t usually have liturgical dancing.
After the service, I made hot chocolate and watched the classic ‘80s movie Space Camp with Charmaine and some of the other women from our floor. While we were watching it, Kara came by and asked me if I had the Beatles’ White Album, because she wanted to listen to “Rocky Raccoon,” but that’s not one I have.
December 20 December 20, 1980: Twelve days after the artist’s death, “(Just Like) Starting Over” by John Lennon becomes the first #1 hit for Lennon as a solo artist.
December 26 December 26, 1963: The first Beatles singles to be released in the U.S., “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” are...released...in the U.S. Sorry, I couldn’t think of a more clever way to word this clearly.
December 31 December 31, 2010: Tit and I celebrated the New Year at Tom and Melissa’s house again. We ate, drank some mixed drinks, and hung out, talking. Melissa’s brother Andrew and I played Beatles Rock Band together. After midnight, I switched to drinking soda so I could be our designated driver.
Lupe Vélez appeared in Photoplay magazine in 1928.
December 5, 2016: A 28-year-old man from North Carolina arrives at Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant armed with a rifle and two additional firearms. The man, who had been reading completely falsified conspiracy theories that the restaurant served as a front for child abuse by D.C. elites, threatened staff with the weapons and fired the rifle in the restaurant’s kitchen, apparently a “warning shot” not directed at anyone. He is arrested before anyone inside the pizza place is hurt. In March 2017, the man pleads guilty to federal weapons charges and judge Ketanji Brown Jackson (not yet an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) sentences him to four years in prison. He is released from prison in 2020.
December 14, 1944: Golden Age of Hollywood actress Lupe Vélez dies by suicide, taking 75 barbiturate pills with a glass of brandy. Her secretary found her body lying in Vélez’s bed and not, as urban legend has it, drowned in her toilet.
December 16, 1988: Disco singer Sylvester James dies at his home in San Francisco from AIDS-related illness. He’s 41 years old.
December 17, 2021: Visual artist, classic album cover designer, and novelist Eve Babitz dies at age 78 from Huntington’s disease, the same hereditary neurodegenerative disease that killed Woody Guthrie.
December 20, 1882: Swiss Romantic poet Alice de Chambrier dies at age 21 from complications of diabetes.
December 22, 1995: Retired actor and dancer Butterfly McQueen, then 84 years old, dies at the hospital from burn wounds she suffers when she attempts to heat her home using a kerosene heater that malfunctions.
December 24, 1936: Stage and early silent film actress Irene Fenwick dies at age 49 due to complications of an eating disorder. Her husband Lionel Barrymore (great-uncle of Drew Barrymore), who famously plays Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio every Christmas, is forced to turn the role over his brother John (great-grandfather of Drew Barrymore).
December 26, 2002: Photographer Herb Ritts dies of AIDS-related pneumonia at the age of 50.
December 29, 1170: Knights loyal to King Henry II assassinate Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, inside Becket’s cathedral.
December 30, 1999: Former Beatle George Harrison, his wife Olivia, and their son Dhani are asleep in their home, Friar Park, outside London at around 3 a.m. local time. George and Olivia hear glass breaking. George goes downstairs to investigate, only to find a 33-year-old man screaming. The stranger had broken into the home by breaking a window with a bit of lawn statuary. The man has a knife and stabs George repeatedly in the chest until Olivia comes down and hits the man with a fireplace poker. The intruder then tries to strangle Olivia with the cord of a lamp. Olivia manages to fight off the attacker.
George survives but has to have part of a lung removed. The attacker, who is experiencing serious mental illness, is found to be not criminally liable for his actions because of his mental state and is admitted to a secured mental health hospital, where he stays until after George’s death in 2001 from cancer.
